(P/B) THE IMPORTANCE OF BEING EARNEST
'To lose one parent may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose both looks like carelessness' The Importance of Being Earnest is a glorious comedy of mistaken identity, which ridicules codes of propriety and etiquette. Manners and morality are also victims of Wilde's sharp wit in Lady Windermere's Fan, A Woman of No Importance and An Ideal Husband, in which snobbery and hypocrisy are laid bare. In Salom? and A Florentine Tragedy, Wilde makes powerful use of historical settings to explore the complex relationship between sex and power. The ran...
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(P/B) A STUDY IN SCARLET
When a body is discovered in a bloodstained room in Brixton, the only clues are a wedding ring, a gold watch, a pocket edition of Boccaccio's Decameron, and a woman's name scrawled in blood on the wall. So begins the first investigation by Sherlock Holmes to be recorded by his new room-mate Dr Watson. Their search for the murderer uncovers a story of love and revenge which began years before in Salt Lake City. (From the publisher)...
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(P/B) THE LADY IN THE LAKE AND OTHER NOVELS
Philip Marlowe, the original hard-boiled private eye, returns to walk the mean streets of the American underworld again in these three classic novels. In The Lady in the Lake a business tycoon sets Marlowe on the hunt for some very important lost property - a flighty young wife, who proves murder to find. A wealthy widow sends the wisecracking detective on another trail in The High Window, this time to find a jinxed gold Doubloon. The Little Sister is Chandler's late, great story of a seemingly prim young woman who proves that trouble can ...
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(P/B) OUR TOWN AND OTHER PLAYS
Finding the theatre of the 1920s lacking in bite and conviction, Thornton Wilder set out to bring back realism and to celebrate the innocent, simple and religious. Yet he also tried to endow individual experience with cosmic significance and Our Town is both an affectionate portrait of American life and 'an attempt to find a value above all price for the smallest events in our daily life'. The Skin of our Teeth deals with human survival in a 'comic strip' way, and The Matchmaker is a hilarious farce which urges rebellion against all the co...
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(P/B) INVISIBLE MAN
The lives of countless millions are evoked in Ralph Ellison's superb portrait of a generation of black Americans, Invisible Man. This Penguin Modern Classics edition includes an introduction by John F. Callahan, as well as an introduction by the author. Ralph Ellison's blistering and impassioned first novel tells the extraordinary story of a man invisible 'simply because people refuse to see me'. Published in 1952 when American society was in the cusp of immense change, the powerfully depicted adventures of Ellison's invisible man - from h...
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(P/B) THE TURN OF THE SCREW
The Turn of the Screw tells the story of a young governess sent to a country house to take charge of two orphans. Unsettled by a sense of intense evil in the house she soon becomes obsessed with the idea that something malevolent is stalking the children in her care. (From the publisher)...
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(P/B) THE PICTURE OF DORIAN GRAY
In Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray, so enthralled by his own exquisite portrait, Dorian Gray exchanges his soul for eternal youth and beauty. Influenced by his friend Lord Henry Wotton, he is drawn into a corrupt double life; indulging his desires in secret while remaining a gentleman in the eyes of polite society. Only his portrait bears the traces of his decadence. Oscar Wilde'sThe Picture of Dorian Gray was a succe`s de scandale. Early readers were shocked by its hints at unspeakable sins, and the book was later used as evidenc...
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(P/B) NOTES FROM UNDERGROUND AND THE DOUBLE
'Notes from Underground' (1864) is a study of a single character, 'the real man of the Russian majority', and a revelation of Dostoyevsky's own deepest beliefs. One of his best critics has said of the first part that it forms his 'most utterly naked pages. Never afterwards was he so fully and openly to reveal the inmost recesses, unmeant for display, of his heart.' 'The Double' (1846) is the nightmarish story of Mr Golyadkin, a man who is haunted or possessed by his own double. Is 'Mr Golyadkinjunior' really a double or simply a fearful si...
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(P/B) FRANKENSTEIN
A terrifying vision of scientific progress without moral limits, Mary Shelley's "Frankenstein" leads the reader on an unsettling journey from the sublime beauty of the Swiss alps to the desolate waste of the arctic circle. This "Penguin Classics" edition is edited with an introduction and notes by Maurice Hindle. Obsessed with the idea of creating life itself, Victor Frankenstein plunders graveyards for the material with which to fashion a new being, shocking his creation to life with electricity. But this botched creature, rejected by its...
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(P/B) TO THE LIGHTHOUSE
To the Lighthouse is at once a vivid impressionist depiction of a family holiday, and a meditation on a marriage, on parenthood and childhood, on grief, tyranny and bitterness. Its use of stream of consciousness, reminiscence and shifting perspectives, give the novel an intimate, poetic essence, and at the time of publication in 1927 it represented an utter rejection of Victorian and Edwardian literary values. Virginia Woolf saw the novel as an elegy to her own parents, and in her diary she wrote, 'I used to think of him [father] and moth...
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(P/B) PRIDE AND PREJUDICE
'Vanity, not love, has been my folly’ In Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice, when Elizabeth Bennet first meets eligible bachelor Fitzwilliam Darcy, she thinks him arrogant and conceited; he is indifferent to her good looks and lively mind. When she later discovers that Darcy has involved himself in the troubled relationship between his friend Bingley and her beloved sister Jane, she is determined to dislike him more than ever. In the sparkling comedy of manners that follows, Jane Austen shows us in Pride and Prejudice the folly of judging b...
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(P/B) KEEP THE ASPIDISTRA FLYING
Gordon Comstock loathes dull, middle-class respectability and worship of money. He gives up a 'good job' in advertising to work part-time in a bookshop, giving him more time to write. But he slides instead into a self-induced poverty that destroys his creativity and his spirit. Only Rosemary, ever-faithful Rosemary, has the strength to challenge his commitment to his chosen way of life. Through the character of Gordon Comstock, Orwell reveals his own disaffection with the society he once himself renounced. (From the publisher)...
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(P/B) DELTA OF VENUS
As influential and revelatory in its day as Fifty Shades of Grey is now, Anais Nin's Delta of Venus is a groundbreaking anthology of erotic short stories, published in Penguin Modern Classics In Delta of Venus Anais Nin conjures up a glittering cascade of sexual encounters. Creating her own 'language of the senses', she explores an area that was previously the domain of male writers and brings to it her own unique perceptions. Her vibrant and impassioned prose evokes the essence of female sexuality in a world where only love has meaning. T...
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(P/B) THE WOMAN IN THE DUNES
One of the premier Japanese novels of the twentieth century, The Woman in the Dunes combines the essence of myth, suspense, and the existential novel. In a remote seaside village, Niki Jumpei, a teacher and amateur entomologist, is held captive with a young woman at the bottom of a vast sand pit where they are pressed into shovelling off the ever-advancing sand dunes that threaten the village. (From the publisher)...
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(P/B) THE FALL
Jean-Baptiste Clamence is a soul in turmoil. Over several drunken nights in an Amsterdam bar, he regales a chance acquaintance with his story. From this successful former lawyer and seemingly model citizen a compelling, self-loathing catalogue of guilt, hypocrisy and alienation pours forth. The Fall (1956) is a brilliant portrayal of a man who has glimpsed the hollowness of his existence. But beyond depicting one man's disillusionment, Camus's novel exposes the universal human condition and its absurdities - for our innocence that, once lo...
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(P/B) PERSUASION
'Her attachment and regrets had, for a long time, clouded every enjoyment of youth; and an early loss of bloom and spirits had been their lasting effect'. Anne Elliot's youthful bloom has faded and she has few romantic prospects, having being persuaded to break off her engagement to Frederick Wentworth eight years earlier when he was a naval captain with neither rank nor fortune. But now he has returned and Anne, who has bitterly regretted her decision ever since, sees the possibility of a second chance for happiness. Persuasion, Jane Aust...
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(P/B) BIG SUR
In 1960 Jack Kerouac was near breaking point. Driven mad by constant press attention in the wake of the publication of On the Road, he needed to 'get away to solitude again or die', so he withdrew to a cabin in Big Sur on the Californian coast. The resulting novel, in which his autobiographical hero Jack Duluoz wrestles with doubt, alcohol dependency and his urge towards self-destruction, is one of Kerouac's most personal and searingly honest works. Ending with the poem 'Sea: Sounds of the Pacific Ocean at Big Sur', it shows a man coming d...
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(P/B) THE SOUND OF THE MOUNTAIN
Ogata Shingo is growing old, and his memory is failing him. At night he hears only the sound of death in the distant rumble from the mountain. The relationships which have previously defined his life - with his son, his wife, and his attractive daughter-in-law - are dissolving, and Shingo is caught between love and destruction. Lyrical and precise, The Sound of the Mountain explores in immaculately crafted prose the changing roles of love and the truth we face in ageing. (From the publisher) Translator Edward Seidensticker won the Nation...
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(P/B) EXILE AND THE KINGDOM
The stories of Exile and the Kingdom explore the dilemma of being an outsider - even in one's own country - and of allegiance. With intense power and lyricism, Camus evokes beautiful but harsh landscapes, whether the shimmering deserts of his native Algeria or the wild, mysterious jungles of Brazil. Here a Frenchwoman is gradually seduced by the sheer difference of North Africa, a mutilated renegade is driven mad by the cruelty of his own people, and a barrel-maker watches the slow decline of his craft. A kindly teacher must choose betw...
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(P/B) THE INVISIBLE MAN
With his face swaddled in bandages, his eyes hidden behind dark glasses and his hands covered even indoors, Griffin - the new guest at the Coach and Horses - is at first assumed to be a shy accident victim. But the true reason for his disguise is far more chilling: he has developed a process that has made him invisible, and is locked in a struggle to discover the antidote. Forced from the village and driven to murder, he seeks the aid of his old friend Kemp. The horror of his fate has affected his mind, however - and when Kemp refuses to h...
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