Penguin Modern Classics

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.

Few modern voices have had as profound an impact as Frantz Fanon. A major influence on civil rights, anti-colonial and black consciousness movements around the world, Black Skin, White Masks is an unsurpassed study of the black psyche in a white world.

Hailed for its scientific analysis and poetic grace when it was first published in 1952, it established Fanon as a revolutionary thinker and remains just as relevant and powerful today.

A preacher called Deke O'Malley's been selling false hope: the promise of a glorious new life in Africa for just $1,000 a family. But when thieves with machine guns steal the proceeds - and send one man to the morgue - the con is up. Now Grave Digger Jones and Coffin Ed mean to bring the good people of Harlem back their $87,000, however many corpses they have to climb over to get it.

Cotton Comes to Harlem is a non-stop ride, with violence, sex, double-crosses, and the two baddest detectives ever to wear a badge in Harlem.

Pillar of society and stern upholder of Victorian values, god-fearing Norfolk merchant John Barnard presides over a large and largely unhappy family. This is their story - his brandy-swilling wife, their hapless offspring and their changing fortunes - over the decades. Sylvia Townsend Warner's last novel, The Flint Anchor gloriously overturns our ideas of history, family and storytelling itself.

Detectives Coffin Ed and Grave Digger Jones have lost two criminals. Pinky ran off - but it shouldn't be hard to track down a giant albino in Harlem. Jake the drug dealer, though, isn't coming back - he died after Grave Digger punched him in the stomach. And his death might cost them both their badges. Unless they can track down the cause of all this mayhem - like the African with his throat slit and the dog the size of a lion with an open head wound.

Chester Himes's hardboiled tales of Harlem have a barely contained chaos and a visceral, macabre edge all their own.