Penguin

Kevin and Sadie both know their relationship is dangerous. In these terrifying times in Belfast, no Catholic boy and Protestant girl go out together without resentment and even violence flaring up around them. So what will happen if they insist on seeing each other? This is the second of Joan Lingard's stories about the young Belfast couple Kevin...

The Cold War is over and Ned has been demoted to the training academy. He asks his old mentor, George Smiley, to address his passing-out class. There are no laundered reminiscences; Smiley speaks the truth - perhaps the last the students will ever hear. As they listen, Ned recalls his own painful triumphs and inglorious failures, in a career that...

The author of The Salt Road and The Tenth Gift Jane Johnson returns with a captivating historical novel The Sultan's Wife set in Morocco. Morocco, 1677. The tyrannical King Ismail resides over the palace of Meknes. Through the sweltering heat of the palace streets, Nus Nus, slave to the King and forced into his live of servitude as court scribe, is...

"The Faerie Queene" was the first epic in English and one of the most influential poems in the language for later poets from Milton to Tennyson. Dedicating his work to Elizabeth I, Spenser brilliantly united medieval romance and renaissance epic to expound the glory of the Virgin Queen. The poem recounts the quests of knights including Sir Guyon,...

"War with the Newts (1936)" is Karel Capek's darkly humorous allegory of early twentieth-century Czech politics. Captain van Toch discovers a colony of newts in Sumatra which can not only be taught to trade and use tools, but also to speak. As the rest of the world learns of the creatures and their wonderful capabilities, it is clear that this new...

This novel includes an introduction and notes by Dinny Thorold, University of Westminster and is illustrated by F. Walker and Maurice Greiffenhagen. Unusually for Dickens, "Hard Times" is set, not in London, but in the imaginary mid-Victorian Northern industrial town of Coketown with its blackened factories, downtrodden workers and polluted...