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A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole
Category: Fiction | Series: Penguin Essentials Ser.
John Kennedy Toole's hilarious satire, A Confederacy of Dunces is a Don Quixote for the modern age, and this Penguin Modern Classics edition includes a foreword by Walker Percy.Never published during his lifetime, John Kennedy Toole's masterful comic novel takes its title, as well asfrom Jonathan Swift ...Show more
A Kestrel for a Knave by Barry Hines
Category: Fiction | Series: Penguin Essentials Ser.
Penguin Decades bring you the novels that helped shape modern Britain. When they were published, some were bestsellers, some were considered scandalous, and others were simply misunderstood. All represent their time and helped define their generation, while today each is considered a landmark work of st ...Show more
A Month In The Country: Penguin Essentials by J.L. Carr
Category: Fiction | Series: Penguin Essentials Ser.
A damaged survivor of the First World War, Tom Birkin finds refuge in the quiet village church of Oxgodby where he is to spend the summer uncovering a huge medieval wall-painting. Immersed in the peace and beauty of the countryside and the unchanging rhythms of village life he experiences a sense of ren ...Show more
A Passage to India by E M Forster
Category: Classic Fiction | Series: Penguin Essentials Ser.
Exploring issues of colonialism, faith and the limits of comprehension, E.M. Forster's A Passage to Indiais published as a Penguin Essential for the first time.When Adela Quested and her elderly companion Mrs Moore arrive in the Indian town of Chandrapore, they quickly feel trapped by its insular and pr ...Show more
A Spell of Winter by Helen Dunmore
Category: Fiction | Series: Penguin Essentials Ser.
Incarcerated in the enormous country house of their grandfather - 'the man from nowhere' - they create a refuge against their family's dark secrets, and against the outside world as it moves towards the First World War. As time passes, their sibling love deepens and crosses into forbidden territory. But ...Show more
A Start in Life by Anita Brookner
Category: Fiction | Series: Penguin Essentials Ser.
'Dr Weiss, at forty, knew that her life had been ruined by literature.' Ruth Weiss, an academic, is beautiful, intelligent and lonely. Studying the heroines of Balzac in order to discover where her own childhood and adult life has gone awry, she seeks not salvation but enlightenment. Yet in revisiting ...Show more
Ancient Light by John Banville
Category: Fiction | Series: Penguin Essentials Ser.
'Billy Gray was my best friend and I fell in love with his mother.' Alexander Cleave, an actor who thinks his best days are behind him, remembers his first unlikely affair as a teenage boy in a small town in 1950s Ireland: the illicit meetings in a rundown cottage outside town; assignations in the back ...Show more
Any Human Heart by William Boyd
Category: Fiction | Series: Penguin Essentials Ser.
Every life is both ordinary and extraordinary, but Logan Mountstuart's - lived from the beginning to the end of the twentieth century - contains more than its fair share of both. As a writer who finds inspiration with Hemingway in Paris and Virginia Woolf in London, as a spy recruited by Ian Fleming and ...Show more
Austerlitz by W. G. Sebald
Category: Fiction | Series: Penguin Essentials Ser.
Austerlitz is W. G. Sebald's haunting novel of post-war Europe.In 1939, five-year-old Jacques Austerlitz is sent to England on a Kindertransport and placed with foster parents. This childless couple promptly erase from the boy all knowledge of his identity and he grows up ignorant of his past. Later in ...Show more
Beautiful Ruins by Jess Walter
Category: Fiction | Series: Penguin Essentials Ser.
The story begins in 1962. Somewhere on a rocky patch of the sun-drenched Italian coastline a young innkeeper, chest-deep in daydreams, looks out over the incandescent waters of the Ligurian Sea and views an apparition- a beautiful woman, a vision in white, approaching him on a boat. She is an American s ...Show more
Down and Out in Paris and London by George Orwell
Category: Biography | Series: Penguin Essentials Ser.
With new cover by urban artist Shepard Fairey. To be poor and destitute in 1920s Paris and London was to experience life at its lowest ebb. George Orwell, penniless and with nowhere to go, found himself experiencing just this as he wandered the streets of both capitals in search of a job. By day, he tra ...Show more
Embers by Sandor Marai
Category: Fiction | Series: Penguin Essentials Ser.
Originally published in 1942 and now rediscovered to international acclaim, this taut and exquisitely structured novel by the Hungarian master Sandor Marai conjures the melancholy glamour of a decaying empire and the disillusioned wisdom of its last heirs.In a secluded woodland castle an old General pre ...Show more