Penguin Classics: General Fiction

A new selection of lyrically haunting 1960s short stories from a Japanese literary icon. A writer is seized by apocalyptic visions, a trio of beatniks dance to modern jazz in the ruins of an abandoned church, and a séance brings forth the reproachful spirits of the military dead. In Voices of the Fallen Heroes, stark autobiography contrasts with pure horror,...

A riveting, funny coming-of-age story — the second volume in Pirkko Saisio's award-winning Helsinki trilogy. Teenaged Pirkko can't decide which she hates most — God, her communist father, or her growing breasts. Grandpa has moved into the room long promised to her, and Mother, overworked and distant, tries to keep the peace between her headstrong daughter and husband. It's 1960s...

'One of the tragicomic classics of the AIDS era' The Nation Mimi Smithers, forty-something housewife and aesthete manquee, has moved with her Union Carbide husband from Tehran to Westchester. Life takes an unexpected turn when she meets Joel, a dazzlingly handsome porn star. Soon she tumbles down the rabbit hole of Manhattan and Fire Island society, helping glamorous Joel with...

A moving reimagining of the man at the heart of Operation Mincemeat, brilliantly told by the celebrated wartime statesman, historian and author William Maryngton has one dream in life- to fight for his country, as his father did. Yet, by the time Armistice is reached in 1918, he is too young to fulfil his greatest wish. As time passes, Willie...

A gorgeous new clothbound edition of Soseki's cherished novel, with an introduction by Murakami 'Even bigger than Japan is the inside of your head. Don't ever surrender yourself - not to Japan, not to anything' Soseki's work of gentle humour and doomed innocence depicts twenty-three-year-old Sanshiro, a recent graduate from a provincial college, as he begins university life in the...

A trio of Simenon's finest psychological novels from the 1960s, including- The Hand, Betty and The Blue Room Amidst the fury of a relentless snowstorm, the loyalties of two friends are put to the ultimate test, with fatal consequences. In the shadows of 1960s Paris, a woman on the brink of despair is offered a chance at redemption. But as...

A landmark anthology, staking a new claim for Bengali literature in English The prose short story arrived in Bengal in the wake of British colonizers, and Bengali writers quickly made the form their own. By the twentieth century a profusion of literary magazines and journals meant they were being avidly read by millions. Writers responded to this hunger for words...

From the master of spy thrillers, John le Carre's The Spy Who Came in from the Cold is a gripping story of love and betrayal at the height of the Cold War, published as a beautiful Penguin Clothbound Classics edition for the first time Alec Leamas is tired. It's the 1960s, he's been out in the cold for years, spying...

A powerful and essential tale of female freedom This internationally acclaimed masterpiece by one of Iran's most important and influential writers traces the interwoven destinies of five women - including a wealthy middle-aged housewife, a sex worker and a schoolteacher - as they arrive by different paths to live together in an abundant garden on the outskirts of Tehran. Drawing...

A gripping novella by the cult writer of Siblings Kathrin - five years into a disenchanting marriage - struggles to work the farm with her sister-in-law while her husband Heinrich is away fighting for the Third Reich. To help them with the harvest, Heinrich arranges for Alexei, a Russian prisoner of war, to labour in the fields. Though initially suspicious...

Exiled from Paris, Maigret discovers some disturbing secrets in a sleepy coastal town. A short, sprightly man appeared in the doorway, looked left and right, and went back into the passage. A moment later, the improbable happened. The little man reappeared, bent over, clinging to a long mass that he now started dragging through the mud. It must have been...

Divorce, madness and self-destruction- the unforgettable final novel from the great Danish writer I want to write a book about Vilhelm's room and the events which took place in it, or arose from it; those that led to Lise's death, which I have survived only so that I might write down the story of her and Vilhelm... The ripples from...

Penguin Classics relaunch The Diary of a Nobody began as a serial in Punch and the book which followed in 1892 has never been out of print. The Grossmith brothers not only created an immortal comic character but produced a clever satire of their society. Mr Pooter is an office clerk and upright family man in a dull 1880s suburb....

A new translation of this gripping novel, originally intended as the last in the Maigret series, which sees the inspector brought out of his peaceful retirement. Maigret shrugged his shoulders, buried his hands in his pockets and went off without answering. He had just spent one of the most wretched days in his life. For hours, in his corner, he...

A 50th-anniversary Deluxe Edition of the incomparable 20th-century masterpiece of satire and fantasy, in a newly revised version of the acclaimed Pevear and Volokhonsky translation. Nothing in the whole of literature compares with The Master and Margarita. One spring afternoon, the Devil, trailing fire and chaos in his wake, weaves himself out of the shadows and into Moscow. Mikhail Bulgakov’s...

Season of Migration to the North is an "Arabian Nights" in reverse, enclosing a moral about international misconceptions and delusions. This is the story of a student who returns to his village after his obsession with the West had led him to London and the beds of women with similar obsessions about the mysterious East.

A hardback series for le Carré collectors The Russia House follows Barley Blair, who is not a Service man but rather a small-time publisher and a self-destructive soul whose only loves are whisky and jazz. One drunken night at a dacha in Peredelkino during the Moscow Book Fair, Barley befriends a high-ranking Soviet scientist who could be the greatest asset...

Shortlisted for the International Booker Prize, a heart-wrenching fable of enduring attachment by one of France's most original writers at work today. A Leopard-Skin Hat may be Anne Serre's most moving novel yet. A masterpiece of simplicity, emotion and elegance, it is the story of an intense friendship between the Narrator and his close childhood friend, Fanny, who suffers from...

Penguin Modern Hardbacks – a new series of iconic works from the Modern Classics list with bold, mid-century-inspired cover designs. Carson McCullers' prodigious first novel was published to instant acclaim when she was just twenty-three. Set in a small town in the middle of the deep South, it is the story of John Singer, a lonely deaf-mute, and a disparate...

An epic novel of postwar, nuclear-age Japan, by the author of Territory of Light. Mitch and Yonko haven't spoken in a year. As children, they were inseparable, raised together in an orphanage outside Tokyo—but ever since the sudden death of Mitch's brother, they've been mourning in their private ways, worlds apart. In the aftermath of the Fukushima nuclear catastrophe, they...

An electrifying novel about the Nazi who reinvented himself, Albert Speer. "Which is the most seductive, truth or fiction?" This is the story of Albert Speer - The protege. The 'good Nazi'. The star. The mythmaker. In 1969, Speer, Hitler's favourite architect and Minister of Armaments and War Production, publishes his memoirs. Rewriting his own past, claiming to have known...

A powerful new translation of Nobel Prize winner Hermann Hesse's masterpiece of youthful rebellion—with a foreword and cover art by James Franco. A Penguin Classic A young man awakens to selfhood and to a world of possibilities beyond the conventions of his upbringing in Nobel Prize winner Hermann Hesse's beloved novel Demian. Emil Sinclair is a quiet boy drawn into...

This enduring novel of crime and retribution vividly reflects the social and moral values of New England in the 1840s. The House of the Seven Gables is Nathaniel Hawthorne's gripping psychological drama concerning the Pyncheon family, a dynasty founded on pious theft, who live for generations under a dead man's curse until their house is finally exorcised by love. Hawthorne,...

Cooper's most enduringly popular novel combines heroism and romance with powerful criticism of the destruction of nature and tradition. Set against the French and Indian siege of Fort William Henry in 1757, The Last of the Mohicans recounts the story of two sisters, Cora and Alice Munro, daughters of the English commander, who are struggling to be reunited with their...

"One of the wittiest, most playful, and most alive and ageless books ever written." -- Dave Eggers, The New Yorker A revelatory new translation of the playful, incomparable masterpiece of one of the greatest Black authors in the Americas. A Penguin Classic The mixed-race grandson of ex-slaves, Machado de Assis is not only Brazil's most celebrated writer but also a...

The final novel of one of America’s most beloved writers—a tale of degeneration, corruption, and spiritual crisis A Penguin Classic In awarding John Steinbeck the 1962 Nobel Prize in Literature, the Nobel committee stated that with The Winter of Our Discontent, he had “resumed his position as an independent expounder of the truth, with an unbiased instinct for what is...

Winesburg, Ohio tells the story of George Willard, a young reporter on the Winesburg Eagle. One by one, the inhabitants of Winesburg, Ohio, confide their hopes, their dreams, and their fears to him. This town of friendly but solitary people comes to life as Anderson's unique talent exposes the emotional undercurrents that bind its people together. In this timeless cycle...

Sara Crewe, an exceptionally intelligent and imaginative student at Miss Minchin's Select Seminary for Young Ladies, is devastated when her adored, indulgent father dies. Now penniless and banished to a room in the attic, Sara is demeaned, abused, and forced to work as a servant. How this resourceful girl's fortunes change again is at the centre of A Little Princess,...

Don Quixote has become so entranced reading tales of chivalry that he decides to turn knight errant himself. In the company of his faithful squire, Sancho Panza, these exploits blossom in all sorts of wonderful ways. While Quixote's fancy often leads him astray - he tilts at windmills, imagining them to be giants - Sancho acquires cunning and a certain...

The masterpiece of Steinbeck’s later years—at once a family saga and a modern retelling of the Book of Genesis. Part of the Penguin Orange Collection, Winner of the 2016 AIGA + Design Observer 50 Books | 50 Covers competition and a limited-run series of American classics designed with a modern take on the iconic Penguin paperback. A Penguin Classic In...

Set against the frozen waste of a harsh New England winter, Edith Wharton's Ethan Frome is a tale of despair, forbidden emotions, and sexual tensions, published with an introduction and notes by Elizabeth Ammons in Penguin Classics. Ethan Frome works his unproductive farm and struggles to maintain a bearable existence with his difficult, suspicious, and hypochondriac wife, Zeenie. But when...

A deluxe edition of Mary Shelley's haunting adventure about ambition and modernity run amok. Nominated as one of America's best-loved novels by PBS's The Great American Read. Now a Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition with an introduction by Elizabeth Kostova and cover art by Ghost World creator Daniel Clowes, Mary Shelley's timeless gothic novel presents the epic battle between man and...

Winner of the National Book Award "The most profound and accomplished American novel since the end of World War II." —The New Republic “A screaming comes across the sky...” A few months after the Germans’ secret V-2 rocket bombs begin falling on London, British Intelligence discovers that a map of the city pinpointing the sexual conquests of one Lieutenant Tyrone...

Nobel Prize winner Hermann Hesse’s iconic countercultural novel about the search for authenticity in an inauthentic world, in a new translation. A Penguin Classic At first glance, Harry Haller seems like a respectable, educated man. In reality, he is the Steppenwolf: wild, strange, alienated from society, and repulsed by the modern age. But as he is drawn into a series...

The classic novel of a boy raised by apes in the African jungle, now the basis for a major motion picture, The Legend of Tarzan, starring Alexander Skarsgård, Margot Robbie, Samuel L. Jackson, and Djimon Hounsou. Originally published in 1914, Burroughs’s Tarzan of the Apes, the ideal image of pure animalistic power at odds with the civilized world, appealed to...

Possibly the worthiest contender for the title of The Great American Novel, this perennial bestseller is updated with a new introduction by Mark Twain scholar R. Kent Rasmussen. The classic boyhood adventure tale, updated with a new introduction by noted Mark Twain scholar R. Kent Rasmussen and a foreword by Azar Nafisi, author of Reading Lolita in Tehran and The...

"We know the old adage about judging books by their covers, but how could you not when the covers are as lovely as these?" – Vogue (U.K.) The jacket design by Coralie Bickford-Smith reflects the elegance and glamour of the Art Deco period paired with the modern aesthetic of mechanical repetition. Each jacket comes with a detachable bookmark. Anthony and...

The Prince and the Pauper by Mark Twain tells the intriguing tale of two boys who, despite their identical looks and shared birthday, lead remarkably different lives. Edward Tudor is a prince and the heir to King Henry VIII, while Tom Canty is a destitute pauper. However, their lives take an unexpected turn when fate intervenes and Edward finds himself...

The authoritative original English version of a beloved classic. One of the world's best-loved stories of shipwreck and survival, The Swiss Family Robinson portrays a family's struggle to create a new life for themselves on a strange and fantastic tropical island. Blown off course by a raging storm, the family—a Swiss pastor, his wife, their four young sons, plus two...

May you not rest, as long as I am living. You said I killed you - haunt me, then. Lockwood, the new tenant of Thrushcross Grange on the bleak Yorkshire moors, is forced to seek shelter one night at Wuthering Heights, the home of his landlord. There he discovers the history of the tempestuous events that took place years before—of...

Letter to My Judge is a dark, psychological tale of deadly obsession, presented here in a masterful new translation. My dear Judge, I would like one man, just one, to understand me. And I really hope that man can be you. In a small town in western France, Dr Charles Alavoine seems to lead the perfect life—his own medical practice,...

Set in a vanished rural world of ghosts and devils, this is a beautiful coming-of-age novel from the Polish Nobel Laureate. The Issa Valley begins with, 'Thomas was born in the village of Gine at that time of year when a ripe apple thumps to the ground during an afternoon lull.' So a boy's life begins in a winding river...

Joyce's lyrical, poetic, semi-autobiographical novel in a new annotated edition, with an introduction by Joseph Brooker. The portrayal of Stephen Dedalus's Dublin childhood and youth, his quest for identity through art and his gradual emancipation from the claims of family, religion and Ireland itself, is also an oblique self-portrait of the young James Joyce and a universal testament to the...

Colette's irresistible depiction of a childhood in rural France, in a lush new translation by Belinda Jack. 'I was an independent, stray dog who answered to no one...' Claudine lives in a large house with a rose-filled garden and a vegetable patch smelling of tomato leaves and apricots. Beyond her house is the village, where travelling performers stop for the...

Part of the new Penguin James Joyce collection—reissues of Joyce's work with fresh new settings and contemporary introductions and notes by leading scholars. Dubliners, Joyce's first major work and written when he was only twenty-five, brought his city to the world for the first time. His stories are rooted in the rich detail of Dublin life, portraying ordinary, often defeated...

A feminist cult classic about love, independence and what it means to be an individual. '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 declaration of co-dependency? A new dimension of...

James Joyce's final, dazzlingly experimental masterpiece, with a new introduction by Brian Fox. Joyce's final work, Finnegans Wake, is his masterpiece of the night, as Ulysses is of the day. Supreme linguistic virtuosity conjures up the dark underground worlds of sexuality and dream. Joyce undermines traditional storytelling and all official forms of English and confronts the different kinds of betrayal—cultural,...

An essential exploration of Polish literature, with a foreword by Olga Tokarczuk. The thirty-nine superb stories of The Penguin Book of Polish Short Stories run the length of the literal and imaginative creation of Poland, from 1918 (when Poland regained its independence after 123 years of colonisation by neighbouring empires) to the present. The stories include 'Miss Winczewska', by the...

The best in short fiction from around the world, from celebrated anthologist and author John Freeman and award-winning novelist Rabih Alameddine. In The Penguin Book of the International Short Story, writers from different nations, languages and sensibilities come together in a globe-spanning and long overdue tour of modern fiction. In 'Super-Frog Saves Tokyo', Haruki Murakami presents a man who believes...

The Vagabond is Colette's subversive and witty tale of a dancer in Belle Époque France, presented here in a fresh new Penguin Classics translation. Renée, aged thirty-three and divorced from her serially unfaithful husband, reinvents herself as a dancer in France's music halls. When a wealthy suitor appears, promising marriage and stability, Renée must choose between the security he represents...

Part of the new Penguin James Joyce collection—reissues of Joyce's work with fresh new settings and contemporary introductions and notes by leading scholars. Following the events of one single day in Dublin, the 16th of June 1904, and what happens to the characters Stephen Dedalus, Leopold Bloom and his wife Molly, Ulysses is a monument to the human condition. It...

The Last Man by Mary Shelley is a landmark novel that invented the human extinction genre and initiated climate fiction. It imagines a world where newly forged communities and reverence for nature rise from the ashes of a pandemic-ravaged society. This edition is now available for the first time in Penguin Classics, with a foreword by Rebecca Solnit. Written while...

Powys' great visionary novel at last in Penguin Modern Classics One of the great cult novels, a book that can be read and re-read throughout a lifetime, A Glastonbury Romance is John Cowper Powys' masterpiece. Set in a beautifully imagined fictional version of the West Country, the novel inhabits a twentieth century under siege from older and stranger forces. An...

A dazzling tapestry of myth, fantasy and folk tale from Argentina's great writer of speculative fiction, in a translation by Ursula K. Le Guin. In city squares and golden palaces, a series of storytellers recount the history of the greatest Empire that never was: a history in which orphans rise from the underworld to the throne, mad emperors raze cities,...

A profound exploration of colonialism, from one of the Caribbean's most powerful literary voices. A powerful reimagining of the age of European exploration, Natives of My Person tells the story of a nameless Commandant who sets sail under imperial orders—somewhere between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries—to locate the fabled island of San Cristobal, a place shrouded in myth and promise....

A new translation by David Bellos of the last great novel by France's greatest novelist. In the turmoil of the French Revolution, the year 1793 represented the peak of bloody revolutionary violence. Victor Hugo plunges into this tumultuous period with a story of courage and betrayal across the political classes. As the revolution rages, three characters—a nobleman turned revolutionary, a...

A new selection of six short stories by one of Japan's most iconic twentieth-century writers. An adolescent girl narrates her day in an existential masterpiece that explores what it means to be a forming person in a fomenting society. A woman writes a farewell note to her husband, an artist who has driven her away with his counterfeit profundity and...

A beautiful and merciless novel about the tyranny of the family—and a highly acclaimed bestseller in Italy. On that day, ten years ago, I saw my parents for the last time. Since then I've changed phone numbers, houses, continents, I've erected an impregnable wall and put an ocean between us. They've been the best ten years of my life. A...

Playful, sharp and fantastical: a new selection of writing by Leonora Carrington, the last great Surrealist. In 1940, Leonora Carrington — a twenty-two-year-old British-born Surrealist artist — was persuaded to flee France and the advancing German army for Spain. Already suffering from a psychotic break occasioned by the arrest of her lover by the Nazi authorities, she was soon confined...

Jane Austen's classic novel with cover artwork from the major new feature film starring Daisy Edgar-Jones. The more I know of the world, the more am I convinced that I shall never see a man whom I can really love. I require so much! Marianne Dashwood wears her heart on her sleeve, and when she falls in love with the...

COMING THIS AUTUMN: A MAJOR NETFLIX SERIES STARRING FLORENCE PUGH The magnum opus of a giant of American literature, East of Eden is an epic, unforgettable family saga of blood ties and betrayal. 'There is only one book to a man,' John Steinbeck wrote of East of Eden. 'It has everything in it I have been able to learn about...

Guy Mannering is an astrologer who only half-believes in his art. Instead, he places his faith in patriarchal power, wealth, and social position. However, the Scotland of this novel is a nation in which the old hierarchies are breaking down. Guy must learn the limits of the nabob's authority in a society where each social group— from gypsies and smugglers,...

Tender and bittersweet, these stories by Truman Capote form a captivating tribute to the Christmas season. Selected from across Capote's writing life, the stories in this volume range from nostalgic portraits of childhood to more unsettling works that reveal the darkness beneath the festive glitter. In the Deep South of Capote's youth, a young boy, Buddy, and his beloved maiden...

The thrilling international bestseller by 'China's answer to John le Carre' (Financial Times) Hidden deep in the mountains, the recruits at Unit 701, China's secret services, operate in a dark, shadowy world. There is the 'wind-listener', a blind surveillance officer who can hear sounds from miles away; the beautiful, unstable maths genius who meets a violent end; the old man...

A beautiful Penguin Clothbound Classics edition of Gaskell's most famous novel ‘How am I to dress up in my finery, and go off and away to smart parties, after the sorrow I have seen today?’ Elizabeth Gaskell's compassionate, richly dramatic novel features one of the most original and fully-rounded female characters in Victorian fiction, Margaret Hale. It shows how, forced...

A moving portrayal of loss, consolation and belonging in a remote community. It seemed that even the jungle fell silent for a moment as if it wanted to help save a little child. In the depths of the Mexican jungle, American traveller Gerard Gales is hunting for alligators when he comes across a small village along the banks of the...

The Death Ship is a cult masterpiece and a darkly comic tale of survival on the high seas. Whoever survived the Yorikke could never be frightened any more during his lifetime by anything. Stateless and stranded after he loses his passport, sailor Gerald Gales flees arrest and persecution across Europe, until he finally finds work on the Yorikke, a decrepit...

An unflinching, absurdly funny portrait of life in exile by one of the greatest Yugoslav writers ‘In the end life is reduced to a heap of random, unconnected details. It could have been like this or like that, it's absolutely immaterial.’ A pink cigarette lighter, lollipop sticks, a beer-bottle opener: these are some of the contents of Roland the Walrus'...

Three desperate prospectors embark on a perilous quest for gold in 1920s Mexico. 'Gold is a very devilish sort of a thing, believe me, boys' Deep in the wild heart of Mexico's Sierra Madre mountains lies treasure beyond reckoning, just waiting to be found by those who know where to look. Or so believe three Americans—Dobbs, Curtin and Howard—down on...

The sensational debut novel of one of the 20th century's greatest modernist writers. Clarice Lispector's sensational, prize-winning debut novel Near to the Wild Heart was published when she was twenty-three and earned her the name 'Hurricane Clarice'. It tells the story of Joana, from her wild, creative childhood, as the 'little egg' who writes poems for her father, through her...

Atlas Shrugged, by Ayn Rand, is a monumental work that intricately weaves a gripping narrative with profound philosophical underpinnings. The story unfolds in a dystopian United States, where governmental overreach and stifling regulations have led to an economy on the brink of collapse. At its heart is the enigmatic figure of John Galt, a man whose ambitious plan to 'stop...

Femme Fatale by Guy de Maupassant is part of the Little Black Classics series, a new collection launched to celebrate Penguin's 80th anniversary. “They trailed in all their vulgar glory over the fresh green grass...” This evocative phrase captures the essence of de Maupassant's exploration of human nature and societal norms, which are deftly woven throughout the narrative.

Little Black Classics - the new series to celebrate Penguin's 80th anniversary \"Oh, good God,\" he kept saying with great relish. \"Good God...\"

Little Black Classics - the new series to celebrate Penguin's 80th anniversary. Although he feared death, he could not stop. "If I stopped now, after coming all this way - well, they'd call me an idiot!"

Little Black Classics - the new series to celebrate Penguin's 80th anniversary No, no, I've got your word for it, I've got to die ... you promised me ... you told me ... Turgenev's accounts of hunting in rural Russia, and the extraordinary characters he meets there. Introducing Little Black Classics - 80 books for Penguin's 80th birthday. Little Black...

Little Black Classics - the new series to celebrate Penguin's 80th anniversary Lord Arthur Savile's Crime He was not blind to the fact that murder, like the religions of the Pagan world, requires a victim as well as a priest...

Little Black Classics - the new series to celebrate Penguin's 80th anniversary "And again, as always, he had the feeling he was holding something that never was quite his - his. Something too delicate, too precious, that would fly away once he let go." Three sharp and powerful short stories from Katherine Mansfield, one of the genre's all-time masters. Introducing...

Little Black Classics – the new series to celebrate Penguin's 80th anniversary Mrs Rosie and the Priest 'When the men were off somewhere, he would come visiting their wives more solicitously than any priest they'd had before...' Mrs Rosie and the Priest is part of the delightful collection of short stories showcasing Giovanni Boccaccio's wit and insight into human nature....

Little Black Classics - the new series to celebrate Penguin's 80th anniversary On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts explores the macabre world of murder as an art form. The author enthralls readers with his satirical and darkly humorous discourse. 'People begin to see that something more goes to the composition of a fine murder than two blockheads...

The Atheist's Mass is part of the Little Black Classics series, launched to celebrate Penguin's 80th anniversary. "This is as much a mystery as the Immaculate Conception, which of itself must make a doctor an unbeliever." The enigmatic tale unfolds in true Balzacian style, exploring the dichotomy between faith and scepticism, belief and science, through the eyes of a doctor...