Penguin Modern Classics

Bobby - young, black and happily in love with Hispanic girlfriend Maria - lives in a cramped Bronx apartment with his mother, his younger siblings and walls full of rats. But when Bobby and Maria are brutally attacked by a Hispanic gang, leaving the couple severely injured, everything changes. Maria may be lost, but, under the unusual care of the reclusive doctor he knows only as Moishe, Bobby might just have stumbled into a hopeful future of which he could never have previously dreamed. The Willow Tree is a searing trip of despair and hope through the lives of America's dispossessed inner-city residents.

A notice in The Times addressed to 'Those who Appreciate Wistaria and Sunshine' advertises a 'small mediaeval Italian Castle on the shores of the Mediterranean to be let furnished for the month of April'. Four very different women take up the offer, escaping dreary London for the sunshine of Italy. Among the party are Mrs Wilkins and Mrs Arthuthnot, both fleeing unappreciative husbands; beautiful Lady Caroline, sick of being 'grabbed' by lovestruck men; and the imperious Mrs Fisher, who spends her time remembering the bearded 'great men' she knew in her Victorian childhood. By the end of their holiday, all the women will fall completely under the spell of Italy in this funny, insightful and very charming novel.

Ten-year-old Randal Thane is distressed to be taken from his mother, his governess and his home and sent to prep school. But once there, he discovers an adult world he had never before imagined, and falls unwillingly but entirely under the spell of a charismatic older boy, Felton, who will introduce him to all the pleasures, pains and perplexities of first love.

A unique, enchanting and complicated coming-of-age story about the passion between two young boys, In the Making is widely hailed as G. F. Green's masterpiece, and is now in print for the first time since its original publication in 1952.

In this remarkable autobiography, Man Ray - painter, photographer, sculptor, film maker and writer - relates the story of his life, from his childhood determination to be an artist and his technical drawing classes in a Brooklyn high school, to the glamorous and heady days of Paris in the 1940s, when any trip to the city 'was not complete until they had been "done" by Man Ray's camera'.

Friend to everyone who was anyone, Ray tells everything he knows of artists, socialites and writers such as Matisse, Hemingway, Picasso and Joyce, not to mention Lee Miller, Nancy Cunard, Alberto Giacometti, Gertrude Stein, Dali, Max Ernst and many more, in this decadent, sensational account of the early twentieth-century cultural world.

A new translation by David Horrocks.

At first sight Harry Haller seems like a respectable, educated man. In reality he is the Steppenwolf: wild, strange, alienated from society and repulsed by the modern age. But as he is drawn into a series of dreamlike and sometimes savage encounters - accompanied by, among others, Mozart, Goethe and the bewitching Hermione - the misanthropic Haller discovers a higher truth, and the possibility of happiness. This haunting portrayal of a man who feels he is half-human and half-wolf became a counterculture classic for a disaffected generation. Yet it is also a story of redemption, and an intricately-structured modernist masterpiece. This is the first new translation of Steppenwolf for over eighty years, returning to the fresh, authentic language of Hesse's original.

Into the insular town of 1930s Ferrara, a new doctor arrives. Fadigati is hopeful and modern, and more than anything wants to fit into his new home. But his fresh, appealing appearance soon crumbles when the townsfolk discover his homosexuality, and the young man he pays to be his lover humiliates him publicly.

As anti-Semitism spreads across Italy, the Jewish narrator of the tale begins to feel pity for the ostracized doctor, as the fickle nature of a community changing under political forces becomes clear. The Gold-Rimmed Spectacles is a gripping and tragic study of how lives can be destroyed by those we consider our neighbours.

The tale of Kerouac's alter-ego, Vanity of Duluoz presents Jack Duluoz's high school experiences as a sporting jock in Massachusetts and his time at Columbia University on a football scholarship. Just as Jack's glamorous new adult life begins, so does World War II, and he joins the US Navy to travel the world. As Jack experiences more, he realizes the limits of his former plans and returns to New York at the start of the Beat movement, to a riot of drugs, sex and writing. Vanity of Duluoz was Kerouac's final work published before his death in 1969.

An experimental novel which remained unpublished for years, Visions of Cody is Kerouac's fascinating examination of his own New York life, in a collection of colourful stream-of-consciousness essays. Transcribing taped conversations between members of their group as they took drugs and drank, this book reveals an intimate portrait of people caught up in destructive relationships with substances, and one another. Always fixated by Neal Cassady - the Cody of the title, renamed for the book along with Allen Ginsberg and William Burroughs - Kerouac also explores the feelings he had for a man who would inspire much of his work.

In Homer's Daughter Robert Graves recreates the Odyssey. This bold retelling of the ancient epic imagines that its author was not the blind and bearded Homer of legend, but a young woman in Western Sicily who calls herself Nausicaä. In Robert Graves's words, Homer's Daughter is 'the story of a high-spirited and religious-minded Sicilian girl who saves her father's throne from usurpation, herself from a distasteful marriage, and her two younger brothers from butchery by boldly making things happen, instead of sitting still and hoping for the best.'

In July 1914, Franz Kafka's fiancée Felice broke off their engagement in a humiliating public tribunal, surrounded by her friends and family, and the other woman with whom Kafka had recently fallen in love. Broken and bereft, Kafka - at the height of his writing powers - turned the experience into his masterpiece, The Trial, where his lovers became the faceless prosecutors of Josef K. In Kafka's Other Trial, Canetti explores each letter that Kafka wrote to his fiancée, from their first tender moments together to his final letter and his refusal to reconcile.

In this affecting book, he offers moving insights into the creativity of Franz Kafka and the torment he suffered as a man, a lover, and a writer.

Robert Graves first came across the name of Roger Lamb in 1914, when Graves was an English officer instructing his platoon in regimental history. Lamb was a British soldier who had served his king during the American War of Independence, and whose claim to a footnote in history is that he managed to escape twice from American prison camps. When Graves went to America in the 1930s, he remembered Sergeant Lamb, investigated his story and created this fictionalized memoir telling Lamb's story from his Irish childhood to war and revolution, weaving a mesmerizing tale of courage and adventure.

Edward Venn-Thomas lives in the twentieth century but has been mysteriously transported to the future, and the apparently idyllic society of New Create, where there is no hunger, no war and no dissatisfaction. However Venn-Thomas is starting to find life among the New Cretans rather dull. He comes to realize that their perfect existence, inspired by the poets and magicians of their strange occultic religion, lacks one fundamental thing - evil. So Venn-Thomas sees it as nothing less than his duty to introduce them to the darker side of life. First published in 1949 and also known as Watch the North Wind Rise, Graves's novel is a thrilling blend of utopian fantasy, science fiction and mythology.

Nobel Prize-winning author Canetti spent only a few weeks in Marrakesh, but it was a visit that would remain with him for the rest of his life. In The Voices of Marrakesh, he captures the essence of that place: the crowds, the smells - of spices, camels and the souks - and, most importantly to Canetti, the sounds of the city, from the cries of the blind beggars and the children's call for alms to the unearthly silence on the still roofs above the hordes.

In these immaculately crafted essays, Canetti examines the emotions Marrakesh stirred within him and the people who affected him for ever.

In order to reclaim his father's kingdom, Jason has been sent on an impossible mission - to take the golden ram's fleece that lies far away, guarded by a dragon. Jason, who is so attractive that women fall instantly in love with him, sets sail in the Argo, along with the greatest heroes of ancient Greece, including the surly (and often drunk) Hercules, the enchanting musician Orpheus and the battling twins Castor and Pollux. As they battle clashing rocks, monsters and seductresses, watched over by pitiless gods, they will learn that victory comes at a price.

In The Golden Fleece Robert Graves transforms Greek myth into a thrilling and richly imagined story, bringing the ancient world vividly alive.

Robert Graves's controversial historical novel is a bold reworking of the story of Christ. Here Jesus is not the son of God, but the result of a secret marriage - the descendant of Herod and true King of the Jews. Written from the perspective of a lowly official at the end of the first century AD, King Jesus recounts Jesus's birth, youth, life as a charismatic 'wonder worker' and the unorthodox, bitter nature of his death and resurrection. Portraying Jesus not as divine but as a flawed human bent upon his own doom, this retelling of the gospels is a compelling blend of research, imagination and narrative power.

Marie Powell is sixteen when her father marries her to the poet John Milton in payment of a debt. They move to a pretty garden-house in London, but she struggles to adjust to her new life. Her husband is high-minded and unyielding, and only makes Marie long for the man she really loves. As Civil War sweeps across England and the King is killed, a battle starts to rage between husband and wife - one that only the powerful can win.

Told through the fictional journals of Milton's wife, Robert Graves's sympathetic and sensitive reconstruction of her tragic life is also a convincing, linguistically rich portrait of seventeenth-century England as it is ravaged by war.