Classics

A teenage girl's difficult journey towards adulthood in a time of war. "A school story for grownups that is also about our inability or refusal to protect children from history" SARAH MOSS "Of all Szabo's novels, Abigail deserves the widest readership...

Now a major Netflix series. The best-known of Shirley Jackson's novels, and the inspiration for writers such as Neil Gaiman and Stephen King, The Haunting of Hill House is a chilling story of the power of fear. Four seekers have arrived at the...

Although written in 1967, it's time we all caught up with James Baldwin and read (or re-read) this book now. Even our best intentions need to be checked, and James Baldwin's words are the way. A voice from the past, needed as much today and even more so...

No one burned hotter than Eve Babitz. Possessing skin that radiated "its own kind of moral laws," spectacular teeth, and a figure that was the stuff of legend, she seduced seemingly everyone who was anyone in Los Angeles for a long stretch of the 1960s...

An astonishingly frank and deeply autobiographical account of homosexual relationships in an era when love between men was not only stigmatised, but also illegal, E.M. Forster's Maurice is edited by P.N. Furbank with an introduction by David Leavitt in...

From Justin Torres, author of We the Animals, comes National Book Award-winner Blackouts, a gorgeous novel exploring love, loss and the stories we leave behind. With inventive and transformative form and prose that only deepens the resonance of the...

A series of provocative discussions on everything from individual authors to contemporary religious thinking, Against Interpretation and Other Essays is the definitive collection of Susan Sontag's best known and important works published in Penguin...

Brilliantly capturing her young narrator's voice, Sagan's stiletto-sharp novella of entitlement, impetuosity and cruel tragedy on the Riviera is an ice-cool slice of essential summer fiction. Sylish, shimmering and amoral, Sagan's tale of adolescence...

Poet and pervert, Humbert Humbert becomes obsessed by twelve-year-old Lolita and seeks to possess her, first carnally and then artistically, 'to fix once for all the perilous magic of nymphets'. Is he in love or insane? A tortured soul or a monster?...

he Vet's Daughter combines shocking realism with a visionary edge. The vet lives with his bedridden wife and shy daughter Alice in a sinister London suburb. He works constantly, captive to a strange private fury, and treats his family with brutality and...

Ten tales of loss and longing, from one one Japan's greatest writers It was the height of summer, and there was anger in the rays of the sun A summer holiday that turns to tragedy; a moonlit journey to fulfil a wish; a couple’s unusual way of...

"You are about to begin reading Italo Calvino's new novel...Relax. Concentrate. Dispel every other thought. Let the world around you fade." —from If On A Winter's Night a Traveler   Italo Calvino's stunning classic imagines a novel...

Nausea is the story of Antoine Roquentin, a French writer who is horrified at his own existence. In impressionistic, diary form he ruthlessly catalogs his every feeling and sensation. His thoughts culminate in a pervasive, overpowering feeling of nausea...

E.M. Forster’s beloved novel of forbidden love, culture clash, and the confines of Edwardian society. Visiting Florence with her prim and proper cousin Charlotte as a chaperone, Lucy Honeychurch meets the unconventional, lower-class Mr...

Described by Clarice Lispector as 'the best one', this intoxicating portrayal of a man searching for his destiny is her mystical, enigmatic masterpiece'All I've got is hunger. And that instable way of grasping an apple in the dark-without letting it...

California's fertile Salinas Valley is home to two families whose destinies are fruitfully, and fatally, intertwined. Over the generations, between the beginning of the twentieth century and the end of the First World War, the Trasks and the Hamiltons...

Potent and vividly emotional, Simone de Beauvoir’s captivating novel questions freedom and individual responsibility in the face of brutality. ‘These carefree faces, on which we allowed our smiles to spread, were for others the mask of...

The woman's place of power within each of us is neither white nor surface; it is dark, it is ancient, and it is deepThe revolutionary writings of Audre Lorde gave voice to those 'outside the circle of this society's definition of acceptable women'...

'Witty, stylish and ferociously absorbing' -- ObserverJean-Baptiste Grenouille is abandoned on the filthy streets of eighteenth-century Paris as a baby, but grows up to discover he has an extraordinary gift: a sense of smell more powerful than any other...

'She was dead even before I became aware of her existence...'A child has been abducted from a sleepy Kent village, her face plastered across the media. As the crime unleashes a wave of hysteria, the claustrophobic world of Rowan Anderson and his...