Penguin Classics: General Fiction

Fifty new books at £1 each, celebrating the pioneering spirit of the Penguin Modern Classics series, from inspiring essays to groundbreaking fiction and poetry. Of Dogs and Walls offers an evocative glimpse into the subtle nuances of human experience. 'Though their house was new, the wall had been there a long time.' In these two stories, which have never before...

Our Game, John le Carré's post-Cold War masterpiece, is filled with suspense, betrayal, desire, and drama. The Cold War is over, and retired secret servant Tim Cranmer has been put out to pasture, spending his days making wine on his Somerset estate. But then he discovers that his former double agent Larry—dreamer, dissolute, philanderer, and disloyal friend—has vanished, along with...

Parade's End, Ford's great masterpiece set in the First World War, is now available in Penguin Black Classics with an introduction by Julian Barnes. Consisting of four novels - Some Do Not..., No More Parades, A Man Could Stand Up, and The Last Post - Parade's End is the story of Christopher Tietjens and his progress from the secure world...

Petersburg by Andrei Bely is a vivid, memorable, and striking story set at the heart of the 1905 Russian revolution. This colourful evocation of Russia's capital during the short, turbulent period of the first socialist revolution is considered Bely's masterpiece. The story follows Nikolai Ableukhov's journey as he is caught up in the revolutionary politics of those seminal days. Exploring...

Quicksand by Nella Larsen is a powerful first novel that evocatively portrays the racial and gender restrictions that can mark a life. Born to a white mother and an absent black father, and despised for her dark skin, Helga Crane has long had to fend for herself. As a young woman, Helga teaches at an all-black school in the South,...

One of George Eliot's most ambitious and imaginative novels, Romola is set in Renaissance Florence during the turbulent years following the expulsion of the powerful Medici family, during which the zealous religious reformer Savonarola rose to control the city. At its heart is Romola, the devoted daughter of a blind scholar, married to the clever but ultimately treacherous Tito. His...

Ruth is the story of Ruth Hilton, an orphaned young seamstress who captures the attention of a gentleman, Henry Bellingham, who is captivated by her simplicity and beauty. When she loses her job and home, he offers her comfort and shelter, only to cruelly desert her soon after. Nearly dead with grief and shame, Ruth is given the chance of...

Jay Rubin's translation of Soseki's cherished novel, new to Penguin Classics. One of Soseki's most beloved works of fiction, the novel depicts the 23-year-old Sanshiro leaving the sleepy countryside for the first time in his life to experience the constantly moving 'real world' of Tokyo, its women and university. In the subtle tension between our appreciation of Soseki's lively humour...

Sketches from a Hunter's Album, Turgenev's first major prose work, is a series of twenty-five sketches that capture the observations and anecdotes of the author during his travels through Russia, fuelled by his passion for hunting. His album is filled with moving insights into the lives of those he encounters—peasants and landowners, doctors and bailiffs, neglected wives and bereft mothers....

First time in Black Classics for this famous Victorian retelling of the stories of Shakespeare's plays - sells 8-10,000/year in its PPC edition. As children, Charles and Mary Lamb took great delight in exploring their benefactor's extensive library; as adults, they began writing children's books together that also appealed to all generations. In Tales from Shakespeare, they wished to bring...

Introducing Little Clothbound Classics - irresistible, mini editions of short stories, novellas, and essays from the world's greatest writers, designed by the award-winning Coralie Bickford-Smith. Territory of Light is the radiant story of a young woman, living alone in Tokyo with her two-year-old daughter, in her first year of separation from her husband. At once tender and lacerating, luminous and...

The first great German novel - an extraordinary recreation of the horrors of the Thirty Years War, written by a veteran of the conflict. First published in 1668, The Adventures of Simplicius Simplicissimus tells the picaresque, brilliantly described adventures of a boy swept up in the Thirty Years War and the terrible things that he experiences. Some of it is...

Twenty new titles in the much-loved and hugely successful Penguin English Library series. 'The voice of the sea is seductive; never ceasing, whispering, clamoring, murmuring, inviting the soul to wander for a spell in abysses of solitude' When The Awakening was first published in 1899, charges of sordidness and immorality seemed to consign it into obscurity and irreparably damage its...

The Awakening and Selected Stories by Kate Chopin is a groundbreaking depiction of a woman who dares to defy the expectations of society in the pursuit of her desire. When The Awakening was first published in 1899, charges of sordidness and immorality seemed to consign it into obscurity and irreparably damage its author's reputation. However, a century after her death,...

A provocative and astute portrayal of a world caught by the lure of progress. Published in 1886, The Bostonians begins with the arrival in Boston of Basil Ransom, a young Mississippi lawyer in search of a career. Through his cousin, Olive Chancellor, Ransom comes to meet Verena, the beautiful daughter of a charlatan faith-healer and showman. When they hear Verena...

Fifty new books at £1 each, celebrating the pioneering spirit of the Penguin Modern Classics series, from inspiring essays to groundbreaking fiction and poetry. Dispatch the maimed, the old, the weak, destroy the very world itself, for what is the point of life if the promise of fulfilment lies elsewhere? On the windswept coast of rural Suffolk, a deranged scientist...

When Benjamin Button's father arrives at the hospital, he is surprised and ashamed to find his new baby boy is a weathered, aged man, to all appearances no younger than seventy years old. As time goes by, young Benjamin comes to no longer require a cane, his hair ceases to be grey, his limbs become less frail, his wrinkles less...

J.-K. Huysmans's gaudy, shocking, and largely autobiographical novel, The Damned (La-Bas) was quickly condemned and just as quickly achieved cult status. It follows Durtal, a shy, censorious man, who is writing a biography of Gilles de Rais, the fifteenth-century nobleman, child-murderer, and supposed model for "Bluebeard." Bored and disgusted by the vulgarity of everyday life, Durtal seeks spiritual solace by...

One of the most startling literary debuts of all time, now in Penguin Black Classics. As the First World War reaches its final year, an illicit love affair begins between a sixteen-year-old boy and a young woman married to a soldier at the front. They meet secretly in her flat on the outskirts of Paris, in cornfields and on river...

The Europeans is part of a series of new editions of Henry James's most famous novels and short stories. It is one of a series of new editions of Henry James's most famous short stories and novels.

New in Penguin Japanese Classics - a gripping novel about a love affair gone wrong. Introducing Penguin Japanese Classics - a collection of some of Japan's most celebrated and ground-breaking 20th-century writers, with covers inspired by Japanese art and design. Taking us from a sun-drenched affair in a seaside town to an underground 'ark' full of shadows and eccentrics, with...

The History of Mr Polly tells the story of Mr Polly, an ordinary middle-aged man exhausted by his wife's nagging and his monotonous job as the owner of a regional gentleman's outfitters. Confronted with the looming threat of bankruptcy, Mr Polly decides that the only escape from his frustrating existence is to burn down his shop and take his own...

The House on the Hill is a devastating novel set in wartime Italy, written by the great twentieth-century author Cesare Pavese, now available in a new translation by Tim Parks. Shortlisted for The Society of Authors Translation Award 2022. In June 1943, Allied aircraft are bombing industrial Turin, and Fascist Italy seems to be on its knees. Corrado, a teacher,...

The famous Gothic novel from Ann Radcliffe. From the first moment Vincentio di Vivaldi, a young nobleman, sets eyes on the veiled figure of Ellena, he is captivated by her enigmatic beauty and grace. But his haughty and manipulative mother is against the match and enlists the help of her confessor to come between them. Schedoni, previously a leading figure...

This volume includes Family Happiness, The Kreutzer Sonata, The Devil, and Father Sergius. The four stories are all about love, but they take very different attitudes towards it. Tolstoy knows that his readers have fallen in love and also, often, fallen out of it; they have wanted to kill their loved ones; they have lusted vigorously; or desperately sought the...

Tomcat Murr is a loveable, self-taught animal who has written his own autobiography. But a printer's error causes his story to be accidentally mixed and spliced with a book about the composer Johannes Kreisler. As the two versions break off and alternate at dramatic moments, two wildly different characters emerge from the confusion - Murr, the confident scholar, lover, carouser...

New edition The Longest Journey by E M Forster follows the story of Rickie Elliot, a sensitive and intelligent young man with an intense imagination and a certain amount of literary talent, who sets out from Cambridge full of hopes to become a writer. However, when his stories are not successful, he decides instead to marry the beautiful but shallow...

A new collection of Rudyard Kipling's short stories, selected and edited by Jan Montefiore. Rudyard Kipling is one of the most magical storytellers in the English language. This new selection brings together the best of his short writings, following the development of his work over fifty years. They take us from the harsh, cruel, vividly realised world of the 'Indian'...

The Napoleon of Notting Hill is G. K. Chesterton's wild and whimsical debut novel, set in a future embattled London. London, 1984. Democracy has given up the ghost. England's ruler is randomly selected, and this year it's Auberon Quin, a clerk with an odd sense of humour. Quin mandates that each borough of London become an independent neo-medievalist state, complete...

Michael Hulse's new translation perfectly conveys the unsettling beauty of the original and is accompanied by an introduction on Rilke's life and the biographical and literary influences on the Notebooks. This edition also includes suggested further reading, a chronology, and notes. While his old furniture rots in storage, Malte Laurids Brigge lives in a cheap room in Paris, with little...

One of Poland's most significant twentieth-century epics, by the 1924 winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature. In the village of Lipce, scandal, romance, and drama crackle in every hearth. Boryna, a widower and the village's wealthiest farmer, has taken the young and beautiful Jagusia as his bride - but she only has eyes for his impetuous son Antek. Over...

An updated translation of this risqué and comic account of three travellers. The Satyricon is one of the most outrageous and strikingly modern works to have survived from the ancient world. Most likely written by an advisor of Nero, it recounts the adventures of Encolpius and his companions as they travel around Italy, encountering courtesans, priestesses, con men, brothel-keepers, and...

A hardback series for le Carre collectors The Cold War is over and Ned has been demoted to the training academy. He asks his old mentor, George Smiley, to address his passing-out class. There are no laundered reminiscences; Smiley speaks the truth - perhaps the last the students will ever hear. As they listen, Ned recalls his own painful triumphs...

When a young woman dies during a shooting party at the country estate of a dissolute count, a magistrate is called upon to investigate. The mystery deepens and suspicion falls more widely as it emerges that the dead woman was at the centre of a tangled web of relationships: with her elderly husband, with the lecherous count, and with the...

A hardboiled story of abduction and murder in the Los Angeles hills. Private Detective Lew Archer doesn't believe in coincidences... A forest fire has mysteriously broken out in the hills above southern California. Meanwhile, Lew Archer has been asked by a desperate mother to find her six-year-old son. Instead, he discovers the boy's wealthy father, murdered, and buried in a...

Fifty new books at £1 each, celebrating the pioneering spirit of the Penguin Modern Classics series, from inspiring essays to groundbreaking fiction and poetry. The Veiled Woman 'What did she expect of him? What was her quest? Did she have an unfulfilled desire?' Transgressive desires and sexual encounters are recounted in these four pieces from one of the greatest writers...

Fifty new books at £1 each, celebrating the pioneering spirit of the Penguin Modern Classics series, from inspiring essays to groundbreaking fiction and poetry. Everything was dead, everything unreal; the dark mob was made up of stiff lay-figures One of America's greatest writers explores mob violence, voyeurism, and betrayal in these unforgettable tales of Californian life.

A savage indictment of British society at the turn of the century, from the author of Mrs. Dalloway. The Years is the story of three generations of the Pargiter family - their intimacies and estrangements, anxieties and triumphs - mapped out against the bustling rhythms of London's streets during the first decades of the twentieth century. A work of fluid...

Fifty new books at £1 each, celebrating the pioneering spirit of the Penguin Modern Classics series, from inspiring essays to groundbreaking fiction and poetry. Oh the cruelty of time, that destroys all things! Beguiling, strange and hair-raising tales from early 20th century Japan—Nagai's Behind the Prison, Uno's Closet LLB and Akutagawa's deeply macabre General Kim.

First published in 1877, these three stories are dominated by questions of doubt, love, loneliness, and religious experience, and together form a triumphant conclusion to Flaubert's literary career. With elegant simplicity, A Simple Heart relates the story of Felicite - an uneducated serving-woman who retains her Catholic faith despite a life of desolation and loss. Inspired by a stained-glass window...

A gripping novel that ultimately questions our capacity for moral strength and the depths of human integrity. It was I who removed de P- this morning. With these chilling words, Victor Haldin shatters the solitary, industrious existence of Razumov, his fellow student at St Petersburg University. Razumov aims to overcome the denial of his noble birth by a brilliant career...

Conrad's last great novel, featuring one of his most fascinating heroes, Victory is a psychological thriller, a tragic romance and a commentary on the lies that we tell ourselves. Axel Heyst, a dreamer and a restless drifter, believes he can avoid suffering by cutting himself off from others. Then he becomes involved in the operation of a coal company on...

The cult classic from one of France's most stylish writers Impish, foul-mouthed Zazie arrives in Paris from the country to stay with her uncle Gabriel. All she really wants to do is ride the metro, but finding it shut because of a strike, Zazie looks for other means of amusement and is soon caught up in a comic adventure that...

Introducing Little Clothbound Classics — irresistible, mini editions of short stories, novellas, and essays from the world's greatest writers, designed by the award-winning Coralie Bickford-Smith. Widely considered to be one of the greatest ever writers of the form, Anton Chekhov's short stories offer unforgettable character, crystalline expression, and a beautiful, quiet uncertainty. Collected here are five of his very best...

Twenty new titles in the much-loved and hugely successful Penguin English Library series. 'It would be a dull world if we all thought alike.' After seven years of marriage, the beautiful Lady Brenda Last is bored with life at Hetton Abbey, the Gothic mansion that is the pride and joy of her husband, Tony. She drifts into an affair with...

A new selection and translation of the best of de Maupassant's short stories. Set in the Paris of society women, prostitutes, and small-minded bourgeoisie, as well as the isolated villages of rural Normandy that de Maupassant knew as a child, the thirty-three tales in this volume are among the most darkly humorous and brilliant short stories in nineteenth-century literature. They...

A haunting, dreamlike portrayal of the encroaching horror of the Holocaust onto a genteel MittelEuropean resort town. A masterpiece ... the greatest novel of the Holocaust - The Guardian Badenheim 1939, a resort town near the forests of Vienna, is preparing for the arts festival of the summer season. The hotel workers and local tradespeople rush to prepare the small...

A dreamlike, chimerical masterpiece from a lost pre-war Europe—critically acclaimed and rightly revered. Baron Bagge, a cavalry officer stationed in Eastern Europe during the First World War, receives orders to ride into a platoon of Russian machine guns. But instead of meeting certain death, he and his brigade pass, unscathed, into a bizarrely peaceful land where festivities are in full...

Introducing Little Clothbound Classics – irresistible, mini editions of short stories, novellas and essays from the world's greatest writers, designed by the award-winning Coralie Bickford-Smith. Dorothy Parker was the most talked-about woman of the decadent 1920s, notorious as a hard-drinking bad girl with a talent for endlessly quotable one-liners. In the stories collected here, she brilliantly captures the spirit of...

Black Shack Alley is a semiautobiographical Caribbean novel that explores shifting race relations in early twentieth-century colonial Martinique. It features a foreword by the Martinican author Patrick Chamoiseau. This Penguin Classic follows in the tradition of Richard Wright's Black Boy, as Joseph Zobel's 1950 novel chronicles the coming-of-age of Jose, a young boy dealing with issues of power and identity...

Introducing Little Clothbound Classics - irresistible, mini editions of short stories, novellas and essays from the world's greatest writers, designed by the award-winning Coralie Bickford-Smith. Katherine Mansfield's perceptive and resonant writing helped to define the modern short story, observing apparently trivial incidents to create quietly devastating revelations of inner lives. Graceful, delicate and burning with emotion, Mansfield's stories were integral...

The bestselling novel by cult writer Wang Xiaobo, a satire of the Cultural Revolution, in its first full English translation. ‘Life is but a slow, drawn-out process of getting your balls crushed.’ Twenty-one-year-old Wang Er, stationed in a remote mountain commune, spends his days herding oxen, napping, and dreaming of losing his virginity. His dreams come true in the shape...

The new paperback series - Penguin English Library Now, what I want is, Facts. Teach these boys and girls nothing but Facts. Facts alone are wanted in life. Plant nothing else, and root out everything else. Coketown is dominated by the figure of Mr Thomas Gradgrind, school owner and model of Utilitarian success. Feeding both his pupils and his family...

A selection of the best short stories by Oh Jung-hee, one of South Korea's most influential writers. In this emblematic selection of her stories, Oh Jung-hee probes beneath the surface of seemingly quotidian lives to expose nightmarish family configurations warped by desertion, psychosis, and death. In Chinatown, a young girl living on the edge of the city's Chinese community comes...

New in Penguin Japanese Classics: an innovative feminist novel about motherhood and girlhood. Introducing Penguin Japanese Classics—a collection of some of Japan's most celebrated and ground-breaking 20th century writers, with covers inspired by Japanese art and design. Taking us from a sun-drenched affair in a seaside town to an underground 'ark' full of shadows and eccentrics, with stops at mountains...

A feminist cult classic about love, independence and what it means to be an individual, translated into English for the first time. 'I want to have him, I really do. I just don't want him to have me.' Martina and Gustav, students in 1970s Stockholm, meet and fall immediately into coupledom. But what is coupledom? A route to marriage? A...

The heartbreaking story of two orphans fighting for survival at the end of World War Two, published in English for the first time. In the dying days of the War, Seita and Setsuko must fend for themselves. Firebombs have obliterated their home in Kobe, leaving them searching for shelter and scrambling to survive in the depths of the countryside. But,...

A haunting novel exploring a mother's fierce love for her disabled son as she grapples with her own mental health, by the author of the feminist cult classic The Princess of 72nd Street. For Clarence's mother, life revolves around her young son; she takes him to see specialists to find the cause of his blindness and developmental delays, protects him...

Never before translated short stories by the legendary genius Ágota Kristóf. I Don't Care – it's not even pretty. The song is sad, and old, so old. I Don't Care presents the best short fiction by the Hungarian master Ágota Kristóf, selected by the author herself and available in English for the first time. Written immediately before her acclaimed Notebook...

A handpicked selection of novels featuring Simenon's legendary literary detective, Inspector Maigret, with striking new covers. Maigret's Pickpocket finds Inspector Maigret savouring a beautiful spring morning in Paris when he has his wallet stolen by a pickpocket. The wallet is returned the next day, but on the condition that Maigret visit the thief's apartment. What Maigret discovers there sees him...

A wonderful new collection of Henry James's short stories about Americans in Europe. Daisy Miller is one of Henry James's great heroines—a young, independent American travelling in Europe, whose flouting of social conventions has the potential to lead to disaster. Her story is here accompanied by six more tales set among English castles, Swiss hotels, and French ports, all riffing...

One of the greatest classics of Chinese literature One of China's Four Great Classical Novels, Monkey King was written anonymously during the Ming dynasty and is most commonly attributed to Wu Cheng'en, the son of a silk-shop clerk from east China. It recounts a Tang-dynasty monk's quest for Buddhist scriptures, accompanied by an omni-talented kung-fu Monkey King called Sun Wukong;...

The 100th title in the phenomenally successful and much-loved Penguin Clothbound Classics series. This selection of Poe's stories, poetry, and other writing demonstrates the astonishing power and imagination with which he probed the darkest corners of the human mind. The Fall of the House of Usher describes the final hours of a family tormented by tragedy and the legacy of...

Twenty new titles in the much-loved and hugely successful Penguin English Library series "Oh, my dear, relations are like drugs, - useful sometimes, and even pleasant, if taken in small quantities and seldom, but dreadfully pernicious on the whole, and the truly wise avoid them" Taking respite from the Man of Wrath, her children, and her stifling household, Elizabeth discovers...

A selection of Lafcadio Hearn's brilliantly entertaining and eerie ghost stories, regarded as major classics in Japan. In this collection of classic ghost stories from Japan, beautiful princesses turn out to be frogs, paintings come alive, deadly spectral brides haunt the living, and a samurai delivers the baby of a Shinto goddess with mystical help. Here are all the phantoms...

New in Penguin Japanese Classics - ghost stories from a master recounter of the macabre. Introducing Penguin Japanese Classics - a collection of some of Japan's most celebrated and ground-breaking 20th-century writers, with covers inspired by Japanese art and design. Taking us from a sun-drenched affair in a seaside town to an underground 'ark' full of shadows and eccentrics, with...

"This world is made of clouds and of the shadows of clouds. It is made of mental landscapes, porous as air, where men and women are as trees walking, and as reeds shaken by the wind." First published in 1929, Wolf Solent was the first in John Cowper Powys' great sequence of visionary works of fiction. Set in Hardy's Wessex,...

Fifty new books at £1 each, celebrating the pioneering spirit of the Penguin Modern Classics series, from inspiring essays to groundbreaking fiction and poetry. 'The illegible signature of teetering disaster' Three great stories—The Aurelian, Signs and Symbols, and Lance—the latter is both a derisive attack on science fiction and an attempt to imagine the real pain and horror that would...

A twisting psychological thriller of a family caught in a murderous trap of their own making. Mr Marble is in serious debt, desperate for money to pay his family's bills, until the combination of a wealthy relative, a bottle of Cyanide, and a shovel offer him the perfect solution. Slowly, the Marble family becomes poisoned by guilt and caught in...

"Ambiguities indeed! One long brain-muddling, soul-bewildering ambiguity (to borrow Mr. Melville's style), like Melchisedeck, without beginning or end—a labyrinth without a clue—an Irish bog without so much as a Jack o' the'lantern to guide the wanderer's footsteps—the dream of a distempered stomach, disordered by a hasty supper on half-cooked pork chops." So judged the New York Herald when Pierre was...

A collection of some of Dostoyevsky's finest short stories. With their penetrating psychological insight and their emphasis on human dignity, respect, and forgiveness, Dostoyevsky's early short stories contain the seeds of the themes that came to his major novels. Poor Folk, the author's first great literary triumph, is the story of a tragic relationship between an impoverished copy clerk and...

The definitive 25th-anniversary edition of Burroughs's legendary second novel. Originally written in 1952 but not published till 1985, Queer is an enigma. It serves as both an unflinching autobiographical self-portrait and a coruscatingly political novel. It is Burroughs' only realist love story and a montage of comic-grotesque fantasies that paved the way for his masterpiece, Naked Lunch. Set in Mexico...

One of the great masterpieces of Russian literature. Throughout his life, Isaac Babel was torn by opposing forces, by the desire both to remain faithful to his Jewish roots and yet to be free of them. This duality of vision infuses his work with a powerful energy from the earliest tales, including 'Old Shloyme' and 'Childhood', which affirm his Russian-Jewish...

Russian Short Stories from Pushkin to Buida is a unique collection that brings together acknowledged masterpieces from classic authors such as Chekhov and Gogol, alongside a rich selection from less familiar writers. From the reign of the Tsars in the early 19th century to the collapse of the Soviet Union and beyond, the short story has long held a central...

First time in Black Classics for Lawrence—previously in PMC. Lawrence was one of the great short story writers of the 20th century. This new collection of ten stories shows the variety of Lawrence's achievement. The works develop from early realism towards myth and fairy tale, murder and ghost stories.

A selection of ground-breaking short stories, from the author of Mrs Dalloway Virginia Woolf tested the boundaries of fiction in these short stories, developing a new language of sensation, feeling and thought, and recreating in words the 'swarm and confusion of life'. Defying categorisation, the stories range from the more traditional narrative style of Solid Objects through the fragile impressionism...

A stirring novel of idealist loyalty and sibling love, by one of East Germany's most important writers. 1960. The border between East and West Germany has closed. For Elisabeth, a young painter, the GDR is her generation's chance to build an egalitarian socialist future. For her brother Uli, it is a place of stricture and oppression. Separating them is the...

Sketches by Boz collected a rich and strange mixture of reportage, observation, fancy and fiction centred on the metropolis. It was Dickens's first book, published when he was twenty-four, and in it, we find him walking the London streets, in theatres, pawnshops, law-courts, prisons, along the Thames, and on the omnibus, missing nothing, recording and transforming urban and suburban life...

First paperback publication of the essential tales drawn from the acclaimed new translation. This is the essential one-volume edition of Tales from 1,001 Nights, drawn from the acclaimed landmark translation published in three volumes by Penguin Classics in 2008. It contains 'Aladdin', 'Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves', 'Sindbad the Sailor', and many others of the most enjoyable and beloved...