The Road to Lichfield is the Booker Prize shortlisted first novel by Penelope Lively, published as a Penguin Essential for the first time on the 40th anniversary of its publication. Ann Linton leaves
Nick Hornby's internationally bestselling first novel, available as a Penguin Essential for the first time. Do you know your desert-island, all-time, top five most memorable split-ups? Rob does. He ke
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 Ind
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
The Reluctant Fundamentalist is Mohsin Hamid's thrillingly provocative international bestseller, available as a Penguin Essential for the first time. Shortlisted for the Man Booker prize in 2007 Now a
The hilarious 1980s political satire by Jonathan Coe, published as a Penguin Essential for the first time. It is the 1980s and the Winshaw family are getting richer and crueller by the year: Newspaper
Nobel prize winner and author of One Hundred Years of Solitude Gabriel Garcia Marquez tells a tale of an unrequited love that outlasts all rivals in his masterpiece Love in the Time of Cholera, publis
The Lady in the Lake is a classic detective novel by the master of hard-boiled crime, available as a Penguin Essential for the first time. Derace Kingsley's wife ran away to Mexico to get a quickie di
Oskar Schell is an inventor, Francophile, tambourine player, Shakespearean actor, jeweler, pacifist. He is nine years old. And he is on an urgent, secret search through the five boroughs of New York t
'Mr. Holmes, they were the footprints of a gigantic hound!' The death, quite suddenly, of Sir Charles Baskerville in mysterious circumstances is the trigger for one of the most extraordinary cases eve
A celebration of the drama and intensity of the mother-child relationship, published as a Penguin Essential for the first time. It is the Swinging Sixties, and Rosamund Stacey is young and inexperienc
The Plague by Albert Camus is an extraordinary odyssey into the darkness and absurdity of human existence. 'On the morning of April 16, Dr Rieux emerged from his consulting-room and came across a dead
Animal Farm, by George Orwell - author of 1984, one of Britain's most popular novels - is a brilliant political satire and a powerful and affecting story of revolutions and idealism, power and corrupt
To be poor and destitute in 1920s Paris and London was to experience life at its lowest ebb. George Orwell, penniless and with nowhere to go, found himself experiencing just this as he wandered the st
To the just-fashionable French Riviera come Dick and Nicole Diver - handsome, rich, and enormous fun. Their dinners are legend, their atmosphere magnetic, their intelligence fine. But something is wro
From the moment the author arrived in Kenya in 1914 to manage a coffee plantation, her heart belonged to Africa. Drawn to the intense colours and ravishing landscapes, she spent her happiest years on
