ADAM HAMDY is a bestselling author and screenwriter. His most recent novel, The Other Side of Night, was an NPR best book of 2022 and a New York Times best thriller of the year, and has been described as ingenious and deeply moving. He is the author of the Scott Pearce series of modern spy thrillers, Black 13, Red Wolves and White Fire, and the Pendulum trilogy. Keep up to date with his latest books and news at www.adamhamdy.com.

Adam Hamdy

Adam Hart-Davis

Adam Haslett is the author of the story collection You Are Not a Stranger Here and the novels Imagine Me Gone and Union Atlantic. He has twice been a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award and his books have been translated into over thirty languages. His journalism on culture and politics has appeared in The Financial Times, Esquire, The New Yorker, The Guardian, Der Spiegel, The Nation, and The Atlantic, among others. He lives in New York City.

Adam Haslett

Adam Henson is perhaps the best-known farmer in the UK, presenting on BBC's Countryfile to millions of viewers each Sunday evening. He's also appeared on Lambing Live, Secret Britain, Coast and Inside Out. Adam also runs the award-winning Cotswold Farm Park in Gloucestershire, which welcomes family visitors all year round and is home to many rare breeds. He has a monthly column in Countryfile magazine, as well as the Cotswold Life magazine. He has written several books including the Sunday Times bestseller Like Farmer, Like Son. This is his first children's book and it is the perfect introduction to the farm.

Adam Henson

Adam Henson presents Countryfile, often from his 650-hectare farm in the Cotswolds. Having studied Agriculture at college, Adam took over Bemborough Farm from his father, Joe. The farm now grows wheat, spring barley and oilseed rape, runs a flock of 400 commercial ewes and has the UK's leading collection of rare breeds, many of which are in demand for film sets and advertisements. Cotswold Farm Park (www.cotswoldfarmpark.co.uk) offers a total countryside experience for all the family, welcoming more than 100,000 visitors each year. 
 
Adam presented Lambing Live with Kate Humble, writes for Countryfile magazine and has appeared on Radio 4's On Your Farm and Farming Today. He is the author of three previous books, Adam’s Farm: My Life on the Land, the Sunday Times bestseller, Like Farmer, Like Son and A Farmer and His Dog.

Adam Higginbotham has written for magazines including The New Yorker, the New York Times Magazine, Wired and Smithsonian. He is also the author of Challenger: A True Story of Heroism and Disaster on the Edge of Space, which was awarded the Kirkus Prize for Nonfiction and the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction. He lives in New York City.

Adam Higginbotham

Adam Hills is an internationally recognised comedian and host of award-winning Channel 4 show The Last Leg. His collection of stories from a life in comedy, Best Foot Forward, was a Times bestseller.

Adam Hills

Adam Howling

Adam J. Kurtz

Adam Jacot de Boinod

ADAM JOHNSON won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2013 for his second novel, the New York Times bestseller The Orphan Master’s Son (‘Excavates the very meaning of life’ New York Times). His short story 'Nirvana' won the prestigious Sunday Times/EFG Short Story Award. He is the author of acclaimed story collections, Fortune Smiles and Emporium and the novel Parasites Like Us. He teaches creative writing at Stanford University and lives with his family in San Francisco.

Adam Johnson

Adam Kay is a former doctor who has written five million books and sold seven copies. No, hang on – he’s written seven books and sold five million copies. His debut book, This is Going to Hurt, is a literary sensation: a Sunday Times number one bestseller for over a year, winning a record-breaking four National Book Awards and selling over 3 million copies. Kay adapted This is Going to Hurt as a BAFTA-winning comedy-drama series for the BBC. Adam Kay’s children’s books have been translated into 32 languages and sold over 1 million copies, making him one of the UK’s bestselling children’s authors. Kay’s Anatomy became the fastest-selling children’s general non-fiction hardback of the decade. His first picture book, Amy Gets Eaten, was published in 2023, and his first children’s novel, Dexter Procter the Ten-Year-Old Doctor, was published in September 2024.

Adam Kay

Adam studied illustration and animation, and received a BA followed by an MA from the Edinburgh College of Art. As a student he won a competition to create a short film for MOMI and Channel 4, and once his career producing animated commercials was under way, he became an illustrator as well. He has regular columns in the UK and the US.

Adam Larkum

Adam Lashinsky

Adam Macqueen

Adam Mars-Jones

Adam O'Riordan was born in Manchester in 1982, where he currently lives. In 2008 he became the youngest Poet-in-Residence at The Wordsworth Trust, the Centre for British Romanticism. His first collection In the Flesh (2010) win a Somerset Maugham Award. He is the Academic Director of the Writing School at Manchester Metropolitan University.

Adam O'Riordan

Adam Phillips, formerly Principal Child Psychotherapist at Charing Cross Hospital, London, is a practising psychoanalyst and a visiting professor in the English department at the University of York. He is the author of numerous works of psychoanalysis and literary criticism, including most recently On Giving Up, On Wanting to Change, Attention Seeking, In Writing, Unforbidden Pleasures and Missing Out. He is General Editor of the Penguin Modern Classics Freud translations, and a Fellow of The Royal Society of Literature.

Adam Phillips

Adam Rackley

Adam Richardson is the UK's top trending health and fitness coach with a rapidly growing audience across both TikTok and Instagram. Adam is passionate about removing barriers to exercise and movement, a philosophy that is key to his work as a Personal Trainer in which he strives to help his clients feel more confident, as well as more fit and healthy.

Adam Richardson

Adam Roberts is acknowledged as the senior scholar of international relations in the UK. He was Montague Burton Professor of International Relations at Oxford University 1986-2007, and President of the British Academy 2009-13 - the head of humanities in Britain. He was on the Council of the International Institute for Strategic Studies, London (2002-08), a member of the UK Defence Academy Advisory Board (2003-15) and is now on the Board of Advisers of the Lieber Institute for Law and Land Warfare at the United States Military Academy, West Point.

Adam Roberts

Adam Roberts is the author of The Amateur Gourmet and Secrets of the Best Chefs, and coauthor of Give My Swiss Chards to Broadway. He started his food blog, The Amateur Gourmet, in 2004 and currently writes The Amateur Gourmet Newsletter on Substack. Roberts has also written for The Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times, and for film and television. He lives in Brooklyn with his husband and their dog, Winston. Food Person is his first novel.

Adam Robinson is based in the Middle East and is a regular contributor to newspapers in the Arab world and also to the British media. He is the author of numerous books on the region, including Bin Laden: Behind the Mask of the Terrorist.

Adam Robinson

Adam Ross

Adam Rutherford

Adam Rutherford is an award-winning writer, broadcaster, and geneticist at University College London. His books include A Brief History of Everyone Who Ever Lived, The Book of Humans, and the Sunday Times bestseller How to Argue with a Racist. He has written and presented numerous documentaries for BBC radio and television, including Inside Science and The Cell. Adam has also worked as a science advisor on many films, including the Oscar-winning Ex Machina (2015) and Annihilation (2018).

Adam Smith

Adam Smyth runs the 39 Step Press, an experiment in printing, from a cold barn in Oxfordshire. He is also Professor of English Literature and the History of the Book at Balliol College, University of Oxford.

Adam Smyth

Adam Sweeting

Adam Tandy

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Richard Cobb

<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>

The most difficult and often savage relationship in 20th century western Europe was between the French and the Germans. Twice, cataclysmic wars were fought out on their borders, successfully by the French in 1914-18 and unsuccessfully in 1940. Both wars led to military occupation--for the large block of northern France behind the German trenches in the First World War and ultimately the whole country in the Second. 
 
Richard Cobb's extraordinary book is a meditation on the whole idea of occupation. How do you survive? When do you collaborate? What moral compromises are necessary? Above all, it is a book about the way that history gives a shape and rationality to events which for those living through them are completely mysterious, and terrifying. For those trapped under German rule--frightened, confused, malnourished--what is the right course of action? French and Germans, Germans and French recreates, with a brilliant mix of wit and sympathy, the story of one of the modern era's great dramas.

French and Germans, Germans and French

A Personal Interpretation of France under Two Occupations, 1914–1918/1940–1944

E. M. Cioran

A Short History of Decay (1949) is E. M. Cioran's nihilistic and witty collection of aphoristic essays concerning the nature of civilization in mid 20th-century Europe. Touching upon man's need to worship, the feebleness of God, the downfall of the Ancient Greeks and the melancholy baseness of all existence, Cioran's pieces are pessimistic in the extreme, but also display a beautiful certainty that renders them delicate, vivid, and memorable. Illuminating and brutally honest, A Short History of Decay dissects man's decadence in a remarkable series of moving and beautiful pieces.

A Short History of Decay

E. H. Carr

'E.H. Carr, author of the monumental History of Soviet Russia, now proves himself to be not only one of our most distinguished historians but also one of the most valuable contributors to historical theory' Spectator 
 
In formulating an answer to the question of 'What is History', Carr argues that the 'facts' of history are simply those which historians have chosen to focus on. All historical facts come to us as a result of interpretive choices by historians influenced by the standards of their age. 
 
Now for the first time in Penguin Modern Classics, with an introduction by Richard J. Evans, author of the Third Reich trilogy.

What is History?

Eduardo Galeano

'Football is a pleasure that hurts' 
 
This unashamedly emotional history of football is a homage to the romance and drama, spectacle and passion of a 'great pagan mass'. Through stories of superstition, heartbreak, tragedy, luck, heroes and villains, those who lived for football and those who died for it, Eduardo Galeano celebrates the glory of a game that - however much the rich and powerful try to control it - still retains its magic. 
 
'The Uruguayan whose writing got right to the heart of football ... readers were never in doubt of the warmth of the blood running through his veins' Guardian 
 
'Galeano can run rings round our glamorous football intelligentsia' When Saturday Comes 
 
'Stands out like Pele on a field of second-stringers' New Yorker

Football in Sun and Shadow

Allen Ginsberg

In 1977, twenty years after the publication of his landmark poem 'Howl' and Jack Kerouac's On the Road, Allen Ginsberg decided it was time to teach a course on the literary history of the Beat Generation. In The Best Minds of My Generation - a compilation of lectures from the course, expertly edited by renowned Beats scholar, Bill Morgan - Ginsberg gives us the convoluted origin story of the 'Beat' idea. Amongst anecdotes of meeting Kerouac, Burroughs and other figures for the first time, Ginsberg elucidates the importance of music, and particularly jazz rhythms, to Beat writing, discusses their many influences - literary, pharmaceutical and spiritual - and paints a portrait of a group who were leading a literary revolution. A unique document that works both as historical record and unconventional memoir, The Best Minds of My Generation is a vivid, personal and eye-opening look at one of the most important literary movements of the twentieth century.

The Best Minds of My Generation

A Literary History of the Beats

A. J. Liebling

Take a ringside seat next to A. J. Liebling at some of the greatest fights in history. Here is Joe Louis's devastating final match; Sugar Ray Robinson's dramatic comeback; and Rocky Marciano's rise to heavyweight glory. The heated ringside atmosphere, the artistry of the great boxers and the blows and parries of the classic fights are all vividly evoked in a volume described by Sports Illustrated as 'the best American sports book of all time'. 
 
'A rollicking god among boxing writers ... before Tom Wolfe and Hunter S. Thompson were out of diapers, Liebling was taking his readers on excursions through the hidden and often hilarious levels of this bruised subculture ... the Master' Los Angeles Times 
 
'Nobody wrote about boxing with more grace and enthusiasm' The New York Times

The Sweet Science

Boxing and Boxiana - A Ringside View

Marc Chagall

Chagall was born in Witebsk in White Russia, the son of a herring merchant who lived opposite a laundress and a chimney sweep. After the Revolution, while waiting for emigration papers, he wrote his autobiography at the age of 34. 
 
My Life reads like one of Chagall's paintings: emotional, fragmentary, humorous, colourful and dream-like, soaked in nostalgia for Jewish small-town society, familiar to us from The Fiddler on the Roof. It combines a colourist's eye for detail, an artist's passion for life, a satirical sense of humour with a backdrop of Belle Époque Paris and revolutionary Russia. The character sketches are magnificent. 
 
Chagall produced 50 illustrations which accompany the text. The first English translation of My Life was published in 1965 and it has been in print ever since.

My Life

A. J. A. Symons

One summer afternoon A.J.A. Symons is handed a peculiar novel called Hadrian the Seventh and, captivated by this forgotten masterpiece, determines to learn everything he can about its mysterious author. Symons proceeds as a detective might, investigating leads, collecting evidence and corresponding with witnesses. The object of his search is Frederick Rolfe, the self-appointed Baron Corvo - artist, rejected candidate for priesthood and author of serially autobiographical fictions - and its story is told in The Quest for Corvo: a dazzling portrait of an insoluble tangle of talents, frustrated ambitions, arrogance and paranoia. 
 
The book, which reads with all the excitement of detective fiction, is at once a literary pilgrimage and reflection on the obsessions and deceptions which lie at the heart of biography.

The Quest for Corvo

An Experiment in Biography

George Orwell

The Lion and the Unicorn was written in London during the worst period of the Blitz. It is vintage Orwell, a dynamic outline of his belief in socialism, patriotism and an English revolution. His fullest political statement, it has been described as 'one of the most moving and incisive portraits of the English character' and is as relevant now as it ever has been.

The Lion and the Unicorn

Socialism and the English Genius

James Baldwin

'The story of the negro in America is the story of America ... it is not a very pretty story' 
 
James Baldwin's breakthrough essay collection made him the voice of his generation. Ranging over Harlem in the 1940s, movies, novels, his preacher father and his experiences of Paris, they capture the complexity of black life at the dawn of the civil rights movement with effervescent wit and prophetic wisdom. 
 
'A classic ... In a divided America, James Baldwin's fiery critiques reverberate anew' Washington Post 
 
'Edgy and provocative, entertainingly satirical' Robert McCrum, Guardian 
 
'Cemented his reputation as a cultural seer ... Notes of a Native Son endures as his defining work, and his greatest' Time

Notes of a Native Son

W. N. P. Barbellion

The young naturalist W. N. P. Barbellion described this remarkably candid record of living with multiple sclerosis as 'a study in the nude'. It begins as an ambitious teenager's notes on the natural world, and then, following his diagnosis at the age of twenty-six, transforms into a deeply moving account of battling the disease. His prose is full of humour and fierce intelligence, and combines a passion for life with clear-sighted reflections on the nature of death. 
 
Barbellion selected and edited this manuscript himself in 1917, adding a fictional editor's note announcing his own demise. This Penguin Classics edition includes 'The Last Diary', which covers the period between submission of the manuscript and Barbellion's actual death in 1919.

The Journal of a Disappointed Man

Jessica Lack

'Art is not a luxury. Art is a basic social need to which everyone has a right'. 
 
This extraordinary collection of 100 artists' manifestos from across the globe over the last 100 years brings together political activists, anti-colonialists, surrealists, socialists, nihilists and a host of other voices. From the Négritude movement in Europe, Africa and Martinique to Japan's Bikyoto, from Iraqi modernism to Australian cyberfeminism, they are by turns personal, political, utopian, angry, sublime and revolutionary. Some have not been published in English before; some were written in climates of censorship and brutality; some contain visions of a future still on the horizon. What unites them is the belief that art can change the world.

Why Are We 'Artists'?

100 World Art Manifestos

George Lamming

In a sleepy fishing village in 1930s Barbados, nine-year-old G. leads a life of quiet mischief. While the village lies tranquil in the shadow of its English landlord, Mr Creighton, and his towering house on the hill, G. makes his own fun, crab catching, teasing preachers, and playing among the pumpkin vines. Yet from this world of boyish pursuits, the precocious G. finds himself slowly awakening to strange goings-on in adult society. All around him, sudden bursts of violence - a devastating flood on the morning of his birthday; the headmaster unduly flogging his schoolmates on Empire day - hint at a brutality and destruction lurking beneath the apparently peaceful order of things. 
 
As the mounting wrongs of the present drive the villagers to rise up against Mr Creighton, the fissures in the façade of his Barbadian 'little England' begin to crack open, laying bare the central, bruising secret at the heart of their shared past. And as the world he knows crumbles before his eyes, G. is spurred ever closer to a life-changing decision. Poetic, unsettling, this classic coming-of-age novel is a story of tragic innocence, as a poor village boy comes to consciousness amid the collapse of colonial rule in mid-century Barbados.

In the Castle of My Skin

Iris Origo

In 1870 an astonishing cache, containing some 150,000 letters and great numbers of business documents, came to light. Iris Origo drew on this material to paint, in detail, a picture of Italian domestic life on the eve of the Renaissance. Francesco di Marco Datini, the 14th-century Tuscan merchant who forms the central subject of Iris Origo's study, has now probably become the most intimately accessible figure of the later Middle Ages. The book is rightly celebrated as one of the most engrossing of all modern books on Italian life and history.

The Merchant of Prato

Daily Life in a Medieval Italian City

Paulo Freire

This seminal text argues that the perceived passivity of the poor is the direct result of  economic, social and political domination. The book suggests that in some countries the oppressors use the 'piggy bank' system - treating students as passive, empty vessels - to preserve their authority and maintain a culture of silence. Through cooperation and dialogue, Freire suggests, the authoritarian teacher-pupil model can be replaced with critical thinking so that the student becomes co-creator of knowledge. Crucial to Freire's argument is the belief that every human being, no matter how impoverished or illiterate, can develop an awareness of self, and the right to be heard.

Pedagogy of the Oppressed

Hannah Arendt

'How could such a book speak so powerfully to our present moment? The short answer is that we, too, live in dark times' Washington Post 
 
Hannah Arendt's chilling analysis of the conditions that led to the Nazi and Soviet totalitarian regimes is a warning from history about the fragility of freedom, exploring how propaganda, scapegoats, terror and political isolation all aided the slide towards total domination. 
 
'A non-fiction bookend to Nineteen Eighty-Four' The New York Times 
 
'The political theorist who wrote about the Nazis and the 'banality of evil' has become a surprise bestseller' Guardian

The Origins of Totalitarianism

'England is a family in which the young are generally thwarted and most of the power is in the hands of irresponsible uncles and bedridden aunts. Still, it is a family.' 
 
'England Your England' is one of the most compelling and insightful portraits of the nation ever written. Shot through with Orwell's deeply felt sense of patriotism and love for his homeland, the essay is at the same time unfailingly clear-eyed about the nation's failings: entrenched social inequality, a dishonest press and a class system that only works for those at the top. Written during the Second World War, as the bombs were falling on England, the essay today speaks to the nation's current moment of crisis just as urgently as it did in Orwell's own time. It is a crucial read for anyone who wants to understand who we are, and where we've come from.

England Your England

Raoul Peck

The New York Times bestseller based on the Oscar nominated documentary film 
 
In June 1979, the writer and civil rights activist James Baldwin embarked on a project to tell the story of America through the lives of three of his murdered friends: Medgar Evers, Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr. He died before it could be completed. In his documentary film, I Am Not Your Negro, Raoul Peck imagines the book Baldwin never wrote, using his original words to create a radical, powerful and poetic work on race in the United States - then, and today. 
 
'Thrilling . . . A portrait of one man's confrontation with a country that, murder by murder, as he once put it, "devastated my universe"' The New York Times 
 
'Baldwin's voice speaks even more powerfully today . . . the prose-poet of our injustice and inhumanity . . . The times have caught up with his scalding eloquence' Variety 
 
 'A cinematic séance . . . One of the best movies about the civil rights era ever made' Guardian 
 
 'I Am Not Your Negro turns James Baldwin into a prophet' Rolling Stone

I Am Not Your Negro

Svetlana Alexievich

Haunting stories from the Soviet-Afghan War from the winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature 
 
- A new translation of Zinky Boys based on the revised text - 
 
From 1979 to 1989 Soviet troops engaged in a devastating war in Afghanistan that claimed thousands of casualties on both sides. While the Soviet Union talked about a 'peace-keeping' mission, the dead were shipped back in sealed zinc coffins. Boys in Zinc presents the honest testimonies of soldiers, doctors and nurses, mothers, wives and siblings who describe the lasting effects of war. 
 
Weaving together their stories, Svetlana Alexievich shows us the truth of the Soviet-Afghan conflict: the killing and the beauty of small everyday moments, the shame of returned veterans, the worries of all those left behind. When it was first published in the USSR in 1991, Boys in Zinc sparked huge controversy for its unflinching, harrowing insight into the realities of war.

Boys in Zinc

Leon Trotsky

'The greatest history of an event I know' - C.L.R. James 
 
Regarded by many as among the most powerful works of history ever written, The History of the Russian Revolution offers an unparalleled account of one of the most pivotal and hotly debated events in world history. This book presents, from the perspective of one of its central actors, the profound liberating character of the early Russian Revolution. 
 
Originally published in three parts, Trotsky's masterpiece is collected here in a single volume. It is still the most vital and inspiring record of the Russian Revolution ever published.

History of the Russian Revolution

Martin Luther King, Jr.

'[He] inspired a generation ... He changed the course of history' Barack Obama 
 
As Martin Luther King, Jr. prepared for the Birmingham campaign in early 1963, he drafted the final sermons for Strength to Love, a volume of his best-known lectures. King had begun working on the sermons during a fortnight in jail in July 1962 and A Gift of Love includes these classic sermons, along with two new lectures. 
 
Drawing inspiration from both his Christian faith and the non-violent philosophy of Mahatma Gandhi, A Gift of Love illustrates King's vision of love and peaceful action as social and political forces for change.

A Gift of Love

Sermons from Strength to Love

Steven Runciman

''The whole tale is one of faith and folly, courage and greed, hope and delusion.' 
 
The Christian and Muslim empires of the Middle East had fought each other for centuries, two ancient, powerful civilizations, in some ways very familiar to one another. In 1095 something extraordinary happened. The Pope issued an appeal to the leaders of western Europe to recover the Christian Holy Places from Islamic rule. The response to his appeal was overwhelming as, in scenes of hysteria, many thousands of men volunteered to leave their old lives behind and march to rescue Jerusalem. Now, across western Europe, everyone from monarchs to beggars were planning to travel many hundreds of dangerous miles in search of salvation, riches or both. 
 
A triumph of prose-writing, argument and research, Steven Runciman's A History of the Crusades is an unimprovable account of events which changed the world and which still resonate today. In this first volume he tells the story of the First Crusade - from its unlikely beginnings to the horrors of the siege of Jerusalem and the carving out of aggressive new western European states on the edge of the eastern Mediterranean.

A History of the Crusades I

The First Crusade and the Foundation of the Kingdom of Jerusalem

'The whole tale is one of faith and folly, courage and greed, hope and delusion' 
 
The triumph of the First Crusade transformed the eastern Mediterranean, creating a series of European-ruled states along the coast and in Armenia. But the region's Muslim rulers were far from defeated and the major cities of inland Syria, Egypt and elsewhere now rallied to expel the colonisers. How could the crusaders stabilize their rule and continue to attract the thousands of new recruits needed to replace their terrible losses, both from battle and disease? 
 
A triumph of prose-writing, argument and research, Steven Runciman's A History of the Crusades is an unimprovable account of events which changed the world and which still resonate today. In this second volume he tells the story of the catastrophic Second Crusade and the inexorable rise of the crusaders' nemesis, Saladin.

A History of the Crusades II

The Kingdom of Jerusalem and the Frankish East 1100-1187

'The whole tale is one of faith and folly, courage and greed, hope and delusion' 
 
In 1187 the catastrophic Battle of Hattin resulted in Saladin's destruction of the crusaders' main army. In an atmosphere of total crisis, the three principal leaders of Europe, Philip Augustus, Richard the Lionheart and Frederick Barbarossa decided that they should personally lead armies to relieve the beleaguered survivors. 
 
A triumph of prose-writing, argument and research, Steven Runciman's A History of the Crusades is an unimprovable account of events which changed the world and which still resonate today. In this final volume he starts with the glamorous Third Crusade and then tells the later story as the crusader states collapsed - a less well-known but fascinating period where crusaders found themselves fighting everywhere from Egyptian swamps to the Great Hungarian Plain and the apparent clarity of the original urge to liberate Jerusalem seemed a distant dream.

A History of the Crusades III

The Kingdom of Acre and the Later Crusades

Jean Rhys

Jean Rhys wrote this autobiography in her old age, now the celebrated author of Wide Sargasso Sea but still haunted by memories of her troubled past: her precarious jobs on chorus lines and relationships with unsuitable men, her enduring sense of isolation and her decision at last to become a writer. From the early days on Dominica to the bleak time in England, living in bedsits on gin and little else, to Paris with her first husband, this is a lasting memorial to a unique artist.

Smile Please

Laurie Lee

'Magical' Daily Mail 
'I finished it with an ache in my heart and a tear in my eye' Spectator 
 
From the author of Cider With Rosie, Village Christmas is a moving, lyrical portrait of England through the changing years and seasons. 
 
Laurie Lee left his childhood home in the Cotswolds when he was nineteen, but it remained with him throughout his life until, many years later, he returned for good. This collection brings to life the sights, sounds, landscapes and traditions of his home - from centuries-old May Day rituals to his own patch of garden, from carol singing in crunching snow to pub conversations and songs. Here too he writes about the mysteries of love, living in wartime Chelsea, Winston Churchill's wintry funeral and his battle, in old age, to save his beloved Slad Valley from developers. 
 
Told with a warm sense of humour and a powerful sense of history, Village Christmas brings us a picture of a vanished world. 
 
'Brings to life the landscapes and traditions of Lee's home in Gloucestershire, from centuries-old May Day rituals and carol-singing on Christmas Eve, to his battle in old age to save his beloved Slad valley from developers' Guardian 
 
'Simply written, observant and shot through with Lee's characteristic humility ... Against his whitewashed prose are touches of beauty' The Times Literary Supplement

Village Christmas

And Other Notes on the English Year

'This selection is a ceaseless delight ... there is a treat on almost every page' Daily Telegraph 
 
George Orwell wrote, in his words, from 'a desire to see things as they are'. This new collection of his journalism and other writings, including articles, essays, broadcasts, poems, book and film reviews from across his career, shows his unmatched genius for observing the world. Whether discussing Polish immigration or Scottish independence, railing against racism, defending the English language or holding an imaginary conversation with Jonathan Swift, these pieces reveal a clear-eyed, entertaining and eternally relevant chronicler of his age. 
 
Edited with an introduction by Peter Davison 
 
'Orwell's luminous gift was for seeing things, for noticing what others missed, took for granted or simply found uninteresting, for discovering meaning and wonder in the familiarity of the everyday... Nothing escaped or seemed beneath his notice, which was what made him such a good reporter... Seeing Things As They Are is intended to be a collection first and foremost of his journalism, with preference given to lesser-known pieces and reviews as well as some of the poems he wrote. It is full of interest and curiosities' Jason Cowley, Financial Times 
 
'Peter Davison gives us a feast of [Orwell's] shorter writings, showing how from such hesitant beginnings he evolved into the writer of enduring importance we know, committed to decency, equality and political honesty, who could nevertheless wax lyrical over the first signs of spring or an imaginary English pub' Gordon Bowker, Independent

Seeing Things as They Are: Selected Journalism and Other Writings

Italo Calvino

'Words connect the visible track to the invisible thing ... like a fragile makeshift bridge cast across the void' 
 
With imagination and wit, Italo Calvino sought to define the virtues of the great literature of the past in order to shape the values of the future. His effervescent last works, left unfinished at his death, were the Charles Eliot Norton lectures, which he was due to deliver at Harvard in 1985-86. These surviving drafts explore the literary concepts closest to his heart: Lightness, Quickness, Multiplicity, Exactitude and Visibility (Constancy was to be the sixth), in serious yet playful essays that reveal his debt to the comic strip and the folktale. This collection, now in a fluent and supple new translation, is a brilliant précis of a great writer whose legacy will endure through the millennium he addressed. 
 
Translated by Geoffrey Brock 
 
'The book I give most to people is Six Memos for the Next Millennium' Ali Smith 
 
'Wonderful . . . full of wit and erudition' Daily Telegraph

Six Memos for the Next Millennium

Arne Næss

'The smaller we come to feel ourselves compared with the mountain, the nearer we come to participating in its greatness.' 
 
 
Philosopher, mountaineer, activist and visionary, Arne Naess's belief that all living things have value made him one of the most inspirational figures in the environmental movement. Drawing on his years spent in an isolated hut high in the Norwegian mountains, and on influences as diverse as Gandhi's nonviolent action and Spinoza's all-encompassing worldview, this selection of the best of his writings is filled with wit, charisma and intense connection with nature. Emphasizing joy, cooperation and 'beautiful actions', they create a philosophy of life from a man who never lost his sense of wonder at the world. 
 
'Arne Naess's ideas ... inspired environmentalists and Green political activists around the world' The New York Times

Ecology of Wisdom

Winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature 
 
'Desperately important and impossible to put down. It is timeless. . . what shines clear from the testimonies is love - love which can make you do the most spectacular things ' Sheena Patel, Observer 
 
'- A new translation of Voices from Chernobyl based on the revised version - 
 
In April 1986 a series of explosions shook the Chernobyl nuclear reactor. Flames lit up the sky and radiation escaped to contaminate the land and poison the people for years to come. While officials tried to hush up the accident, Svetlana Alexievich spent years collecting testimonies from survivors - clean-up workers, residents, firefighters, resettlers, widows, orphans - crafting their voices into a haunting oral history of fear, anger and uncertainty, but also dark humour and love. 
 
A chronicle of the past and a warning for our nuclear future, Chernobyl Prayer shows what it is like to bear witness, and remember in a world that wants you to forget. 
 
'Beautifully written. . . heart-breaking' - Arundhati Roy, Elle 
 
'One of the most humane and terrifying books I've ever read' - Helen Simpson, Observer

Chernobyl Prayer

Voices from Chernobyl

Penguin Modern Classics

Black Heart Blue

Black Lace Book Of Women Sexual Fantasies

Black Star Series

Blacklist

Set inside Blandings Castle, this comedy series follows Lord Emsworth and his pig Empress as they meet with his dysfunctional family and friends, and the havoc that follows.

Blandings

Blandings Castle

Blood City Rollers

Bloodlines

Blossom Street

Blue Ant

Bluey

Bodyguard

Bodyguard Series

Bollocks to Alton Towers

Book of Dust Series

Borderlands

Born Wicked

Boudica: the last defender of the Celtic culture; the only woman openly to have led her warriors into battle; the only British warrior to have stood against the might of Imperial Rome - and triumphed. 
 
This is her story.

Boudica

Boy Soldier

Brain Chemicals

Brave Bunnies

Bridge

Bridget Jones's Diary

Brief Encounters

Bright Young Things

Brotherband

Arthur Bryant and John May are Golden Age detectives living in the modern world. Together they head up the Peculiar Crimes Unit, ready to solve any of the weird and wonderful crimes that fall across their desks.

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