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Penguin Group
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It is the sum of myself, as far as the written word can go — Kerouac on The Town and the City. Kerouac's debut novel is a great coming of age story which can be read as the essential prelude to his later classics. Inspired by grief over his father's death and gripped by determination to write the Great American Novel, he draws largely on his own New England childhood. |
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When his buddy Hawk is beaten within an inch of his life, Spenser infiltrates a ruthless mob in the name of friendship — and revenge. |
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If you had one wish this Christmas, what would it be? Sarah wishes not to be lonely. She shouldn't be — not with Eddie, her husband, and their two children by her side... but since Sarah waved farewell to the bright lights of the big city and moved to a picture perfect home in the country, her marriage is missing its usual sparkle. So when Eddie's job takes him away from home shortly before Christmas, the enforced break in their relationship — while tricky — probably couldn't have come at a better time. But will his absence make her heart grow fonder? And if so, for whom? As seasonal cheer begins to flow, Sarah discovers rather a lot can happen in one holiday... especially when it's Christmas. Jane Green and her friends are delighted to bring you this enchanting trio of tales for the holiday — stories about falling headlong in love and the miracle of second chances. |
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This is the next book in the brilliant and bestselling Diary of a Wimpy Kid is on its way! Share in the hilarious adventures of everyone's favourite wimpy kid, Greg Heffley, in the highly-anticipated seventh book in the Diary of a Wimpy Kid series. It is also now a box office-busting major motion franchise with the third Wimpy Kid movie releasing in the UK on August 3rd. |
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Johannes is an aesthete, dedicated to creating the possibility of seduction through the careful manipulation of young women. He stealthily pursues the innocent Cordelia until she becomes increasingly drawn to him. But when she is ready to give herself completely, she realizes she may have got everything wrong. United by the theme of love, the writings in the Great Loves series span over two thousand years and vastly different worlds. Readers will be introduced to love's endlessly fascinating possibilities and extremities: romantic love, platonic love, erotic love, gay love, virginal love, adulterous love, parental love, filial love, nostalgic love, unrequited love, illicit love, not to mention lost love, twisted, and obsessional love... |
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In 1901, a young frontiersman named Peter Force comes to New York City and finds a job digging the first subway tunnels. Into his path falls the beautiful mathematical prodigy Cheri-Anne Toledo, whose memories appear to come from another world: the long-forgotten Kingdom of Ohio. Could she have stumbled onto the most dangerous secret imaginable: the key to travelling through time? Peter must find out fast, as the pair are pursued by titans Thomas Edison and J.P. Morgan into the dark labyrinth beneath the metropolis. Peter and Cheri-Anne find themselves wrestling with the nature of history, technology, and the unfolding of time itself. |
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'I live on Brazzaville Beach... I am here because two sets of strange and extraordinary events happened to me... One in England, first, and then one in Africa.' On Brazzaville Beach, on the edge of Africa, Hope Clearwater examines the complex circumstances that brought her there. Sifting the details for evidence of her own innocence or guilt, she tells her engrossing story with a blunt and beguiling honesty that not only intrigues and disturbs but is also completely enthralling. |
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A mother's greatest wish-or worst nightmare-comes true when she finds hints that her dead son may still be alive. |
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A desperate father hires Alatriste to rescue his daughter from a convent where a powerful priest is said to be using the girl as his personal concubine. Soon Alatriste discovers that he has become part of a religious and political conspiracy that leads all the way to the highest levels of the Inquisition. |
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Story-telling is an ingrained habit; I wouldn't know what else to do. But the mythology that is intriguing today is that of imagined alternatives. Somehow, choice and contingency have landed you where you are, as the person that you are, and the whole process seems so precarious that you look back at those climatic moments when things might have gone differently, when life might have spun off in some other direction, and wonder at this apparently arbitrary outcome In this fascinating new piece of fiction, Penelope Lively takes moments from her own life and asks what if she had made other choices: what if she hadn't escaped from Alexandria at the outbreak of WWII? What would her life have been like if she had become pregnant when she was 18? If she had married someone else? If she taken a different job? If she had lived her life abroad? In this highly original work, Penelope Lively examines alternative destinies, choices and the moments in our lives when we could have chosen a different path... |
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The citizens of Moonlight Cove are changing. Some are losing touch with their deepest emotions. Others are surrendering to their wildest urges. And the few who remain unchanged are absolutely terrified — if not brutally murdered in the dead of night. Enter the shocking world of Moonlight Cove, where four unlikely survivors confront the darkest realms of human nature... |
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Hollis Henry is broke.Milgrim is owned.Garreth can't be bought. And they all have something that global marketing magnate Hubertus Bigend needs/wants, as he finds himself outmaneuvered and adrift, after a Department of Defense contract for combat-wear turns out to be the gateway drug for arms dealers so shadowy they can out-Bigend Bigend himself. |
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This is the classic story of Heidi, an unwanted child who finds love and happiness against all the odds. |
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For Willi Kufult, prison life means staying out of trouble, keeping his cell clean, snagging a precious piece of tobacco — and dreaming of the day of his release. Then he gets out. As Willi tries to make a new life for himself in Hamburg, finding a job and even love, he still cannot escape his past. Gradually he becomes sucked into a world of drink, desperation and deceit, and with one terrible act, he is ensnared in a noose of his own making... Hans Fallada's dark and moving 1934 novel brilliantly describes a seedy criminal underworld of shabby lives and violent deeds, showing how our actions always catch up with us. |
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Just how did Roald Dahl get into writing? Where did he get his ideas from? What ingredients in his life turned him into the kind of writer he was? This title provides answers to these questions. It includes stories and anecdotes from Roald Dahl's school days and family life. |
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Jane Austen chronicles the subtleties and nuances of- and the aspirations and machinations at work in — her own social milieu. Through the stories of her spirited heroines and their circles, their interactions and rituals, their movements from ballrooms to drawing rooms, from London and Bath to parklands and gardens, she recreates the life of The English gentry that she observed in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Each of her novels is a love story and a story about marriage — marriage for love, for financial security, for social status. But they are not romances; ironic, comic, wise and penetrating, they are brilliant portrayals of the society Jane Austen knew. |
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This is the declassified CIA story that inspired the new film from Ben Affleck and George Clooney. Tehran, November 1979. Militant students stormed the American embassy and held sixty Americans captive for a gruelling 444 days. But until now the CIA has never revealed the twist to the Iran Hostage Crisis: six Americans escaped. The escape plot was run by Antonio Mendez, head of the CIA's extraction team and a master of disguise. Mendez came up with an idea so daring and potentially foolish that it seemed destined for Hollywood... and indeed it was. He invented a fake sci-fi film called Argo (from the actual name of the CIA mission, a reference to Jason and the Argonauts). After announcing the production to the movie industry, Mendez put together a team of real 1970s Hollywood actors, directors and producers — along with covert CIA officers. They would travel to revolutionary Iran under a foreign film visa, and while 'scouting locations' throughout the country they would track down the six Americans who were hiding out. After giving them false identities as part of the film crew, they would spirit them back across the border. One part Ocean's 11 and another part Black Hawk Down, Mendez's mind-bogglingly complicated and risky gamble paid off: each escapee was extracted without a shot being fired. Mendez is considered one of the greatest officers in CIA history. The story of this, his greatest mission, has never been told. |
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Bread, cash, dosh, dough, and loot. Call it what you like, it matters now more than ever. In The Ascent of Money, Niall Ferguson shows that finance is the foundation of all human progress and the lifeblood of history. From the cash injection that funded the Italian Renaissance to the stock market bubble that sparked the French Revolution, from the bonds that fuelled Britain's war effort to the Wall Street Crash and today's meltdown, this is the story of boom and bust as it's never been told before. Whether you're scraping by or rolling in it, there's no better time to understand the ascent of money. |
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