Penguin Books

Olivia Potts’ mother died when she just twenty-five. Stricken with grief, she did something life changing and rather ridiculous: she gave up a high-flying legal career to study at the notoriously difficult Le Cordon Bleu

A riveting, deeply personal account of history in the making-from the president who inspired us to believe in the power of democracy In the stirring, highly anticipated first volume of his presidential memoirs, Barack Obama tells the story of his improbable odyssey from young man searching for his identity to leader of the free world, […]

‘But, you may say, we asked you to speak about women and fiction – what has that got to do with a room of one’s own?’ A Room of One’s Own grew out of a lecture that Virginia Woolf had been invited to give at Girton College, Cambridge in 1928 and became a landmark work […]

A story of love and redemption, faith and forgiveness, Ask Again, Yes reveals the way childhood memories change when viewed from the distance of adulthood – villains lose their menace, and those who appeared innocent seem less so.

‘Bad Island is an extraordinary, unsettling document: a silent species-history in eighty frames, a mute future archive.I can imagine it discovered in the remnants of a civilisation; a set of runes found amid the ruins. Stark in its lines and dark in its vision, Bad Island reads you more than you read it’ Robert Macfarlane […]

The spellbinding new novel from one of our most fearless chroniclers of the female experience, Bunny is a down-the-rabbit-hole tale of loneliness and belonging, friendship and desire, and

This bitterly funny Cold War satire on the end of the world expresses our deepest fears of Armageddon, and has become a counter-culture classic.

The book that influenced writers from Carl Sagan to Stephen Hawking, Flatland is set in a two-dimensional world where life exists only in lines and shapes – until one of its inhabitants, ‘A. Square’, has his perspective transformed forever. This brilliantly eccentric classic is an invitation to see beyond our own reality. ‘At once a […]

What was Pol Pot eating while two million Cambodians were dying of hunger? Did Idi Amin really eat human flesh? And why was Fidel Castro obsessed with one particular cow? Traveling across four continents, from the ruins of Iraq to the savannahs of Kenya, Witold Szablowski tracked down the personal chefs of five dictators known […]

Deeply personal and powerfully moving, a short and timely series of essays on the experience of lockdown, by one of the most clear-sighted and essential writers of our time

For thousands of years, mending was a deep craft that has for too long been a secret history. But now it’s back, bigger and better than ever. In this book Kate Sekules introduces the art of visible mending as part of an important movement to give fashion back its soul. Part manifesto, part how-to, MEND! […]

A decade ago, Caitlin Moran thought she had it all figured out. Her instant bestseller How to Be a Woman was a game-changing take on feminism, the patriarchy, and the general ‘hoo-ha’ of becoming a woman. Back then, she firmly believed ‘the difficult bit’ was over, and her forties were going to be a doddle. […]

The bestselling French graphic novel about the mind-bending world of quantum physics Take an incredible journey through the quantum universe with explorer Bob and his dog Rick, as they travel through a world of wonders, talk to Einstein about atoms, hang out with Heisenberg on Heligoland and eat crepes with Max Planck. Along the way, […]

The infamous literary hoax that fooled the art world On January 8 1960, artist Nat Tate set out to burn his entire life’s work. Four days later he jumped off a Staten Island ferry, killing himself. His body was never found. When William Boyd published his biography of Abstract Expressionist Nat Tate, tributes poured in […]

Nineteen Arab women journalists speak out about what it’s like to report on their changing homelands in this first-of-its-kind essay collection, with a foreword by CNN chief international correspondent Christiane Amanpour “A stirring, provocative and well-made new anthology . . . that rewrites the hoary rules of the foreign correspondent playbook, deactivating the old clichés.” […]

Written under the pseudonym James Tiptree Jr., the pioneering and outlandish tales of Alice B. Sheldon are some of the greatest science fiction short stories of the twentieth century, telling of dystopian chases

The master of weird fiction, H. P. Lovecraft combines cosmic fantasy with creeping horror in these three tales of malevolent alien forces, body-switching and travel across the space-time continuum. ‘Evil, in Lovecraft, is universal, pervasive’ Michael Chabon ‘His prescience and novelty seem more and more remarkable … shows a deeply modern horror at the universe’ […]

The Cypher Files is an utterly unique reading experience. In this brain-bending interactive game, you’ll solve puzzles on every page, and obtain keys to move forward by submitting answers online. To solve each puzzle, you’ll need to think outside the book. You are an agent of CY.P.H.E.R., the secret international agency working on ‘unsolvable’ code-based […]

The perfect gift this Christmas season: a generous selection of some of the greatest festive stories of all time This is a collection of the most magical, moving, chilling and surprising Christmas stories from around the world, taking us from frozen Nordic woods to glittering Paris, a New York speakeasy to an English country house, […]

Part pulp adventure, part otherworldly meditation, this is the story of Trafalgar Medrano: intergalactic trader and lover of bitter coffee and black cigarettes. In the bars and cafés of Rosario, Argentina, he recounts

Every life has the power to change the world. Ndaba Mandela was raised by his grandfather, the man known to the world as Nelson Mandela. Here Ndaba offers a rare and personal insight into the man behind the myth, sharing with us his memories – charming, intimate and sometimes surprising – to illuminate Mandela’s much-loved […]

The #1 Sunday Times and International Bestseller from ‘the most influential public intellectual in the Western world right now’ (New York Times). What are the most valuable things that everyone should know? Acclaimed clinical psychologist Jordan Peterson has influenced the modern understanding of personality, and now he has become one of the world’s most popular […]

Fully restored edition of Anthony Burgess’ original text of A Clockwork Orange, with a glossary of the teen slang ‘Nadsat’, explanatory notes, pages from the original typescript, interviews…..

In this nightmare vision of youth in revolt, fifteen-year-old Alex and his friends set out on a diabolical orgy of robbery, rape, torture and murder. Alex is jailed for his….

‘One of his most enthralling creations’ -Daily Telegraph Broke and working as a tour guide in Germany, rootless Englishman Ted Mundy catches a glimpse of an old friend hiding in the shadows. A friend he thought was lost to him. A friend who took him from radical 1960s Berlin to life as a double agent. […]

In a working-class neighbourhood in 1940s Stockholm, a young man named Bengt falls into deep, private turmoil with the unexpected death of his mother. As he struggles to cope with her loss, his despair slowly transforms to rage when he discovers that his father had a mistress. Bengt swears revenge on behalf of his mother’s […]

Set in the tragic arena of the Middle East conflict, this compelling story of love and torn loyalties plays out against the backdrop of an unwinnable war.

Keep all of your stationery together in this beautiful purple pencil case, inspired by Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own – a blazing 1929 feminist polemic, which was a powerful call for women’s financial independence and intellectual freedom. Product Information: Made from natural cotton with a nylon liner.  22mm width x 135mm height x […]

Lucy has her rigid, middle-class life mapped out for her until she visits Florence with her uptight cousin Charlotte, and finds her neatly ordered existence thrown off balance……

A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian is bestselling author Marina Lewycka’s hilarious and award winning debut novel, now available as a Penguin Essential for the first time. ‘Two years after my mother died, my father fell in love with a glamorous blonde Ukrainian divorcée. He was eighty-four and she was thirty-six. She exploded into […]

Anita Brookner’s first novel, available as a Penguin Essential for the first time. ‘Dr Weiss, at forty, knew that her life had been ruined by literature.’ Ruth Weiss, an academic, is beautiful, intelligent and lonely. Studying the heroines of Balzac in order to discover where her own childhood and adult life has gone awry, she […]

‘One of his most enthralling creations’ -Daily Telegraph Broke and working as a tour guide in Germany, rootless Englishman Ted Mundy catches a glimpse of an old friend hiding in the shadows. A friend he thought was lost to him. A friend who took him from radical 1960s Berlin to life as a double agent. […]

An intimate conversation about music and creativity, between the internationally bestselling writer and a world-class conductor. ‘My only purpose in this book was for me, as a music lover, to have a discussion of music with the musician Seiji Ozawa that was as open and honest as possible. I simply wanted to bring out the […]

An intimate conversation about music and creativity, between the internationally bestselling writer and a world-class conductor. ‘My only purpose in this book was for me, as a music lover, to have a discussion of music with the musician Seiji Ozawa that was as open and honest as possible. I simply wanted to bring out the […]

Kathy Acker: Rich girl, street punk, scholar, stripper, victim, media-whore … and cultural icon. The late Kathy Acker’s legend and writings are wrapped in mythologies, many of them created by her. Twenty years after her untimely death aged just 50, Acker’s legend has faded, but her writing has become clearer. A few years ago, the […]

Any Human Heart is William’s Boyd’s classic, bestselling novel, now available as a Penguin Essential for the first time. Every 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 […]

The gap year classic, available as a Penguin Essential for the first time in the year of its 20th anniversary. A devastatingly funny satire on the whole idea of student travel,and particularly the India back-pack trail. Dave travels to India with Liz because he thinks he might be able to get her into bed. Liz […]

Vintage Minis bring you the world’s greatest writers on the experiences that make us human – from birth to death and everything in between.

Autobiography covers Morrissey’s life from his birth until the present day. Steven Patrick Morrissey was born in Manchester on May 22nd 1959. Singer-songwriter and co-founder of…..

“Shelby and her art are extremely my shit. You need this book.” —Samantha Irby, New York Times bestselling author of We Are Never Meeting in Real Life “The rare Instagram-turned-book that actually works.” —Jezebel A wickedly funny illustrated look at living and dating in a patriarchal culture that celebrates men for displaying the bare minimum of […]

Babies: our biggest mystery and our most natural consequence, our hardest test and our enduring love. Anne Enright describes the intensity, bewilderment and extravagant happiness of her experience of having babies, from the exhaustion of early pregnancy to first smiles and becoming acquainted with the long reaches of the night. Everyone, from parents to the […]

A young woman anxiously waits for her date on a street corner in New York City; he sits in a pizza parlour across the street, watching her discomfort. The stories in this collection peer deep into the inner lives of men and women, explore the cavernous spaces between what we say and what can be […]

‘Kerouac’s grittiest novel … sensual and uninhibited’ The New York Times Driven mad by three years of endless telegrams, phonecalls, mail, reporters and snoopers in the wake of his hugely successful novel On the Road, Jack Kerouac, ‘King of the Beats’, needs peace, quiet and sobriety: surrounded and outnumbered he has to ‘get away to […]

‘Black Leopard, Red Wolf is the kind of novel I never realized I was missing until I read it. A dangerous, hallucinatory, ancient Africa, which becomes a fantasy world as well-realized as anything Tolkien made, with language as powerful as Angela Carter’s. I cannot wait for the next installment’ – Neil Gaiman In this stunning follow-up […]

‘Late into the night we talked of love, of its complications. In my father’s eyes they were imaginary…This conception of rapid, violent and passing love affairs appealed to my imagination. I was not at the age when fidelity is attractive. I knew very little about love’. The French Riviera: home to the Beautiful People. And […]

Meet Holly Golightly – a free spirited, lop-sided romantic girl about town. With her tousled blond hair and upturned nose, dark glasses and chic black dresses, Holly is…..

A beautiful clothbound edition of Evelyn Waugh’s classic novel of duty and desire set against the backdrop of the faded glory of the English aristocracy in the run-up to the Second World War. The most nostalgic and reflective of Evelyn Waugh’s novels, Brideshead Revisited looks back to the golden age before the Second World War. […]

Charles Ryder, a lonely student at Oxford, is captivated by the outrageous and exquisitely beautiful Sebastian Flyte. Invited to Brideshead, Sebastian’s magnificent family home…..

‘Addictive … a charter for wistfulness’ Observer ‘An enchanting rabbit hole of handmade houses’ The New York Times ‘The Bible of pared back, natural living’ Der Spiegel ‘Take a deep breath and let the inspiration sink in’ GQ Cabin Porn began as an on-line project created by a group of friends to inspire their own […]

How do we find calm in our frantic modern world? Tim Parks – lifelong sceptic of all things spiritual – finds himself on a Buddhist meditation retreat trying to answer this very question. With brutal honesty and dry wit, he recounts his journey from disbelief to something approaching inner peace and tackles one of the […]

Kurt Vonnegut’s Cat’s Cradle is an irreverent and highly entertaining fantasy about the playful irresponsibility of nuclear scientists, beautifully repackaged as part of the Penguin Essentials range. ‘All of the true things I am about to tell you are shameless lies.’ Dr Felix Hoenikker, one of the founding fathers of the atomic bomb, has left […]

‘… a human being, an intellectual human being who constantly bends the entire force of his mind on the ridiculous task of forcing a wooden king into the corner of a wooden board, and does it without going mad!’ A group of passengers on a cruise ship challenge the world chess champion to a match. […]

The first volume in The Copenhagen Trilogy, the searing portrait of a woman’s journey through love, friendship, ambition and addiction, from one of Denmark’s most celebrated twentieth-century writers. Tove knows she is a misfit, whose childhood is made for a completely different girl. In her working-class neighbourhood in Copenhagen, she is enthralled by her wild, […]

‘Language is a body, a living creature …and this creature’s home is the inarticulate as well as the articulate’. John Berger’s work has revolutionized the way we understand visual language. In this new book he writes about language itself, and how it relates to thought, art, song, storytelling and political discourse today. Also containing Berger’s […]

When it comes to death, is there ever a best case scenario? In this disarmingly witty book, Julian Barnes confronts our unending obsession with the end. He reflects on what it means to miss God, whether death can be good for our careers and why we eventually turn into our parents. Barnes is the perfect […]

Death in Spring is a dark and dream-like tale of a teenage boy’s coming of age in a remote village in the Catalan mountains; a place cut off from the outside world, where cruel customs are blindly followed

 The final volume in The Copenhagen Trilogy, the searing portrait of a woman’s journey through love, friendship, ambition and addiction, from one of Denmark’s most celebrated twentieth-century writers Tove is only twenty, but she’s already famous, a published poet and wife of a much older literary editor. Her path in life seems set, yet she […]

How does a writer compose a suicide note? This was not a question that the prize-winning novelist William Styron had ever contemplated before. In this true account of his depression, Styron describes an illness that reduced him from a successful writer to a man arranging his own destruction. He lived to give us this gripping […]

One of the last surviving members of the futurist generation, Bruno Munari’s Design as Art is an illustrated journey into the artistic possibilities of modern design translated by Patrick Creagh published as part of the ‘Penguin on Design’ series in Penguin Modern Classics. ‘The designer of today re-establishes the long-lost contact between art and the […]

You’ve just passed someone on the street who could be the love of your life, the person you’re destined for – what do you do? In Murakami’s world, you tell them a story. The five weird and wonderful tales collected here each unlock the many-tongued language of desire, whether it takes the form of hunger, […]