Alan Duff

Alan Durant is the author of books for a wide age-range, from picture books such as Burger Boy, Angus Rides the Goods Train and Always and Forever to top-end teenage thrillers (Blood, Flesh and Bones). Having worked as a copywriter at Walker Books, he is now a full-time author. 
 
He's married, with three children and lives in Brighton. He does a lot of school visits throughout the UK and abroad and also runs writing workshops.

Alan Durant

Alan Edge

Alan Ereira

Alan Garner

Alan Gilbey

Alan Gordon is the founder and director of the Pain Psychology Center in California, a leading treatment facility for chronic pain sufferers that sees over 1,500 patients from around the world every year. Debilitated by chronic pain throughout his body for several years and frustrated by the lack of effective treatment, Gordon developed the ground-breaking Pain Reprocessing Therapy (PRT) – a highly effective system of psychological techniques that rewire the brain’s neural circuits to turn off “stuck” pain signals. He is an adjunct assistant professor at the University of Southern California.

Alan Gordon

Alan Grant

Born in 1926 in New York City, Alan Greenspan worked as a Juilliard-trained professional musician before studying Economics at New York University, where he earned his PhD. From 1974 to 1977, he served as Chair of the Council of Economic Advisers under President Gerald Ford. In 1987, President Ronald Reagan appointed him Chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, a position he held until his retirement in 2006. He is the author of the bestselling The Age of Turbulence and The Map and the Territory 2.0.

Alan Greenspan

Alan H Guth

Alan Hansen was one of Britain's most respected football players and is now one of the most outspoken and popular football pundits.

Alan Hansen

Alan Harris is a Welsh playwright who has written several plays for BBC radio including The Lighthouse and The Gold Farmer. His play A Good Night Out in the Valleys launched the new National Theatre Wales in 2010 and he has also been awarded a prestigious Creative Wales Award.

Alan Harris

Alan Hill

Alan Hollinghurst was born in 1954. He is the author of one of the most highly praised first novels to appear in the 1980s, The Swimming-Pool Library, and was selected as one of the Best of Young British Novelists 1993. His second novel, The Folding Star, won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize and was shortlisted for the 1994 Booker Prize. His novel The Line of Beauty won the Booker Prize in 2004. His most recent novel, The Sparsholt Affair, was published in 2017.

Alan Hollinghurst

Alan Hooper is a founder and Honorary Fellow of the Centre for Leadership Studies, 
University of Exeter, and is also a visiting Professor at Bristol Business 
School. He has been a CEO in the public sector and now consults widely on 
senior management development and the management of change.

Alan Hooper

Alan Isler was born in England in 1934, emigrating to the US at the age of 18. After serving in the US army he went on to study literature at Columbia University, and taught for much of his adult life. Isler was the author of several novels including Kraven Images, The Bacon Fancier, Clerical Errors, The Living Proof and The Prince of West End Avenue, which won the National Jewish Book Award in 1994. Isler died in 2010. 
 .

Alan Isler

Alan J Wilson

Alan Jenkins

Alan Johnson was born in May 1950. He is a British Labour Party politician who served as Home Secretary from June 2009 to May 2010. Before that he filled a wide variety of cabinet positions in both the Blair and Brown governments, including Health Secretary and Education Secretary. Until 20 January 2011 he was Shadow Chancellor of the Exchequer. Johnson was the Member of Parliament for Hull West and Hessle until his retirement from politics in 2017. 
 His first book, This Boy, won the RSL Ondaatje Prize and the Orwell Prize in 2013. His second, Please Mister Postman, won the National Book Award for Autobiography of the Year in 2014. His third, The Long and Winding Road, was published in 2016 and won the Parliamentary Book Award for Best Memoir.

Alan Johnson

Alan Jones

Belfast-born twins Alan and Gary Keery love cereal. As creators of The Cereal Killer Café, the trendiest new eatery on Brick Lane, they have turned that love of the nation’s favourite comfort food into a thriving business. The opening of their first café saw extraordinary interest with press and broadcast coverage from all over the world. The café was voted best new restaurant by Hot Dinners in 2014. A second café is opening in summer 2015.

Alan Keery

Alan Langford

Alan Lerner

Alan MacDonald

Alan Macdonald

Alan Macfarlane

Alan McDonald

Alan Melville

Alan Moore

Alan Moorehead was born in Melbourne, Australia. He travelled to England in 1937 and became a renowned foreign correspondent for the London Daily Express. Writer, world traveller, biographer, essayist, journalist, Moorehead was one of the most successful writers in English of his day. During World War II he won an international reputation for his coverage of campaigns in the Middle East and Asia, the Mediterranean and Northwest Europe. He died in 1983.

Alan Moorehead

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Jean-Paul Sartre

<a href="https://shop.penguin.co.uk/collections/book-bundles-modern-classics/?&amp;utm_source=Penguin.co.uk&amp;utm_medium=Linked_text&amp;utm_campaign=Penguin_Modern_Classics_Series_26_06">Choose 3 timeless classics for only £21 over on the Penguin Shop</a>

Nausea is both the story of the troubled life of a young writer, Antoine Roquentin, and an exposition of one of the most influential and significant philosophical attitudes of modern times - existentialism. The book chronicles his struggle with the realization that he is an entirely free agent in a world devoid of meaning; a world in which he must find his own purpose and then take total responsibility for his choices. A seminal work of contemporary literary philosophy, Nausea evokes and examines the dizzying angst that can come from simply trying to live.

Nausea

Julian Green

Julian Green was born to American parents in Paris in 1900, and spent most of his life in the French capital. Paris is an extraordinary, lyrical love letter to the city, taking the reader on an imaginative journey around its secret stairways, courtyards, alleys and hidden places. Whether evoking the cool of a deserted church on a hot summer's day, remembering Notre Dame in a winter storm in 1940, describing chestnut trees lit up at night like 'Japanese lanterns' or lamenting the passing of street cries and old buildings, his book is filled with unforgettable imagery. It is a meditation on getting lost and wasting time, and on what it truly means to know a city.

Paris

Mary Wollstonecraft

Writing in an age when the call for the rights of man had brought revolution to America and France, Mary Wollstonecraft produced her own declaration of female independence in 1792. Passionate and forthright, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman attacked the prevailing view of docile, decorative femininity, and instead laid out the principles of emancipation: an equal education for girls and boys, an end to prejudice, and for women to become defined by their profession, not their partner. Mary Wollstonecraft's work was received with a mixture of admiration and outrage - one critic called her 'a hyena in petticoats' - yet it established her as the mother of modern feminism.

A Vindication of the Rights of Woman

Penguin Classics

Matsuo Basho

In his perfectly crafted haiku poems, Basho described the natural world with great simplicity and delicacy of feeling. When he composed The Narrow Road to the Deep North he was a serious student of Zen Buddhism setting off on a series of travels designed to strip away the trappings of the material world and bring spiritual enlightenment. He wrote of the seasons changing, of the smell of the rain, the brightness of the moon and the beauty of the waterfall, through which he sensed the mysteries of the universe. These travel writings not only chronicle Basho's perilous journeys through Japan, but also capture his vision of eternity in the transient world around him.

The Narrow Road to the Deep North and Other Travel Sketches

Thomas More

In Utopia, Thomas More gives us a traveller's account of a newly discovered island where the inhabitants enjoy a social order based on natural reason and justice, and human fulfilment is open to all. As the traveller, Raphael, describes the island to More, a bitter contrast is drawn between this rational society and the custom-driven practices of Europe. So how can the philosopher try to reform his society? In his fictional discussion, More takes up a question first raised by Plato and which is still a challenge in the contemporary world. In the history of political thought few works have been more influential than Utopia, and few more misunderstood.

Utopia

George Orwell

Fascism and Democracy collects five brilliant examples of Orwell's writing during the darkest days of World War Two. Grappling with the principles of democracy and the potential of reform, the meaning of literature and free speech in times of violence, and the sustainability of objective truth, Orwell offers a compelling portrayal of a nation where norms and ideals can no longer be taken for granted. Like the best of Orwell's writing, these essays also serve as timeless reminders of the fragility of freedom.

Fascism and Democracy

Edward W. Said

'Stimulating, elegant and pugnacious' Observer 
 
In this highly acclaimed work, Edward Said surveys the history and nature of Western attitudes towards the East, considering Orientalism as a powerful European ideological creation - a way for writers, philosophers and colonial administrators to deal with the 'otherness' of eastern culture, customs and beliefs. He traces this view through the writings of Homer, Nerval, Flaubert, Disraeli and Kipling, whose imaginative depictions have greatly contributed to the West's romantic and exotic picture of the Orient. Drawing on his own experiences as an Arab Palestinian living in the West, Said examines how these ideas can be a reflection of European imperialism and racism.

Orientalism

For avid readers and the uninitiated alike, this is a chance to reengage with classic literature and to stay inspired and entertained. 
 
The concept of the magazine is simple: the first half is a long-form interview with a notable book fanatic and the second half explores one classic work of literature from an array of surprising and invigorating angles.

The Happy Reader – Issue 14

Saul Bellow

"Sentence by sentence, page by page, Bellow is simply the best writer we have." -The New York Times Book Review 
 
In It All Adds Up, Pulitzer and Nobel Prize-winning author Saul Bellow takes readers on a brilliantly insightful journey through literary America over a forty-year period. In sentence after sentence, page after page, readers are offered brilliant perceptions and unusual insights into everyday life in America and the life of the mind. Moving from political figures like Roosevelt and Khrushchev to artists like Mozart, Dostoevsky, and John Cheever, from New York and Chicago to Paris-and including the deeply personal "Autobiography of Ideas"-Bellow, with great humor and wisdom, records the enduring thoughts and opinions of a lifetime of observation, thoughts that speak to us with renewed energy for our times.

It All Adds Up

From the Dim Past to the Uncertain Future

'It is hard to know how it could possibly be bettered' - Daily Telegraph 
 
The prose poem has proven one of the most innovative and versatile poetic forms of recent years. In the century-and-a-half since Charles Baudelaire, Emma Lazarus, Oscar Wilde and Ivan Turgenev spread the notion of a new kind of poetry, this 'genre with an oxymoron for a name' has attracted and beguiled many of our most beloved writers. Yet, even now, this peculiarly rich and expansive form can strike many readers as something of a mystery. 
 
Here, Jeremy Noel-Tod reconstructs the history of the prose poem for us by selecting the essential pieces of writing - by turns luminous, brooding, lamentatory and comic - which have defined and developed it at each stage, covering a greater chronological sweep and international range than any previous anthology of this kind. In The Penguin Book of the Prose Poem, Margaret Atwood rubs shoulders with Claudia Rankine; Lu Xun and Rabindranath Tagore take seats in the family tree above Seamus Heaney and Simon Armitage; and Czeslaw Milosz sits just pages from Eileen Myles.

The Penguin Book of the Prose Poem

From Baudelaire to Anne Carson

Margery Kempe

The story of the eventful and controversial life of Margery Kempe - wife, mother, businesswoman, pilgrim and visionary - is the earliest surviving autobiography in English. Here Kempe (c.1373-c.1440) recounts in vivid, unembarrassed detail the madness that followed the birth of the first of her fourteen children, the failure of her brewery business, her dramatic call to the spiritual life, her visions and uncontrollable tears, the struggle to convert her husband to a vow of chastity and her pilgrimages to Europe and the Holy Land. Margery Kempe could not read or write, and dictated her remarkable story late in life. It remains an extraordinary record of human faith and a portrait of a medieval woman of unforgettable character and courage.

The Book of Margery Kempe

Richard Wagner

The scale and grandeur of Wagner's The Ring of the Nibelung has no precedent and no successor. It preoccupied Wagner for much of his adult life and revolutionized the nature of opera, the orchestra, the demands on singers and on the audience itself. The four operas-The Rhinegold, The Valkyrie, Siegfried and Twilight of the Gods - are complete worlds, conjuring up extraordinary mythological landscapes through sound as much as staging. 
 
Wagner wrote the entire libretto before embarking on the music. Discarding the grand choruses and bravura duets central to most operas, he used the largest musical forces in the context often of only a handful of singers on stage. The words were essential: he was telling a story and making an argument in a way that required absolute attention to what was said. The libretto for The Ring lies at the heart of nineteenth century culture. It is in itself a work of power and grandeur and it had an incalculable effect on European and specifically German culture. John Deathridge's superb new translation, with notes and a fascinating introduction, is essential for anyone who wishes to get to grips with one of the great musical experiences.

The Ring of the Nibelung

Angela Y. Davis

'Black women were equal to their men in the oppression they suffered; they were their men's social equals within the slave community; and they resisted slavery with a passion equal to their men's' 
 
Ranging from the age of slavery to contemporary injustices, this seminal history of race, gender and class inequality by the radical political activist Angela Davis offers an alternative view of female struggles for liberation. Tracing the intertwined histories of the abolitionist and women's suffrage movements, Davis examines the racism and class prejudice inherent in so much of white feminism, and in doing so brings to light new pioneering heroines, from field slaves to mill workers, who fought back and refused to accept the lives into which they were born.

Women, Race & Class

Penguin Modern Classics

John le Carré

West Germany in the 1960s is a simmering cauldron of radical protests. Amid the turmoil Leo Harting, a Second Secretary in the British Embassy, has gone missing - along with more than forty Confidential embassy files. Alan Turner of the Foreign Office must travel to Bonn to recover them. As he gets closer to the truth of Harting's disappearance, he will discover that the face of Cold War Europe - and the attentions of the British Ministry itself - are far uglier that he could possibly have imagined. 
Le Carré's searing Cold War novel creates a world where the lines between right and wrong, good and evil, are horribly blurred.

A Small Town in Germany

Shirley Jackson

Shirley Jackson's 1953 classic about life with her husband and four children in rural Vermont is one of America's most celebrated memoirs of family life. Facing badly behaved imaginary friends, intractable bank managers, an oblivious husband and ever-encroaching domestic chaos, Jackson might want to throw her hands up in despair but somehow manages to turn ordinary family experiences into brilliant adventures. Frequently hilarious, always warm and never sentimental, this is a book for anyone who has ever been in a family.

Life Among the Savages

Roberto Calasso

In Ka, Roberto Calasso delves into the corpus of classical Sanskrit literature recreating and re-imagining the enchanting world of ancient India. Beginning with the Rig-Veda, Ka weaves together myths from the Upanishad, the Mahabharata and the stories of the Buddha, all of which pose questions that have haunted us for millennia.

The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony is a masterful retelling of the ancient myths and fables we may only think we know. From the tale of Europa and the bull to the fall of Troy, Roberto Calasso weaves his way through the entire world of Greek mythology with a captivating sense of curiosity and intrigue that casts these classical stories in a whole new light for a modern reader.

The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony

Audre Lorde

The woman's place of power within each of us is neither white nor surface; it is dark, it is ancient, and it is deep 
 
The revolutionary writings of Audre Lorde gave voice to those 'outside the circle of this society's definition of acceptable women'. Uncompromising, angry and yet full of hope, this collection of her essential prose - essays, speeches, letters, interviews - explores race, sexuality, poetry, friendship, the erotic and the need for female solidarity, and includes her landmark piece 'The Master's Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master's House'. 
 
'The truth of her writing is as necessary today as it's ever been' Guardian

Sister Outsider

I have been woman 
for a long time 
beware my smile 
I am treacherous with old magic 
 
Filled with rage and tenderness, Audre Lorde's most acclaimed poetry collection speaks of mothers and children, female strength and vulnerability, renewal and revenge, goddesses and warriors, ancient magic and contemporary America. These are fearless assertions of identity, told with incantatory power.

The Black Unicorn

28 June 2019 marks the fiftieth anniversary of the Stonewall uprising - the most significant event in the gay liberation movement and the catalyst for the modern fight for LGBTQ rights in the United States. Drawing from 
the New York Public Library's archives, The Stonewall Reader is a collection of firsthand accounts, diaries, periodic literature and articles from LGBTQ magazines and newspapers that documented both the years leading up to and the years following the riots. Most importantly, this anthology shines a light on forgotten figures who were 
pivotal in the movement, such as Lee Brewster, head of the Queens Liberation Front and Ernestine Eckstine, one of the few out, African American, lesbian activists in the 1960s.

The Stonewall Reader

The Happy Reader - Issue 13

Adolf Loos

'But art has nothing to do with forgery, with lies. The paths of art may be thorny, but they are clean.' 
 
Ornament and Crime comprises a selection of essays by celebrated Viennese architect, Adolf Loos, and cover the full range of design - from architecture to jewellery, pottery to plumbing, craft training to printing. A great enthusiast and great hater, Loos and his ideas were absolutely fundamental to 20th century aesthetics, as well as being very enjoyable to read. He extols heroes and denigrates villains, as he makes quite clear: 'If you want to have a contemporary craft, if you want to have contemporary utility objects, then poison the architects'. 
 
The Penguin on Design series includes the works of creative thinkers whose writings on art, design and the media have changed our vision forever.

Ornament and Crime

Jan Karski

'Insistently asks the question: What would you do? Would you fight, or acquiesce, or collaborate? ... Karski was deeply patriotic and ludicrously brave ... an astonishing testament of survival' Ben Macintyre, author of Operation Mincemeat 
 
It is 1939. Jan Karski, a brilliant young Polish student, enjoys a life of parties and pleasure. Then war breaks out and his familiar world is destroyed. Now he must live under a new identity, in the resistance. And, in a secret mission that could change the course of the war, he must risk his own life to try and save those of millions.

Story of a Secret State: My Report to the World

John Mortimer

Horace Rumpole, the old boy committed to defending the apparently indefensible, trusting of a jury, scornful of the law's pomposities, appears here in a new edition of the 1978 iconic Rumpole debut. 
 
This volume collects the much-loved stories 'Rumpole and the Younger Generation', 'Rumpole and the Alternative Society', 'Rumpole and the Honourable Member', 'Rumpole and the Married Lady', 'Rumpole and the Learned Friends' and 'Rumpole and the Heavy Brigade'.

Rumpole of the Bailey

From the Hebrew Bible's shadowy realm of Sheol to twenty-first-century visions of Hell on earth, The Penguin Book of Hell takes us through three thousand years of eternal damnation. Along the way, you'll take a ferry ride with Aeneas to Hades, across the river Acheron; meet the Devil as imagined by a twelfth-century Irish monk - a monster with a thousand giant hands; wander the nine circles of Hell in Dante's Inferno; and witness the debates that raged in Victorian England when new scientific advances cast doubt on the idea of an eternal hereafter. Drawing upon religious poetry, epics, theological treatises, stories of miracles and accounts of saints' lives, this fascinating volume of hellscapes illuminates how Hell has long haunted us, in both life and death.

The Penguin Book of Hell

Virginia Woolf

A Room of One's Own, based on a lecture given at Girton College Cambridge, is one of the great feminist polemics, ranging in its themes from Jane Austen and Charlotte Bronte to the silent fate of Shakespeare's gifted (imaginary) sister and the effects of poverty and sexual constraint on female creativity. Published almost a decade later Three Guineas breaks new ground in its discussion of men, militarism and women's attitudes towards war. These two pieces reveal Virginia Woolf's fiery spirit and sophisticated wit and confirm her status as a highly inspirational essayist.

A Room of One's Own/Three Guineas

Anne Frank

"June, 1942: I hope I will be able to confide everything to you, as I have never been able to confide in anyone, and I hope you will be a great source of comfort and support." 
 
In Amsterdam, in the summer of 1942, the Nazis forced teenager Anne Frank and her family into hiding. For over two years, they, another family and a German dentist lived in a 'secret annexe', fearing discovery. All that time, Anne kept a diary. 
 
An intimate record of tension and struggle, adolescence and confinement, anger and heartbreak, this is the definitive edition of the diary of Anne Frank.

The Diary of a Young Girl

The Definitive Edition

Among all the technological accomplishments of the last century, none has captured our imagination more deeply than the movement of humans into outer space. From Sputnik to SpaceX, the story of that journey is told as never before in The Penguin Book of Outer Space Exploration. 
 
Renowned space historian John Logsdon has uncovered the most fascinating items in the NASA archive and woven them together with expert narrative guidance to create a history of how Americans got to space and what they've done there. Beginning with rocket genius Wernher von Braun's vision for voyaging to Mars and closing with Elon Musk's contemporary plan to get there, this volume traces major events like the founding of NASA, the first American astronauts in space, the moon landings, the Challenger disaster, the daring Hubble Telescope repairs and more.

The Penguin Book of Outer Space Exploration

NASA and the Incredible Story of Human Spaceflight

Evelyn Waugh

'Only when one has lost all curiosity about the future has one reached the age to write an autobiography.' Waugh begins his story with heredity, writing of the energetic, literary and sometimes eccentric men and women who, unknown to themselves, contributed to his genius. Save for a few pale shadows, his childhood was warm, bright and serene. The Hampstead and Lancing schooldays which followed were sometimes agreeable, but often not. His life at Oxford - which he evokes in Brideshead Revisited - was essentially a catalogue of friendship. His cool recollection of those hedonistic days is a portrait of the generation of Harold Acton, Cyril Connolly and Anthony Powell. That exclusive world he recalls with elegant wit and precision. He closes with his experiences as a master at a preparatory school in North Wales which inspired Decline and Fall.

A Little Learning

The First Volume of an Autobiography

Whether celebrating Hogarth or savaging Hollywood, mocking modern manners or defending traditional English architecture, inviting readers to 'come inside' the Catholic Church or expressing his contempt for modish Marxism and American-style religion, Evelyn Waugh's journalism is sparkling, sometimes vitriolic and always full of good sense. In this wonderful selection he explores his Oxford youth, his unexpected conversion, his literary enthusiasms (from P. G. Wodehouse to Graham Greene) and the perils of basing fictional characters on real people. Decades after their publication, these pieces still retain their capacity to delight, to surprise and to shock.

A Little Order

Selected Journalism

Pocket clothbound volumes from the world's greatest poets, and with a stunning range of anthologies. Each volume has an elegant jacket, full cloth sewn binding, silk ribbon marker and headbands, with gold stamping on front and spine and decorative endpapers. In size, price and presentation they make ideal gifts and are a joy to read and collect. More than eighty titles in print.

Everyman's Library POCKET POETS

Everyman’s Library Contemporary Classics

Ex-Heroes

Explore with Peter Rabbit

Extraordinary Lives

Factory Girls

Fairwick Chronicles

Fairytale in Progress

Faith, Hope and Glory

Laid-back Roman detective Marcus Didius Falco investigates crimes in the dangerous world of first century Rome, a place of political intrigue, corruption and murder.

Falco

Fall of the Dragon

Luce doesn’t like the sound of the Sword and Cross reform school, and it lives up to all her expectations. Until she meets Daniel. He’s perfect, but what she doesn’t realise is that they have met before. Many times. He is a fallen angel, and each time they meet they are torn apart, Luce dying and Daniel forced to live on without her. They think that they have found a way to break the curse, but they will have to make great sacrifices along the way. Love never dies in this darkly romantic series which spans centuries in its storytelling.

Fallen

Falling Kingdoms

Far Out Five

Far-Flung Adventures

Sam and Remi Fargo are a husband and wife team on a quest. Treasure hunters, they travel the world looking for ancient artefacts and exotic bounty. They're in it for the history and the mystery, but others are not so honourable, and the Fargo's often find themselves caught up in ancient riddles, desperate to solve the puzzle before the bad guys get there first.

Fargo Adventures

Fate & Flame

Father Brown

Father, I Don’t Want This Marriage

Faust

Feral Love

More than 100 million copies sold worlwide, this is a series that will obsess you, possess you, and stay with you forever.

Fifty Shades

Find Spot

Finn Fitzpatrick Series

First Favourite Tales

The First Festivals series invites children to explore the world's culture from the comfort of their home, encourages the development of hand-eye coordination and is recommended for children aged 2 and over.

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