Penguin Classics: General Fiction

New to PMC Mr. Artur Sammler, Holocaust survivor, intellectual, and occasional lecturer at Columbia University in 1960s New York City, is a registrar of madness, a refined and civilised being caught among people crazy with the promises of the future (moon landings, endless possibilities). His Cyclopean gaze reflects on the degradations of city life while looking deep into the sufferings...

A reissue of the PMC edition of Woolf's masterpiece, now with a new jacket. One of the most moving, revolutionary artworks of the twentieth century - Michael Cunningham Mrs Dalloway introduces us to Clarissa Dalloway, elegant and vivacious, as she prepares for a party and reflects on those she once loved. Meanwhile, in another part of London, Septimus Warren Smith...

The final novel in the Great Plains trilogy, this is a celebration of the American Midwest with Cather's strongest heroine at its heart. Jim and Ántonia meet as children in the wide open plains of Nebraska at the end of the nineteenth century. Jim leaves for college and a career in the east, while Ántonia stays at home, dedicating herself...

Three works of erotic prose fusing sex and spirituality, new to Penguin Modern Classics. In these three works of erotic prose, Georges Bataille fuses sex and spirituality in a highly personal and philosophical vision of the self. My Mother is a frank and intense depiction of a young man's sexual initiation and corruption by his mother, where the profane becomes...

Thirteen strangely wrought stories make up Nabokov's Dozen. In some of these stories, shadowy people pass through, cooped up by life, mangled by it, with nowhere to escape to. Their dreams lie stifled, smothered by routine and repetition, and frustrations lurk in all the corners. In others, there are elusive glimpses of fleeting happiness, which flutter away before they can...

Nadja is a Surrealist romance, and has come to be known as a book which defined that movement's attitude towards life. With its blend of intimate confession and sense of the marvellous, Nadja weaves a mysterious and compelling tapestry of daily life as seen through a magical perspective. Combining autobiographical fact with memory and imagination, Breton spins one of the...

This brutal, shattering glimpse of the fate of millions of Russians under Stalin shook Russia and shocked the world when it first appeared. Discover the importance of a piece of bread or an extra bowl of soup, the incredible luxury of a book, the ingenious possibilities of a nail, a piece of string, or a single match in a world...

On Heroes and Tombs is Sabato's masterpiece of obsessive love and murder set in 1950s Buenos Aires, now available in Penguin Modern Classics. This dark, philosophical novel is centred around a violent crime committed by Alejandra, the daughter of a prominent Argentinian family. Alejandra's act entangles the lives of three men: her father, Fernanda Vidal, who believes he is hunted...

Arnold Bennett's superb London novel—both a story about one grim household and a panorama of the life of a great city. Henry Earlforward, a shabby Clerkenwell bookseller, has retired from life to devote himself (and his wife Violet) to a consuming passion for money. Miserliness becomes a fatal illness, and Bennett provides a terrifying description of its ravages. However, the...

A tale of survival from one of the most beloved Nigerian writers, now in Penguin Modern Classics for the first time. When Adah's dream of moving to England becomes a reality, she soon discovers that life for a young Nigerian woman living in London in the 1960s is far from what she had imagined. The cold weather and cramped, crumbling...

Sweet Thursday reads as a post-war continuation of Cannery Row. Set on the Californian coast, amongst the junk heaps and flop houses of Monterey, the book brings to life the denizens of a netherworld of laughter and tears. From Fauna, who runs the local brothel, to Hazel, a bum whose mother must have wanted a daughter, the rich tapestry of...

The Besieged City, Clarice Lispector's revelatory third novel, is now available in English for the first time. Written in flight from Lispector's 'shipwreck of introspection', it is a book unlike any other in the Lispector canon, a novel focused on the simple act of seeing the external world. Its heroine, Lucrecia, is utterly mute and unreflective, possibly devoid of any...

New to Penguin Modern Classics, a timeless tale of divided generations and enduring friendship. Following a baseball game that nearly became a religious war, two Jewish boys become friends. Danny comes from the strict Hasidic sect that keeps him bound in centuries of orthodoxy. Reuven is brought up by a father patently aware of the twentieth century. Everything tries to...

New to Penguin Classics, the remarkable, devastating collected stories by the author of Wide Sargasso Sea. Some of Jean Rhys's most powerful writing is to be found in this rich, dark collection of her collected stories. Her fictional world is haunted by her own, painful memories—of cheap hotels and drab Parisian cafes; of devastating love affairs; of her childhood in...

New to Penguin Modern Classics, a searing novel from Tove Ditlevsen, author of the wildly acclaimed Copenhagen Trilogy. Copenhagen, 1968. Lise, a children's book writer and married mother of three, is becoming increasingly haunted by disembodied faces and taunting voices. Convinced that her housekeeper and husband are plotting against her, she descends into a terrifying world of sickness, pills and...

A tale of intense friendship and almost overwhelming grief amongst the frozen fjords of rural Norway. In winter, the black ice cracks like a gunshot across the lake, growing thicker and darker every night. Nearby, a frozen waterfall transforms into a fantastic, baroque structure with dripping buttresses, flying spurs of ice and translucent, sparkling towers. The schoolchildren call it the...

The tale of a woman transformed by a Black healing community in 1970s America, publishing for the first time in Penguin Modern Classics. A book full of marvels - New Yorker The American Deep South, in the 1970s. Velma Henry, once a formidable political activist, has grown weary and disillusioned with the fight for civil rights. She wants to end...

Reissuing in Penguin Modern Classics as part of our Paul Bowles relaunch, with a new introduction by Paul Theroux. The Sheltering Sky is a book about people on the edge of an alien space; somewhere where, curiously, they are never alone. - Michael Hoffman. Port and Kit Moresbury, a sophisticated American couple, are finding it more than a little difficult...

One of Kerouac's most enduring and touching works. The Subterraneans haunt the bars and clubs of San Francisco, surviving on a diet of booze and benzedrine, Proust and Verlaine. Living amongst them is Leo, an aspiring writer, and Mardou, half-Indian, half-Negro, beautiful and neurotic. Their bittersweet and ill-starred love affair sees Kerouac at his most evocative. Many regard this as...

Another collection of stories about the irrepressible barrister Horace Rumpole comes to Penguin Modern Classics. The Trials of Rumpole sees Horace Rumpole, the irrepressible barrister fuelled by cigars, Tennyson, steak-and-kidney pud and the cooking claret from Pommeroy's wine bar, returning for further misadventures. Amid an unfortunate and temporary downturn in London crime, the Old Bailey hack sits in Chambers (he...

The True Heart is a love story set in Victorian England by one of the most original writers of the twentieth century. Leaving her orphanage at sixteen, Sukey Bond finds employment as a servant in the remote New Easter Farm, deep within the Essex Marshes. There she falls in love with simple, gentle Eric, the son of the rector's wife....

Volume one of Javier Marías's acclaimed and evocative novel in parts. Recently divorced, Jacques Deza moves from Madrid to London to start anew. At a party held by retired don, semi-retired spy and old friend Sir Peter Wheeler, he meets the inscrutable Bertram Tupra. Tupra is impressed by Deza's talent for seeing through people and enlists him in a mysterious...

Your Face Tomorrow, Volume 3 is the concluding part of Javier Marías's acclaimed and evocative 'novel in parts'. Jacques Deza is back in London and once again working for the secret intelligence agency run by Bertram Tupra. Deza finds himself forced to watch Tupra's collection of incriminating videotapes of important public figures. The recordings document unconventional private lives—and horrific acts....

A soaring, sensual coming-of-age novel, by the legendary Black, lesbian, mother, warrior, poet. If I didn't define myself for myself, I would be crunched into other people's fantasies for me and eaten alive. A little black girl opens her eyes in 1930s Harlem. Around her, a heady swirl of passers-by, car horns, kerosene lamps, the stock market falling, fried bananas,...

A new translation of a twisting detective novel from the celebrated author of the Maigret series. The Strangers in the House follows Hector Loursat, a lawyer in the small town of Moulins, who has lived as a drunken recluse since his wife left him eighteen years ago. Unmoored from society and estranged from his daughter, he shuts himself away, numbed...

The second novel in the Great Plains trilogy, The Song of the Lark is a passionate portrait of the artist as a young woman. Thea Kronberg, a young girl from a small town in Colorado, has a great gift—her beautiful singing voice. Her talent takes her to the great opera houses of Europe, and through ambition and hard work, she...

At long last, William S. Burroughs's cult classic and undoubted masterpiece enters Penguin Modern Classics. A cultural landmark and the most shocking novel in the English language, Naked Lunch is an exhilarating ride into the darkest recesses of the human psyche. An unnerving tale of an addict unmoored in New York, Tangier, and ultimately a nightmarish wasteland known as Interzone,...

A mesmerizing novel about the magical and gritty world of Bucharest in the 1980s by a celebrated Eastern European writer. 'Gripping, impassioned, unexpected' - Los Angeles Times A dreamlike novel of memory and magic, Nostalgia turns the dark world of Communist Bucharest into a place of strange enchantments. Here, a man plays increasingly death-defying games of Russian Roulette, a child...

Virginia Woolf's playful mock biography of a chameleonic historical figure, written for her intimate friend Vita Sackville-West. Orlando has always been an outsider... His longing for passion, adventure, and fulfilment takes him out of his own time. Chasing a dream through the centuries, he bounds from Elizabethan England and imperial Turkey to the modern world. Will he find happiness with...

'There is a depth and clarity to his writing that captivates the reader' - Sunday Times When Joel Knox's mother dies, he is sent into the exotic unknown of the Deep South to live with a father he has never seen. But once he gets there, everyone is curiously evasive when Joel asks to see his father. Truman Capote's first...

One of America's most influential and admired short story writers, new to Penguin Modern Classics. From the gothic Old South to revolutionary Mexico, few writers have evoked such a multitude of worlds, both exterior and interior, as powerfully as Katherine Anne Porter. This collection gathers together the best of her Pulitzer Prize-winning short fiction, including Pale Horse, Pale Rider, where...

The much-loved masterpiece from one of the key figures of twentieth-century Italian literature. In the sweltering summer of 1938, with Lisbon in the grip of Portugal's dictatorship of António Salazar, a journalist is coming to terms with the rise of fascism around him and its insidious impact on his work. Consumed by the passing of his wife and the child...

Professor Timofey Pnin, late of Tsarist Russia, is now precariously perched on a college campus in the fast beating heart of the USA. In a series of funny and sad misunderstandings, Pnin does halting battle with American life and language.

A romantic, thrilling memoir that has become a French classic. You will be a great hero, a general, Gabriele d'Annunzio, Ambassador of France! For his whole life, Romain Gary's fierce, eccentric mother had only one aim: to make her son a great man. And she did. This, his thrilling, wildly romantic autobiography, is the story of his journey from poverty...

New to PMC Ravelstein features Abe Ravelstein, a brilliant professor at a prominent midwestern university and a man who revels in training the movers and shakers of the political world. He has lived grandly and ferociously—and much beyond his means. His close friend Chick suggests he put forth a book expressing his convictions about the ideas which sustain humankind, or...

A private meeting, chance encounters and a mysterious tour of Lisbon, in this brilliant homage to Tabucchi's country, culture and people. In the city of Lisbon, Requiem's narrator has an appointment to meet someone on a quay by the Tagus at twelve. Misunderstanding twelve to mean noon as opposed to midnight, he is left to wait. As the day unfolds...

The notorious dark, modern-day fable of New York from this cult master, new to Penguin Modern Classics. Harry Goldfarb, heroin addict and son of lonely widow Sara, cares only about enjoying the good life with girlfriend Marion and best friend Tyrone C Love, and making the most of all the hash, poppers, and dope they can get. Sara Goldfarb sits...

New to Penguin Modern Classics, the very first selection of stories featuring the irrepressible Rumpole. Horace Rumpole, the old boy committed to defending the apparently indefensible, trusting of a jury, and scornful of the law's pomposities, appears here in a new edition of the 1978 iconic Rumpole debut. This volume collects the much-loved stories Rumpole and the Younger Generation, Rumpole...

A fruity, foxy masterpiece, defender of our wilting faith in mankind - Sunday Times Horace Rumpole, the rascally, Wordsworth-quoting Old Bailey hack, should be enjoying his retirement. Soaking unhappily in the Florida sun with his wife, Hilda (She Who Must Be Obeyed), it is safely assumed by all that Rumpole's wig has been hung up for good. But when a...

A startling, densely poetic portrait of 1970s Ghana as it emerges from colonial rule. Search Sweet Country follows the lives of an eclectic, interconnected group of Ghanaians living in and around the sprawling, chaotic city of Accra in the mid-1970s. Bringing the city to life in dizzying, lyrical prose, Laing weaves a story filled with bizarre and often melancholy characters:...

Secret Rendezvous is a Kafkaesque marvel and a biting satire of bureaucracy, medicine, and modern life. In Tokyo, in the middle of the night, an uncalled-for ambulance arrives to spirit away a man's wife, though she is perfectly healthy. He sets out on an epic journey to find her, navigating the labyrinthine corridors of a strange and enormous hospital. Days...

Bellow is one of the giants of the twentieth-century novel. Read Seize the Day and see why San Francisco Examiner Fading charmer Tommy Wilhelm has reached his day of reckoning and is scared. In his forties, he still retains a boyish impetuousness that has brought him to the brink of chaos. He is separated from his wife and children, at...

A tale of wasted love, and beauty, by Japan's literary master. Shimamura is tired of the bustling city. He takes the train through the snow to the mountains of the west coast of Japan, to meet with a geisha he believes he loves. Beautiful and innocent, Komako is tightly bound by the rules of a rural geisha, and lives a...

A new translation of this counterculture classic by David Horrocks. At first sight, 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 of dreamlike and sometimes savage encounters—accompanied by, among others, Mozart, Goethe, and the bewitching Hermione—the...

Summer Will Show by Sylvia Townsend Warner is an extraordinary re-imagining of historical fiction. The novel explores the tale of a Victorian woman's love for her husband's mistress. The story follows a young English aristocrat who, cut adrift by tragedy, is led by her husband's former mistress deep into the fervour, chaos, and bloodshed of the French revolution. Summer Will...

Tell Me How Long the Train's Been Gone is Baldwin's fourth novel, recounting a lifetime of grappling with love, loss, and identity. 'Everyone wishes to be loved, but in the event, nearly no one can bear it.' At the height of his theatrical career, the actor Leo Proudhammer is nearly felled by a heart attack. As he hovers between life...

A powerfully tender portrait of a single mother in 1970s Tokyo. Wonderfully poetic ... extraordinary freshness ... a Virginia Woolf quality — Margaret Drabble Territory of Light is the radiant story of a young woman, living alone in Tokyo with her two-year-old daughter. Its twelve chapters follow the first year of the narrator's separation from her husband. The novel is...

The Adventures of Augie March follows the life of Augie, a poor boy growing up in Chicago during the Great Depression. Described as a 'born recruit', he becomes entangled in a series of wild occupations, only to reject each one as too confining for his ambitions. His independence faces its greatest challenge when he meets the glamorous Thea, a huntress...

A reissue of the successful PMC edition of Woolf's landmark feminist polemic A Room of One's Own, based on a lecture given at Girton College Cambridge, is one of the great feminist polemics. Woolf's blazing writing on female creativity, the role of the writer, and the silent fate of Shakespeare's imaginary sister remains a powerful reminder of a woman's need...

Set in the volatile Paris summer of 1938, The Age of Reason follows two days in the life of Mathieu Delarue, a philosophy teacher, and his circle in the cafes and bars of Montparnasse. Mathieu has so far managed to contain sex and personal freedom in conveniently separate compartments. But now he is in trouble, urgently trying to raise 4,000...

Borges' stories have a deceptively simple, almost laconic style. In maddeningly ingenious stories that play with the very form of the short story, Borges returns again and again to his themes- dreams, labyrinths, mirrors, infinite libraries, the manipulations of chance, gaucho knife-fighters, transparent tigers and the elusive nature of identity itself.

Brilliant ... a panorama of a remarkable talent ... McCullers's finest stories — The New York Times A classic work that has charmed generations of readers, this collection assembles Carson McCullers's best stories, including her beloved novella The Ballad of the Sad Café. A haunting tale of a human triangle that culminates in an astonishing brawl, the novella introduces readers...

Anthony and Gloria are the essence of Jazz Age glamour. A brilliant and magnetic couple, they fling themselves at life with an energy that is thrilling. New York is a playground where they dance and drink for days on end. Their marriage is a passionate theatrical performance; they are young, rich, alive and lovely and they intend to inherit the...

New to Penguin Modern Classics, a moving portrayal of the fragility of the human mind and an acclaimed Norwegian masterpiece. The Birds is the story of Mattis, a mentally handicapped man who lives with and is cared for by his older sister, Hege. Within their isolated, lakeside existence, Mattis cannot make sense of his tangled thoughts, frightening apparitions, surges of...

One of the most remarkable artists of our age. — Mario Vargas Llosa The Book of Sand was the last of Borges' major collections to be published. The stories are, in his words, 'variations on favourite themes... combining a plain and at times almost colloquial style with a fantastic plot'. It includes such marvellous tales as 'The Congress', 'Undr' and...

The Box Man by Kobo Abe is an existential and entertaining masterpiece. "This is the record of a box man." The streets of Tokyo have been seeing a strange phenomenon recently—people who have decided to live their lives in a box on the street. Behind their cut-out eyeholes, they sit and watch from behind their four cardboard walls. Our nameless...

The Castle is Kafka's last great, unfinished novel— the book that hangs over the whole modern era like a nightmare. The Castle tells the story of K., the unwanted Land Surveyor who is never to be admitted to the Castle nor accepted in the village, and yet cannot go home. As he encounters dualities of certainty and doubt, hope and...

Available in English for the first time, The Chandelier is one of Lispector's most radical books and a key part of what made her a Brazilian legend. 'She found the best clay that one could desire- white, supple, sticky, cold ... She would get a clear and tender material from which she could shape a world' Like the clay from...

The Complete Stories is a comprehensive collection of short fiction by Truman Capote, one of the masters of twentieth-century American literature. This definitive volume showcases Capote's talent for skilfully crafted narratives and rich characterisation, capturing a wide range of human emotions and experiences. Each story reflects his keen insight into the human condition and his ability to transform the mundane...

A masterpiece of historical fiction, The Corner That Held Them depicts the lives of medieval nuns amid the turmoil of rebellion and the Black Death. Sylvia Townsend Warner's portrayal of a fourteenth-century nunnery is widely considered to be one of the greatest historical novels of all time. An often hilarious ode to community living, it is also a poignant, delicate...

Another addition to Penguin Modern Classics' key Kerouac holdings. The Dharma Bums appeared just one year after the author's explosive On the Road had put the Beat Generation on the literary map and Kerouac on the best-seller list. The same expansiveness, humour, and contagious zest for life that sparked the earlier novels sparks this one too, but through a more...

New to Modern Classics, published alongside The Ballad of Peckham Rye Lise has been driven to distraction by working in the same accountants' office for sixteen years. So she leaves everything behind her, transforms herself into a laughing, garishly-dressed temptress and flies abroad on the holiday of a lifetime. But her search for adventure, sex and the obsessional experience takes...

The First Man offers an incredibly moving account of Camus' poverty-stricken childhood in Algeria, the love of his silent mother, and the remarkable figure of an old schoolteacher who saved him from ignorance. Camus was working on a manuscript version of the book when he was killed in a car accident with his publisher Michel Gallimard. The First Man was...

A brilliant exploration of power and dysfunction in Victorian England Pillar of society and stern upholder of Victorian values, god-fearing Norfolk merchant John Barnard presides over a large and largely unhappy family. This is their story - his brandy-swilling wife, their hapless offspring and their changing fortunes - over the decades. Sylvia Townsend Warner's last novel, The Flint Anchor gloriously...

Hartley's classic novel of innocence lost, now reissued with a new jacket. When one long, hot summer, young Leo is staying with a school friend at Brandham Hall, he begins to act as a messenger between Ted, the farmer, and Marian, the beautiful young woman up at the hall. He becomes drawn deeper and deeper into their dangerous game of...

A new hardback edition of Fitzgerald's brilliant and most famous novel. The Great Gatsby is the tale of Jay Gatsby, a man who seemingly has everything, yet one thing remains forever beyond his grasp. His glittering parties are the talk of the town, attended by everyone who is anyone. Day and night, his Long Island mansion buzzes with bright young...

“To know how to free oneself is nothing; the arduous thing is to know what to do with one's freedom.” - André Gide Michel had been a blindfolded scholar until, newly married, he contracted tuberculosis. His will to recover brings self-discovery and the growing desire to rebel against his background of culture, decency, and morality. But the freedom from constraints...

A searing coming-of-age tale by one of the greatest Spanish writers of the 20th century, set on the island of Mallorca during the Spanish Civil War. "This is an old and wicked island. An island of Phoenicians and merchants, of bloodsuckers and frauds." Ana María Matute's 1959 novel, Primera memoria (translated as The Island), is a stifling story of rebellious...

Larry McMurtry's hilarious and touching novel, in Penguin Modern Classics for the very first time. Sam the Lion runs the pool-hall, the picture house and the all-night café. Coach Popper whips his boys with towels and once took a shot at one when he disturbed his hunting. Billy wouldn't know better than to sweep his broom all the way to...

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry's timeless tale of love and loneliness is now widely available in Penguin Modern Classics for the first time. Antoine de Saint-Exupéry first published The Little Prince in 1943, only a year before his plane vanished over the Mediterranean Sea during a reconnaissance mission. Nearly eighty years later, this fable of love and loneliness has lost none of...

The definitive collection of Shirley Jackson's short stories, including The Lottery - one of the most terrifying and iconic stories of the twentieth century. An excellent host finds himself turned out of home by his own guests; a woman spends her wedding day frantically searching for her husband-to-be; and in Shirley Jackson's best-known story, a small farming village comes together...

Magical realism meets Greek myth in this wonderfully offbeat novel. An inexplicable message flashing onto the screen of his Apple II computer at 3 a.m. heralds the beginning of a startling quest for frustrated author Herman Orff. Taking up the offer of a cure for writer's block leads him to 'those places in your head that you can't get to...

Rarely has emotional turbulence been so delicately conveyed – The New York Times With delicacy of perception and memory, humour and pathos, Carson McCullers spreads before us the three phases of a weekend crisis in the life of a motherless twelve-year-old girl. Within the span of a few hours, the irresistible, hoydenish Frankie passionately plays out her fantasies at her...

Originally published at the zenith of Nazi Germany's power, Steinbeck's fable The Moon is Down explores the effects of invasion on both the conquered and the conquerors. Occupied by enemy troops, a small, peaceable town comes face-to-face with evil imposed from the outside and betrayal from within the close-knit community. As he delves into the motivations and emotions of the...

In le Carré's first post-Cold War novel, a night manager at a Cairo hotel helps British Intelligence penetrate the secret world of ruthless arms dealers. At the start of it all, Jonathan Pine is merely the night manager at a luxury hotel. But when a single attempt to pass on information to the British authorities—about an international businessman at the...

The final masterwork that was nearly destroyed, from one of the greatest authors of the twentieth century. Dr Philip Wild, a man of brilliance, wit, fortune and tremendous bulk, is used to suffering humiliations at the hands of his wife, the younger, slender, and rudely promiscuous Flora. But in a novel, a 'maddening masterpiece' documenting her infidelities, written by one...

First time in Penguin Modern Classics In Ponyboy's world, there are two types of people. There are the Socs, the rich society kids who get away with anything. Then there are the greasers, like Ponyboy, who aren't so lucky. Ponyboy has a few things he can count on—his older brothers, his friends, and trouble with the Socs, whose idea of...

A disoriented and confused young woman looks back on her life and her place in the world. New to Penguin Modern Classics. The Passion According to G.H., a well-to-do Rio sculptress, enters the room of her maid, which is as clear and white 'as in an insane asylum from which dangerous objects have been removed'. There she sees a cockroach—black,...

A stunning new series look for one of the greatest writers of the 20th century in Penguin Modern Classics. The Pearl is Steinbeck's flawless parable about wealth and the evil it can bring. When Kino, an Indian pearl-diver, finds the Pearl of the world he believes that his life will be magically transformed. He will marry Juana in church and...

An extraordinarily ambitious, surprising, and enjoyable book, this is the second of two volumes celebrating the British short story. This is the first anthology capacious enough to celebrate the full diversity and energy of its writers, subjects, and tones. The most famous authors are here, as well as many others, including some magnificent stories that have never been republished since...