Adam Usden

Adam Wagner

Adam Wasson

Adam Weymouth's work has been published widely, including in Granta, The Atlantic, The Observer and the BBC. His first book, Kings of the Yukon, won the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year, the Lonely Planet Adventure Travel Book of the Year and the Prix Paul-Emile Victor. He has been named by the National Writing Centre as one of ten writers shaping the UK's future.

Adam Weymouth

Adam Wisniewski-Snerg (1937-95) was born on the outskirts of Warsaw. His science fiction writing is largely focused around the consequences of totalitarianism. Although largely unread during his lifetime, after his suicide in 1995 his work began to receive major critical attention. He is now considered to be, along with Stanislaw Lem, one of Poland's greatest science fiction writers.

Adam Wisniewski-Snerg

Ade Edmondson

Adele Lang

Adele Nozedar is an author and photographer. Previously, she was in a cult indie band, then ran her own indie record label and became A&amp;R Director/General Manager of a major record company. 
 
Her wide-ranging passions are reflected in her books, which include The Hedgerow Handbook (2012), The Signs and Symbols Sourcebook (2011), The Secret Language of Birds (2006), and The Element Encyclopedia of Native Americans (2013).

Adele Nozedar

Adele Puhn

Adeline Yen Mah

Adelle Waldman is a freelance writer and book critic. She worked as a reporter at the New Haven Register and the Cleveland Plain Dealer, and wrote a column for the Wall Street Journal's website. Her articles also have appeared in The New York Times Book Review,The New Republic,Slate,The Wall Street Journal, and other national publications. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.

Adelle Waldman

Aditi Kakade Beaufrand is an Indian illustrator based in France. She likes experimenting with bright, happy colours. She grew up reading fairytales, watching animated films and imagining adventure stories, and her style is an embodiment of her Indian heritage and western culture. She loves animals and taking long walks on the beach, but she is never too far away from a pencil and a paper to draw her perception of the world.

Aditi Kakade Beaufrand

Aditya Chakrabortty

Adiva Geffen is a bestselling writer and playwright. Her plays have appeared on major stages in Israel, she lectures and leads numerous writing workshops and she is a board member of the Israeli Writers’ Association. 
 
 Geffen started out as a special-education teacher, before serving as the spokesperson for the Habima National Theatre for more than a decade. She founded and subsequently led the Israeli Theatre Award for ten years, and now serves as head of The Gnazim Institute of the Hebrew Writers Association, the largest Hebrew literature archive in the world. 
 
 Born in Haifa, Israel and the mother of three sons, Geffen now lives in Tel Aviv with her partner Aharon Meidan.

Adiva Geffen

Adnan Sarwar, 35, is a former British soldier who served in the Iraq War.  He has since worked as a military consultant to film and is a writer based in London.  Read more at www.adnansarwar.com / @adnansarwar

Adnan Sarwar

Adolf Hitler

Adolf Loos (1877-1933) was a leading Austro-Hungarian architect, perhaps most famous for the revolutionary 'Loos House' opposite the Hofburg Palace in Vienna, which caused outrage when it was built in 1912, and the wonderful American Bar, also in Vienna. He wrote extensively on architecture and design, working in reaction to the elaborate mass of decoration celebrated by the Vienna Secession movement.

Adolf Loos

Adolfo García Ortega

Adomnan of Iona

Adonis

Adriaan Van Dis

Adrian Bean

Adrian Bliss is a creator, writer and performer from London, best known for his comedy sketches which, explore everything from history to natural science to religion. Adrian's work has earned him nearly 20 million followers across social media and has been featured in CNN, The Times and Vogue. Adrian was named one of the New Faces of Comedy at Just For Laughs, and his one-man play Inside Everyone sold out its debut run at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival prior to opening.

Adrian Bliss

Adrian Desmond

Adrian Edmondson

Adrian Fort

Adrian Gilbert

Adrian Henri

Adrian House

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Jane Austen

Jane Austen's brilliant, hilarious - and often outrageous - early stories, sketches and pieces of nonsense. 
 
Jane Austen's earliest writing dates from when she was just eleven years, and already shows the hallmarks of her mature work: wit, acute insight into human folly, and a preoccupation with manners, morals and money. But it is also a product of the eighteenth century in which she grew up - dark, grotesque, often surprisingly bawdy, and a far cry from the polished, sparkling novels of manners for which she became famous. Drunken heroines, babies who bite off their mother's fingers, and a letter-writer who has murdered her whole family all feature in these very funny pieces. This edition includes all of Austen's juvenilia, including her 'History of England' - written by 'a partial, prejudiced, and ignorant Historian' - and the novella 'Lady Susan', in which the anti-heroine schemes and cheats her way through high society. Taken together, they offer a fascinating - and often surprising - insight into the early Austen. 
 
This major new edition is the first time Austen's juvenilia has appeared in Penguin Classics. Edited by Professor Christine Alexander, it includes an introduction, notes and other useful editorial materials. 
 
Jane Austen, born in 1775, wrote many burlesques, parodies and other stories in her youth, including a short epistolary novel, Lady Susan. The novels published in her lifetime include Sense and Sensibility (1811), Pride and Prejudice (1813), Mansfield Park (1814) and Emma (1816). Persuasion was written in a race against failing health in 1815-16, and was published, together with Northanger Abbey,posthumously in 1818. Austen died in Winchester on 18 July 1817. 
 Christine Alexander is Scientia Professor of English at the University of New South Wales and general editor of the Juvenilia Press. She has published extensively on the Brontës and has co-edited the first book on literary juvenilia, The Child Writer from Austen to Woolf (2005). 
 
'Spirited, easy, full of fun, verging with freedom upon sheer nonsense ... At fifteen she had few illusions about other people and none about herself' - Virginia Woolf' 
 
[Her] inspiration was the inspiration of Gargantua and of Pickwick; it was the gigantic inspiration of laughter' - G. K. Chesterton

Love and Freindship

And Other Youthful Writings

Clarice Lispector

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The publication of Clarice Lispector's Complete Stories, eighty-five in all, is a major literary event. Now, for the first time in English, are all the stories that made her a Brazilian legend: from teenagers coming into awareness of their sexual and artistic powers to humdrum housewives whose lives are shattered by unexpected epiphanies to old people who don't know what to do with themselves. Lispector's stories take us through their lives - and ours. From one of the greatest modern writers, these 85 stories, gathered from the nine collections published during her lifetime, follow Clarice Lispector throughout her life.

Complete Stories

Nikolay Leskov

The story of a passionate young woman who escapes her stifling marriage through adultery and murder, Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk is now the basis for an acclaimed new film starring Florence Pugh 
 
Nikolai Leskov is one of the most unique voices of nineteenth-century Russia, with a fascination for idiosyncratic characters, lurid crimes, comic absurdity, spirituality and the joy of pure story. This volume contains five of his greatest short tales, including the matchless masterpiece Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk. 
 
Translated with an introduction by David McDuff

Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk And Other Stories

Danilo Kiš

A counter-prophet attempts the impossible to prove his power; a girl sees the hideous fate of her sisters and father in a mirror bought from a gypsy; the death of a prostitute causes an unanticipated uprising; and the lives of every ordinary person since 1789 are recreated in the almighty Encyclopedia of the Dead. These stories about love and death, truth and lies, myth and reality range across many epochs and settings. Brilliantly combining fact and fiction, epic and miniature, horror and comedy, this was Danilo Kiš final work, published in Serbo-Croatian in 1983.

The Encyclopedia of the Dead

Gustave Flaubert

'She decided she would teach him to speak and he was very soon able to say, 'Pretty boy!', 'Your servant, sir!' and 'Hail Mary!''

A Simple Heart

Leo Tolstoy

Although he feared death, he could not stop. 'If I stopped now, after coming all this way - well, they'd call me an idiot!'

How Much Land Does A Man Need?

Ryunosuke Akutagawa

'What is the life of a human being - a drop of dew, a flash of lightning? This is so sad, so sad.' 
 
Autobiographical stories from one of Japan's masters of modernist story-telling. 
 
Introducing Little Black Classics: 80 books for Penguin's 80th birthday. Little Black Classics celebrate the huge range and diversity of Penguin Classics, with books from around the world and across many centuries. They take us from a balloon ride over Victorian London to a garden of blossom in Japan, from Tierra del Fuego to 16th-century California and the Russian steppe. Here are stories lyrical and savage; poems epic and intimate; essays satirical and inspirational; and ideas that have shaped the lives of millions. 
 
Ryunosuke Akutagawa (1892-1927). Akutagawa's Rashomon and Seventeen Other Stories is also available in Penguin Classics.

The Life of a Stupid Man

Nikolay Gogol

'Strangely enough, I mistook it for a gentleman at first. Fortunately I had my spectacles with me so I could see it was really a nose.'

The Nose

Edgar Allan Poe

'Presently I heard a slight groan, and I knew it was a groan of mortal terror ... the low stifled sound that arises from the bottom of the soul.' 
 
Stories about murder, mystery and madness, portraying the author's feverish imagination at its creative height. 
 
Introducing Little Black Classics: 80 books for Penguin's 80th birthday. Little Black Classics celebrate the huge range and diversity of Penguin Classics, with books from around the world and across many centuries. They take us from a balloon ride over Victorian London to a garden of blossom in Japan, from Tierra del Fuego to 16th-century California and the Russian steppe. Here are stories lyrical and savage; poems epic and intimate; essays satirical and inspirational; and ideas that have shaped the lives of millions. 
 
Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849). Poe's works available in Penguin Classics are The Complete Tales and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe, The Fall of the House of Usher and Other Writings, The Masque of the Red Death, The Murders in the Rue Morgue and Other Tales, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket, The Pit and the Pendulum, The Portable Edgar Allan Poe and The Science Fiction of Edgar Allan Poe.

The Tell-Tale Heart

William S. Burroughs

This surreal fable, set in America's Old West, features a cast of notorious characters: The Crying Gun, who breaks into tears at the sight of his opponent; The Priest, who goes into gunfights giving his adversaries the last rites; and The Nihilistic Kid himself, Kim Carson, a homosexual gunslinger who, with a succession of beautiful sidekicks, sets out to challenge the morality of small-town America and fight for intergalactic freedom. 
 
Fantastical and humorous, The Place of Dead Roads continues William Burroughs' exploration of society's controlling forces - the State, the Church, women, literature, drugs - with a style that is utterly unique in twentieth-century literature.

The Place of Dead Roads

Louisa May Alcott

A Merry Christmas collects the best holiday stories of Louisa May Alcott, from the yuletide benevolence of Marmee and her 'little women,' to the recently discovered tales of 'The Quiet Little Woman' and 'Kate's Choice,' to the moving 'What Love Can Do'. Deeply influenced by real-life events, including characters based on Louisa's family members and drawing from her experiences participating in the suffrage and abolitionist movements, these stories have the authentic texture and detail of Christmas in nineteenth-century America.

A Merry Christmas

And Other Christmas Stories

Ludmilla Petrushevskaya

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.

There Once Lived a Mother Who Loved Her Children, Until They Moved Back In

Three Novellas About Family

Washington Irving

In Irving's great work, The Sketch Book, fictional historian Diedrich Knickerbocker introduces us to Rip van Winkle, the Dutch colonist who slept through the Revolutionary War; Ichabod Crane, the superstitious, social-climbing schoolmaster; and the pumpkin-topped Headless Horseman, ancestor to countless horror film antiheroes. In addition to 'The Legend of Sleepy Hollow' and 'Rip Van Winkle', The Sketch Book touches on cultural and historical concerns that remain compelling, thanks to Irving's modern outlook and impressive foresight. 
 
This new edition, with an introduction from Elizabeth L. Bradley, demonstrates how inextricably Irving's writings are woven into the fabric of American culture - high and low.

The Legend of Sleepy Hollow and Other Stories

Henry James

A wonderful new selection of Henry James's short stories exploring the relationship between art and life, edited by Michael Gorra. 
 
This volume gathers seven of the very best of Henry James's short stories, all focussing the relationship between art and life. In 'The Aspern Papers', a critic is determined to get his hands on a great poet's papers hidden in a faded Venetian house - not matter what the human cost. 'The Author of Beltraffio', 'The Lesson of the Master' and 'The Figure in the Carpet' all focus on naive young men's unsettling encounters with their literary heroes. In 'The Middle Years', a dying novelist begins to glimpse his own potential, while 'The Real Thing' and 'Greville Fane' both explore the tension between artistic and commercial success. These fables of the creative life reveal James at his ironic, provocative best. 
 
Henry James was born in 1843 in New York and died in London in 1916. In addition to many short stories, plays, books of criticism, autobiography and travel, he wrote some twenty novels, the first published being Roderick Hudson (1875). They include The Europeans, Washington Square, The Portrait of a Lady, The Bostonians, The Princess Casamassima, The Tragic Muse, The Spoils of Poynton, The Awkward Age, The Wings of the Dove, The Ambassadors and The Golden Bowl. 
 
Michael Gorra is Professor of English at Smith College and the author of Portrait of a Novel: Henry James and the Making of an American Masterpiece (2012), a finalist for both the Pulitzer Prize and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize in biography.

The Aspern Papers and Other Tales

The diabolical Nova Criminals now include the nightmarish characters of Sammy the Butcher, Iron Claws, Izzy the Push and the Brown Artist, and are poised to wreak untold destruction on the world with their new-found control. Only Inspector Lee of the Nova Police has any chance of stopping them, by dismantling the word and image machine before it's too late. 
 
The third book of Burroughs's linguistically prophetic 'cut-up' trilogy - following The Soft Machine and The Ticket That Exploded - Nova Express is a hilarious and Swiftian parody of bureaucracy and the frailty of the human animal.

Nova Express

The Restored Text

A terrifying, surreal space-age odyssey, The Soft Machine initiated Burroughs' Cut-Up Trilogy that includes Nova Express and The Ticket That Exploded. The book draws the reader into an unmappable textual space, where nothing is true and everything is permitted, to make a total assault on the colonising powers of planet earth that have turned us all into machines. 
 
Edited and introduced by renowned Burroughs scholar Oliver Harris, this new edition clarifies for the first time the extraordinary history of The Soft Machine's writing and rewriting, demolishing the myths of Burroughs' chance-based writing methods and demonstrating for a new generation the significance of his greatest experiment.

The Soft Machine

Inspector Lee and the Nova Police have been forced to engage the Nova Mob in one final battle for the planet. This is Burroughs's nightmare vision of scientists and combat troops, of Johnny Yen's chicken-hypnotizing and green Venusian-boy-girls, of ad men and conmen whose destructive language has spread like an incurable disease; a virus and parasite that takes over every human body. 
 
One of Burroughs's most approachable works, The Ticket That Exploded is the climax of his innovative 'cut-up' Nova trilogy - following The Soft Machine and Nova Express - and is an enthralling and frightening image of the future.

The Ticket That Exploded

Rudyard Kipling

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The story of Mowgli, the man-cub who is brought up by wolves in the jungles of Central India, is one of the greatest literary myths ever created. As he embarks on a series of thrilling escapades, Mowgli encounters such unforgettable creatures as the bear Baloo, the graceful black panther Bagheera and Shere Khan, the tiger with the blazing eyes. Other animal stories in The Jungle Books range from the dramatic battle between good and evil in 'Rikki-tikki-tavi' to the macabre comedy 'The Undertakers'. With The Jungle Books Rudyard Kipling drew on ancient beast fables, Buddhist philosophy and memories of his Anglo-Indian childhood to create a rich, symbolic portrait of man and nature, and an eternal classic of childhood.

The Jungle Books

Hans Fallada

Darkly funny, searingly honest short stories from Hans Fallada, author of bestselling Alone in Berlin 
 
In these stories, criminals lament how hard it is to scrape a living by breaking and entering; families measure their daily struggles in marks and pfennigs; a convict makes a desperate leap from a moving train; a ring - and with it a marriage - is lost in a basket of potatoes. 
 
Here, as in his novels, Fallada is by turns tough, darkly funny, streetwise and effortlessly engaging, writing with acute feeling about ordinary lives shaped by forces larger than themselves: addiction, love, money.

Tales from the Underworld

Selected Shorter Fiction

James Thurber

This collection brings together the best of James Thurber's brilliantly funny, eccentric and anarchic writings. It includes his most famous work, The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, in which an ordinary man's fantasies have a more powerful hold on him than reality, as well as essays, poetry and cartoons gathered from all of Thurber's collections. Making fun of his own weaknesses and those of other people (and dogs) - the English teacher who looked only at figures of speech, the Airedale who refused to include him in the family, the botany lecturer who despaired of him totally - James Thurber is a true original, whose off-beat imagination shows us everyday life from a different angle.

The Thurber Carnival

Isak Dinesen

These five rich, witty and magical stories from the author of Out of Africa include one of her most well known tales, &lsquo;Babette&rsquo;s Feast&rsquo;, which was made into the classic film. It tells the story of a French cook working in a puritanical Norwegian community, who treats her employers to the decadent feast of a lifetime. There is also a real-life Prospero and his Ariel in &lsquo;Tempests&rsquo;, a mysterious pearl-fisher in &lsquo;The Diver&rsquo; and a brief, tragic encounter in &lsquo;The Ring&rsquo;. All the stories have a mystic, fairy-tale quality, linked by themes of angels, the sea, dreams and fate. They were among the last to be written by Isak Dinesen, and show her as a master of short fiction.

Babette's Feast and Other Stories

H. P. Lovecraft

Part of a new six-volume series of the best in classic horror, selected by award-winning director Guillermo del Toro. 
 
 Howard Phillips Lovecraft's unique contribution to American literature was a melding of traditional supernaturalism (derived chiefly from Edgar Allan Poe) with the genre of science fiction that emerged in the early 1920s. The Thing on the Doorstep and Other Weird Storiesbrings together a dozen of the master's tales - from his early short stories 'Under the Pyramids' (originally ghostwritten for Harry Houdini) and 'The Music of Erich Zann' (which Lovecraft ranked second among his own favourites) through to his more fully developed works, 'The Dunwich Horror', 'The Case of Charles Dexter Ward', and 'At the Mountains of Madness'. The book presents the definitive corrected texts of these works, along with Lovecraft critic and biographer S. T. Joshi's illuminating introduction and notes to each story. 
 
 Howard Phillips Lovecraft (1890-1937) was born in Providence, Rhode Island, where he spent most of his life. His relatively small body of work - three novels and sixty short stories - has nevertheless exercised an incalculable influence on horror and supernatural fiction.

The Thing on the Doorstep and Other Weird Stories

Albert Camus

The stories of Exile and the Kingdom explore the dilemma of being an outsider - even in one's own country - and of allegiance. With intense power and lyricism, Camus evokes beautiful but harsh landscapes, whether the shimmering deserts of his native Algeria or the wild, mysterious jungles of Brazil. 
 
Here a Frenchwoman is gradually seduced by the sheer difference of North Africa, a mutilated renegade is driven mad by the cruelty of his own people, and a barrel-maker watches the slow decline of his craft. A kindly teacher must choose between the law and a life, while a modest painter is out of his depth in the hypocrisy of the art world, and a French engineer discovers a new sense of belonging in a distant land. 
 
French novelist, essayist, and playwright. Albert Camus (1913-1960) was a representative of non-metropolitan French literature. His origin in Algeria and his experiences there in the thirties were dominating influences in his thought and work. 
 
Carol Cosman is the translator of many works from French, both literary and scholarly. Among the books she has translated are Jean-Paul Sartre's "The Family Idiot: Gustave Flaubert, 1821-1857," Honoré de Balzac's "Colonel Chabert," Simone de Beauvoir's "America Day by Day," and most recently René Daumal's "Mount Analogue".

Exile and the Kingdom

Stories

The story of the man-cub Mowgli who is raised by wolves in the Indian jungle, guided by his mentors Baloo the bear, Bagheera the black panther and the ancient python Kaa, and who confronts his arch-enemy Shere Khan the tiger, is one of the greatest literary myths ever created. Mowgli's adventures are juxtaposed with other animal stories set in the British Empire, ranging from the heroic battle of 'Rikki-tikki-tavi' and the Himalayan pastoral 'Purun Bhagat' to the drama of survival in 'The White Seal'. With The Jungle Books Rudyard Kipling drew on ancient beast fables, Buddhist philosophy and memories of his Anglo-Indian upbringing to create a rich, symbolic portrait of man and nature, and an eternal classic of childhood that has had a lasting impact on our imaginations. 
 
Part of a series of new editions of Kipling's works in Penguin Classics, this volume contains a General Preface by Jan Montefiore and an introduction by Kaori Nagai discussing the many imperial, Indian and literary contexts of The Jungle Books.

Wallace Stegner

'This is the age for the short story. None will be better or more worthy of admiration than Wallace Stegner's Collected Stories' Washington Post Book World 
 
In a literary career spanning more than fifty years, Wallace Stegner, winner of a Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, has created a remarkable record of the history and culture of twentieth-century America. These thirty-one stories demonstrate why he is acclaimed as one of America's master storytellers. Here are tales of young love and older wisdom, of the order and consistency of the natural world and the chaos, contradictions and continuities of the human being. 
 
'Exemplary stories ... The reader of Stegner's writing is immediately reminded of an essential America ... a distinct place, a unique people, a common history, and a shared heritage remembered as only Stegner can' Los Angeles Times

Collected Stories

Kingsley Amis

The short stories of Kingsley Amis - the great master of post-war comic prose - are dark, playful, moving, surprising and extremely funny. This definitive collection gathers all Amis's short fiction in a single volume for the first time and encompasses five decades of storytelling. In 'The 2003 Claret', written in 1958, a time machine is invented for the weighty task of sending a man to 2010 to discover what the booze will taste like. In 'Boris and the Colonel' a Cambridge spy is unearthed in the sleepy English countryside with the help of a plucky horse, while In 'Mason's Life' two men meet inside their respective dreams. The collection spans many genres, offering ingenious alternative histories, mystery and horror, satirical reflections and a devilishly funny attacks. Amis's stories reveal the scope of his imagination and the warmth beneath his acerbic humour, and they all share the unmistakable style and wit of one of Britain's best loved writers. 
 
Kingsley Amis' (1922-1995) works take a humorous yet highly critical look at British society, especially of the period following the end of World War II. Born in London, Amis explored his disillusionment with British society in novels such as THAT UNCERTAIN FEELING (1955). His other works include THE GREEN MAN (1970); STANLEY AND THE WOMEN (1984); and THE OLD DEVILS (1986) which won the Booker Prize. Amis also wrote poetry, criticism, and short stories. 
 
Rachel Cusk was born in 1967. She has won the Whitbread First Novel Award and the Somerset Maugham Award, and is the author of two works of non-fiction and seven novels, including In The Fold, longlisted for the 2005 Man Booker Prize, and Arlington Park, shortlisted for the Orange Broadband Prize 2007. Her non-fiction book, A Life's Work, was published to huge acclaim in 2001, and her account of a summer spent in Italy with her family, The Last Supper, was published in 2009. Her most recent novel, The Bradshaw Variations was published in 2009. In 2003 she was chosen as one of Granta's Best Young Novelists. She lives in Brighton.

John Mortimer

For the first time in Penguin Modern Classics, this is a new selection of some of the best moments in the trials of Horace Rumpole, fiction's most loved barrister-at-law. When not downing Château Fleet Street in Pommeroy's Wine Bar or held in check by She Who Must Be Obeyed, the Old Bailey hack can be found battling through the Law Courts with his formidable mixture of wit, eloquence, cynicism and scruffiness. And whether he is defending various members of the notorious and incompetent south London crime family, the Timsons, or mocking the pomposity and hypocrisy of his own profession, Rumpole is an amiably relentless reminder of what justice should really be about. These twenty stories serve as the definitive introduction to one of the wisest and wittiest characters in British comic writing, in all his shabby glory.

The Collected Stories of Rumpole

In these dark, dreamlike love stories with a twist, Ludmilla Petrushevskaya tells of strange encounters in claustrophobic communal apartments, ill-fated holiday romances, office trysts, schoolgirl crushes, tentative courtships, rampant infidelity, tender devotion and terrifying madness. By turns sly and sweet, earthy and sublime, these fables of flawed love blend black humour and macabre spectacle with transformative moments of grace.

There Once Lived a Girl Who Seduced Her Sister's Husband, And He Hanged Himself: Love Stories

Javier Marías

In the dark narratives that make up When I Was Mortal by Javier Marías, winner of the Dublin IMPAC prize and author of the bestselling A Heart So White, a dapper Paris doctor dispenses a treatment for dissatisfied wives. A mother auditions for her first porn movie. A writer working on a study of pain makes himself the subject of his experiments. A voyeur mistakes a murderer for a fellow peeping tom ... these are some of the characters observed by the narrator of these chilling stories. Ironic, unsettling, imbued with dread and with droll humour, Javier Marías' short tales cast a shrewd, sardonic eye on humanity. 
 
Javier Marías was born in Madrid in 1951. He has published ten novels, two collections of short stories and several volumes of essays. His work has been translated into thirty-two languages and won a dazzling array of international literary awards, including the prestigious Dublin IMPAC award for A Heart So White. He is also a highly practised translator into Spanish of English authors, including Joseph Conrad, Robert Louis Stevenson, Sir Thomas Browne and Laurence Sterne. He has held academic posts in Spain, the United States and in Britain, as Lecturer in Spanish Literature at Oxford University.

When I Was Mortal

Margaret Drabble

Margaret Drabble is one of the major literary figures of her generation. In this collection of her complete short fiction from across four decades, she examines the intense private worlds and passions of everyday people. 
 
From one man's honeymooning epiphany in 'Hassan's Tower' to the journeying fantasies of 'A Voyage to Cythera', and from the sharp joy of 'The Merry Widow' to the bloody reality of the collection's title story, these are moving, witty and provocative tales, exploring cruel and loving relationships, social change and personal obsessions, and confirming her status as a leading practitioner of the art of the short story.

A Day in the Life of a Smiling Woman

The Collected Stories

Described by his creator as 'short, fat and primitive', Evert Bäckström is a rather unique homicide detective but he is undeniably the real deal with it comes to modern policing. 
 
This series is blackly comic, thrillingly compelling and utterly real.

Bäckström

CAMP GOLD

Caedmon Aisquith

Cairo Trilogy

Can You Solve the Murder?

Capital

Care Bears

Cartoon Kid

Cath Kidston

A crime-fiction series with a twist - private investigator Catherine Berlin, is a damaged soul struggling with a heroin addiction, but she still manages to do her best, even when her own neck is on the chopping block.

Catherine Berlin

Celeste Express

Central Intelligence

Chaos and Flame

Charles Hayden

Charles Paris Dramatisations

Charlie Bass

Charlie Changes Into a Chicken

Charlie and Lola

Cherry Blossoms After Winter

Chevalier

Chinese Cinderella

Life at Tanglewood isn't all sleepovers, picnics and beach parties. Cherry, Summer, Skye, Coco and Honey all face some tough life challenges in this delicious series from bestselling girls' favourite Cathy Cassidy. Every sister has a secret to share. Which one will be your favourite?

Chocolate Box Girls

Christmas

Chronicles of Vladimir Tod

Churchminister

Welcome inside the violent, treacherous world of Roman politics, and learn how one man - clever, compassionate, devious, vulnerable - fought to reach the top.

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