Penguin Modern Classics

For six months, Julia has lived alone in a drab Parisian hotel on an allowance from her ex-lover, Mr. Mackenzie. When his cheques stop, Julia decides to leave France and return to London. The tale of her ten day visit contains some of Jean Rhys's most sensitive, poignant writing. Past her prime, exhausted by broken love affairs and addled by drink, Julia is tragically unable to find what she really wants - love.

Jean Rhys was a talent before her time with an impressive ability to express the anguish of young, single women. In Good Morning, Midnight Rhys created the powerfully modern portrait of Sophia Jansen, whose emancipation is far more painful and complicated than she could expect, but whose confession is flecked with triumph and elation. One of the most honest and distinctive British novelists of the 20th Century, Jean Rhys wrote about women with perception and sensitivity in an innovative and often controversial way.

'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.

Set in a superficially romantic, between-wars Paris, Quartet is a poignant tale of a lonely woman. Set against a background of winter-wet streets, Pernod in smoky cafes and cheap hotel rooms with mauve- flowered wallpaper, Marya tries to make something substantial of her life in order to withstand the unreality of her surroundings. Alone, her Polish husband in prison, she is taken up by an English couple who slowly overwhelm her with their passions.

First published in 1934, Voyage in the Dark is the story of an unhappy love affair, a portrait of a hypocritical society and an exploration of exile and breakdown; all written in Jean Rhys's hauntingly simple and beautiful style. Eighteen, on her own and independent as much through circumstance as character, Anna has exchanged the West Indies of her childhood for the cold greyness of England, with its narrow streets and narrower rules. As she drifts towards the demi-monde of 1914 London, she comes to realise that life will never be so free and easy again. Her childish dreams have been replaced by the harsher reality of living in a man's world, where all charity has its price.

Jean Rhys's late, literary masterpiece Wide Sargasso Sea was inspired by Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre, and is set in the lush, beguiling landscape of Jamaica in the 1830s. Born into an oppressive, colonialist society, Creole heiress Antoinette Cosway meets a young Englishman who is drawn to her innocent sensuality and beauty. After their marriage the rumours begin, poisoning her husband against her. Caught between his demands and her own precarious sense of belonging, Antoinette is driven towards madness.

A young woman anxiously waits for her date on a street corner in New York City; he sits in a pizza parlour across the street, watching her discomfort.

A middle-aged woman returns to a New York that is haunted by the passion and intensity of her former relationship with her estranged best friend.

A secretarial graduate starts her first job at a lawyer's office and quietly keeps her cruel experiences at his hands locked inside herself.

The stories in this collection peer deep into the inner lives of men and women, explore the cavernous spaces between what we say and what can be expressed, and are full of tenderness and cruelty. Published for the first time in Penguin Modern Classics, Bad Behaviour provides a devastatingly insightful and urgently necessary view of our times.

'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.

In a dreamlike Japanese town on the banks of the Ikuta River, Ineko loses the ability to see certain things. It begins with a ping-pong ball and progresses to her fiancé, whom she cannot see at all. The doctors call it somagnosia, and Ineko's mother and her fiancé place her in a psychiatric clinic to recover. As they walk home along the riverbank, they consider: is her condition really a form of madness? Is Ineko's selective blindness an expression of her love? Are the trees around them weeping?

Delicate, strange and spare, this novella carries the art of the novel into tantalizing and mysterious new realms.

Set in rural Japan shortly after World War II, The Frolic of the Beasts tells the story of a strange and utterly absorbing love triangle between a former university student, Koji; his would-be mentor, the eminent literary critic Ippei Kusakado; and Ippei's beautiful, enigmatic wife, Yuko. When brought face-to-face with one of Ippei's many marital indiscretions, Koji finds his growing desire for Yuko compels him to action in a way that changes all three of their lives profoundly. Originally published in 1961 and now available in English for the first time, The Frolic of the Beasts is a haunting examination of the various guises we assume throughout our lives, and a tale of psychological self-entrapment, seduction, and violence.

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'.

'Wonderfully poetic ... extraordinary freshness ... a Virginia Woolf quality' Margaret Drabble

Territory of Light is the radiant story of a young woman, living alone in Tokyo with her two-year-old daughter. Its twelve chapters follow the first year of the narrator's separation from her husband. The novel is full of light, sometimes comforting and sometimes dangerous: sunlight streaming through windows, dappled light in the park, distant fireworks, dazzling floodwater, de-saturated streetlamps and mysterious explosions. The delicate prose is beautifully patterned: the cumulative effect is disarmingly powerful and bright after-images remain in your mind for a long time.

Doris is going to be a big star. Wearing a stolen fur coat and recently fired from her office job, she takes an all-night train to Berlin to make it in the movies. But what she encounters in the city is not fame and fortune, but gnawing hunger, seedy bars, and exploitative men - and as Doris sinks ever lower, she resorts to desperate measures to survive. Very funny and intensely moving, this is a dazzling portrait of roaring Berlin in the 1920s, and a poignant exploration of the doomed pursuit of fame and glamour.

Augie March is a penniless and parentless Chicago boy growing up during the Great Depression. A 'born recruit', he drifts through life latching onto a wild succession of occupations, including butler, thief, dog-washer, sailor and salesman, then proudly rejects each one as too limiting. Not until he tangles with the glamorous Thea, a huntress with a trained eagle, can he attempt to break free.

A modern-day Everyman in search of identity and fulfilment, Augie is the star performer in Bellow's exuberant, richly observed human variety show.

Herzog is alone, now that his wife Madeleine has left him for his best friend. Solitary, in a crumbling house which he shares with rats, he is buffeted by a whirlwind of mental activity. People are rumouring that his mind had collapsed. But is it true? Locked for days in the custody of his rambling memories, Herzog scrawls frantic letters which he never mails. His mind buzzes with conundrums and polemics, writing in a spectacular intellectual labyrinth.

Is he crazy, or is he a genius?

In one of his finest achievements, Nobel Prize winner Saul Bellow presents a multifaceted portrait of a modern-day hero, a man struggling with the complexity of existence and longing for redemption.

For many years, the great poet Von Humboldt Fleisher and Charlie Citrine, a young man inflamed with a love for literature, were the best of friends. At the time of his death, however, Humboldt is a failure, and Charlie's life has reached a low point: his career is at a standstill, and he's enmeshed in an acrimonious divorce, infatuated with a highly unsuitable young woman and involved with a neurotic mafioso. And then Humboldt acts from beyond the grave, bestowing upon Charlie an unexpected legacy that may just help him turn his life around.