Penguin Books

For over forty years the demands of the Cold War shaped the life of almost all of us. Europe was seemingly split in two indefinitely. This is a book of extraordinary scope and daring. It is conventional to see the first half of the 20th century as a nightmare and the second half as a reprieve. Westad shows that for much of the world the second half...

In the fifth book of the Romanzo di Ferrara, Bassani follows a day in the slipping life of Edgardo Limentani, a man of forty-five who sets out with a shooting party into the watery countryside surrounding Ferrara. As the day wears on, his malaise grows, seeping from his thoughts and feelings into the natural world around him, until it reaches an...

A major new anthology of great Japanese short stories introduced by Haruki MurakamiThis fantastically varied and exciting collection celebrates the great Japanese short story, from its modern origins in the nineteenth century to the remarkable examples being written today. Curated by Jay Rubin (who has himself freshly translated several of the...

'There were two kinds of landscape characteristic of the inner planets of the Sun: the purposeful and the desolate.'The planet Quinta is pocked with ugly mounds and covered by a spiderweb-like network draped from spindly poles. It is a kingdom of phantoms and of a beauty afflicted by madness. The Earth spaceship Hermes arrives on Quinta with the...

No. 1 bestselling author John Grisham's newest legal thriller takes you inside a law firm that's on shaky ground.“[A] buoyant, mischievous thriller . . . Grisham writes in such an inventive spirit. . . . A treat."—Janet Maslin, The New York Times Mark, Todd, and Zola came to law school to change the world, to make it a better place. But now, as...

Suddenly - tomorrow or the day after - teenage girls find that with a flick of their fingers, they can inflict agonizing pain and even death. With this single twist, the four lives at the heart of Naomi Alderman's extraordinary, visceral novel are utterly transformed....