Fading charmer Tommy Wilhelm has reached his day of reckoning and is scared. In his forties, he still retains a boyish impetuousness that has brought him to the brink of chaos: he is separated from his wife and children, at odds with his vain, successful father, failed in his acting career (a Hollywood agent once placed him as 'the type that loses the girl') and in a financial mess. In the course of one climactic day he reviews his past mistakes and spiritual malaise, until a mysterious, philosophizing con man grants him a glorious, illuminating moment of truth and understanding, and offers him one last hope ...

Born to a mother already six months widowed, the young David Copperfield suffers at the hands of a tyrannical stepfather and at the hard graft of the factory floor. But his boyhood wanderings take him from Suffolk and London to Dover and beyond - and through the lives of a host of colourful characters.


'Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show' Dickens's epic, exuberant novel is one of the greatest coming-of-age stories in literature. It chronicles David Copperfield's extraordinary journey through life, as he encounters villains, saviours, eccentrics and grotesques, including the wicked Mr Murdstone, stout-hearted Peggotty, formidable Betsey Trotwood, impecunious Micawber and odious Uriah Heep. Dickens's great Bildungsroman (based, in part, on his own boyhood, and which he described as a 'favourite child') is a work filled with life, both comic and tragic. The Penguin English Library - 100 editions of the best fiction in English, from the eighteenth century and the very first novels to the beginning of the First World War.

A fabulously engaging and exciting novel about a man who has to learn about life and love the hard way. Harry Silver has it all. A successful job in TV, a gorgeous wife, a lovely child. And in one moment of madness, he chucks it all away. Man and Boy is the story of how he comes to terms with his life and achieves a degree of self-respect, bringing up his son alone and, gradually, learning what words like love and family really mean. It is very well written, pacy, funny, and heart-breakingly moving.

The Remorseful Day is the thirteenth and last novel in Colin Dexter's Oxford-set detective series. 'Where does this all leave us, sir?' 'Things are moving fast.' 'We're getting near the end, you mean?' 'We were always near the end.' The murder of Yvonne Harrison had left Thames Valley CID baffled. A year after the dreadful crime they are still no nearer to making an arrest. But one man has yet to tackle the case - and it is just the sort of puzzle at which Chief Inspector Morse excels. So why is he adamant that he will not lead the re-investigation, despite the entreaties of Chief Superintendent Strange and dark hints of some new evidence? And why, if he refuses to take on the case officially, does he seem to be carrying out his own private enquiries? For Sergeant Lewis this is yet another example of the unsettling behaviour his chief has been displaying of late . . .

Julian Treslove, a professionally unspectacular former BBC radio producer, and Sam Finkler, a popular Jewish philosopher, writer and television personality, are old school friends. Despite very different lives, they've never quite lost touch with each other - or with their former teacher, Libor Sevcik. Both Libor and Finkler are recently widowed, and together with Treslove they share a sweetly painful evening revisiting a time before they had loved and lost. It is that very evening, when Treslove hesitates a moment as he walks home, that he is attacked - and his whole sense of who and what he is slowly and
ineluctably changes.

Neglected by his father and stepmother in the years after his mother's death, seventeen-year-old Lewis Aldridge commits an act of violence that lands him in prison and returns two years later to a community that no longer welcomes him, a situation that is complicated by secrets that are revealed during his relationship with his new boss's daughters. Reprint.

It's two fifteen a.m., you're in bed alone and you're woken by the phone. Your eyes are wide and your body tense before it has completed so much as a single ring. And as you wake, in the tiny moment between sleep and consciousness, you know already that something is wrong. Only someone bad would call at such an hour. Or someone good, but with bad news, which would probably be worse. You lie there in the darkness and wait for the answer machine to kick in. Your own voice sounds strange as it tells you that nobody is there but that a message can be left.
You feel your heart beat. You listen. And then you hear the one voice in the world you least expect . . . your very own Blast From the Past.

One house. Ten contestants. Thirty cameras. Forty microphones. Yet again the public gorges its voyeuristic appetite as another group of unknown and unremarkable people submit themselves to the brutal exposure of the televised real-life soap opera, House Arrest. Everybody knows the rules: total strangers are forced to live together while the rest of the country watches them do it. Who will crack first? Who will have sex with whom? Who will the public love and who will they hate? All the usual questions. And then, suddenly, there are some new ones. Who is the murderer? How did he or she manage to kill under the constant gaze of the thirty television cameras? Why did they do it? And who will be next?

Pitching an extraordinary battle between cruel authority and a rebellious free spirit, Ken Kesey's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest is a novel that epitomises the spirit of the sixties. This Penguin Classics edition includes a preface, never-before published illustrations by the author, and an introduction by Robert Faggen. Tyrannical Nurse Ratched rules her ward in an Oregon State mental hospital with a strict and unbending routine, unopposed by her patients, who remain cowed by mind-numbing medication and the threat of electroshock therapy. But her regime is disrupted by the arrival of McMurphy - the swaggering, fun-loving trickster with a devilish grin who resolves to oppose her rules on behalf of his fellow inmates. His struggle is seen through the eyes of Chief Bromden, a seemingly mute half-Indian patient who understands McMurphy's heroic attempt to do battle with the powers that keep them imprisoned. The subject of an Oscar-winning film starring Jack Nicholson, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest an exuberant, ribald and devastatingly honest portrayal of the boundaries between sanity and madness. If you enjoyed One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, you might like Anthony Burgess's A Clockwork Orange, also available in Penguin Modern Classics. 'A glittering parable of good and evil' The New York Times Book Review 'A roar of protest against middlebrow society's Rules and the Rulers who enforce them' Time 'If you haven't already read this book, do so. If you have, read it again' Scotsman

his is the story of a man who believes in all the British values of a stiff upper lip and keeping emotion in check. He also believes you can only truly love one person in your life, and he loses that love when his wife dies. Taking work as a teacher of English as a foreign language, he begins a series of affairs with his students, knowing that because each of them has to go home after a few months there will be no commitments and no future in any of the relationships. Until he meets a woman who turns all his ideas - about being English, about being able to love - upside down. This novel has all the emotional power and humour of Tony Parson's 1999 hit novel, Man and Boy.

Vikas Swarup's spectacular debut novel opens in a jail cell in Mumbai, India, where Ram Mohammad Thomas is being held after correctly answering all twelve questions on India's biggest quiz show, Who Will Win a Billion? It is hard to believe that a poor orphan who has never read a newspaper or gone to school could win such a contest. But through a series of exhilarating tales Ram explains to his lawyer how episodes in his life gave him the answer to each question. 

Ram takes us on an amazing review of his own history -- from the day he was found as a baby in the clothes donation box of a Delhi church to his employment by a faded Bollywood star to his adventure with a security-crazed Australian army colonel to his career as an overly creative tour guide at the Taj Mahal. 

The Catcher in the Rye is the ultimate novel for disaffected youth, but it's relevant to all ages. The story is told by Holden Caulfield, a seventeen- year-old dropout who has just been kicked out of his fourth school. Throughout, Holden dissects the 'phony' aspects of society, and the 'phonies' themselves: the headmaster whose affability depends on the wealth of the parents, his roommate who scores with girls using sickly-sweet affection.

Lazy in style, full of slang and swear words, it's a novel whose interest and appeal comes from its observations rather than its plot intrigues (in conventional terms, there is hardly any plot at all). Salinger's style creates an effect of conversation, it is as though Holden is speaking to you personally, as though you too have seen through the pretences of the American Dream and are growing up unable to see the point of living in, or contributing to, the society around you.

Generally considered to be F. Scott Fitzgerald's finest novel, The Great Gatsby is a consummate summary of the "roaring twenties", and a devastating expose of the ‘Jazz Age’.

Through the narration of Nick Carraway, the reader is taken into the superficially glittering world of the mansions which lined the Long Island shore in the 1920s, to encounter Nick's cousin Daisy, her brash but wealthy husband Tom Buchanan, Jay Gatsby and the mystery that surrounds him.

The Great Gatsby is an undisputed classic of American literature from the period following the First World War and is one of the great novels of the twentieth century.

Meet Oswald Hendryks Cornelius, Roald Dahl's most disgraceful and extraordinary character . . . Aside from being thoroughly debauched, strikingly attractive and astonishingly wealthy, Uncle Oswald was the greatest bounder, bon vivant and fornicator of all time. In this instalment of his scorchingly frank memoirs he tells of his early career and erotic education at the hands of a number of enthusiastic teachers, of discovering the invigorating properties of the Sudanese Blister Beetle, and of the gorgeous Yasmin Howcomely, his electrifying partner in a most unusual series of thefts . . .

Animal Farm, by George Orwell - author of 1984, one of Britain's most popular novels - is a brilliant political satire and a powerful and affecting story of revolutions and idealism, power and corruption. 'All animals are equal. But some animals are more equal than others.' Mr Jones of Manor Farm is so lazy and drunken that one day he forgets to feed his livestock. The ensuing rebellion under the leadership of the pigs Napoleon and Snowball leads to the animals taking over the farm. Vowing to eliminate the terrible inequities of the farmyard, the renamed Animal Farm is organised to benefit all who walk on four legs. But as time passes, the ideals of the rebellion are corrupted, then forgotten. And something new and unexpected emerges. . . 

Celebrate Adrian Mole's 50th Birthday with this new double edition, featuring the first two books in the hilarious collection and see life through the spectacles of a misunderstood boy growing up in the early 1980s. Friday January 2nd I felt rotten today. It's my mother's fault for singing 'My Way' at two o'clock in the morning at the top of the stairs. Just my luck to have a mother like her. There is a chance my parents could be alcoholics. Next year I could be in a children's home. Meet Adrian Mole, a hapless teenager providing an unabashed, pimples-and-all glimpse into adolescent life. Telling us candidly about his parents' marital troubles, The Dog, his life as a tortured poet and 'misunderstood intellectual', his love for the divine Pandora and his horror at learning of his mother's pregnancy, Adrian's painfully honest diary is a hilarious and heartfelt chronicle of misspent adolescence.

Winner of the 1999 Pulitzer Prize and Pen Faulkner prize. Made into an Oscar-winning film, The Hours' is a daring and deeply affecting novel inspired by the life and work of Virginia Woolf. In 1920s London, Virginia Woolf is fighting against her rebellious spirit as she attempts to make a start on her new novel. A young wife and mother, broiling in a suburb of 1940s Los Angeles, yearns to escape and read her precious copy of Mrs Dalloway'. And Clarissa Vaughan steps out of her smart Greenwich village apartment in 1990s New York to buy flowers for a party she is hosting for a dying friend. Moving effortlessly across the decades and between England and America, this exquisite novel intertwines the stories of three unforgettable women.