Penguin Books

'The eyes that glanced at me shone with a pale-green light'A crazed vivisectionist engineers a new super-breed of monstrous 'Beast Men' on a remote Pacific island, in H. G. Wells's Victorian scientific nightmare of man playing god....

'The way I need you is a loneliness I cannot bear'Making its twenty-three-year-old author an overnight literary sensation, this story of isolated, lost lives intersecting in a small town in the American South is a masterpiece of humane sensitivity....

'40,000 francs, which lay before him in a heap of gold and banknotes.'Written in twenty-six days to pay off Dostoyevsky's own roulette debts, The Gambler is a graphic psychological study of addiction, accompanied here by a brilliant short story of excruciating social embarrassment....

'Out of the hideously scarred soil of Flanders rose black, splintered trunks of trees'In one of the greatest war memoirs ever written, an ordinary German soldier recalls the horror and bloodlust of combat on the Western Front with brutal, unflinching candour and stark simplicity....

'Even bigger than Japan is the inside of your head. Don't ever surrender yourself - not to Japan, not to anything'A shy, unworldly young student has his eyes opened to Tokyo's bustling metropolis, in this delicate, bitter-sweet work of innocence and experience from Japan's foremost modern novelist....

Saved, rescued, fished-up, half-drowned, out of the deep, dark river, dry clothes, hair shampooed and set...Set in a 1930s Paris of shabby hotel rooms, seedy bars and drunken encounters, Jean Rhys's semi-autobiographical portrayal of a young woman's sexual encounters is a searingly honest exploration of loneliness and yearning....