Penguin Modern Classics

Leaving her orphanage at sixteen, Sukey Bond finds employment as a servant in the remote New Easter Farm, deep within the Essex Marshes. There she falls in love with simple, gentle Eric, the son of the rector's wife. But when their relationship is discovered, they are swiftly separated. So begins Sukey's quest to be reunited, a quest that will take her through every layer of Victorian society...

'A towering achievement. There is simply nothing like it in the history of Black radical thought' Cornel West

'Cedric Robinson's brilliant analyses revealed new ways of thinking and acting' Angela Davis

'This work is about our people's struggle, the historical Black struggle'

Any struggle must be fought on a people's own terms, argues Cedric Robinson's landmark account of Black radicalism. Marxism is a western construction, and therefore inadequate to describe the significance of Black communities as agents of change against 'racial capitalism'. Tracing the emergence of European radicalism, the history of Black African resistance and the influence of these on such key thinkers as W. E. B. Du Bois, C. L. R. James and Richard Wright, Black Marxism reclaims the story of a movement.

Fly and the Fly Bottle is perhaps Ved Mehta's masterpiece: a collection of his brilliantly revealing conversations with some of the twentieth century's most important philosophers. Engaging with such heavyweights as Isaiah Berlin, Gilbert Ryle, and Elizabeth Anscombe, Mehta is not only able to shed light on the personalities involved in shaping modern philosophy, as well as on the particularities of that philosophic thought, but also to minutely examine the surrounding atmosphere of mid-century British life.

'Life for sale. Use me as you wish. I am a twenty-seven-year-old male. Discretion guaranteed. Will cause no bother at all.'

When Hanio Yamada realizes the future holds nothing of worth to him, he puts his life for sale in a Tokyo newspaper, thus unleashing a series of unimaginable exploits.

A world of revenge, murderous mobsters, hidden cameras, a vampire woman, poisonous carrots, espionage and code-breaking, a junkie heiress, home-made explosives and decoys reveals itself to the unwitting Hanio. Is there anything he can do to stop it?

Ved Mehta's brilliant Mahatma Gandhi and his Apostles provides an unparalleled portrait of the man who lead India out of its colonial past and into its modern form. Travelling all over India and the rest of the world, Mehta gives a nuanced and complex, yet vividly alive, portrait of Gandhi and of those men and women who were inspired by his actions.

Returning to 1960s' India after decades beyond its borders, Ved Mehta explores his native country with two sets of eyes: those of the man educated in the West, and those of the child raised under the Raj. Travelling from the Himalayas in the east to Kerala in the west, Ved Mehta's observations and insights into India and some of its most interesting figures - including Indira Gandhi, Jaya Prakash Narayan and Satyajit Ray - create one of the twentieth century's most thought-provoking travel memoirs.

Sylvia Townsend Warner's portrayal of a fourteenth-entury nunnery is widely considered to be one of the greatest historical novels of all time. An often hilarious ode to community living, it is also a poignant, delicate exploration of spirituality's relationship to the material world.

The story of a young English aristocrat, who - cut adrift by tragedy - is led by her husband's former mistress deep into the fervour, chaos and bloodshed of the French revolution, Summer Will Show is a fearless and wildly entertaining tale of loss and self-discovery.

Growing up in a working-class neighbourhood in Copenhagen, Tove feels that her childhood is made for a completely different girl. As 'long, mysterious words begin to crawl across my soul', she comes to understand that she has a vocation that will define her life. Her path seems assured, but she has no idea of the struggles ahead - love affairs, wanted and unwanted pregnancies, artistic failure and destructive addiction. As the years go by, the central tension of Tove's life comes into painful focus: the terrible lure of dependency, in all its forms, and the possibility of living freely and fearlessly - as an artist on her own terms.

Copenhagen, 1968. Lise, a children's book writer and married mother of three, is becoming increasingly haunted by disembodied faces and taunting voices. Convinced that her housekeeper and husband are plotting against her, she descends into a terrifying world of sickness, pills and institutionalization. But is sanity in fact a kind of sickness? And might mental illness itself lead to enlightenment?

Brief, intense and haunting, Ditlevsen's novel recreates the experience of madness from the inside, with all the vividness of lived experience.

D. W. Winnicott was one of the most influential figures in child psychiatry. In this landmark work, re-issued on the fiftieth anniversary of his death, he lays out his ground-breaking theories of child development, and how children become independent from their parents.

Along the way Winnicott touches on a wide range of questions, from why babies cry and why toddlers are aggressive to how to teach children about sex. Above all, Winnicott encourages parents to ignore external pressures and guilt, and to trust their own instincts. His accessible and non-judgemental approach remains as radical today as it was in the 1960s.

Book 10 in Ved Mehta's Continents of Exile series. Nearly 50 years in the making, Continents of Exile is one of the great works of twentieth-century autobiography: the epic chronicle of an Indian family in the twentieth century. From 1930s India to 1950s Oxford and literary New York in the 1960s-80s, this is the story of the post-colonial twentieth century, as uniquely experienced and vividly recounted by Ved Mehta.

In lucid, sparse prose Mehta documents the twists and turns of a romantic history peppered with disappointment and anguish - that is until, in his search for self-understanding, he meets a surprising guide who shows the way toward new insights about himself and those he has loved.

Book 11 in Ved Mehta's Continents of Exile series. Nearly 50 years in the making, Continents of Exile is one of the great works of twentieth-century autobiography: the epic chronicle of an Indian family in the twentieth century. From 1930s India to 1950s Oxford and literary New York in the 1960s-80s, this is the story of the post-colonial twentieth century, as uniquely experienced and vividly recounted by Ved Mehta.

This chapter of Mehta's remarkable memoirs details the many dilemmas he encounters during the building of a new home on a strange, irresistible island: from ever-climbing costs to a frequent infestations of potato bugs in the basement. Underlying the travails of construction lies a richly allegorical tale about Mehta's own struggles as a writer and as a man in love.

Published in 1957, two years after its author's death at the age of forty-five, A Death in the Family remains a near-perfect work of art, an autobiographical novel that contains one of the most evocative depictions of loss and grief ever written. As Jay Follet hurries back to his home in Knoxville, Tennessee, he is killed in a car accident - a tragedy that destroys not only a life, but also the domestic happiness and contentment of a young family. A novel of great courage, lyric force, and powerful emotion, A Death in the Family is a masterpiece of American literature.

The last volume of Ved Mehta's Continents of Exile series. Nearly 50 years in the making, Continents of Exile is one of the great works of twentieth-century autobiography: the epic chronicle of an Indian family in the twentieth century. From 1930s India to 1950s Oxford and literary New York in the 1960s-80s, this is the story of the post-colonial twentieth century, as uniquely experienced and vividly recounted by Ved Mehta.

During the clamour of a New York dinner party, Mehta is startled to find his father crying on his mother's shoulders. This episode begins a painful and revealing voyage into his father's personal history. In stark prose, Mehta unravels a passionate, clandestine affair that bore quiet yet extraordinary consequences for himself and his family. Red Letters also serves as a brilliant exploration and a recreation of British India: its sights and sounds, its injustices and its secrecy.