The last novel from the unsurpassed master of American detective fiction, Dashiell Hammett's The Thin Man is a genre-defining...

Inspired by his own eccentric aunt, Patrick Dennis's Auntie Mame is a madcap comedy, published with an afterword by Matteo...

How I Came to Know Fish (1974) is Ota Pavel's magical memoir of his childhood in Czechoslovakia. Fishing with his father and his...

A modern fable, a post-apocalyptic romance, a gothic horror story; Angela Carter's genre-defying fantasia Heroes and Villains...

A young working class woman abandoned by her bourgeois lover, the tensions of intermarriage between established classes and...

'January 22nd - Robert startles me at breakfast by asking if my cold - which he has hitherto ignored - is better. I reply that it...

Asher Lev is a gifted loner, the artist who painted the sensational Brooklyn Crucifixion. Into it he poured all the anguish and...

Primo Levi was one of the most astonishing voices to emerge from the twentieth century. This landmark selection of his short...

Both devastating and funny, The Lonely Londoners is an unforgettable account of immigrant experience - and one of the great...

Handsome, worldly and intelligent, Solal holds a position of enviable power in 1930s Geneva. But as Under-Secretary-General of...

Sybille Bedford's first novel, A Legacy is a savage indictment of the brutality and anti-Semitism spawned in German officer-cadet...

The story of the title deals with a little boy named Larry and his feelings towards his father. When his father returns home from...

The key literary figure in the pubs of post-war Fitzrovia, Maclaren-Ross pulled together his dispersed energies to write two...

Primo Levi was one of the most astonishing voices to emerge from the twentieth century: a man who survived one of the ugliest...

Gandhi's non-violent struggles against racism, violence, and colonialism in South Africa and India had brought him to such a...

School is 'wet and weedy', according to Nigel Molesworth, the 'goriller of 3B', 'curse of St Custard's' and superb chronicler of...

The Penguin Modern Classics edition of John Dos Passos' U.S.A. is a groundbreaking work of experimental fiction which, with its...

In The House of Bernarda Alba, a tyrannical matriarch rules over her house and five daughters, cruelly crushing their hopes and...

Unfinished at the time of his death, F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Last Tycoon is a story of doomed love set against the extravagance...

Intimidated by her father, the rector of Knype Hill, Dorothy performs her submissive roles of dutiful daughter and bullied...

My part of Ireland had a poet at one time, a poor ragged fellow whom no respectable person whom no respectable person would be...

Jean Rhys's first novel, a heartbreaking and disturbingly intimate portrayal of an isolated woman in Paris

Set in a...

Primo Levi was among the greatest witnesses to twentieth-century atrocity. In this gripping novel, based on a true story, he...

Brideshead Revisited is Evelyn Waugh's stunning novel of duty and desire set amongst the decadent, faded glory of the English...

'It is the sum of myself, as far as the written word can go' Kerouac on The Town and the City Kerouac's debut novel is a great...

This epoch-making book cuts through confused thinking and forces us to re-examine many cherished ideas about knowledge,...

A young and inexperienced sea captain finds that his first command leaves him with a ship stranded in tropical seas and a crew...

Asher Lev is a gifted loner, the artist who painted the sensational Brooklyn Crucifixion. Into it he poured all the anguish and...

The Catcher in Rye is the ultimate novel for disaffected youth, but it's relevant to all ages. The story is told by Holden...

'We are mistaken when we say that 'It isn't the same for them as it would be for us', and that people bred in the slums can...