Contemporary fiction titles are those which focus on the present or near past. Stories rooted in the current cultural, social, and political landscape which feature characters we can all recognise.
Contemporary Fiction Books
Penguin Books Ltd Dont Look Now and Other Stories
Book SynopsisCollecting five stories of suspense, mystery and slow, creeping horror, Daphne Du Maurier''s Don''t Look Now and Other Stories includes an introduction by Susan Hill, author of The Woman in Black, in Penguin Modern Classics.John and Laura have come to Venice to try and escape the pain of their young daughter''s death. But when they encounter two old women who claim to have second sight, they find that instead of laying their ghosts to rest they become caught up in a train of increasingly strange and violent events. The four other haunting, evocative stories in this volume also explore deep fears and longings, secrets and desires: ''Not After Midnight'', in which a lonely teacher investigates a mysterious American couple; ''A Border Line Case'', in which a young woman confronts her father''s past and his associations with the IRA; ''The Way of the Cross'', in which a party of pilgrims to Jerusalem encounter strange phenomena in the Garden of Gethsemane; and ''Th
£9.49
Penguin Books Ltd Go
Book SynopsisThe novel that launched the beat generation''s literary legacy describes the world of Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg and Neal Cassady. Published two months before Kerouac began ON THE ROAD, GO is the first and most accurate chronicle of the private lives the Beats lived before they became public figures. In lucid fictional prose designed to capture the events, emptions and essence of his experience, Holmes describes an individualistic post-World II New York where crime is celebrated, writing is revered, and parties, booze, discussions, drugs and sex punctuate life.
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Penguin Books Ltd Sunset Song
Book SynopsisWITH AN INTRODUCTION BY ALI SMITHYoung Chris Guthrie lives a brutal life in the harsh landscape of northern Scotland, torn between her passion for the land, duty to her family and her love of books. When her mother, broken by repeated childbirths, takes her own life and poisons her two youngest children, Chris is left with her father to run the farm on her own. Soon she is alone, and for the first time can choose how to spend her life. But as the First World War begins, everything changes, and the young men leave Scotland for battle. The first in Gibbon''s classic trilogy A Scot''s Quair, Sunset Song is infused with local vernacular, and innovatively blends Scots and English in an intense description of Scottish life in the early twentieth century.
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Penguin Books Ltd Rabbit at Rest
Book SynopsisIt''s 1989, and Harry ''Rabbit'' Angstrom is far from restful. Fifty-six and overweight, he has a struggling business on his hands and a heart that is starting to fail. His family, too, are giving him cause for concern. His son Nelson is a wreck of a man, a cocaine addict with shattered self-respect. Janice, his wife, has decided that she wants to be a working girl. And as for Pru, his daughter-in-law, she seems to be sending out signals to Rabbit that he knows he should ignore, but somehow can''t. He has to make the most of life, after all. He doesn''t have much time left ...
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Penguin Books Ltd Child of All Nations
Book SynopsisKully knows some things you don't learn at school. She knows the right way to roll a cigarette and pack a suitcase. She knows that cars are more dangerous than lions. She knows you can't enter a country without a passport or visa. And she knows that she and her parents can't go back to Germany again her father's books are banned there. But there are also things she doesn't understand, like why there might be a war in Europe just that there are men named Hitler, Mussolini and Chamberlain involved. Little Kully is far more interested where their next meal will come from and the ladies who seem to buzz around her father. Meanwhile she and her parents roam through Europe. Her mother would just like to settle down, but as her restless father struggles to find a new publisher, the three must escape from country to country as their visas expire, money runs out and hotel bills mount up.Trade ReviewA truly great read, in all the meanings of great - and funny and deft, heartening and terrible, relevant right now all over again -- Ali SmithNothing short of a revelation ... I am still haunted by it * Evening Standard *A delicious novel about an irreverent thirteen year old, Child of All Nations smokes and so does its heroine -- Erica JongHugely engaging... with room for everything - shrewdness, forgiveness, wit and loneliness - while love makes all its hopeless deals with hope -- Anne Michaels, author of Fugitive Pieces
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Penguin Books Ltd The Poorhouse Fair Penguin Modern Classics
Book SynopsisAt the Diamond County Home for the Aged, the inmates prepare for the annual ritual of the Poorhouse Fair, a summer celebration at which the old and infirm sell their produce on stalls to the people of the local town. Bitter, resentful and edging towards senility, the elderly residents of the Home take pride every year in the responsibility and self-respect they gain from this one day. But when the fair goes less well than the old folks had hoped, they are in no doubt who to blame: Conner, the new prefect of the home. Together, they begin to revolt against the younger man, and reassert their own independence.
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Penguin Books Ltd Rabbit is Rich
Book SynopsisJohn Updike was born in 1932 in Shillington, Pennsylvania. He is the author of over fifty books, including The Poorhouse Fair; the Rabbit series (Rabbit, Run; Rabbit Redux; Rabbit Is Rich; Rabbit At Rest); Marry Me; The Witches of Eastwick, which was made into a major feature film; Memories of the Ford Administration; Brazil; In the Beauty of the Lilies; Toward the End of Time; Gertrude and Claudius; and Seek My Face. He has written a number of collections of short stories, including The Afterlife and Other Stories and Licks of Love, which includes a final Rabbit story, Rabbit Remembered. His essays and criticism first appeared in publications such as the New Yorker and the New York Review of Books, and are now collected into numerous volumes. Collected Poems 1953-1993 brings together almost all of his verse, and a new edition of his Selected Poems is forthcoming fr
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Penguin Books Ltd Light Years
Book SynopsisJames Salter is the author of the novels Solo Faces, Light Years, A Sport and a Pastime, The Arm of Flesh (revised as Cassada), and The Hunters; the memoirs Gods of Tin and Burning the Days; and the collection, Dusk and Other Stories which won the 1989 PEN/Faulkner Award. He lives in Colorado and on Long Island.Richard Ford (b. 1944) is a well-known Mississippi writer, winner of both the 1996 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction and the Pulitzer Prize in Literature for his novel Independence Day. His earlier works include A Piece of My Heart, The Ultimate Good Luck, Fifty Great Years of Esquire Fiction, Wildlife, and The Sportswriter.
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Penguin Books Ltd Call it Sleep
Book SynopsisDavid Schearl arrives in New York in his mother''s arms to begin his new life as an immigrant in the ''Golden Land''. David is hated by his father - an angry, violent man unable to find his niche in the New World - but is fiercely loved and protected by his Yiddish-speaking mother. An innovative, multi-lingual novel, Call It Sleep subtly interweaves the overwhelming love between a mother and son with the terrors and anxieties David experiences, as he seeks to find his own identity amidst the cultural disarray of early twentieth-century America.
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Penguin Books Ltd Homo Faber
Book SynopsisThe novel tells the story of a middle-class UNESCO engineer called Walter Faber, who believes in rational, calculated world. Strange events undermine his security - an emergency landing in a Mexican desert against all odds, his friend Joachim hangs himself in the Mexican jungle, and he falls in love with a woman who dies of a concussion, he has an incestuous affair. Finally Faber becomes ill with stomach cancer, but it is too late for him to change his life.
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Penguin Books Ltd The Shooting Party
Book Synopsis''Threads of romance, social comment, country lore and intrigue both above and below stairs are cunningly worked together to create a brilliant tapestry'' Sunday TelegraphIt is 1913 - a breath away from the Great War - and Edwardian England is about to vanish into history. An assorted group of men and women gather at Sir Randolph Nettleby''s estate for a shooting party. Opulent, adulterous, moving assuredly through the rituals of eating and slaughter, they are an era''s dazzlingly obtuse and brilliantly decorative finale.A quiet, elegant meditation on class frustration and the transience of human concern, The Shooting Party is also the inspiration behind one of the great landmarks of popular culture - Downtown Abbey.Trade ReviewThreads of romance, social comment, country lore and intrigue both above and below stairs are cunningly worked together to create a brilliant tapestry... I have seldom enjoyed a book so much * Sunday Telegraph *Colegate has found a perfect metaphor for the passing of a way of life * Spectator *A modern classic * The Times *A minor masterpiece * Daily Mail *
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Penguin Books Ltd Dangling Man
Book SynopsisExpecting to be inducted into the army, Joseph has given up his job and carefully prepared for his departure to the battlefront. When a series of mix-ups delays his induction, he finds himself facing a year of idleness. Dangling Man is his journal, a wonderful account of his restless wanderings through Chicago''s streets, his musings on the past, his psychological reaction to his inactivity while war rages around him, and his uneasy insights into the nature of freedom and choice.
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Penguin Books Ltd Collected Stories Bellow Saul Penguin Modern
Book SynopsisThis is the definitive collection of short stories by Saul Bellow. Abundant, precise, various, rich and exuberant, the stories display the stylistic and emotional brilliance which characterizes this master of prose. Some stories recount the events of a single day, some are contained in a wider frame; each story is a characteristic combination of observation and a celebration of humanity.
£15.29
Penguin Books Ltd More Die of Heartbreak Penguin Modern Classics
Book SynopsisKenneth Trachtenberg has left his native Paris for the Midwest. He has come to be near his beloved uncle, the world-renowned botanist Benn Crader, self-described ''plant visionary.'' While his studies take him around the world, Benn, a restless spirit, has not been able to satisfy his longings after his first marriage and lives from affair to affair and from ''bliss to breakdown.'' Imagining that a settled existence will end his anguish, Benn ties the knot again, opening the door to a flood of new torments.
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Penguin Books Ltd Mr. Sammlers Planet
Book SynopsisMr Artur Sammler, intellectual and occasional lecturer at Columbia University in 1960s New York City, is a registrar of madness, a refined and civilized being caught among people crazy with the promises of the future. His Cyclopean gaze reflects on the degradations of city life while looking deep into the sufferings of the human soul.
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Penguin Books Ltd The Victim Penguin Modern Classics
Book SynopsisLeventhal is a natural victim; a man uncertain of himself, never free from the nagging suspicion that the other guy may be right. So when he meets a down-at-heel stranger in the park one day and finds himself being accused of ruining the man''s life, he half believes it. He can''t shake the man loose, can''t stop himself becoming trapped in a mire of self doubt, can''t help becoming ... a victim.
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Penguin Books Ltd The Actual Penguin Modern Classics
Book SynopsisThe story behind The Actual belongs to Harry Trellman, an aging, astute businessman who has never belonged anywhere.
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Penguin Books Ltd Ravelstein
Book SynopsisAbe Ravelstein is a brilliant professor who glories 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 has suggested that he put forth a book of his convictions about the ideas which sustain humankind, or kill it. Much to Ravelstein''s own surprise, the book makes him a millionaire. Ravelstein suggests in turn that Chick write a memoir or a life of him, and during the course of a celebratory trip to Paris the two share thoughts on mortality, philosophy and history, loves and friends, old and new
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Penguin Books Ltd The Deans December
Book SynopsisDean Corde is a man of position and authority at a Chicago university. He accompanies his wife to Bucharest where her mother, a celebrated figure, lies dying in a state hospital. As he tries to help her grapple with an unfeeling bureaucracy, news filters through to him of mounting problems left behind in Chicago. Corde is troubled: at home the centre is not holding firm, in Eastern Europe authority is cruel and dehumanizing.
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Penguin Books Ltd Brazil
Book SynopsisTristao Raposo, a nineteen-year old black child of the Rio slums, spies Isabel Leme, an eighteen-year-old upper-class white girl, across the hot sands of Copacabana Neach, and presents her with a ring. Their flight into marriage takes them from urban banality to the farthest reaches of Brazil''s wild west....
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Penguin Books Ltd Couples
Book SynopsisAn intoxicating yet sensitive novel about the sexual experiences of ten couples from Tarbox, New England. Well-to-do, sociable, articulate but dangerously unfulfilled; they play word games in the evening and adultery all year round.
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Penguin Books Ltd A Month of Sundays
Book SynopsisUpdike''s seventh novel concerns a month of seven days, a month of enforced rest and recreation as experienced by the Reverend Tom Marshfield, sent west from his Midwestern church in disgrace.
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Penguin Books Ltd Marry Me
Book SynopsisSally is big, blonde and pampered. She's married to Richard. But she loves Jerry. Jerry loves Sally in return, but he's also still in love with his wife Ruth. Who's been sleeping with Richard As a hot, feverish summer of snatched weekends, secret phone calls and illicit lovemaking on the beach comes to a head, it turns out everyone knows more than they've been letting on. And that no one knows quite when to stop.
£10.80
Penguin Books Ltd Complete Short Stories
Book SynopsisA collection of stories.
£9.49
Penguin Books Ltd Anthem
Book SynopsisA powerful dystopian novel from a writer who experienced firsthand the dehumanising conditions of Soviet Russia, Ayn Rand''s Anthem includes an introduction by Leonard Peikoff in Penguin Modern Classics.Equality 7-2521 is a man apart. Since The Great Rebirth it has been a crime in his world to think or act as an individual. Even love is forbidden. Yet since his childhood in the Home of the Infants, Equality 7-2521 has felt that he is different. When he is sent by The Council of Vocations to work as a road sweeper, he stumbles upon a link to the old world that gives him the spur to break free. First published in England in 1938, Ayn Rand''s short dystopian novel crystallizes the ideas of individualism and competition that would make her name.Ayn Rand (1905-82), born Alisa Rosenbaum in St. Petersburg, Russia, emigrated to America with her family in January 1926, never to return to her native land. Her novel The Fountainhead was published in 1943 and eventually became a bestseller. Still occasionally working as a screenwriter, Rand moved to New York City in 1951 and published Atlas Shrugged in 1957. Her novels espoused what came to be called Objectivism, a philosophy that champions capitalism and the pre-eminence of the individual. If you enjoyed Anthem, you might also like Yevgeny Zamyatin''s We, available in Penguin Classics.''She created a new credo for all individualists''The Times Literary Supplement
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Penguin Books Ltd Under the Jaguar Sun
Book SynopsisA couple on an epicurean journey across Mexico are excited by the idea of a particular ingredient, suggested by ancient rituals of human sacrifice. Precariously balanced on his throne, a king is able only to listen to the sounds around him - sure that any deviation from their normal progression would mean the uprising of the conspirators that surround him. And three different men search desperately for the beguiling scents of lost women, from a Count visiting Madame Odile''s perfumery, to a London drummer stepping over spent, naked bodies.Trade Review'The pleasure of these stories is intense: the flexibility and range of Calvino's imagination bring to them a kind of organic perfection as though they had not been written by a man but rather grown of their own accord' Sunday Telegraph
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Penguin Books Ltd Numbers in the Dark
Book SynopsisNumbers in the Dark is a collection of short stories covering the length of Italo Calvino''s extraordinary writing career, from when he was a teenager to shortly before his death. They include witty allegories and wise fables; a town where everything has been forbidden apart from the game of tip-cat; a pitiable tribe watching the flight paths of guided missiles from outside their mud huts; a computer programmer considering the possible sequence of a series of brutal acts; and dialogues with Henry Ford, a Neanderthal and the gloomy, overthrown Montezuma ...Trade Review'The author's command of detail and his fine, inventive imagination, his ability to turn ideas upside down and inside out, his awareness of the comic capacity of everyday life, are always ready to surprise and delight.' Literary Review
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Penguin Books Ltd The Place of Dead Roads
Book SynopsisThis surreal fable, set in America''s Old West, features a cast of notorious characters: The Crying Gun, who breaks into tears at the sight of his opponent; The Priest, who goes into gunfights giving his adversaries the last rites; and The Nihilistic Kid himself, Kim Carson, a homosexual gunslinger who, with a succession of beautiful sidekicks, sets out to challenge the morality of small-town America and fight for intergalactic freedom. Fantastical and humorous, The Place of Dead Roads continues William Burroughs'' exploration of society''s controlling forces - the State, the Church, women, literature, drugs - with a style that is utterly unique in twentieth-century literature.
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Penguin Books Ltd Junky
Book SynopsisA novel that offers an account of the constant cycle of drug dependency, cures and relapses.
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Penguin Books Ltd The Wild Boys
Book SynopsisIn this funny, nightmarish masterpiece of imaginative excess, grotesque characters engage in acts of violent one-upmanship, boundless riches mangle a corner of Africa into a Bacchanalian utopia, and technology, flesh and violence fuse with and undo each other. A fragmentary, freewheeling novel, it sees wild boys engage in vigorous, ritualistic sex and drug taking, as well as pranksterish guerrilla warfare and open combat with a confused and outmatched army. The Wild Boys shows why Burroughs is a writer unlike any other, able to make captivating the explicit and horrific.
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Penguin Books Ltd My Education
Book SynopsisMy Education is Burroughs''s last novel, first published two years before his death in 1997. It is a book of dreams, collected over several decades and as close to a memoir as we will see. The dreams cover themes from the mundane and ordinary - conversations with his friends Allen Ginsberg or Ian Sommerville, feeding his cats, procuring drugs or sex - to the erotic, bizarre and visionary. Always a rich source of imagery in Burroughs''s own fiction, in this book dreams become a direct and powerful force in themselves.
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Penguin Books Ltd The Cat Inside
Book SynopsisBoth heartwarming and meditative, The Cat Inside explores not only the personal relationship between Burroughs and cats, but the deeper relationship of cats with mankind, which Burroughs traces back to the Egyptians. This book of moving and witty discourse is for both Burroughs fans and cat lovers alike.
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Penguin Books Ltd Cities of the Red Night
Book SynopsisAn opium addict is lost in the jungle; young men wage war against an empire of mutants; a handsome young pirate faces his execution; and the world''s population is infected with a radioactive epidemic. These stories are woven together in a single tale of mayhem and chaos. In the first novel of the trilogy continued in The Place of Dead Roads and The Western Lands, William Burroughs sharply satirizes modern society in a poetic and shocking story of sex, drugs, disease and adventure.
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Penguin Books Ltd Maggie Cassidy
Book SynopsisFrom the bard of the Beat Generation, Jack Kerouac''s Maggie Cassidy is an autobiographical novel of young love, published in Penguin Modern Classics.Though publishers stopped Maggie Cassidy''s Jack Duluoz and On the Road''s Sal Paradise from sharing the same name, Kerouac meant the books to be two parts of the same life. While On the Road made Paradise (and Kerouac) a hero for generations to come of the disaffected and restless, Maggie Cassidy is an affectionate portrait of the teenager that made the man - of friendship and first love growing up in a New England mill town. Duluoz is a high school athletics and football star who meets Maggie Cassidy and begins a devoted, inconstant, tender adolescent love affair. It is one of the most sustained, poetic pieces of Kerouac''s ''spontaneous prose''.Jack Kerouac (1922-69) was an American novelist, poet, artist and part of the Beat Generation. His first published novel, The Town and th
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Penguin Books Ltd The Original of Laura
Book SynopsisThe Original of Laura is Vladimir Nabokov''s final, incredible unfinished novel in fragments. 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 of her lovers and given to the doctor, she appears as My Laura. Dishonoured, Wild still finds pleasure in life, by indulging in self-annihilation, beginning with the removal of his toes.
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Penguin Books Ltd Tales from the Decameron Penguin Classics
Book SynopsisBawdy and moving, hilarious and reflective: these stories offer the very best of Boccaccio’s Decameron—an inspiration for the Netflix dark comedy The Decameron—in a brilliant, playful new translation. “The Decameron reads in some ways as a guide to social distancing and self-isolation.” —The New York TimesIn the early summer of the year 1348, as a terrible plague ravages the city, ten charming young Florentines take refuge in country villas to tell each other stories—one hundred stories of love, adventure, and surprising twists of fortune that later inspired Chaucer, Keats, and Shakespeare. Now, this hugely enjoyable volume collects the best stories of Boccaccio's masterwork in a fresh, accessible new translation by Peter Hainsworth. It includes such celebrated, thought-provoking tales as Isabella and the Pot of Basil (famously adapted by Keats) and PatTrade Review“The Decameron, by Giovanni Boccaccio (1313–1375), made a great impression on me. . . . Ten youths—seven women and three men—take turns telling stories for 10 days. At around the age of 16, I found it reassuring that Boccaccio, in conceiving his narrators, had made most of them women. Here was a great writer, the father of the modern story, presenting seven great female narrators. There was something to hope for. . . . The seven female narrators of the Decameron should never again need to rely on the great Giovanni Boccaccio to express themselves. . . . The female story, told with increasing skill, increasingly widespread and unapologetic, is what must now assume power.” —Elena Ferrante, The New York Times
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Penguin Books Ltd Up Above the World
Book SynopsisA chance encounter while holidaying in Central America leads an American couple, the Slades, to befriend the charming, handsome Grove Soto and his young Cuban mistress. But as the Slades'' trip becomes prolonged and they grow increasingly dependent on their new acquaintances, an undercurrent of cruelty begins to disturb the comfort and niceties to which they are accustomed. Up Above the World shows Paul Bowles to be a master of the tension and horror of rising viciousness.
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Penguin Books Ltd No Longer at Ease
Book SynopsisObi Okonkwo is an idealistic young man who, thanks to the privileges of an education in Britain, has now returned to Nigeria for a job in the civil service. However in his new role he finds that the way of government seems to be backhanders and corruption. Obi manages to resist the bribes that are offered to him, but when he falls in love with an unsuitable girl - to the disapproval of his parents - he sinks further into emotional and financial turmoil. The lure of easy money becomes harder to refuse, and Obi becomes caught in a trap he cannot escape. Showing a man lost in cultural limbo, and a Nigeria entering a new age of disillusionment, No Longer at Ease concludes Achebe''s remarkable trilogy charting three generations of an African community under the impact of colonialism, the first two volumes of which are Things Fall Apart and Arrow of God.
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Penguin Books Ltd The Smell of Hay
Book SynopsisA new translation of Giorgio Bassani''s haunting collection of short stories that evoke 1930s Ferrara, with an introduction by Ali Smith.Isolated lives and a lost world are evoked in these memorable stories set in the Jewish-Italian community of 1930s Ferrara. A young man''s unrequited love; a strange disappearance; a faded hotel; a lonely funfair; the smell of mown hay at the gates of the Jewish Cemetery - these vivid, impressionistic snapshots build a picture of life''s brevity and intensity. Part of the sequence including The Gold-Rimmed Spectacles and The Garden of the Finzi-Continis, and featuring people and places from these novels, The Smell of Hay is told with a voice that is by turns intimate, ironic, elegiac and rueful. This new translation contains two pieces, added by Bassani to his earlier collection, which have never appeared in Trade ReviewGiorgio Bassani is one of the great witnesses of this century, and one of its great artists * Guardian *
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Penguin Books Ltd Behind the Door
Book SynopsisTrade ReviewGiorgio Bassani is one of the great witnesses of this century, and one of its great artists * Guardian *Powerful new translations . . . Bassani began as a poet, and McKendrick's redelivery of this taut uncompromising fiction reveals resonance and generosity -- Ali SmithNo one else writes about time like this. Bassani is deeply unsettling and yet a joy to read. -- David Herman * Jewish Chronicle *
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Penguin Books Ltd The Heron
Book Synopsis''Exquisite. . . a classic tour de force'' The New York Times ''It struggled to keep itself aloft, to gain height. But then it suddenly gave up, and dropped as though it were breaking into many pieces''Early on a cold Sunday morning, forty-five-year-old Edgardo Limentani gets up to join a shooting party in the countryside surrounding the town of Ferrara. As the day passes, he contemplates his past, his disappointments and how he has got here. Like the birds he shoots, he realizes, he is trapped, broken, waiting alone for the final coup de grâce. Then he sees a way out.The fifth book in Bassani''s Novel of Ferrara sequence, and his final novel, The Heron is a taut, poignant portrait of a middle-aged man''s reckoning with his life.Trade ReviewExquisite. . . a classic tour de force that will be around for a long time * The New York Times *Giorgio Bassani is one of the great witnesses of this century, and one of its great artists * Guardian *Powerful new translations . . . Bassani began as a poet, and McKendrick's redelivery of this taut uncompromising fiction reveals resonance and generosity -- Ali SmithBassani's masterpiece * The New York Times *
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Penguin Books Ltd The GoldRimmed Spectacles
Book SynopsisInto the insular town of 1930s Ferrara, a new doctor arrives. Fadigati is hopeful and modern, and more than anything wants to fit into his new home. But his fresh, appealing appearance soon crumbles when the townsfolk discover his homosexuality, and the young man he pays to be his lover humiliates him publicly. As anti-Semitism spreads across Italy, the Jewish narrator of the tale begins to feel pity for the ostracized doctor, as the fickle nature of a community changing under political forces becomes clear. The Gold-Rimmed Spectacles is a gripping and tragic study of how lives can be destroyed by those we consider our neighbours.Trade ReviewSingular . . . The town of Ferrara and its inhabitants are realized with an extraordinary clarity * Guardian *Powerful new translations . . . Bassani began as a poet, and McKendrick's redelivery of this taut uncompromising fiction reveals resonance and generosity -- Ali Smith
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Penguin Books Ltd Within the Walls
Book SynopsisA young working class woman abandoned by her bourgeois lover; the tensions of intermarriage between established classes and communities; a holocaust survivor seemingly back from the dead; a formidable socialist activist defying house arrest; the only surviving witness to the first local atrocity of the Second World War.Trade ReviewGiorgio Bassani is one of the great witnesses of this century, and one of its great artists * Guardian *Powerful new translations . . . Bassani began as a poet, and McKendrick's redelivery of this taut uncompromising fiction reveals resonance and generosity -- Ali SmithNo one else writes about time like this. Bassani is deeply unsettling and yet a joy to read. -- David Herman * Jewish Chronicle *
£999.99
Penguin Books Ltd Thousand Cranes
Book SynopsisKikuji has been invited to a tea ceremony by a mistress of his dead father. He is shocked to find there the mistress''s rival and successor, Mrs. Ota, and that the ceremony has been awkwardly arranged for him to meet his potential future bride. But he is most shocked to be drawn into a relationship with Mrs. Ota - a relationship that will bring only suffering and destruction to all of them. Thousand Cranes reflects the tea ceremony''s poetic precision with understated, lyrical style and beautiful prose.Trade ReviewA literary habitat like no other . . . quietly devastating fiction. . . . Behind a lyrical and understated surface, chaotic passions pulse * The Independent (London) *Thousand Cranes has the qualities of the best Japanese writing: a stunning economy, delicacy of feeling, and a painter's sensitivity to the visible world * The Atlantic *A novel of exquisite artistry . . . rich suggestibility . . . and a story that is human, vivid and moving * New York Herald Tribune *Kawabata is a poet of the gentlest shades, of the evanescent, the imperceptible. This is a tragedy in soft focus, but its passions are fierce * Commonweal *
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Penguin Books Ltd The Sound of the Mountain
Book SynopsisOgata Shingo is growing old, and his memory is failing him. At night he hears only the sound of death in the distant rumble from the mountain. The relationships which have previously defined his life - with his son, his wife, and his attractive daughter-in-law - are dissolving, and Shingo is caught between love and destruction. Lyrical and precise, The Sound of the Mountain explores in immaculately crafted prose the changing roles of love and the truth we face in ageing.Trade ReviewKawabata is a poet of the gentlest shades, of the evanescent, the imperceptible * Commonweal *A rich, complicated novel. . . . Of all modern Japanese fiction, Kawabata's is the closest to poetry * The New York Times Book Review *
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Penguin Books Ltd Briar Rose Spanking the Maid
Book SynopsisRobert Coover is the author of twenty-some books of fiction and plays, his most recent being Noir and A Child Again. He has been nominated for the National Book Award and awarded numerous prizes and fellowships, including the William Faulkner Award, the Rea Lifetime Achievement Award for the Short Story, and a Lannan Foundation Literary Fellowship. His plays have been produced in New York, Los Angeles, Paris, London, and elsewhere. At Brown University, he teaches "Cave Writing" (a writing workshop in immersive virtual reality), and other experimental electronic writing and mixed media workshops, and directs the International Writers Project, a freedom-to-write program.Trade ReviewRobert Coover is one of our masters now... He seems to be able to do anything * The New York Times Book Review *
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Penguin Books Ltd The Elephant
Book SynopsisThe Elephant (1957) is Slawomir Mrozek''s award-winning collection of hilarious and unnerving short stories, satirising life in Poland under a totalitarian regime. The family of a wealthy lawyer keep a ''tamed progressive'' as a pet; a zoo saves money for the workers by fashioning their elephant from rubber; a swan is dismissed from the municipal park for public drunkenness; and under the Writers'' Association, literary critics are banished to the salt mines. In these tales of bureaucrats, officials and artists, Mrozek conjures perfectly a life of imagined crimes and absurd authority.Trade ReviewExtraordinary . . . Mrozek's brief fables are something like Kafka's stories, but they're funnier * Spectator *The satiric intent is unambiguous, and offers hope to the oppressed mind...so deft and so piercing -- Nicholas Lezard * Guardian *[The series] sheds remarkable light on the literature, culture and politics of the region...anyone coming fresh to the field will be captivated by the richness, variety, humour and pathos of a classic literature that, through a shared historical experience, transcends national and linguistic boundaries. -- CJ Schüler * Independent on Sunday *This [series] is a wonderful idea ... They are absurdist parables, by turns hilarious, unsettling and enigmatic. -- Nicholas Lezard * Guardian *I urge you to go and read them. -- Adam Thirlwell * New Statesman *This new series of Central European Classics is important well beyond simply providing 'good reads'. -- Stephen Vizinczey * Daily Telegraph *
£9.49
Penguin Books Ltd Paradise Postponed
Book SynopsisWhen Simeon Simcox, a socialist clergyman, leaves his entire fortune not to his family but to the ruthless, social-climbing Tory MP Leslie Titmuss, the Rector''s two sons react in very different ways. Henry, novelist and former ''angry young man'' turned grumpy old reactionary, decides to fight the will and prove their father was insane. Younger brother Fred, a mild-mannered country doctor, takes a different approach, quietly digging in Simeon''s past, only to uncover an entirely unexpected explanation for the legacy.An exquisitely drawn saga of ancient rivalries and class struggles, featuring a glorious cast of characters, Paradise Postponed is a delicious portrait of English country life by a master satirist.Trade ReviewHats off to John Mortimer. He's done it again! * Spectator *He reveals on every page . . . a sense of the absurd, a shrewd eye for human foibles and an infallible sense of comic timing * New York Times *Paradise Postponed is an hilarious novel and thoroughly recommended * Daily Telegraph *
£10.44
