Penguin Books

Lucy has her rigid, middle-class life mapped out for her until she visits Florence with her uptight cousin Charlotte, and finds her neatly ordered existence thrown off balance.Her eyes are opened by the unconventional characters she meets at the Pension Pertolini: flamboyant romantic novelist Eleanor Lavish, the Cockney Signora, curious Mr Emerson...

Grady - beautiful, rich, flame-haired, defiant - is the sort of girl people stare at across a room. The daughter of an important man, who people want to be introduced to. A girl to whom people sense something is going to happen ...But her privileged society life of parties, debutantes and dresses leaves her wanting more. And excitement comes in the...

How does a democracy die?What can we do to save our own?What lessons does history teach us?In the 21st century democracy is threatened like never before. Drawing insightful lessons from across history - from Pinochet's murderous Chilean regime to Erdogan's quiet dismantling in Turkey - Levitsky and Ziblatt explain why democracies fail, how leaders...

On the morning of April 16, Dr Rieux emerged from his consulting-room and came across a dead rat in the middle of the landing.'It starts with the rats. Vomiting blood, they die in their hundreds, then in their thousands. When the rats are all gone, the citizens begin to fall sick. Like the rats, they too die in ever greater numbers.The authorities...

'The election happened ... And then there was radio silence.'The morning after Trump was elected president, the people who ran the US Department of Energy - an agency that deals with some of the most powerful risks facing humanity - waited to welcome the incoming administration's transition team. Nobody appeared. Across the US government, the same...

A brilliant, bestselling feminist novel from Weimar Germany, from the author of Child of All Nations'A formidable literary talent ... Sharp yet naive, Gilgi is utterly human' Irish TimesGilgi knows where she's going in life: she's ambitious, focused and determined, even when her boss tries it on with her, even when her parents reveal a terrible...