Penguin Modern Classics

Originally published in 1967, Ngugi's third novel is his best known and most ambitious work. A GRAIN OF WHEAT portrays several characters in a village whose intertwined lives are transformed by the 1952-1960 Emergency in Kenya. As the action follows the village's arrangements for Uhuru (independence) Day, this is a novel of stories within stories, a narrative interwoven with myth as well as allusions to real-life leaders of the nationalist struggle, including Jomo Kenyatta. At the centre of it all is the reticent Mugo, the village's chosen hero and a man haunted by a terrible secret. As events unfold, compromises are forced, friendships are betrayed and loves are tested.

THE RIVER BETWEEN explores life on the Makuyu and Kameno ridges of Kenya in the early days of white settlement. Faced with an alluring, new religion and 'magical' customs, the Gikuyu people are torn between those who fear the unknown and those who see beyond it. Some fellow Joshua and his fiery brand of Christianity while others proudly pursue tribal independence. In the midst of this disunity stands Waiyaki, a dedicated visionary born to a line of prophets. He struggles to educate the tribe- a task he sees as the only unifying link between the two factions - but his plans for the future raise issues which will determine both his own and the Gikuyu's survival.

A mysterious woman stands and smiles at Monroe Stahr, the last of the great Hollywood princes. Enchanted by one another, they begin a passionate but hopeless love affair.

'There has been no more terribly acute critic of America than this steel-conscious and death-conscious Spaniard, with his curious passion for the modernities of nickel and tinfoil and nitre . . .' So wrote Conrad Aiken of Lorca's violent response to the New York he encountered as a student at Columbia University in 1929 and 1930. Born and brought up in Andalusia, Lorca's reaction to the brutality and loneliness of the vast city was one of amazement and indignation. His poetry moved away from the lyricism of the early Romanceros and became a vehicle for experimental techniques through which he expressed tortured feelings of alienation and dislocation. Based on a new edition of the original text, Greg Simon's and Steven White's new translation brings to life Lorca's arresting imagery. Christopher Maurer, a leading authority on Lorca's work, provides an enlightening introduction placing Poet in New York in context, and there are translations of Lorca's letters as well as a lecture he gave about the work. Illustrated with archive photographs, this comprehensive volume will make Lorca's masterpiece available to a whole new generation of readers.

Stevie Smith was one of the few modern poets to reach a wide general audience. Bizarre, witty, sad, sometimes caustic, her poems impart a zest for life, and reveal her unique eye for the marvels of the ordinary and her deep sensibility to the paradoxical nature of all human emotions.

Spain's greatest and most well-loved modern poet, Lorca has long been admired for the emotional intensity and dark brilliance of his work, which drew on music, drama, mythology and the songs of his Andulucian childhood. From the playful Suites and stylized Gypsy Ballads, to his own dark vision of urban life, Poet in New York, and his elegaic meditation on death, Lament for Ignacio Sánchez Mejías; his range was remarkable. This bilingual edition provides versions by distinguished poets and translators, drawing on every book of poems published by Lorca and on his uncollected works.

'This century's most compelling theorist of racism and colonialism' Angela Davis

Written at the height of the Algerian war for independence from French colonial rule and first published in 1961, Frantz Fanon's Wretched of the Earth has provided inspiration for anti-colonial movements ever since, analysing the role of class, race, national culture and violence in the struggle for freedom. With power and anger, Fanon makes clear the economic and psychological degradation inflicted by imperialism. It was Fanon, himself a psychotherapist, who exposed the connection between colonial war and mental disease, who showed how the fight for freedom must be combined with building a national culture, and who showed the way ahead, through revolutionary violence, to socialism.

'In clear language, in words that can only have been written in the cool heat of rage, he showed us the internal theatre of racism' Deborah Levy

Lucan has been orphaned and Zosine has been deserted, and London is a hostile place for two young girls without a home. Bound together by poverty, grief and their shared years at school, they set out to make a future for themselves in new surroundings. They are adopted by the austere, puritanical Reverend Pennhallow and his wife, and in their large, gloomy house they become immersed in study. But, after a chain of disturbing events, it does not take long before they realize that the cleric and his wife are not all they seem to be ...

The brilliant tale of Anais Nin's true love affair with Henry Miller, and her ambiguous, charged relationship with his wife, June. Drawn from the journals of a single momentous year in Paris, Henry and June provides a wildly lyrical account of a woman's sexual awakening and the disillusion of idealized marriage.

An enchanting collection from India's foremost storyteller, rich in wry, warmly observed characters from every walk of Indian life - merchants, beggars, herdsmen, rogues - all of whose lives are microcosms of the human experience Like Nambi in the title story, Narayan has the mesmeric ability to spellbind his audience. This he achieves with a masterful combination of economy and rhythm, creating haunting images and a variety of settings to evoke a unique paradox of reality and folklore.

Considered an 'audacious' second novel, GIOVANNI'S ROOM is set in the 1950s Paris of American expatriates, liaisons, and violence. This now-classic story of a fated love triangle explores, with uncompromising clarity, the conflicts between desire, conventional morality and sexual identity.

"Nothing but the darkness, and all around them destruction, and before them nothing but the fire--a bastard people, far from God, singing and crying in the wilderness!" First published in 1953, Baldwin's first novel is a short but intense, semi-autobiographical exploration of the troubled life of the Grimes family in Harlem during the Depression.

The Forsyte Saga is the first part of John Galsworthy’s magnificent, well-loved Forsyte Chronicles, which trace the changing fortunes of the wealthy Forsyte dynasty through fifty years of material triumph and emotional disaster. The Forsyte Saga begins as the nineteenth century is drawing to a close, and the upper middle classes, with their property and propriety, are becoming a dying section of society. The Forsytes are blind to this fact, clinging to their conventions and ‘brilliant respectability’. As dignified Soames Forsyte struggles to uphold the old moral code in the face of the social revolution resulting from the Great War, his wife Irene’s extraordinary beauty causes even more disruption. The bitter feud between them comes to split the Forsyte family for two generations.

In this second part of John Galworthy's trilogy of love, power, money and family feuding, a new generation has arrived to divide the Forsyte clan with society scandals and conflicting passions.

In this final volume of The Forsyte Saga Galsworthy writes about the lives and loves of the Cherrell family, cousins of the Forsytes. For centuries, the Cherrell sons have left their home of Condaford Grange to serve the state as soldiers, clergymen and administrators, but the 1930s bring uncertainty in a world of rapidly altering morals and unemployment. Galsworthy’s portrayal of the effect of political change on individuals show him as a great social novelist as well as the author of one of the most gripping family sagas ever written.