Summer Reads

A searing autobiographical novel about a single night in prison suggests how broken spirits can be mended, and dreams rebuilt through imagination and human kindness“Like Pamuk’s Snow, Dawn is the Turkish tragedy writ small. In contrast to Snow, it places...

Arguably the first English novel and still the ultimate castaway narrative, Defoe’s iconic tale of shipwreck and survival retains its exoticism and adventure into the twenty-first century.  The Penguin English Library Edition of Robinson Crusoe by Daniel...

Samuel Richardson's Pamela is a captivating story of one young woman's rebellion against the social order, edited by Peter Sabor with an introduction by Margaret A. Doody in Penguin Classics.Fifteen-year-old Pamela Andrews, alone in the world, is pursued...

The Penguin English Library Edition of Tristram Shandy by Laurence Sterne'I am got, I know not how, into a cold unmetaphorical vein of infamous writing, and cannot take a plumb-lift out of it for my soul; so must be obliged to go on writing like a Dutch...

A key work in the German 'Sturm und Drang' movement, Johann Goethe's autobiographical epistolary novel The Sorrows of Young Werther is a defining moment in early Romanticism, which has influenced writers from Mary Shelley to Thomas Mann. This Penguin...

'I have so much and my feeling for her devours everything, I have so much and without her everything is nothing.'The Sorrows of Young Werther propelled Goethe to instant fame when it first appeared in 1774. Goethe drew on his own unhappy experiences to...

The complex moral ambiguities of seduction and revenge make Les Liaisons dangereuses (1782) one of the most scandalous and controversial novels in European literature. The subject of major film and stage adaptations, the novel's prime movers, the Vicomte...

“The great plague novel.” —The New YorkerSet in Lombardy during the Spanish occupation of the late 1620s, The Betrothed tells the story of two young lovers, Renzo and Lucia, prevented from marrying by the petty tyrant Don Rodrigo, who desires Lucia for...

“Excellent…Donlea tells a propulsive tale.” – The New York TimesThe New York Times Best Thrillers This Season | E! News Recommended Books | Overdrive Biggest Books of the MonthFans of Verity by Colleen Hoover won’t want to miss this thrilling new...

The New York Times Bestseller   From Pulitzer Prize winner Ed Yong, a groundbreaking, wondrously informative, and vastly entertaining examination of the most significant revolution in biology since Darwin—a “microbe’s-eye view” of the world that reveals...

A magnificent new translation of Dostoevsky's masterpiece, which when first published in 1991 was described by the TIMES as 'a miracle' and by THE INDEPENDENT as a near 'ideal translation'. The BROTHERS KARAMAZOV - Dostoevsky's most widely read novel -...

“In this sly and salacious work, Nutting forces us to take a long, unflinching look at a deeply disturbed mind, and more significantly, at society’s often troubling relationship with female beauty.” -San Francisco Chronicle   In Alissa Nutting’s...

Galdos's four-part Fortunata and Jacinta (1886-7), the masterpiece among his almost 80 novels, tells the turbulent story of two women, their husbands and their lovers, set against the intricate web of dynastic alliances and class contrasts of Madrid in...

Introduction and Notes by Dr Howard J. Booth, University of Kent at Canterbury. 'When you have experienced Sons and Lovers you have lived through the agonies of the young Lawrence striving to win free from his old life'.Richard Aldington This novel is...

The Penguin English Library Edition of Sons and Lovers by D. H. Lawrence'"She was a brazen hussy.""She wasn't. - And she was pretty, wasn't she?""I didn't look ... And tell your girls, my son, that when they're running after you, they're not to come and...

It is 1913, and Viennese high society is determined to find an appropriate way of celebrating the seventieth jubilee of the accession of Emperor Franz Josef.But as the aristocracy tries to salvage something illustrious out of the collapse of the...

This narrative chronicles the decline of the American South through the experiences of Benjy Compson, who struggles to articulate his vision of life. William Faulkner is the author of "As I Lay Dying" and "Sanctuary" and he won the Nobel Prize in 1949...

The great novel of 1920s Berlin life, in a superb new translation by Michael HofmannFranz Biberkopf is back on the streets of Berlin. Determined to go straight after a stint in prison, he finds himself thwarted by an unpredictable external agency that...

Jaroslav Hašek's black satire, the inspiration for such works as Joseph Heller's Catch-22Good-natured and garrulous, Švejk becomes the Austro-Hungarian army's most loyal Czech soldier when he is called up on the outbreak of the First World War - although...

'I read On the Road in maybe 1959. It changed my life like it changed everyone else's' Bob DylanSal Paradise, a young innocent, joins his hero, the mystical traveller Dean Moriarty, on a breathless, exuberant ride back and forth across the United States...