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A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess
Category: Classics | Series: Penguin Essentials
'What we were after was lashings of ultraviolence'. 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 teenage delinquency and the State tries to reform him - but at what cost? Socia ...Show more
A Month In The Country: Penguin Essentials by J.L. Carr
Category: Fiction | Series: Penguin Essentials Ser.
A damaged survivor of the First World War, Tom Birkin finds refuge in the quiet village church of Oxgodby where he is to spend the summer uncovering a huge medieval wall-painting. Immersed in the peace and beauty of the countryside and the unchanging rhythms of village life he experiences a sense of ren ...Show more
A Passage to India by E M Forster
Category: Classics | Series: Penguin Essentials Ser.
Exploring issues of colonialism, faith and the limits of comprehension, E.M. Forster's A Passage to Indiais published as a Penguin Essential for the first time.When Adela Quested and her elderly companion Mrs Moore arrive in the Indian town of Chandrapore, they quickly feel trapped by its insular and pr ...Show more
A Room with a View by E M Forster, E.M. Forster, E. M. Forster, E.M. Forster And Malcolm Bradbury
Category: Classics | Series: Penguin Essentials
'You love the boy body and soul, plainly, directly, as he loves you ...'. 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. Her eyes are opened by the unconventional characters ...Show more
A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian by Marina Lewycka
Category: No Category | Series: Penguin Essentials
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 divorcee. He was eighty-four and she ...Show more
A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian by Marina Lewycka
Category: Fiction | Series: Penguin Essentials
'Two years after my mother died, my father fell in love with a glamourous blonde Ukrainian divorcee. He was eighty-four and she was thirty-six. She exploded into our lives like a fluffy pink grenade, churning up the murky water, bringing to the surface a sludge of sloughed-off memories, giving the famil ...Show more
A Spell of Winter by Helen Dunmore
Category: No Category | Series: Penguin Essentials Ser.
Incarcerated in the enormous country house of their grandfather - 'the man from nowhere' - they create a refuge against their family's dark secrets, and against the outside world as it moves towards the First World War. As time passes, their sibling love deepens and crosses into forbidden territory. But ...Show more
A Start in Life by Anita Brookner
Category: No Category | Series: Penguin Essentials Ser.
'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 seeks not salvation but enlightenment. Yet in revisiting ...Show more
Ancient Light by John Banville
Category: No Category | Series: Penguin Essentials Ser.
'Billy Gray was my best friend and I fell in love with his mother.' 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 ...Show more
Animal Farm by George Orwell
Category: No Category | Series: Penguin Essentials
George Orwell's timeless and timely allegorical novel--a scathing satire on a downtrodden society's blind march towards totalitarianism."All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others."A farm is taken over by its overworked, mistreated animals. With flaming idealism and stirring slog ...Show more
Any Human Heart by William Boyd
Category: Fiction | Series: Penguin Essentials Ser.
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 inspiration with Hemingway in Paris and Virginia Woolf in London, as a spy recruited by Ian Fleming and ...Show more
Asylum by Patrick McGrath
Category: No Category | Series: Penguin Essentials
This is a story of self-obsession narrated by the point of view of a psychiatrist, published as a Penguin Essential for the first time. As a psychiatrist in a top-security mental hospital in the 1950s, Peter Cleave has made a study of what he calls 'the catastrophic love affair characterized by sexual o ...Show more