Penguin Classics: General Fiction

A breathtaking international bestselling novel about family secrets, and Javier Marías's masterpiece. In the middle of a family lunch, Teresa, just married, goes to the bathroom, unbuttons her blouse and shoots herself in the heart. What made her kill herself immediately after her honeymoon? Years later, this mystery fascinates the young newlywed Juan, whose father was married to Teresa before...

A gem of a book about the aggravations and great joys of cats from a literary master. In the autumn of 1965, flush with the unexpected success of his first published books, the Czech writer Bohumil Hrabal bought a weekend cottage in Kersko, about an hour's drive east of Prague. From then until his death in 1997, he divided his...

He's a writer who, once you read him, makes you want to read everything he's done - Martin Amis, Sunday Times Prosperous, good-looking, and empty inside, 28-year-old advertising executive David Bell appears on the surface to have everything. But he is a man on the brink of losing his sanity. Trapped in a Manhattan office with soulless sycophants as his...

One of the best American novels ever written - a rollicking, controversial New York fable. As Stephen Rojack, a decorated war hero and former congressman who murders his wife in a fashionable New York City high-rise, runs amok through the city in which he was once a privileged citizen, Mailer peels away the layers of our social norms to reveal...

An epic novel of love, war, and revolution from Mikhail Sholokhov, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature. One of the most important Russian masterpieces of the 20th century, And Quiet Flows the Don is an epic novel depicting the lives and struggles of Don Cossacks during the First World War, the Russian Revolution, and the Civil War. The story...

'The greatest find in American crime fiction since Raymond Chandler' — Sunday Times Jackson's woman has found him a foolproof way to make money—a technique for turning ten dollar bills into hundreds. But when the scheme somehow fails, Jackson is left broke, wanted by the police and desperately racing to get back both his money and his loving Imabelle. The...

New to Penguin Modern Classics, as part of our Achebe relaunch. Ezeulu, headstrong chief priest of the god Ulu, is worshipped by the six villages of Umuaro. But he is beginning to find his authority increasingly under threat—from his rivals in the tribe, from those in the white government, and even from his own family. Yet he still feels he...

A Spy In The House Of Love explores the life of Sabina, a beautiful, bored, and bourgeois woman who leads a double life driven by her relentless desire for brief encounters with near-strangers. Propelled into infidelity by a desperate longing for sexual fulfilment, she weaves a sensual web of deceit across New York. However, when the secrecy of her affairs...

Flann O'Brien's first novel is a brilliant impressionistic jumble of ideas, mythology and nonsense. Operating on many levels, it incorporates plots within plots, giving full rein to O'Brien's dancing intellect and Celtic wit. The undergraduate narrator lives with his uncle in Dublin, drinks too much with his friends and invents stories peopled with hilarious and unlikely characters. One of these...

The heart-wrenching autobiographical novel that paved the way for feminist writers in Italy ‘To love, to sacrifice oneself, and to submit! Was this what all women were destined for?’ When her carefree, aspirational childhood in a seaside town is brought brutally to an end, the nameless narrator of Sibilla Aleramo's blazing autobiographical novel discovers the shocking reality of life for...

The bestselling 1988 collection of short stories exploring the inner lives of men and women, ambiguity and unease in relationships, and the cruelty we inflict on one another. A young woman anxiously waits for her date on a street corner in New York City; he sits in a pizza parlour across the street, watching her discomfort. A middle-aged woman returns...

A critically acclaimed tale of abuse and betrayal in America's deep South. Carolina in the 1950s, and Bone—christened Ruth Anna Boatwright—lives a happy life, in and out of her aunt's houses, playing with her cousins on the porch, sipping ice tea, loving her little sister Reece and her beautiful young mother. But Glen Waddell has been watching them all, wanting...

A bestselling collection of short stories from the American master storyteller Mary Gaitskill, author of Bad Behavior. First published in the late 1990s and a bestseller at the time, this incisive collection of short stories explores connection and disconnection in families, between ex-lovers and friends. From a father reflecting on the daughter whose lesbianism he cannot accept, to two people...

Berlin Alexanderplatz is the great novel of 1920s Berlin life, in a superb translation by Michael Hofmann. The subject of this book is the life of the former cement-worker and haulier Franz Biberkopf in Berlin. As our story begins, he has just been released from prison, where he did time for some stupid stuff, and now he is back in...

One of the first bestsellers in Germany after the Second World War, Berlin Finale is a breathtaking novel of the most dramatic period of upheaval in modern history. April 1945, the last days of the Nazi regime. While bombs are falling on Berlin, the Gestapo are still searching for traitors, resistance fighters, and deserters. People mistrust each other more than...

Big Sur is Jack Kerouac's stunningly vivid and gritty second novel, newly added to the Penguin Modern Classics series. 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'. Seeking refuge, he withdrew to a cabin...

From the American master of historical fiction, an award-winning coming-of-age story set amidst the gangster underworld of Depression-era New York City. It's 1930s New York and Billy Bathgate, a fifteen-year-old high-school dropout, has captured the attention of the infamous gangster Dutch Schultz. The product of an East Bronx upbringing by a dysfunctional Catholic mother and an absent Jewish father, Billy...

The book that shocked a generation and introduced Kathy Acker as the enfant terrible of the 1980s literary underground. This is a book about feminism, capitalism, sex, punk, youth, the city, the literary giants, anger, infatuation, and the USA. A teenage coming-of-age story and a glorious, delirious patchwork of prose, poetry, drama, plagiarism, and illustration. Childlike sexual drawings pepper the...

With a new introduction by Emma Larkin Set in the days of the Empire, with the British ruling in Burma, Burmese Days describes both indigenous corruption and Imperial bigotry, when 'after all, natives were natives - interesting, no doubt, but finally only a "subject" people, an inferior people with black faces'. Against the prevailing orthodoxy, Flory, a white timber merchant,...

A masterpiece of American literature, Call It Sleep is a glorious ode to the migrant experience. David Schearl arrives in America in his mother's arms. Waiting for them is a father and husband consumed by frustration and a labyrinth of language and asphalt - New York City at the turn of the century. As David navigates his father's anger and...

A stunning new series look for one of the greatest writers of the 20th century in Penguin Modern Classics. In the din and stink that is Cannery Row, a colourful blend of misfits—gamblers, whores, drunks, bums, and artists—survive side by side in a jumble of adventure and mischief. Lee Chong, the astute owner of the well-stocked grocery store, is also...

The dreamlike story of a single mother and her estranged 11-year-old daughter by Yuko Tsushima, the 'archaeologist of the female psyche'. Child of Fortune is deceptively gentle and dreamlike, teetering on the edge of tragedy. It covers a year in the life of a single mother with an eleven-year-old daughter, combining a complex interior world with memorably visual imagery. The...

“We're not Christians, Christ stopped short of here, at Eboli.” Exiled to a remote and barren corner of Italy for his opposition to Mussolini, Carlo Levi entered a world cut off from history and the state. It was a land hedged in by custom and sorrow, devoid of comfort or solace, where the peasants lived with an eternal patience amidst...

The first part in a trilogy of novels, Cities of the Red Night satirises modern society in a shocking story of sex, drugs, disease, and adventure. An opium addict is lost in the jungle; young men wage war against an empire of mutants; a handsome young pirate faces his execution; and the world's population is infected with a radioactive epidemic....

A classic of postwar literature, a small masterpiece of humour, humanity and heroism from one of the best Czech writers. For gauche young apprentice Milos Hrma, life at the small but strategic railway station in Bohemia in 1945 is full of complex preoccupations. There is the exacting business of dispatching German troop trains to and from the toppling Eastern front;...

A man at his desk is interrupted by the appearance of a woodland elf in his room; the piano maestro Bachmann ends his career; a barber shaves the face of a man who once tortured him; a shy dreamer makes a deal with the Devil. In these sixty-five stories of magic and melancholy, Nabokov displays an astonishing range of inventiveness,...

Years in insurance and marriage to the joyless Hilda have been no more than death in life to George Bowling. This and fear of another war take his mind back to the peace of his childhood in a small country town. But his return journey to Lower Binfield brings complete disillusionment. In Coming Up for Air, George Orwell keenly explores...

Major new collection of Clarice Lispector's short stories for the first time in English. The publication of Clarice Lispector's Complete Stories, eighty-five in all, is a major literary event. Now, for the first time in English, are all the stories that made her a Brazilian legend— from teenagers coming into awareness of their sexual and artistic powers to humdrum housewives...

He belongs with those great demented realists ... whose writing pitilessly exposes the ridiculousness of the human condition. - Will Self A preacher called Deke O'Malley's been selling false hope — the promise of a glorious new life in Africa for just $1,000 a family. But when thieves with machine guns steal the proceeds — and send one man to...

A mesmerizing novel from one of the most important writers working today, winner of the alternative Nobel Prize. Francis Sancher, a handsome outsider, loved by some and reviled by others, is found dead, face down in the mud on a path outside Rivière au Sel, a small village in Guadeloupe. No one is particularly surprised since Sancher, a secretive and...

By the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Angle of Repose A novel of the friendships and woes of two couples, which tells the story of their lives in lyrical, evocative prose by one of the finest American writers of the late 20th century. When two young couples meet for the first time during the Great Depression, they quickly find they have...

New to PMC Expecting to be inducted into the army, Joseph has given up his job and carefully prepared for his departure to the battlefront. When a series of mix-ups delays his induction, he finds himself facing a year of idleness. Dangling Man is his journal, a wonderful account of his restless wanderings through Chicago's streets, his musings on the...

Death Comes for the Archbishop is Cather's masterpiece of life, death, and faith in New Mexico, now part of the Modern Classics collection. Two French priests, friends since childhood, are sent to the newly created diocese of New Mexico. Life there is hard and frequently dangerous. Journeys between parishes are beset by the perils of bandits and storms. The people...

A new selection of stories featuring the celebrated literary detective, Inspector Maigret. An ageing boxer caught in a love triangle. A wealthy Parisian family on the brink of collapse. A mysterious murder in a hotel in Cannes. These tales of human frailty and deceit—three of which are being published in English for the first time—distil the atmosphere, themes and psychological...

Evelyn Waugh's hilarious debut novel, with an introduction by Barbara Cooke. Sent down from Oxford for indecent behaviour, Paul Pennyfeather embarks on a series of bizarre adventures that start in a minor public school and end in one of HM prisons. In this, his first and funniest novel, Evelyn Waugh immediately caught the ear of the public with his account...

This dark satire follows the egotistical Hermann Hermann, a murderer who thinks himself an artist. Self-satisfied, delighting in the many fascinating quirks of his own personality, Hermann is perhaps not to be taken too seriously. But then a chance meeting with a man he believes to be his double reveals a frightening 'split' in Hermann's nature. With shattering immediacy, Nabokov...

First new translation since publication of Albert Camus's story collection. 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...

Newly translated by Michael Hofmann, this is the funny and touching final novel from the author of Child of All Nations. Bombed-out Cologne after the war is a strange place to be. The black market in jam and corsets is booming, half-destroyed houses offer opportunities for stealing doors and eggcups, and de-Nazification parties are all the rage. Recently released from...

Finnegans Wake follows a man's thoughts and dreams during a single night. It is also a book that participates in the re-reading of Irish history that was part of the revival of the early 20th century. The author, James Joyce, also wrote Ulysses, Dubliners, and Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.

A Japanese masterpiece, reissued in Modern Classics. Written when Mishima was only twenty-six, Forbidden Colours is a depiction of a male homosexual relationship, in which a rich older man buys the love of a young man who is stunningly handsome but lacks the ability to love. As in Mann's Death in Venice, the older man's longing for the beauty of...

A brilliant feminist novel from Weimar Germany, from the author of Child of All Nations. Gilgi, One of Us introduces us to Gilgi, a young woman who knows where she's going in life—she's ambitious, determined, and fearless. She's not even derailed when her parents drop a massive bombshell on her twenty-first birthday. But then she meets the charming but aimless...

Great Expectations by Kathy Acker features Pip switching identities, sexes, and centuries in a brilliant experimental explosion of literature, sex, and art. New York City is very peaceful and quiet, and the pale grey mists are slowly rising, to show me the world. Pip switches identities, sexes, and centuries in this punk, fairytale reimagining of Charles Dickens's original Great Expectations....

An unsettling story of a teenage girl's self-destruction from the author of The Lottery. Natalie Waite, daughter of a mediocre writer and a neurotic housewife, is increasingly unsure of her place in the world. In the midst of adolescence, she senses a creeping darkness in her life, which will spread among nightmarish parties, poisonous college cliques, and the manipulations of...

Herzog is alone, now that Madeleine has left him for his best friend. Solitary, in a crumbling house which he shares with rats, he is buffeted by a whirlwind of mental activity. People rumoured that his mind had collapsed. But was it true? Locked for days in the custody of his rambling memories, Herzog scrawls frantic letters which he never...

Growing up in a mining community in rural South Wales, Huw Morgan is taught many harsh lessons. Looking back, where difficult days are faced with courage and the valleys swell with the sound of Welsh voices, it becomes clear that there is nowhere so green as the landscape of his own memory. How Green Was My Valley explores themes of...

The rhapsodic, ground-breaking cult classic about a young woman's battle with schizophrenia. With a Foreword by Esme Weijun Wang and an Afterword by the author 'She fought them with her head and her teeth while the restraints were being tied, trying, doglike, to bite herself.' Sixteen-year-old Deborah's identity is shattering as she retreats further and further from the 'normal' world...

Since the original prewar translation, there has been no completely new rendering of the French original into English. This translation brings to the fore a more sharply engaged, comic, and lucid Proust. In Search of Lost Time is one of the greatest, most entertaining reading experiences in any language. As the great story unfolds from its magical opening scenes to...

Since the original, prewar translation, there has been no completely new rendering of the French original into English. This translation brings to the fore a more sharply engaged, comic, and lucid Proust, creating one of the greatest, most entertaining reading experiences in any language. As the great story unfolds from its magical opening scenes to its devastating end, Penguin makes...

Since the original prewar translation, there has been no completely new rendering of the French original into English. This translation brings to the fore a more sharply engaged, comic, and lucid Proust, creating one of the greatest, most entertaining reading experiences in any language. As the great story unfolds from its magical opening scenes to its devastating end, it is...

Since the original, prewar translation, there has been no completely new rendering of the French original into English. This translation brings to the fore a more sharply engaged, comic, and lucid Proust, creating one of the greatest, most enjoyable reading experiences in any language. As the great story unfolds from its magical opening scenes to its devastating end, it is...

Since the original, prewar translation, there has been no completely new rendering of the French original into English. This translation brings to the fore a more sharply engaged, comic, and lucid Proust, creating one of the greatest, most entertaining reading experiences in any language. As the great story unfolds from its magical opening scenes to its devastating end, Penguin makes...

Since the original, prewar translation, there has been no completely new rendering of the French original into English. This translation brings to the fore a more sharply engaged, comic, and lucid Proust. In Search of Lost Time is one of the greatest, most entertaining reading experiences in any language. As the great story unfolds from its magical opening scenes to...

An indispensable addition to the canon of Burroughs's works, this series of short stories and sketches guides the reader through his literary evolution. Interzone portrays the development of Burroughs's mature writing style by presenting a selection of pieces from the mid-1950s. His outrageous tone of voice represents the exorcism of four decades of oppressive sexual and social conditioning. Burroughs's close...

Invisible Man, Ellison's blistering and impassioned first novel, won the prestigious American National Book Award. It tells the extraordinary story of a man who is invisible "simply because people refuse to see me". His powerfully depicted adventures—from a terrifying Harlem race riot to his expulsion from a Southern college—extend far beyond the story of one man. The lives of countless...

Nightmarish, witty and immaculately conceived, Invitation to a Beheading unsparingly teases out the illogic of tyranny and will establish Nabokov in readers' minds as a serious and intelligent writer. Written in Berlin in 1934, Invitation to a Beheading contains all the surprise, excitement and magical intensity of a work created in two brief weeks of sustained inspiration. It takes us...

June 1940 was the summer of defeat for the French soldiers, deserted by their officers, utterly demoralised, awaiting the Armistice. Day by day, hour by hour, Iron in the Soul unfolds what men thought and felt and did as France fell. Men who shrugged, men who ran, men who fought and tragic men like Mathieu, who had dedicated his life...

A collection of folktales to transport the reader into a world of adventurers, tricksters, kings, peasants, and saints. Meticulously selected and artfully recreated, the selection of stories in Italian Folktales is vast and ranges geographically from Corsica and Sicily to Venice and the Alps. Calvino is himself clearly captivated by the folkloric imagination and communicates this in what is a...

The great writer's brilliant, blistering essay collection, chronicling how America—so great, so accomplished, so magical—began destroying its soul. "Sentence by sentence, page by page, Bellow is simply the best writer we have." - The New York Times Book Review In It All Adds Up, Pulitzer and Nobel Prize-winning author Saul Bellow takes readers on a brilliantly insightful journey through literary...

New to Penguin Classics, Lewis's 1935 bestseller about a demagogue who becomes president of the United States is frighteningly contemporary. It's 1935 and discontent is rife in America. From the political margins appears Buzz Windrip, charismatic presidential candidate and 'inspired guesser at what political doctrines the people would like'. Sweeping to power amid mass elation, he promises wealth for all...

A jazz novel, a sermon and a song of praise to the richness of African-American experience. From Ralph Ellison, author of the classic novel, Invisible Man - the long-awaited follow-up. Here is the master of American vernacular - the rhythms of jazz and gospel and ordinary speech - at the height of his powers, telling a powerful, evocative tale of...

Junky, Burroughs' first novel, remains the most unflinching, unsentimental account of addiction ever written. A largely autobiographical account, Junky explores the constant cycle of drug dependency, cures, and relapses. It takes readers through junk neighbourhoods in New York, New Orleans, and Mexico City, detailing time spent kicking, dealing, and rolling drunks for money. The narrative delves into junk sickness and...

A remarkable collection of dark, funny and haunting short stories from the inimitable author of The Lottery. An anxious devil, a malicious old woman, and a mid-century Jack the Ripper; a pursuit through a nightmarish city, a small boy's thrilling train ride with a female thief, and a town where the possibility of evil lurks behind perfect rose bushes. This...

Keep the Aspidistra Flying follows Gordon Comstock, a man who loathes dull, middle-class respectability and the worship of money. He abandons a 'good job' in advertising to work part-time in a bookshop, intending to gain more time to write. However, instead of flourishing, he slides into self-induced poverty, which gradually destroys his creativity and spirit. Only Rosemary, ever-faithful Rosemary, has...

Selby Jr's controversial cult classic, new to Penguin Modern Classics. Few novels have caused as much controversy as Hubert Selby Jr.'s notorious masterpiece. Described by various reviewers as hellish and obscene, it tells the stories of New Yorkers who at every turn confront the worst excesses in human nature. Yet there are moments of exquisite tenderness in these troubled lives....

From the peerless author of The Lottery, a spectacular new volume of unpublished and newly discovered stories, essays, letters and drawings. Let Me Tell You brings together the deliciously eerie short stories Jackson is best known for with frank and inspiring lectures on writing; comic essays she wrote about her large, rowdy family; and revelatory personal letters and drawings. Jackson's...

First time in Modern Classics and for Penguin to publish one of the great American writers of the last 50 years. Nedra and Viri are a married couple whose favoured life is centred around dinners, ingenious games with their children, enviable friends and near-perfect days passed skating on a frozen river or sunning on the beach. But fine cracks are...

The collection of short stories that launched one of the key figures of twentieth-century Italian literature to fame. A short story collection pivoting on life's ambiguities and the central question they pose in Tabucchi's fiction— is it choice, fate, accident, or even, occasionally, a kind of magic that plays a decisive role in the protagonists' lives? Set in Paris, Lisbon,...

Another addition to Penguin Modern Classics' key Kerouac holdings, alongside On the Road, The Town and the City & The Subterraneans. As he roams the US, Mexico, Morocco, Paris and London, Kerouac records life on the road in prose of pure poetry. Standing on the engine of a train as it rushes past fields of prickly cactus; witnessing his first...

The first novel by the great American novelist, now the subject of a major new film starring Jude Law. Look Homeward, Angel tells the story of Eugene Gant, who was born in 1900 to hard-drinking stone-cutter Oliver and entrepreneurial Eliza, growing up in small-town America. Eugene is both a lonely outsider and a passionate chronicler of American life. As Eugene...

In one of the wittiest novels of them all, Nancy Mitford casts a finely gauged net to capture perfectly the foibles and fancies of the English upper class. Set in the privileged world of the county house party and the London season, this is a comedy of English manners between the wars by one of the most individual, beguiling, and...

New to Penguin Modern Classics Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel García Márquez tells the enduring tale of Florentino Ariza, who has never forgotten his first love. For nearly a lifetime, he has waited in silence since his beloved Fermina married another man. No woman can replace her in his heart. But now, her husband is dead. Finally—after...

Lucky Jim tells the story of Jim Dixon, who has accidentally found himself in a job at one of Britain's new red brick universities. A moderately successful future in the History Department beckons. As long as Jim can survive a madrigal-singing weekend at Professor Welch's, deliver a lecture on 'Merrie England', and resist Christine, the hopelessly desirable girlfriend of Welch's...

The last novel in Simenon's celebrated series When an elegant but nervous woman appears in Inspector Maigret's office and reports her rich and successful husband missing, Maigret and Lapointe find themselves on the trail of a man leading a double life— a prominent Parisian solicitor by day, a playboy known as Monsieur Charles by night.

When a colleague is injured in an undercover operation, Maigret takes over and becomes embroiled in the dark underbelly of the Parisian art scene. During an undercover case, Inspector Lognon is shot in a room he was sharing with a beautiful woman who has since disappeared. Inspector Maigret retraces Lognon's secretive last few days and is drawn into the darker...

A PMC reissue of this collection of Kafka's greatest short fiction, translated by Michael Hofmann. A reissue of the Penguin Modern Classics edition, this collection of new translations brings together the small proportion of Kafka's works that he himself thought worthy of publication. It includes Metamorphosis, his most famous work, an exploration of horrific transformation and alienation; Meditation, a collection...

One of the great novels of Paris, from the winner of the 2014 Nobel Prize in Literature. I am nothing. Nothing but a pale shape, silhouetted that evening against the cafe terrace, waiting for the rain to stop. Guy Roland, a private detective in Paris, is trying to solve the mystery of his own past. His memories erased by amnesia,...

First time in Modern Classics Claudia Hampton, a beautiful, famous writer, lies dying in hospital. But, as the nurses tend to her with quiet condescension, she is plotting her greatest work—a history of the world ... and in the process, my own. Gradually she re-creates the rich mosaic of her life and times, conjuring up those she has known. There...

New to PMC Kenneth Trachtenberg, the witty and eccentric narrator of More Die of Heartbreak, has left his native Paris for the Midwest. He has come to be near his beloved uncle, the world-renowned botanist Benn Crader, a self-described "plant visionary." While his studies take him around the world, Benn, a restless spirit, has not been able to satisfy his...

An uproarious exploration of Caribbean immigrant experience from one of the great writers of the twentieth century. Moses thinks he's got it made. Originally a poor Caribbean immigrant, he is now the proud landlord of a ramshackle house in Shepherd's Bush, London. He has visions of being master of his own domain, writing his memoirs while his trusty sidekick and...

One of Sylvia Townsend Warner's best-loved novels—a droll and deeply affecting story of love and disillusionment on a remote tropical island. After three years on the remote tropical island of Fanua, Timothy Fortune, a missionary from London, has made little headway. The islanders show very little interest in Christianity and he has only a single convert—a boy, Lueli. As Mr...