Bücher der Reihe Penguin Essentials

Austerlitz is W. G. Sebald's haunting novel of post-war Europe.In 1939, five-year-old Jacques Austerlitz is sent to England on a Kindertransport and placed with foster parents. This childless couple promptly erase from the boy all knowledge of his identity and he grows up ignorant of his past. Later in life, after a career as an architectural historian, Austerlitz - having avoided all clues that might point to his origin - finds the past returning to haunt him and he is forced to explore what happened fifty years before. Austerlitz is W.G. Sebald's melancholic masterpiece.'Mesmeric, haunting and heartbreakingly tragic. Simply no other writer is writing or thinking on the same level as Sebald' Eileen Battersby, Irish Times'Greatness in literature is still possible' John Banville, Irish Times, Books of the Year'A work of obvious genius' Literary Review'A fusion of the mystical and the solid ... His art is a form of justice - there can be, I think, no higher aim' Evening Standard'Spellbindingly accomplished; a work of art' The Times Literary Supplement 'I have never read a book that provides such a powerful account of the devastation wrought by the dispersal of the Jews from Prague and their treatment by the Nazis' Observer'A great book by a great writer' Boyd Tonkin, IndependentW . G. Sebald was born in Wertach im Allg u, Germany, in 1944 and died in December 2001. He studied German language and literature in Freiburg, Switzerland and Manchester. In 1996 he took up a position as an assistant lecturer at the University of Manchester and settled permanently in England in 1970. He was Professor of European Literature at the University of East Anglia and is the author of The Emigrants, The Rings of Saturn, Vertigo, Austerlitz, After Nature, On the Natural History of Destruction, Campo Santo, Unrecounted, A Place in the Country. His selected poetry is published in a volume called Across the Land and the Water.

Past, present and future are brought together one momentous June day in 1923. Clarissa Dalloway, elegant and vivacious, is preparing for a party while reminiscing about her childhood romance with Peter Walsh, and dwelling on her daughter Elizabeth's rapidly-approaching adulthood.

Romantic, heroic, comic and tragic, unconventional school mistress Jean Brodie has become an iconic figure in post-war fiction. Her glamour, unconventional ideas and manipulative charm hold dangerous sway over her girls at the Marcia Blaine Academy who become the Brodie 'set', introduced to a world of adult games that they will never forget.

Lady Constance Chatterley feels trapped in her sexless marriage to the Sir Clifford. Paralysed in the First World War, Sir Clifford is unable to fulfil his wife emotionally or physically, and encourages her instead to have a liaison with a man of their own class.

When Adela Quested and her elderly companion Mrs Moore arrive in the Indian town of Chandrapore, they quickly feel trapped by its insular and prejudiced 'Anglo-Indian' community. Determined to escape the parochial English enclave and explore the 'real India', they seek the guidance of the charming and mercurial Dr Aziz, a cultivated Indian Muslim.

'One of the most important American novels of the twentieth century' The Times'It is sometimes advantageous to be unseen, although it is most often rather wearing on the nerves'Ralph Ellison's blistering and impassioned first novel tells the extraordinary story of a man invisible 'simply because people refuse to see me'. Published in 1952 when American society was in the cusp of immense change, the powerfully depicted adventures of Ellison's invisible man - from his expulsion from a Southern college to a terrifying Harlem race riot - go far beyond the story of one individual to give voice to the experience of an entire generation of black Americans.This edition includes Ralph Ellison's introduction to the thirtieth anniversary edition of Invisible Man, a fascinating account of the novel's seven-year gestation.With an Introduction by John F. Callahan'Brilliant' Saul Bellow

My Family and Other Animals is the bewitching account of a rare and magical childhood on the island of Corfu by treasured British conservationist Gerald Durrell. It is also the first book in Durrell's Corfu Trilogy, which inspired ITV's television series The Durrells. Escaping the ills of the British climate, the Durrell family - acne-ridden Margo, gun-toting Leslie, bookworm Lawrence and budding naturalist Gerry, along with their long-suffering mother and Roger the dog - take off for the island of Corfu.But the Durrells find that, reluctantly, they must share their various villas with a menagerie of local fauna - among them scorpions, geckos, toads, bats and butterflies.Recounted with immense humour and charm My Family and Other Animals is a wonderful account of a rare, magical childhood.'Durrell has an uncanny knack of discovering human as well as animal eccentricities' Sunday Telegraph'A bewitching book' Sunday Times

Hotel du Lac is the classic Booker Prize winning novel by Anita Brookner. Into the rarefied atmosphere of the Hotel du Lac timidly walks Edith Hope, romantic novelist and holder of modest dreams. Edith has been exiled from home after embarrassing herself and her friends. She has refused to sacrifice her ideals and remains stubbornly single. But among the pampered women and minor nobility Edith finds Mr Neville, and her chance to escape from a life of humiliating spinsterhood is renewed . . . 'A classic . . . a book which will be read with pleasure a hundred years from now'Spectator'A smashing love story. It is very romantic. It is also humorous, witty, touching and formidably clever' The Times'Hotel du Lac is written with a beautiful grave formality, and it catches at the heart' Observer'Her technique as a novelist is so sure and so quietly commanding' Hilary Mantel, Guardian'She is one of the great writers of contemporary fiction' Literary ReviewAnita Brookner was born in south London in 1928, the daughter of a Polish immigrant family. She trained as an art historian, and worked at the Courtauld Institute of Art until her retirement in 1988. She published her first novel, A Start in Life, in 1981 and her twenty-fourth, Strangers, in 2009. Hotel du Lac won the 1984 Booker Prize. As well as fiction, Anita Brookner has published a number of volumes of art criticism.

Burroughs first novel, a largely autobiographical account of the constant cycle of drug dependency, cures and relapses, remains the most unflinching, unsentimental account of addiction ever written. Through junk neighbourhoods in New York, New Orleans and Mexico City, through time spent kicking, time spent dealing and time rolling drunks for money, through junk sickness and a sanatorium, Junky is a field report (by a writer trained in anthropology at Harvard) from the American post-war drug underground. A cult classic, it has influenced generations of writers with its raw, sparse and unapologetic tone. This definitive edition painstakingly recreates the author s original text word for word.

In the summer of 1920 two men, both war survivors meet in the quiet English countryside. One is living in the church, intent upon uncovering and restoring an historical wall painting while the other camps in the next field in search of a lost grave.

Meet Oliver Tate, 15. Convinced that his father is depressed ("e;Depression comes in bouts. Like boxing. Dad is in the blue corner"e;) and his mother is having an affair with her capoeira teacher, "e;a hippy-looking twonk"e;, he embarks on a hilariously misguided campaign to bring the family back together. Meanwhile, he is also trying to lose his virginity - before he turns sixteeen - to his pyromaniac girlfriend Jordana. Will Oliver succeed in either aim? Submerge yourself in Submarine and find out...

Probably the best English novelist of his generation Nick Hornby Jonathan Coes widely acclaimed novel is set in the 1970s against a distant backdrop of strikes, terrorist attacks and growing racial tension. A group of young friends inherit the editorship of their school magazine and begin to put their own distinctive spin onto events in the wider world. A zestful comedy of personal and social upheaval, The Rotters Club captures a fateful moment in British politics - the collapse of Old Labour - and imagines its impact on the topsy-turvy world of the bemused teenager: a world in which a lost pair of swimming trunks can be just as devastating as an IRA bomb. One of those sweeping, ambitious yet hugely readable, moving, richly comic novels that you find all too rarely in English fiction ... a masterpiece Daily Telegraph Downloadable, abridged audiobook edition read by Jeff Rawle.

Shortlisted for the Orange Prize for Fiction 2006 and winner of the 2006 Prix du Meilleur Livre tranger, The History of Love by bestselling author Nicole Krauss explores the lasting power of the written word and the lasting power of love. 'When I was born my mother named me after every girl in a book my father gave her called The History of Love. . . 'Fourteen-year-old Alma Singer is trying to find a cure for her mother's loneliness. Believing she might discover it in an old book her mother is lovingly translating, she sets out in search of its author.Across New York an old man called Leo Gursky is trying to survive a little bit longer. He spends his days dreaming of the love lost that sixty years ago in Poland inspired him to write a book. And although he doesn't know it yet, that book also survived: crossing oceans and generations, and changing lives. . . 'Wonderfully affecting...brilliant, touching and remarkably poised' Sunday Telegraph'A tender tribute to human valiance. Who could be unmoved by a cast of characters whose daily battles are etched on out mind in such diamond-cut prose?' Independent on Sunday'Devastating...one of the most passionate vindications of the written word in recent fiction. It takes one's breath away' Spectator Nicole Krauss is an American bestselling author who has received international critical acclaim for her first three novels: Great House (shortlisted for the Orange Prize for Fiction 2011), The History of Love and Man Walks into a Room (shortlisted for the LA Times Book Award), all of which are available in Penguin paperback.

FROM THE BOOKER PRIZE-WINNING AUTHOR OF GIRL, WOMAN, OTHER '[Mr Loverman is] Brokeback Mountain with ackee and saltfish and old people' Dawn FrenchWINNER OF THE JERWOOD FICTION UNCOVERED PRIZE 2014 and FERRO GRUMLEY AWARD FOR LGBT FICTION 2015 Barrington Jedidiah Walker is seventy-four and leads a double life. Born and bred in Antigua, he's lived in Hackney since the sixties. A flamboyant, wise-cracking local character with a dapper taste in retro suits and a fondness for quoting Shakespeare, Barrington is a husband, father and grandfather - but he is also secretly homosexual, lovers with his great childhood friend, Morris.His deeply religious and disappointed wife, Carmel, thinks he sleeps with other women. When their marriage goes into meltdown, Barrington wants to divorce Carmel and live with Morris, but after a lifetime of fear and deception, will he manage to break away?Mr Loverman is a ground-breaking exploration of Britain's older Caribbean community, which explodes cultural myths and fallacies and shows the extent of what can happen when people fear the consequences of being true to themselves.Praise for Bernardine Evaristo: 'One of Britain's most innovative authors . . . Bernardine Evaristo always dares to be different' New Nation'Evaristo remains an undeniably bold and energetic writer, whose world view is anything but one-dimensional' Sunday Times'Audacious genre-bending, in-yer-face wit and masterly retellings of underwritten corners of history are the hallmarks of Evaristo's work' New Statesman Bernardine Evaristo is the author of three critically acclaimed 'verse novels' - Lara, The Emperor's Babe (which won the Arts Council Award in 2000) and Soul Tourists. Mr Loverman is her second prose novel, after 2008's Blonde Roots. Evaristo is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and the Royal Society of Arts, and was awarded an MBE in 2009. She lives in London.

In Cape Town, South Africa, an elderly classics professor writes a letter to her distant daughter, recounting the strange and disturbing events of her dying days. She has been opposed to the lies and the brutality of apartheid all her life, but now she finds herself coming face to face with its true horrors.

A castle at the foot of the Carpathian mountains in the 1930s. Two men, inseparable in their youth, meet for the first time in 41 years. They have spent their lives waiting for this moment. Four decades earlier a murky, traumatic event had led to their sudden separation.

'As ambitious as it is remarkable. Balances on seesaws of innocence and violence, sanity and lunacy, hilarity and horror' The Times_____________________________'We will all melt like ice-cream in the sun!'British soldier, East Africa, 1914On the Western Front millions are being slaughtered. But in East Africa a ridiculous and utterly ignored campaign is being waged - one that continues after the Armistice because no one bothers to tell the participants to stop.As the conflict sweeps up Africans and colonials, so those left at home and those fighting abroad find themselves unable to escape the tide of history bearing down on them._____________________________'A towering achievement' John Carey'Compulsively readable' Blake Morrison, Observer 'Funny, assured, a seriocomic romp. A study of people caught in the side pockets of calamity that dramatizes their plights with humour, detail and grit' Harper's

'It would be a dull world if we all thought alike.'After seven years of marriage, the beautiful Lady Brenda Last is bored with life at Hetton Abbey, the Gothic mansion that is the pride and joy of her husband, Tony. She drifts into an affair with the shallow socialite John Beaver and forsakes Tony for the Belgravia set. Brilliantly combining tragedy, comedy and savage irony, A Handful of Dust captures the irresponsible mood of the 'crazy and sterile generation' between the wars.

Penguin presents the unabridged, downloadable, audiobook edition of Everything is Illuminated by Jonathan Safran Foer, read by Jeff Woodman and Scott Shina. THE INTERNATIONALLY BESTSELLING NOVEL ADAPTED INTO A FEATURE FILM WITH ELIJAH WOOD From the bestselling author of Here I Am, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close and We are the Weather - a hilarious, life-affirming and utterly original novel about the search for truth Gripping, hilariously funny and deeply serious. An astonishing feat of writing The Times One of the most impressive novel debuts of recent years Joyce Carol Oates, Times Literary Supplement A first novel of startling originality Jay McInerney, Observer It seems hard to believe that such a young writer can have such a deep understanding of both comedy and tragedy Erica Wagner, The Times A young man arrives in the Ukraine, clutching in his hand a tattered photograph. He is searching for the woman who fifty years ago saved his grandfather from the Nazis. Unfortunately, he is aided in his quest by Alex, a translator with an uncanny ability to mangle English into bizarre new forms; a blind old man haunted by memories of the war; and an undersexed guide dog named Sammy Davis Jr, Jr. What they are looking for seems elusive -- a truth hidden behind veils of time, language and the horrors of war. What they find turns all their worlds upside down...

Nancy Mitford's The Pursuit of Love is one of the funniest, sharpest novels about love and growing up ever written.'He was the great love of her life you know.''Oh, dulling,' said my mother, sadly, 'One always thinks that. Every, every time.' Longing for love, obsessed with weddings and let's not even mention the mysteries of sex, Linda and her sisters and cousin Fanny are on the hunt for the ideal lover. But finding the perfect match is much harder than any of the sisters had ever dreamed. Linda is first courted by a Tory MP and then becomes embroiled with a handsome but humourless communist, before she risks everything on a chance at real, head-over-heels love in war-torn Paris . . .'Peerless' Zoe Heller

When "history" presents itself in the form of two disgruntled CIA operatives who decide that an unsuccessful attempt on the life of JFK will galvanize the nation against Communism, the scales are irrevocably tipped.

From the acclaimed author of the dystopian classic A Clockwork Orange, The Wanting Seed is an inventive, thought-provoking and darkly absurd novel set in a work rampant with overpopulation. The Wanting Seed is part of our Penguin Essentials series which spotlights the very best of our modern classics.As governments struggle to maintain order in the face of overpopulation and food shortages and homosexuality is glorified in an attempt to further limit family sizes, Tristram Foxe and his wife Beatrice-Joanna find themselves facing dire choices. Their world transforms into a chaos of cannibalistic dining-clubs, fantastic fertility rituals, and wars without anger.

After following the advice from a manual called "e;How to Meet and Marry Mr Right"e;, Jane learns that in love there is neither pattern nor promise. This is a funny collection of connected stories and a portrait of Jane, a woman manoeuvring her way through love, sex and relationships.

A collection of Sherlock Holmes adventures, in which the intrepid detective and his faithful companion Dr Watson examine and solve twelve cases that puzzle clients, baffle the police and provide readers with the thrill of the chase.

In the early eighteenth century, Susan Barton finds herself adrift from a mutinous ship and cast ashore on a remote desert island. There she finds shelter with its only other inhabitants: a man named Cruso and his tongueless slave, Friday. In time, she builds a life for herself as Cruso's companion and, eventually, his lover.

It is Ireland in the early 1950s and for Eilis Lacey, as for so many young Irish girls, opportunities are scarce. So when her sister arranges for her to emigrate to New York, Eilis knows she must go, leaving behind her family and her home for the first time.

It is the Swinging Sixties, and Rosamund Stacey is young and inexperienced at a time when sexual liberation is well on its way. She conceals her ignorance beneath a show of independence, and becomes pregnant as a result of a one night stand.

It's New York in the 1940s, where the martinis flow from cocktail hour till breakfast at Tiffany's. And nice girls don't, except, of course, for Holly Golightly: glittering socialite traveller, generally upwards, sometimes sideways and once in a while - down.

Any Human Heart is William's Boyd's classic, bestselling novel - now a major Channel 4 dramaEvery 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 in Paris and Virginia Woolf in London, as a spy recruited by Ian Fleming and betrayed in the war and as an art-dealer in '60s New York, Logan mixes with the movers and shakers of his times. But as a son, friend, lover and husband, he makes the same mistakes we all do in our search for happiness. Here, then, is the story of a life lived to the full - and a journey deep into a very human heart.Any Human Heart will be enjoyed by readers of Sebastian Faulks, Nick Hornby and Hilary Mantel, as well as lovers of the finest British and historical fiction around the world. It was recently adapted for a major Channel 4 four-part drama series scripted by William Boyd and starring Kim Cattrall, Gillian Anderson, Jim Broadbent and Tom Hollander.'Astonishing, touching, extremely funny. A brilliant evocation of a past era and an immensely readable story' Sunday Telegraph'Superb, wonderful, enjoyable' Guardian'A terrific journey through the twentieth century. Thoroughly entertaining and enjoyable' Jeremy Paxman

'One of those books that haunts you for the rest of your life' Sunday TimesWhen a freak cosmic event renders most of the Earth's population blind, Bill Masen is one of the lucky few to retain his sight. The London he walks is crammed with groups of men and women needing help, some ready to prey on those who can still see. But another menace stalks blind and sighted alike. With nobody to stop their spread the Triffids, mobile plants with lethal stingers and carnivorous appetites, seem set to take control.The Day of the Triffids is perhaps the most famous catastrophe novel of the twentieth century and its startling imagery of desolate streets and lurching, lethal plant life retains its power to haunt today.