Penguin Modern Classics

Georges Simenon's chilling portrayal of tragic love, persecution and betrayal.

'One sensed in him neither flesh nor bone, nothing but soft, flaccid matter, so much so that his movements were hard to make out. Very red lips stood out from his orb-like face, as did the thin moustache that he curled with an iron and looked as if it had been drawn on with India ink; on his cheekbones were the symmetrical pink dots of a doll's cheeks.'

People find Mr Hire strange, disconcerting. The tenants he shares his building with try to avoid him. He is a peeping Tom, a visitor of prostitutes, a dealer in unsavoury literature. He is also the prime suspect for a brutal murder that he did not commit. Yet Mr Hire's innocence will not stand in the way of those looking for a scapegoat as tragedy unfolds in this quietly devastating and deeply unnerving novel.

'The romans durs are extraordinary: tough, bleak, offhandedly violent, suffused with guilt and bitterness, redolent of place . . . utterly unsentimental, frightening in the pitilessness of their gaze, yet wonderfully entertaining' John Banville

TELEGRAPH BOOKS OF THE YEAR and OBSERVER BOOKS OF THE YEAR 2014

'This book is a record of what has moved me between Uxbridge and Dagenham. My hope is that it moves you, too.'

Nairn's London is an idiosyncratic, poetic and intensely subjective meditation on a city and its buildings. Including railway stations, synagogues, abandoned gasworks, dock cranes, suburban gardens, East End markets, Hawksmoor churches, a Gothic cinema and twenty-seven different pubs, it is a portrait of the soul of a place, from a writer of genius.

Here are attempts at human connection, both depraved and sublime, and the grinding struggle to survive against the crushing realities of the Soviet system: in Among Friends, a doting mother commits an atrocious act against her beloved son in an attempt to secure his future; The Time: Night examines the suicide of the great Russian poetess Anna Andreevna with heartbreaking clarity; while in Chocolates with Liqueur the struggle for ownership of an apartment between a nurse and a madman turns murderous. With the satirical eye of Cindy Sherman, the psychological perceptiveness of Dostoevsky, and the bleak absurdities of Beckett, Petrushevskaya blends macabre spectacle with transformative moments of grace and shows just why she is Russia's preeminent contemporary fiction writer.

'We are the music makers ... we are the dreamers of dreams'

This new edition of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory celebrates fifty years of the bestselling and beloved classic. The story of Charlie Bucket, a mysterious, eccentric chocolate factory owner and the golden ticket that transforms his existence is a masterpiece of exuberant invention, nonsense, fantasy and dark morality tale; both delightful and cruel.

'You'll never be happy until you can think and feel and look like other people . . .'

Jael 97 is an Alpha. Deemed over-privileged for her beauty, she is compelled to report to the Ministry of Facial Justice, where her face will be reconstructed.

For Jael lives in the New State, created out of the devastation of the Third World War. Under the rule of the Darling Dictator, citizens must wear sackcloth and ashes, and only a 17.5% quotum of personality is permitted to each. Anything that inspires envy is forbidden.

But Jael cannot suppress her rebellious spirit. Secretly, she starts to reassert the rights of the individual, and decides to hunt down the faceless Dictator.


'An exquisitely entertaining fantasy' Observer

In this masterly synthesis, Arthur Koestler cuts through the sterile distinction between 'sciences' and 'humanities' to bring to life the whole history of cosmology from the Babylonians to Newton. He shows how the tragic split between science and religion arose and how, in particular, the modern world-view replaced the medieval world-view in the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century. He also provides vivid and judicious pen-portraits of a string of great scientists and makes clear the role that political bias and unconscious prejudice played in their creativity.

A 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 English before.


'Powerful new translations . . . Bassani began as a poet, and McKendrick's redelivery of this taut uncompromising fiction reveals resonance and generosity' Ali Smith

'Giorgio Bassani is one of the great witnesses of this century, and one of its great artists' Guardian


Giorgio Bassani (1916-2000) was an Italian poet, novelist and editor. The Smell of Hay is the last in a series of six works collected together as Il romanzo di Ferrara. Other works in the cycle include The Garden of the Finzi-Continis, which received the Viareggio Prize and inspired an Academy Award-winning film adaptation by Vittorio de Sica, The Gold-Rimmed Spectacles, and Within the Walls (originally published as Five Stories of Ferrara), which won the Strega Prize.

Jamie McKendrick is a poet and translator. His translations of Bassani's The Garden of the Finzi-Continis and The Gold-Rimmed Spectacles are already available as Penguin Modern Classics, and he is in the process of translating the rest of the Romanzo di Ferrara cycle anew.

From one of twentieth-century China's greatest writers and the author of Lust, Caution, this is an unforgettable story of a love affair set in 1930s Shanghai.

Manzhen is a young worker in a Shanghai factory, where she meets Shijun, the son of wealthy merchants. Despite family complications, they fall in love and begin to dream of a shared life together - until circumstances force them apart. When they are reunited after a separation of many years, can they start their relationship again? Or is it destined to be the romance of only half a lifetime? This affectionate and captivating novel tells the moving story of an enduring love affair, and offers a fascinating window onto Chinese life in the first half of the twentieth century.

Eileen Chang was born in Shanghai in 1920. She studied literature at the University of Hong Kong but returned to Shanghai in 1941 during the Japanese occupation, where she established her reputation as a literary star. She moved to America in 1955 and died in Los Angeles in 1995.

Karen S. Kingsbury taught and studied in Chinese-speaking cities for nearly two decades, and currently lives in Pennsylvania, USA. She has translated Love in a Fallen City for Penguin Classics, as well as other essays and stories by Chang.

'A giant of modern Chinese literature' The New York Times

'Eileen Chang is the fallen angel of Chinese literature' Ang Lee

'A dazzling and distinctive fiction writer' New York Times Book Review

'Chang's world is a stark and mysterious place where people strive to find their way in love but often fail under the pressures of family, tradition, and reputation' New Yorker

A powerful story of the shattering effects of the First World War on both a family and a country - from Hans Fallada, bestselling author of Alone in Berlin

'This remarkable work, now complete after 76 years, could well be one of the finest novels any of us will ever read' Irish Times

Gustav Hackendahl's will is law. Known as 'Iron Gustav', he runs his family and his Berlin carriage business with stern, unyielding discipline. But his children have wills of their own, and soon they slip from his control - some to better lives, some towards disaster. As war breaks out and Gustav's beloved Germany is devastated by hardship and violence, he finds everything he believes in destroyed. Can the man of iron endure, or even change?

Brutal and moving, written with Hans Fallada's gift for capturing the small tragedies of ordinary lives, Iron Gustav is a heartbreaking family chronicle and an unflinching portrayal of the First World War and its aftermath.

Mailer's superb account, written as it was happening, of the first attempt to land men on the moon

'Houston, Tranquility Base here. The Eagle has landed.'

A Fire on the Moon tells the scarcely credible story of the Apollo 11 mission. It is suffused with Mailer's obsession both with the astronauts themselves and with his own anxieties and terrors about the extremity of what they were trying to achieve. Mailer is both admiring and appalled and the result is a book which is both a gripping narrative and a brilliant depiction of the now-forgotten technical issues and uncertainties around the mission. A Fire on the Moon is also a matchless portrait of an America caught in a morass of introspection and misery, torn apart by the war in Vietnam. But for one, extraordinary week in the summer of 1969 all eyes were on the fates of three men in a rocket, travelling a quarter of a million miles away from Earth.

With an introduction by Geoff Dyer.

A charming, mind-bending and anarchic book of imagined civilizations

'Most cosmic civilizations long for things, in the depths of their souls, they would never openly admit to...'

Trurl and Klapaucius are 'constructors' - they travel around the universe creating machines of astonishing inventiveness and power and visiting a bewildering variety of violent, peculiar and morose civilizations. The Cyberiad is oddly reminiscent of Gulliver's Travels, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, The Phantom Tollbooth and Alice in Wonderland. Charming, mind-bending and anarchic, it is perhaps Lem's greatest work. This edition includes all of Daniel Mroz's hallucinatory original illustrations.

The extraordinary letters of Italo Calvino, one of the great writers of the twentieth century, translated into English for the first time by Martin McLaughlin, with an introduction by Michael Wood.

Italo Calvino, novelist, literary critic and editor, was also a masterful letter writer whose correspondents included Umberto Eco, Primo Levi, Gore Vidal and Pier Paolo Pasolini. This collection of his extraordinary letters, the first in English, gives an illuminating insight into his work and life. They include correspondence with fellow authors, generous encouragement to young writers, responses to critics, thoughts on literary criticism and literature in general, as well as giving glimpses of Calvino's role in the antifascist Resistance, his disenchantment with Communism and his travels to America and Cuba. Together they reveal the searching intellect, clarity and passionate commitment of a great writer at work.

'This literally marvelous collection of letters shows him to have been gregarious, puckish, funny, combative, and, above all, wonderful company, and opens a new and fascinating perspective on one of the master writers of the twentieth century. Michael Wood and Martin McLaughlin have done Calvino, and us, a great and loving service.' John Banville

'A charming addition to the Planet Calvino - a place cluttered with sphinxes, chimeras, knights, spaceships and viscounts both cloven and whole' Guardian

Italo Calvino, one of Italy's finest postwar writers, was born in Cuba in 1923 and grew up in San Remo, Italy. Best known for his experimental masterpieces, Invisible Cities and If on a Winter's Night a Traveller, he was also a brilliant exponent of allegorical fantasy in works such as The Complete Cosmicomics. He died in Siena in 1985.

'Powerful . . . unputdownably gripping' Guardian

'The island itself. Its throbbing heat as if in a belljar under the sun, the scorpion in his son's bed, the deafening sound of cicadas'

During his first holiday on the island of Porquerolles Dr Mahé caught a glimpse of something irresistible. As the memory continues to haunt him, he falls prey to a delusion that may offer an escape from his conventional existence - or may destroy him. This is the first English translation of The Mahé Circle, Simenon's dark, malevolent depiction of an ordinary man trapped in mundanity and consumed by obsession.

'Extraordinary . . . Simenon is one of the most important writers of the 20th century' Independent

The definitive Norman Mailer collection, as he writes on Marilyn Monroe, culture, ideology, boxing, Hemingway, politics, sex, celebrity and - of course - Norman Mailer

From his early 'A Credo for the Living', published in 1948, when the author was twenty-five, to his final writings in the year before his death, Mailer wrestled with the big themes of his times. He was one of the most astute cultural commentators of the postwar era, a swashbuckling intellectual provocateur who never pulled a punch and was rarely anything less than interesting. Mind of an Outlaw spans the full arc of Mailer's evolution as a writer, including such essential pieces as his acclaimed 1957 meditation on hipsters, 'The White Negro'; multiple selections from his wonderful Advertisements for Myself; and a never-before-published essay on Freud. The book is introduced by Jonathan Lethem.

The soldiers of C-for-Charlie Company are not cast from the heroic mold. The unit's captain is too intelligent and sensitive for the job, his first sergeant is psychotic, and the enlisted men begin the campaign gripped by cowardice. But they will all discover the thin red line that divides the sane from the mad - and the living from the dead - when they arrive on the island of Guadalcanal in the Pacific. Based on James Jones' experience in the Pacific Theatre during World War II, The Thin Red Line is a raw and unsparing depiction of the senselessness and brutalizing impact of war.

'The stooping figure of my mother, waist-deep in the grass and caught there like a piece of sheep's wool, was the last I saw of my country home as I left it to discover the world'

Abandoning the Cotswolds village that raised him, the young Laurie Lee walks to London. There he makes a living labouring and playing the violin. But, deciding to travel further a field and knowing only the Spanish phrase for 'Will you please give me a glass of water?', he heads for Spain. With just a blanket to sleep under and his trusty violin, he spends a year crossing Spain, from Vigo in the north to the southern coast. Only the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War puts an end to his extraordinary peregrinations . . .