Penguin Books Ltd.

At a New York City Wedding, on a sweltering summer night, four people are trying to get their lives started. Yun has everything he’s ever wanted, but somehow it’s never enough. Emory is finally making her mark, but feels the shame more than the success. Andrew just wants to be honest, but had lied to himself his whole […]

‘Her best yet’ Taylor Jenkins Reid, Malibu Rising ‘One of my favourite authors’ Colleen Hoover, It Ends With Us ‘Magical, delightful, and utterly one of a kind’ Ali Hazelwood, The Love Hypothesis Nora is a cut-throat literary agent at the top of her game. Her whole life is books. Charlie is an editor with a gift for creating bestsellers. And he’s Nora’s work […]

Why do we wear what we wear? To answer this question, we must go back and unlock the wardrobes of the early twentieth century, when fashion as we know it was born. In Bring No Clothes, acclaimed fashion writer Charlie Porter brings us face to face with six members of the Bloomsbury Group-the collective of creatives […]

Why do we wear what we wear? To answer this question, we must go back and unlock the wardrobes of the early twentieth century, when fashion as we know it was born. In Bring No Clothes, acclaimed fashion writer Charlie Porter brings us face to face with six members of the Bloomsbury Group-the collective of creatives […]

A searing, gripping novel about a young Tamil woman living through the Sri Lankan civil war.

Lydia Davis returns with a timeless collection of essays on literature and language. ‘A writer as mighty as Kafka, as subtle as Flaubert, and as epoch-making, in her own way, as Proust’ (Ali Smith) Lydia Davis gathered a selection of her non-fiction writing for the first time in 2019 with Essays. Now, she continues the […]

‘Why can’t a human be more like a cat? That is the question threaded through this vivid patchwork of philosophy, fiction, history and memoir … a wonderful mixture of flippancy and profundity, astringency and tenderness, wit and lament’ Jane O’Grady, Daily Telegraph ‘When I play with my cat, how do I know she is not […]

From Booker-shortlisted author Elif Shafak, Honour is a gripping tale of love, betrayal and clashing cultures. ‘My mother died twice. I promised myself I would not let her story be forgotten’ Pembe and Adem Toprak leave Turkey for London. There they make new lives for their family. Yet the traditions and beliefs of their home […]

A deeply comforting and enlightening book on how Stoicism can inspire us to lead more thoughtful lives What aspects of your life do you really control? What do you do when you cannot guarantee that things will turn out in your favour? And what can Stoicism teach us about how to live together? In the […]

Love and Summer – a remarkable, heart-rending novel by acclaimed writer William Trevor ‘Lingers in the memory as a beautiful meditation on love, belonging and the impossibility of escape’ Observer ‘Unbearably moving’ Spectator It is summer and a stranger has come to quiet Rathmoye. He is noticed by Ellie, the young convent girl, who is […]

‘It’s important that everyone with an interest in fashion reads this book so we can live on a healthier planet’ Arizona Muse ‘The most timely book you’ll read this year’ India Knight * * * * * Running out of space for the clothes you can’t stop buying? Curious about how you can make a […]

The first ever graphic novel adaptation of George Orwell’s timeless dystopia. Winston Smith, an outwardly obedient citizen of Airstrip One, dreams secretly of truth and freedom – but his rebellion will come at a terrible cost. George Orwell’s dark masterpiece has enthralled readers for over seventy years. Now the dystopian world of Big Brother, telescreens, […]

A Hay Festival and The Poole VOTE 100 BOOKS for Women Selection Shortlisted for the 2003 Man Booker Prize, Zoe Heller’s Notes on a Scandal is a darkly compelling novel that explores the taboo subject of pupil/teacher relationships, obsession and betrayal. From the first day that the beguiling Sheba Hart joins the staff of St […]

‘In Japan we have an expression, ‘Float like Cloud, Flow like Water’. Its meaning is: to live free and unconstrained’ In this short introduction to Zen Buddhism, a practising Japanese monk shares the many lessons he has learned from life inside a temple. With charm and humour, he guides us through everything from meditation to […]

‘There is no author whose books I look forward to more than Vaclav Smil’ Bill Gates ‘Smil’s title says it all: to understand the world, you need to follow the trendlines, not the headlines. This is a compelling, fascinating, and most important, realistic portrait of the world and where it’s going’ Steven Pinker Is flying […]

Set between New England and London, On Beauty concerns a pair of feuding families – the Belseys and the Kipps – and a clutch of doomed affairs. It puts low morals among high ideals and asks some searchin

On the Road swings to the rhythms of 1950s underground America, jazz, sex, generosity, chill dawns and drugs, with Sal Paradise and his hero Dean Moriarty, traveller and mystic, the living epitome of Beat. Now recognized as a modern classic, its American Dream is nearer that of Walt Whitman than Scott Fitzgerald, and it goes […]

This exciting collection celebrates the richness and variety of the Spanish short story, from the nineteenth century to the present day. Featuring over fifty stories selected by revered translator Margaret Jull Costa, it blends old favourites and hidden gems – many of which have never before been translated into English – and introduces readers to […]

From the Man Booker Prize-shortlisted, Baileys Women’s Prize-winning author of How to be bothand the critically acclaimed Seasonal quartet ‘Brilliant and engaging, frequently hilarious. . . Smith makes one look at the world afresh’ Sunday Telegraph ‘A beguiling page-turner… To read The Accidental is to be excited from first to last’ Independent ‘Joyous’ The Times […]

FROM THE BOOKER PRIZE-WINNING AUTHOR OF GIRL, WOMAN, OTHER WINNER OF THENESTA FELLOWSHIP AWARD 2003 ‘Wildly entertaining, deeply affecting’ Ali Smith, author of How to be both and Autumn A coming-of-age tale to make the muses themselves roar with laughter and weep for pity — sassy, razor-sharp and transformative — from the acclaimed author of […]

Beautifully packaged reissue of one of Muriel Spark’s best loved novels, The Girls of Slender Means. ‘Long ago in 1945 all the nice people in England were poor, allowing for exceptions’ In the May of Teck Club – a London hostel ‘three times window shattered since 1940 but never directly hit’ – the young lady […]

Written in secret during the darkest days of Stalin’s reign, The Master and Margarita became an overnight literary phenomenon when it was finally published it, signalling artistic freedom for Russians everywhere. Bulgakov’s carnivalesque satire of Soviet life describes how the Devil, trailing fire and chaos in his wake, weaves himself out of the shadows and into Moscow […]

Bulging with brilliant and exciting writing. Its vast sweep takes us from the 15th century, when Christine de Pizan, a court writer in medieval France, imagined a City of Ladies where women would be safe from harassment, through to the present day, with work by Maggie Nelson, Eileen Myles, Rachel Cusk, Deborah Levy and Lola […]

‘Spain is different,’ proclaimed the Franco regime in the 1940s, keen to attract foreign tourists. For the most part, the world has agreed. From the end of its ‘glorious empire’ in 1898 to the dazzling World Cup victory in 2010, the prevailing narrative of modern Spain has emphasized the country’s peculiarity. Generations of historians and […]

“Superb…Gopnik persuasively assembles his case over the course of this mesmerising book, which is as much art history and philosophy as it is biography” Kathryn Hughes, The Guardian When critics attacked Andy Warhol’s Marilyn paintings as shallow, the Pop artist was happy to present himself as shallower still: He claimed that he silkscreened to avoid […]

Most of us live our lives in our clothes without realizing their power. But in the hands of artists, garments reveal themselves. They are pure tools of expression, storytelling, resistance and creativity: canvases on which to show who we really are. In What Artists Wear, style luminary Charlie Porter takes us on an invigorating, eye-opening […]

What is Black art and why don’t we know more about it? This book presents the histories, methodologies and sociopolitical perspectives of a generation of artists and writers who operated with and against the mainstream British art systems during the 1980s. Featuring the writings of artists such as Rasheed Araeen, Sonia Boyce, Eddie Chambers and Lubaina […]

Nobody wrote about police hassle like she did. Nobody wrote about making ends meet, about the history of the slave trade or the comedy of the daily grind, with the same breathtaking originality and brio; and few writers, before or since, have had the courage to write with such honesty about their everyday experience of […]

Peter Guillam, staunch colleague and disciple of George Smiley of the British Secret Service, otherwise known as the Circus, has retired to his family farmstead on the south coast of Brittany when a letter from his old Service summons him to London. The reason? His Cold War past has come back to claim him. Intelligence […]

Rich girl, street punk, lost girl and icon … scholar, stripper, victim and media-whore: The late Kathy Acker’s legend and writings are wrapped in mythologies, created mostly by Acker herself. The media storm that surrounded Kathy Acker’s books was unprecedented: her books were banned in several countries and condemned by the mainstream media, but eventually […]

Alexander Cleave, an actor who thinks his best days are behind him, remembers his first unlikely affair as a teenage boy in a small town in 1950s Ireland: the illicit meetings in a rundown cottage outside town; assignations in the back of his lover’s car on sunny mornings and rain-soaked afternoons. And with these early […]

When the downtrodden animals of Manor Farm overthrow their master Mr Jones and take over the farm themselves, they imagine it is the beginning of a life of freedom and equality. But gradually a cunning, ruthless elite, masterminded by the pigs Napoleon and Snowball, starts to take control. Soon the other animals find themselves hopelessly […]

The first ever graphic adaptation of one of the world’s most loved books. ‘June, 1942: I hope I will be able to confide everything to you, as I have never been able to confide in anyone, and I hope you will be a great source of comfort and support.’ In Amsterdam, in the summer of […]

Recalling Olive Kitteridge in its richness, structure, and complexity, Anything Is Possible explores the whole range of human emotion through the intimate dramas of people struggling to understand themselves and others. Anything is Possible tells the story of the inhabitants of rural, dusty Amgash, Illinois, the hometown of Lucy Barton, a successful New York writer […]

In spring 1962 American actress Dee Moray’s boat motors into an Italian bay and the life of hotelier Pasquale Tursi. Dee – fleeing a film set, claiming to be dying and desperately awaiting her lover – throws herself on Pasquale’s generous mercy. Fifty years later Pasquale lands in Hollywood, sporting a fedora and seeking a […]

As heard on BBC Radio Four – Book of the Week . . . A memoir of love, death and jazz chickens, Eddie Izzard’s fabulous Believe Me is his one and only autobiography . . . ‘I know why I’m doing all this,’ I said. ‘Everything I do in life is trying to get her […]

Covering all eight seasons, this remarkable volume offers a unique and exciting visual exploration of the world of Game of Thrones. In two parts, the book follows the story of the South, where kings and queens battle for the Iron Throne, and of the North, where the White Walkers and their army of the dead […]

Seventeen years after leaving Germany for the US, Nora Krug decided she couldn’t know who she was without confronting where she’d come from. In Heimat, she documents her journey investigating the lives of her family members under the Nazi regime, visually charting her way back to a country still tainted by war. Beautifully illustrated and […]

Written midway between Brave New World and Nineteen Eighty-Four, as the terrible events of the Second World War were unfolding, Kallocain depicts a totalitarian ‘World State’ which seeks to crush the individual entirely. In this desolate, paranoid landscape of ‘police eyes’ and ‘police ears’, the obedient citizen and middle-ranking scientist Leo Kall discovers a drug […]

The story of the phenomenon that is Kraftwerk, and how they revolutionised our cultural landscape. ‘We are not artists nor musicians. We are workers.’ Ignoring nearly all rock traditions, expermenting in near-total secrecy in their Düsseldorf studio, Kraftwerk fused sound and technology, graphic design and performance, modernist Bauhaus aesthetics and Rhineland industrialisation – even human […]

Spring, 1914. The students at the Slade School of Art gather in Henry Tonks’s studio for his life-drawing class. But for Paul Tarrant the class is troubling, underscoring his own uncertainty about making a mark on the world. When war breaks out and the army won’t take Paul, he enlists in the Belgian Red Cross […]

Stylist magazine has asked that question of remarkable women from the worlds of entertainment, politics, sport and fashion. With honesty, wit and a serious no-BS attitude, their lessons address the challenges every woman faces today, from climbing the career ladder and finding inner fulfilment, to forging authentic relationships and overcoming life’s setbacks. Each of these […]

A woman in Vienna walks a tightrope between the two men in her life. There is her lover Ivan, beautiful and unavailable, who obsesses her. And there is Malina, the civil servant with whom she shares an apartment: reserved, fastidious, exacting, chillingly calm. As the balance of power between them starts to shift, she feels […]

A new expanded and illustrated edition of the history-making speeches of Greta Thunberg, the young activist who has become the voice of a generation ‘We are the change and change is coming’ In August 2018 a fifteen-year-old Swedish girl, Greta Thunberg, decided not to go to school one day. A year later, she was joined […]

The murdered man had been an agent – once, long ago. But George Smiley’s superiors at the Secret Service want to see the crime buried, not solved. Smiley will not leave it at that, not when it might lead him all the way to Karla, the elusive Soviet spymaster . . . Smiley’s People is […]

What will the world of tomorrow be like? How does progress happen? And why don’t we have a lunar colony yet? In this witty and entertaining book, Zach and Kelly Weinersmith give us a snapshot of the transformative technologies that are coming next – from robot swarms to nuclear fusion powered-toasters – and explain how […]

Fifteen-year-old Oliver Tate is terrified that his family is falling apart. He fears for his depressed father and is convinced that his mother is having an affair with her capoeira teacher. Deciding that it is down to him alone to save his parents’ marriage, Oliver sets out on a campaign to rescue it while also […]

Like her namesake Jack Kerouac, J.K. is always on the road, travelling Europe with her typewriter in a pillowcase. From J.K.’s irreverent, ironic perspective, Levy charts a new, dizzying, end-of-the-century world of shifting boundaries and displaced peoples.

This book will give you many hours of your life back. ‘Timely and necessary . . . a must-read’ Cal Newport, author of Digital Minimalism Scheduling doctor’s appointments. Planning a party. Buying a present. Filling out paperwork. These are the kind of secretarial and managerial tasks necessary to run a life and a household. Elizabeth […]

One rainy afternoon in Istanbul, a woman walks into a doctor’s surgery. ‘I need to have an abortion’, she announces. She is nineteen years old and unmarried. What happens that afternoon will change her life. Twenty years later, Asya Kazanci lives with her extended family in Istanbul. Due to a mysterious family curse, all the […]

WINNER OF THE COSTA BIOGRAPHY AWARD 2018 SHORTLISTED FOR THE SLIGHTLY FOXED BEST BIOGRAPHY PRIZE 2018 ‘Superb. This is a necessary book – painful, harrowing, tragic, but also uplifting’ Times Little Lien wasn’t taken from her Jewish parents – she was given away in the hope that she might be saved. Hidden and raised by […]

We have spent decades optimising our waking hours, but what about the precious hours after we doze off (or try to)? The Magic of Sleep tells you everything you’ve ever wanted to know about sleep but were too tired to ask. As the most active time for our brains and the most important element to […]

Mokhtar Alkhanshali is twenty-four and working as a doorman when he becomes fascinated with the rich history of coffee and Yemen’s central place in it. He leaves San Francisco and travels deep into his ancestral home to tour terraced farms high in the country’s rugged mountains. He collects samples and organizes farmers and is on […]

Truman Capote makes whiskey-soaked fruitcake in Alabama; Laurie Lee slides across a frozen pond in Gloucestershire; and Shirley Jackson is outwitted by a wily Santa Claus at the bank. Ghosts haunt the Christmases of Muriel Spark and Elizabeth Bowen, while Dostoyevsky, Daphne du Maurier and Italo Calvino take a cynical view of the season and […]

The words on the envelope he has found are written in Kath’s hand, but Glyn ignores his wife’s instruction and breaks the seal. His life unwinds. For he finds a photograph showing Kath holding hands with another man. Unable to forget this long-ago act of betrayal he recklessly excavates the past, seeking out who knew […]

Coming of age in 1970s’ Birmingham, teenager Benjamin Trotter is about to discover the agonies and ecstasies of growing up. Whether it is first love or last rites, IRA bombs or industrial strife, prog versus punk rock, expectations of bad poetry or an unexpected life-changing experience involving lost swimming trunks, The Rotters’ Club is a […]

The unmissable debut novel by the critically acclaimed author of Between the World and Me and We Were Eight Years in Power – a richly imagined and compulsively page-turning journey to freedom OPRAH BOOK CLUB PICK ‘I haven’t felt this way since I first read Beloved… I wish Toni [Morrison] was alive to actually read this […]

‘Unmissable. Like chancing upon an oasis, you want to drink it slowly… Subtle, unpredictable, surprising’ – Guardian Things I Don’t Want to Know is the first in Deborah Levy’s essential three-part ‘Living Autobiography’ on writing and womanhood. Taking George Orwell’s famous essay, ‘Why I Write’, as a jumping-off point, Deborah Levy offers her own indispensable […]

Jen’s 15-year-old daughter goes missing for four agonizing days. When Lana is found, unharmed, in the middle of the desolate countryside, everyone thinks the worst is over. But Lana refuses to tell anyone what happened, and the police draw a blank. The once-happy, loving family return to London, where things start to fall apart. Lana […]