Penguin Books

The gap year classic, available as a Penguin Essential for the first time in the year of its 20th anniversary. A devastatingly funny satire on the whole idea of student travel,and particularly the India back-pack trail. Dave travels to India with Liz because he thinks he might be able to get her into bed. Liz travels to India with Dave because she...

Any Human Heart is William's Boyd's classic, bestselling novel, now available as a Penguin Essential for the first time. Every life is both ordinary and extraordinary, but Logan Mountstuart's - lived from the beginning to the end of the twentieth century - contains more than its fair share of both. As a writer who finds inspiration with Hemingway...

The immensely funny and heartwarming number one bestseller, tells the story of a woman who gets a second chance in life - but will she have the courage to take it?Molly has traded London for a dream home in the country - except it was her husband's dream, not hers. And David is, well, rather dead now.So when a distant relative leaves her a London...

A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian is bestselling author Marina Lewycka's hilarious and award winning debut novel, now available as a Penguin Essential for the first time. 'Two years after my mother died, my father fell in love with a glamorous blonde Ukrainian divorcee. He was eighty-four and she was thirty-six. She exploded into our lives...

Walter Mitty is an ordinary man living an ordinary life. But he has dreams - vivid, extraordinary day dreams - in which the life he leads is one of excitement and even adventure, in which he - a weary, put upon middle-aged man - is the hero of his own story. A man can dream, can't he? The Secret Life of Walter Mitty is just one of the brilliant...

The Ministry of Utmost Happiness takes us on a journey of many years-the story spooling outwards from the cramped neighbourhoods of Old Delhi into the burgeoning new metropolis and beyond, to the Valley of Kashmir and the forests of Central India, where war is peace and peace is war, and where, from time to time, 'normalcy' is declared.Anjum, who...