Summer Reads

“Slender but weighty, thoroughly cerebral. . . . It comes as a welcome corrective to so much American-style realist fiction, which in heavy doses can blur into a kind of sameness. . . what is moving about this novel is its embrace of what has always...

Milan Kundera's lightest novel, a divertimento, an opera buffa, Slowness is also the first of this author's fictional works to have been written in French.   Disconcerted and enchanted, the reader follows the narrator of Slowness through a midsummer's...

Sometimes—perhaps only for an instant—we fail to recognize a companion; for a moment their identity ceases to exist, and thus we come to doubt our own. The effect is at its most acute in a couple, where our existence is given meaning by our perception of...

The author initially intended to call this novel The Lyrical Age. The lyrical age, according to Kundera, is youth, and this novel, above all, is an epic of adolescence; an ironic epic that tenderly erodes sacrosanct values: childhood, motherhood,...

Milan Kundera is a master of graceful illusion and illuminating surprise. In one of these stories a young man and his girlfriend pretend that she is a stranger he picked up on the road—only to become strangers to each other in reality as their game...

A New York Times Notable Book   Irena and Josef meet by chance while returning to their homeland, which they had abandoned twenty years earlier. Will they manage to pick up the thread of their strange love story, interrupted almost as soon as it began...

Kundera brilliantly examines the work of such important and diverse figures as Rabelais, Cervantes, Sterne, Diderot, Flaubert, Tolstoy, and Musil. He is especially penetrating on Hermann Broch, and his exploration of the world of Kafka's novels...

Jerry Pardoe and Jamila Patel hunt down a ritualistic cult inspired by Neothilic cannibals in the new chilling horror from Graham Masterton.Det.Sgt. Jamila Patel and Det.Con. Jerry Pardoe have reluctantly acquired a reputation in the Metropolitan Police...

An uncanny, beguiling and captivating page-turner. So much atmosphere you will be lost in the night's fog and rub your eyes and hope it's not real ... or that it is real. We still haven't figured out which is less scary. ***AN INSTANT...

A debut small-town horror novel that is a chilling blend of Shirley Jackson meets Devil’s Day by way of Westworld   When Lady Mae turns eighteen, she’ll inherit her mother’s ghastly job as the Butcher: dismembering Settlement Five’s guilty criminals as...

With an Introduction and Notes by Adam Roberts, Royal Holloway, University of London. Homer's great epic describes the many adventures of Odysseus, Greek warrior, as he strives over many years to return to his home island of Ithaca after the Trojan War...

Introducing Little Clothbound Classics: irresistible, mini editions of short stories, novellas and essays from the world's greatest writers, designed by the award-winning Coralie Bickford-Smith.Celebrating the range and diversity of Penguin Classics,...

Introducing Little Clothbound Classics: irresistible, mini editions of short stories, novellas and essays from the world's greatest writers, designed by the award-winning Coralie Bickford-Smith.Celebrating the range and diversity of Penguin Classics,...

'Of what a mistake were you guilty in marrying a Man of his age! - just old enough to be formal, ungovernable and to have the Gout - too old to be agreable, and too young to die.'The scheming and unscrupulous Lady Susan is unlike any Austen heroine...

Introducing Little Clothbound Classics: irresistible, mini editions of short stories, novellas and essays from the world's greatest writers, designed by the award-winning Coralie Bickford-Smith.Celebrating the range and diversity of Penguin Classics,...

This collection of Pushkin's stories begins with 'The Queen of Spades', perhaps the most celebrated short story in Russian literature. The young Hermann, while watching some friends gambling, hears a rumour of how an officer's grandmother is always able...

'Really Rawlings, you are incredibly blind sometimes...' This is the final book in the superb E.G. Rawlings trilogy. All of the characters from the last two books are back, with a couple of new faces adding to the rich tapestry of Jane McCulloch's...

It is January 2017. E.G. Rawlings, a noted foreign correspondent forced into retirement after a serious injury in the field, arrives by boat at a vacant mooring on the Thames. To his surprise, he finds it is owned by an old friend from Afghanistan,...

It is 2018, and Rawlings is ready to make a fresh start - but his life rarely goes to plan.Lying in hospital after what he hopes will be his last leg operation, Rawlings reflects that he is now free and without any responsibilities. His brief affair with...

In the wake of Vine's death, Milk and Vine arose to satiate our desire for this timeless, authentic comedy. Following in the footsteps of its predecessor, Milk and Vine II expands the Vine-poetry canon to include over 100 more vines, as well as a...