Penguin

'There has been no more terribly acute critic of America than this steel-conscious and death-conscious Spaniard, with his curious passion for the modernities of nickel and tinfoil and nitre . . .' So wrote Conrad Aiken of Lorca's violent response to the New York he encountered as a student at Columbia University in 1929 and 1930. Born and brought...

Self-satisfied, delighting in the many fascinating quirks of his own personality, Hermann Hermann is perhaps not to be taken too seriously. But then a chance meeting with a man he believes to be his double reveals a frightening 'split' in Hermann's nature. With shattering immediacy, Nabokov takes us into a deranged world, one full of an impudent,...

In Paradise Lost Milton produced poem of epic scale, conjuring up a vast, awe-inspiring cosmos and ranging across huge tracts of space and time. And yet, in putting a charismatic Satan and naked Adam and Eve at the centre of this story, he also created an intensely human tragedy on the Fall of Man. Written when Milton was in his fifties ? blind,...

Alistair Cooke, then a Washington correspondent for "The Guardian", recognized a great story to be told in investigating at first hand, the effects of the Second World War on America and the daily lives of Americans as they adjusted to radically new circumstances. Within weeks of the Pearl Harbor attack, Cooke set off with a reporter's zeal on a...

Meursault leads an unremarkable, bachelor life in Algiers. But his sudden involvement in a violent confrontation throws him into turmoil as he is forced to question the fundamental values of society. Camus creates a world without a God but a society that is still subject to restrictive, man-made rules capable of alienating any who transcend them....

This compact novel, completed in 1900, as with so many of the great novels of the time, is at its baseline a book of the sea. An English boy in a simple town has dreams bigger than the outdoors and embarks at an early age into the sailor`s life. The waters he travels reward him with the ability to explore the human spirit, while Joseph Conrad...