Penguin Books

Have you ever tried to learn another language? When Zhuang first arrives in London from China she feels like she is among an alien species. The city is disorientating, the people unfriendly, the language a muddle of personal pronouns and moody verbs. But with increasing fluency in English surviving turns to living. And they say […]

In this newly revised 10th anniversary edition, Yvon Chouinard–legendary climber, businessman, environmentalist, and founder of Patagonia, Inc.–shares the persistence and courage that have gone into being head of one of the most respected and environmentally responsible companies on earth.  From his youth as the son of a French Canadian handyman to the thrilling, ambitious climbing […]

Why should one half be free to live, while the other is doomed to watch silently from the sidelines? In this visionary collection, Virginia Woolf leads us on a transformative journey through the liberating powers of the mind. From an exploration of why women were barred from writing and under what conditions they might break […]

A timeless travelogue from the leading light of the Beat Generation, Jack Kerouac’s Lonesome Traveller is a jubilant celebration of human discovery As he roams the US, Mexico, Morocco, Paris and London, Kerouac records, in prose of pure poetry, life on the road. Standing on the engine of a train as it rushes past fields […]

How do we love? With romance. With work. Through heartbreak. Throughout a lifetime. As a means, but not an end. Love in all its forms has been an abiding theme of Jeanette Winterson’s writing. Here are selections from her books about that impossible, essential force, stories and truths that search for the mythical creature we […]

Why do we set so much store by marriage? Jane Austen was fascinated by this question, subjecting it to her forensic eye and wonderfully ironic wit again and again. Here are stolen glances and nervous advances, meddling parents and self-important cousins, society whisperings and the fluttering hearts of young lovers. All of them have their […]

Freewheeling and spontaneous, Mexico City Blues is Jack Kerouac’s most significant and emblematic poem. Consisting of 242 loosely linked ‘choruses’, it takes in life, death, spirituality, jazz improvisation, memory, fantasies and dreams, all infused with the rhythm of the blues, to create a surreal and all-encompassing epic. ‘A spontaneous bop prosody and original classic literature‘ -Allen […]

In 1986 Derek Jarman discovered he was HIV positive and decided to make a garden at his cottage on the barren coast of Dungeness. Facing an uncertain future, he nevertheless found solace in nature, growing all manner of plants. While some perished beneath wind and sea-spray others flourished, creating brilliant, unexpected beauty in the wilderness. […]

A hilarious, eye-opening tour of the new romantic landscape, from one of America’s sharpest comic voices and one of its leading sociologists. In the old days, most people would find a decent person who lived in their village or neighbourhood, and after deciding they weren’t a murderer, get married and have kids – all by […]

How did money come to be invented? Why does it now have such significance in our lives? Does it make us happier or unhappier? And what does the future hold for it? With brilliant clarity and insight, Yuval Noah Harari takes the reader on a journey from the very first coins through to 21st century […]

Welcome to motherhood – a land of aching fatigue, constant self-sacrifice and thankless servitude, a land of bottomless devotion, small hands and feet like warm pink roses, and velvet kisses. Here is a land where men and women, once carefree and engrossed in work and sex, now try to solve age-old arguments and search fruitlessly […]

In Mrs Dalloway, Virginia Woolf explores the events of one day, impression by impression, minute by minute, as Clarissa Dalloway’s and Septimus Smith’s worlds look set to collide – this classic novel is beautifully repackaged as part of the Penguin Essentials range. ‘She had a perpetual sense, as she watched the taxi cabs, of being […]

School is almost over – and for Paddy, Liz, Christy and Kevin it’s time to figure out what’s next. But before they start the rest of their lives, these teenagers have the ‘Cave’ – a place to drink, smoke, flirt and listen to punk music

No one loves and quarrels, desires and deceives as boldly or brilliantly as Greek gods and goddesses. In Stephen Fry’s vivid retelling we gaze in wonder as wise Athena is born from the cracking open of the great head of Zeus and follow doomed Persephone into the dark and lonely realm of the Underworld. We […]

A stunning clothbound edition of William S. Burroughs’s cult classic, designed by the acclaimed Coralie-Bickford Smith. Nightmarish and fiercely funny, William Burroughs’ virtuoso, taboo-breaking masterpiece Naked Lunch follows Bill Lee through Interzone: a surreal, orgiastic wasteland of drugs, depravity, political plots, paranoia, sadistic medical experiments and endless, gnawing addiction. One of the most shocking novels […]

‘Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past’ Hidden away in the Record Department of the sprawling Ministry of Truth, Winston Smith skilfully rewrites the past to suit the needs of the Party. Yet he inwardly rebels against the totalitarian world he lives in, which demands absolute obedience and […]

Naomi Klein – award-winning journalist, bestselling author of No Logo, The Shock Doctrine and This Changes Everything, scourge of brand bullies and corporate liars – gives us the toolkit we need to survive our surreal, shocking age. ‘This is a look at how we arrived at this surreal political moment, how to keep it from […]

“Everything needs to change. And it has to start today” In August 2018 a fifteen-year-old Swedish girl, Greta Thunberg, decided not to go to school one day. Her actions ended up sparking a global movement for action against the climate crisis, inspiring millions of pupils to go on strike for our planet, forcing governments to […]

In this dazzling debut, Emilie Pine speaks to the business of living as a woman in the 21st century – its extraordinary pain and its extraordinary joy. Courageous, humane and uncompromising, she writes with

How do we see the world around us? The Penguin on Design series includes the works of creative thinkers whose writings on art, design and the media have changed our vision forever……

On the Road chronicles Jack Kerouac’s years traveling the North American continent with his friend Neal Cassady, “a sideburned hero of the snowy West.” As “Sal Paradise” and “Dean Moriarty,” the two roam the country in a quest for self-knowledge and experience. Kerouac’s love of America, his compassion for humanity, and his sense of language […]

‘I read On the Road in maybe 1959. It changed my life like it changed everyone else’s’ Bob Dylan Sal Paradise, a young innocent, joins his hero, the mystical traveller Dean Moriarty, on a breathless, exuberant ride back and forth across the United States. Their hedonistic search for release or fulfilment through drink, sex, drugs […]

Boisterous, ribald, and ultimately shattering, Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo s Nest is a seminal novel of the 1960s. Here is the unforgettable story of a mental ward and its inhabitants a counterculture classic that inspired the 1975 film adaptation, widely considered one of the greatest movies ever made. Part of the Penguin […]

In this beautiful new edition of selected passages from A New Earth, Eckhart Tolle has picked the essential phrases – the gems of the book – that he feels are most important to readers. These are the passages to savour and absorb, the inspirational essence of the book. They are both a wonderful introduction to […]

How did we get from the Big Bang to today’s staggering complexity, in which seven billion humans are connected into networks powerful enough to transform the planet? And why, in comparison, are our closest primate relatives reduced to near-extinction? Big History creator David Christian gives the answers in a mind-expanding cosmological detective story told on […]

A gorgeous clothbound edition of Woolf’s fantastical and enchanting novel, designed by the acclaimed Coralie-Bickford Smith. Orlando has always been an outsider…His longing for passion, adventure and fulfilment takes him out of his own time. Chasing a dream through the centuries, he bounds from Elizabethan England and imperial Turkey to the modern world. Will he […]

Revolutionary essays on design, aesthetics and materialism – from one of the great masters of modern architecture. Adolf Loos, the great Viennese pioneer of modern architecture, was a hater of the fake, the fussy and the lavishly decorated, and a lover of stripped down, clean simplicity. He was also a writer of effervescent, caustic wit, […]

With a foreword by Sir David Attenborough, breathtakingly beautiful still photography, specially commissioned maps and graphics, and compelling text expanding on the remarkable TV stories and giving the reader a depth of information that

‘Witty, stylish and ferociously absorbing’ Observer Jean-Baptiste Grenouille is abandoned on the filthy streets of eighteenth-century Paris as a baby, but grows up to discover he has an extraordinary gift: a sense of smell more powerful than any other human’s. Gradually he learns how to exploit this gift in the art of creating the most […]

An acclaimed bestseller and international sensation, Patrick Suskind’s classic novel provokes a terrifying examination of what happens when one man’s indulgence in his greatest passion—his sense of smell—leads to murder. In the slums of eighteenth-century France, the infant Jean-Baptiste Grenouille is born with one sublime gift-an absolute sense of smell. As a boy, he lives […]

Pic, or Pictorial Review Jackson, is a ten-year-old boy from North Carolina. When his grandfather dies and he is sent to live with another relative, his older brother, Slim, comes to rescue him. Together they hitch to New York City and, eventually, all the way to California, encountering hardship, kindness, music, love and danger as […]

Judith Schalansky was born in 1980 on the wrong side of the Berlin Wall. The Soviets wouldn’t let anyone travel so everything she learnt about the world came from…..

In the late eighties and early nineties, Moby, then an underground DJ and musician, was scraping out a living in New York City. In a scene popular chiefly among working-class African-Americans and Latinos, Moby – a poor, skinny, white Christian, vegan and teetotaller – looked like he would never make it. By the late nineties, […]

Since its launch with The Odyssey in 1946, Penguin Classics has become the largest and best-known classics imprint in the world. Spanning 4,000 years of world literature, covering all the greatest works of fiction, poetry, drama, history and philosophy in between, Postcards from Penguin Classics is the perfect gift for book lovers everywhere. Here you […]

A collection of 100 postcards, each featuring a different and iconic Penguin book jacket. From classics to crime, here are over seventy years of quintessentially British design in one box……

Could drugs offer a new way of seeing the world? In 1953, in the presence of an investigator, Aldous Huxley took four-tenths of a gramme of mescalin, sat down and waited to see what would happen. When he opened his eyes everything, from the flowers in a vase to the creases in his trousers, was […]

Is who we are really only skin deep? In this searing, remonstrative book, Toni Morrison unravels race through the stories of those debased and dehumanised because of it. A young black girl longing for the blue eyes of white baby dolls spirals into inferiority and confusion. A friendship falls apart over a disputed memory. An […]

Irvine Welsh, ‘poet laureate of the chemical generation’, exposes the seamy underbelly of rave’s utopian dream. Lloyd, our permanently pilled-up protagonist, pushes his weekends to breaking point and beyond in this frazzled trip through Scottish clubland. He experiences the vertiginous uppers and downers of the Second Summer of Love, dabbles in a spot of disc […]

The Rosie Result is the triumphant final instalment of the internationally bestselling series that began with The Rosie Project. —— Don Tillman – scientist, husband, father, and world’s greatest problem-solver – met his wife Rosie by inventing The Wife Project. But ten years on from marrying ‘the world’s most incompatible woman’, Don is facing a […]

Search Sweet Country follows the lives of an eclectic, interconnected group of Ghanaians living in and around the sprawling, chaotic city of Accra in the mid-1970s. Bringing the city to life in dizzying, lyrical prose, Laing weaves a story filled with bizarre and often melancholy characters: an idealistic professor, a lovely young witch, a wide-eyed […]

George Orwell wrote, in his words, from ‘a desire to see things as they are’. This new collection of his journalism and other writings, including articles, essays, broadcasts, poems, book and film reviews from across his career, shows his unmatched genius for observing the world. Whether discussing Polish immigration or Scottish independence, railing against racism, […]

‘An adventure that takes us to the ends of the earth via the rich but often barren landscape of the human heart’ -The Times Why was an English lawyer shot dead in Turkey by his firm’s top client? How can a down-at-heel magician in Devon explain the vast fortune that has mysteriously appeared in his […]

Your sister might be the kindred soul who knows you best, or the most alien being in your household; she might enrage you or inspire you; she might be your fiercest competitor or closest co-conspirator, but she’ll always share with you a totally unique bond. Meg, Jo, Beth and Amy are four of the most […]

The concluding part of John le Carré’s celebrated Karla Trilogy, Smiley’s People sees the last confrontation between the indefatigable spymaster George Smiley and his great enemy, as their rivalry comes to a shattering end. A Soviet defector has been assassinated on English soil, and George Smiley is called back to the Circus to clear up […]

A haunting novella of fame and disillusionment by a Japanese literary icon Written shortly after Yukio Mishima himself had acted in the film Afraid to Die, this novella is a rich and unflinching psychological portrait of a celebrity coming apart at the seams as the absurdity of his existence comes sharply into focus. With exquisite, […]

Susan Sontag is most often remembered as a brilliant essayist – inquisitive, analytical, fearlessly outspoken. Yet all throughout her life, she also wrote short stories: fictions which wrestled with those ideas and preoccupations she

How do you remember the summers of your childhood? For Laurie Lee they were flower-crested, heady, endless days. Here is an evocation of summer like no other – a remote valley filled with the scent of hay, jazzing wasps, blackberries plucked and gobbled, and games played until the last drop of dusk. Lee’s joyful and […]

Is there anything quite so exhilarating as swimming in wild water? This is a joyful swimming tour of Britain, a frog’s-eye view of the country’s best bathing holes – the rivers, rock pools, lakes, ponds, lochs and sea that define a watery island. Charming, funny, inspiring, an assertion of the native swimmer’s right to roam, […]

An ambitious, exuberant new novel moving from north west London to West Africa, from the multi-award-winning author of White Teeth and On Beauty Two brown girls dream of being dancers – but only one, Tracey, has talent. The other has ideas: about rhythm and time, about black bodies and black music, what constitutes a tribe, […]

The highly anticipated new book from Malcolm Gladwell, No.1 international bestselling author of The Tipping Point, Blink, Outliers, What the Dog Saw and David and Goliath. The routine traffic stop that ends in tragedy. The spy who spends years undetected at the highest levels of the Pentagon. The false conviction of Amanda Knox. Why do […]

‘Wonderfully poetic … extraordinary freshness … a Virginia Woolf quality’ Margaret Drabble At once tender and lacerating, luminous and unsettling, Territory of Light is a novel of abandonment, desire and transformation. It was originally published in twelve parts in the Japanese literary monthly Gunzo, between 1978 and 1979, each chapter marking the months in real […]

The daily lives of ordinary people are replete with objects, common things used in commonplace settings. These objects are our constant companions in life. As such, writes Soetsu Yanagi, they should be made with care and built to last, treated with respect and even affection. They should be natural and simple, sturdy and safe – […]

The heart warming new novel from Graeme Simsion, the international bestselling author of The Rosie Project and The Rosie Effect  Can you define your life by a single song? Adam Sharp – former pianist in a hip Melbourne bar, now a respectable IT consultant in Norwich – can. And it’s ‘You’re Going to Lose that […]

The dazzling, exhilarating debut novel from one of the most groundbreaking writers of his generation, The Broom of the System is an outlandishly funny and fiercely intelligent exploration of the paradoxes of language, storytelling, and reality Part of the Penguin Orange Collection, a limited-run series of twelve influential and beloved American classics in a bold […]

When Mae is hired to work for the Circle, the world’s most powerful internet company, she feels she’s been given the opportunity of a lifetime. Run out of a sprawling California campus, the Circle links…..

Fast, thrilling, compulsively addictive – The Circle is Dave Eggers’s timely novel about our obsession with the internet, now available as a Penguin Essential for the first time. When Mae is hired to work for the Circle, the world’s most powerful internet company, she feels she’s been given the opportunity of a lifetime. Run out […]

‘The book breathes life, anger and excitement’ -Observer Tessa Quayle, a brilliant and beautiful young social activist, has been found brutally murdered by Lake Turkana in Nairobi. The rumours are that she was faithless, careless, but her husband Justin, a reserved, garden-loving British diplomat, refuses to believe them. As he sets out to discover what […]

‘A breeze of a read, makes you see our male-manufactured world a little differently… Grayson Perry has written the very book I wanted to write’ – Matt Haig ‘GRAYSON PERRY FOR KING AND QUEEN OF ENGLAND. Imagine how BRILLIANT our country would look if he was.’ – Caitlin Moran Grayson Perry has been thinking about […]

Jack Kerouac’s classic novel about friendship, the search for meaning, and the allure of nature A witty, moving philosophical novel, Jack Kerouac’s The Dharma Bums is a journey of self-discovery through the lens of Zen Buddhist thought. This Penguin Modern Classics edition includes an introduction by Ann Douglas. Following the explosive energy of On the […]

The Dinner Party immerses us in the comic and strange realities of modern life, as we journey through the lives of the unlovable, the unloved, and those who love too much: Jack, who nervously tries to befriend the surly removal man by buying him a latte and a croissant; Sarah, who endlessly imagines how her […]