Penguin Modern Classics

Peter and Paul, the two sons of German businessman Harald Winter, are bonded together by a childhood trauma. But as they grow up the brothers also grow apart. When the shadow of the Third Reich falls they become divided by war and their differing ideals - only to meet again years later at the Nuremberg trials. An epic prelude to the Bernard Samson Game, Set and Match trilogy, Winter is a rich, tragic portrait of the fortunes of a family, and a nation, over half a century.

Texan billionaire General Midwinter will stop at nothing to bring down the USSR - even if it puts the whole world at risk. The fourth and final novel featuring the cynical, insolent narrator of The IPCRESS File sees him sent from his shabby Soho office to bone-freezing Helsinki in order to penetrate Midwinter's vast anti-Communist network - and stop a deadly virus from wiping out the planet.

Fourth Galaxy, 4 November 2052: in the blackness of space a figure in blue overalls tumbles over and over as it drifts towards the planet Badr-al-Budur. No space suit, no helmet, no oxygen. He can't be alive, can he? But he is.

First Navigator Fremder Gorn is the only survivor when the Corporation tanker Clever Daughter disappears. Nobody knows how he did it, and everybody, including Fremder himself, wants to know. Dr Caroline Lovecraft, Head of the Physio/Psycho unit, finds that intimacy doesn't lead to answers and Fremder's own memories are resolutely obscure. Fremder's name means stranger, and his story is otherworldly and yet ultimately life-affirming.

1963 Berlin is dark and dangerous. The anonymous hero of The IPCRESS File has been sent to help arrange the defection - in an elaborate mock coffin - of a leading Soviet scientist. But, as he soon discovers, this deception hides an even deadlier truth. One of the first novels written after the construction of the Berlin Wall, Funeral in Berlin revels in the murky, chilling atmosphere of a divided city.

A sunken U-Boat has lain undisturbed on the Atlantic ocean floor since the Second World War - until now. Inside its rusting hull, among the corpses of top-rank Nazis, lie secrets people will kill to obtain. The sequel to Len Deighton's game-changing debut The IPCRESS File, Horse Under Water sees its nameless, laconic narrator sent from fogbound London to the Algarve, where he must dive through layers of deceit in a place rotten with betrayals.

Shortlisted for The Society of Authors Translation Award 2022

June, 1943. Allied aircraft are bombing industrial Turin; Fascist Italy seems to be on its knees. Corrado, a teacher, is staying in relative safety in the hills above the city. He has no attachments and claims to be happy that way. But against his better judgement he is drawn into a circle of anti-fascists who congregate at a nearby tavern. As the authorities' net closes around his friends, Corrado must face a painful choice: emotional and political commitment, with all its dangers - or devastating retreat.

A high-ranking scientist has been kidnapped. A secret British intelligence agency must find out why. But as the quarry is pursued from grimy Soho to the other side of the world, what seemed a straightforward mission turns into something far more sinister. With its sardonic, cool, working-class hero, Len Deighton's sensational debut The IPCRESS File rewrote the spy thriller and became the defining novel of 1960's London.

An inexplicable message flashing onto the screen of his Apple II computer at 3 a.m. heralds the beginning of a startling quest for frustrated author Herman Orff. Taking up the offer of a cure for writer's block leads him to 'those places in your head that you can't get to on your own'. Herman is plunged into a semi-dreamland inhabited by a bizarre combination of characters from myth and reality: the talking head of Orpheus; a lost love; the young girl of Vermeer's famous portrait - and a frequency of Medusas.

Serial philanderer Jonathan Fitch is distraught when his girlfriend Serafina leaves him. In a desperate state at Piccadilly Circus underground station, he meets wealthy, mysterious Mr Rinyo-Clacton, and ends up agreeing to a Faustian pact: Mr Rinyo-Clacton will give Jonathan one million pounds, if he agrees to die in a year's time. Can Jonathan go on living like this? Can he go on living at all? A wry, affectionate look at what goes on between consenting, relenting and dissenting adults.

'O what we ben! And what we come to...' Wandering a desolate post-apocalyptic landscape, speaking a broken-down English lost after the end of civilization, Riddley Walker sets out to find out what brought humanity here. This is his story.

Spare, taut and told with flashes of pitch-black humour, the short stories of Norwegian master Kjell Askildsen capture all the strangeness of modern existence. In this selection of tales, spanning the whole of his brilliant career, unnerving encounters occur, lonely individuals try to connect, families and relationships are fractured, and we are confronted by the fragility and absurdity of life.

A lonely woman in Rio de Janeiro makes a connection that will change her life. Ulisses, a mysterious man, has penetrated her soul and turned her inside out.

This is a devastating novel of the interior, of a woman yearning to love, of the ultimate unknowability of the other in a relationship, of the cosmic changes that enrich us and destroy us at the dawn of love.

Bombed-out Cologne after the war is a strange place to be. The black market in jam and corsets is booming, half-destroyed houses offer opportunities for stealing doors and eggcups, and de-Nazification parties are all the rage. Recently released from a prisoner-of-war camp, Ferdinand drifts around the city, strenuously avoiding his fiancée and drinking brandy with his fabulous cousin. But is this any way to go on?

Told with Keun's characteristic humour, irony and generosity of spirit, this is a wry portrait of a man, a city and a nation that asks how we go on living even in the face of total defeat.

Dorothy Never - fat - lives alone in New York, spending her days alone ever since the downfall of her guru, the Ayn Rand-like Anna Granite. Justine Shade - thin - finds herself only able to connect with people who will hurt her, and is writing an article about Anna Granite, her philosophy of Definitism, and her loyal followers.

They are drawn together with an intense magnetism. As we learn the stories of their lives, we understand the extent to which each girl is shaped by the dark trauma of their childhoods. In a magnificently incisive psychological portrait, Mary Gaitskill forensically draws threads that show how these characters search for connection in a world that has damaged them so.

Don Juan, that notorious libertine, has disappeared. Has he been dragged down to hell by demons, as rumoured - or has he escaped? Doña Ana, the woman he tried to seduce, will stop at nothing to discover the truth. Set in a rural eighteenth-century Spain rife with suspicion and cruelty, and featuring a glorious cast of peasants, aristocrats and vengeful ghosts, this moving, surprising tragicomedy is also Sylvia Townsend Warner's response to the dark days of the Spanish Civil War.

A golden Cadillac big enough to cross the ocean has been seen sailing along the streets of Harlem. A hit-and-run victim's been hit so hard she got embedded in the wall of a convent. A shootout with three heistmen dressed as cops has left an important politician in a coma - and a lot of money missing. And Grave Digger Jones and Coffin Ed Johnson are the ones who have to piece it all together.

All Shot Up is chaotic, bloody - and completely unforgettable. Chester Himes wrote detective fiction darker, dirtier and more extreme than anyone else dared.