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Penguin Group
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This novel presents the author's take on Hollywood and its grotesque inhabitants. It tells the story of African film-maker Aurelien No and his attempt to remake his prize-winning student film. Other stories relate tales that concern disparate characters in what are often exotic locales. |
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Enigmatic Claire is 30 and lives alone. When she meets Martin Gibson, a faded scholar, she becomes inordinately interested. She is even more interested when she meets his wife, a far more spectacular personality. But the unexpected news of this woman's death releases emotions that were not entirely foreseen. |
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In the summer of 1920 two men, both war survivors meet in the quiet English countryside. One is living in the church, intent upon uncovering and restoring an historical wall painting while the other camps in the next field in search of a lost grave. Out of their meeting, comes a deeper communion and a catching up of the old primeval rhythms of life so cruelly disorientated by the Great War. |
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The Hearing Trumpet is the story of 92-year-old Marian Leatherby, who is given the gift of a hearing trumpet only to discover that what her family is saying is that she is to be committed to an institution. But this is an institution where the buildings are shaped like birthday cakes and igloos, where the Winking Abbess and the Queen Bee reign, and where the gateway to the underworld is open. It is also the scene of a mysterious murder. Occult twin to Alice in Wonderland, The Hearing Trumpet is a classic of fantastic literature that has been translated and celebrated throughout the world. |
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Syvlia Day's Passion for the Game is a tale of deception, lust and deadly desire in Georgian England. Maria, Lady Winter, is coerced into using her searing beauty and siren body to find out why dangerous pirate Christopher St. John has been let out of jail. But pirate St. John's only chance of avoiding the hangman is to use his renowned seduction skills to melt Lady Winter's icy heart and to discover her secrets. Entangled in a twisted game of deception and desire, Maria and Christopher are each determined to be the one to win this lusty battle of wits... Praise for Sylvia Day, bestselling author of the sensational Bared to You and Reflected in You, first two books in the Crossfire trilogy: Move over Danielle Steel and Jackie Collins, this is the dawn of a new Day. (Amuse). Several shades darker and a hundred degrees hotter than anything you've read before. (Reveal). |
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This Dickensenian story is of two brothers who come from nowhere and want everything. When Paul marries Louise, Johnnie is part of the contract, while their daughter Anna is entangled in it from birth. When Johnnie has to get out of the country, Louise goes with him. This has been her story too, right from the beginning. |
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In 1919 Thomas Mann hailed Effi Briest (1895) as one of the six most significant novels ever written. Set in Bismarck's Germany, Fontane's luminous tale of a socially suitable but emotionally disastrous match between the enchanting seventeen-year-old Effi and an austere, workaholic civil servant twice her age, is at once touching and unsettling. Fontane's taut, ironic narrative depicts a world where sexuality and the enjoyment of life are stifled by narrow-mindedness and circumstance. Considered by many to be the pinnacle of the nineteenth-century German novel, Effi Briest is a tale of adultery that ranks with Madame Bovary and Anna Karenina and brilliantly demonstrates the truth of the author's comment and women's stories are generally far more interesting. |
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Australia is a lucky country, run mainly by second-rate people who share its luck. The phrase 'the lucky country' has become part of our lexicon; it's forever being invoked in debates about the Australian way of life, but is all too often misused by those blind to Horne's irony. When it was first published in 1964, The Lucky Country caused a sensation. Horne took Australian society to task for its philistinism, provincialism and dependence. The book was a wake-up call to an unimaginative nation, an indictment of a country mired in mediocrity and manacled to its past. Although it's a study of the confident Australia of the 1960s, the book still remains illuminating and insightful decades later. The Lucky Country is valuable not only as a source of continuing truths and revealing snapshots of the past, but above all as a key to understanding the anxieties and discontents of Australian society today. |
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This important piece of Australian fiction is republished for the first time as a Penguin Modern Classic. Elizabeth Jolley's award-winning novel is presented in a fresh, new format that is a must-have for lovers of Australian literature. Miss Hester Harper, middle-aged and eccentric, brings Katherine into her emotionally impoverished life. Together they sew, cook gourmet dishes for two, run the farm, make music and throw dirty dishes down the well. One night, driving along the deserted track that leads to the farm, they run into a mysterious creature. They heave the body from the roo bar and dump it into the farm's deep well. But the voice of the injured intruder will not be stilled and, most disturbing of all, the closer Katherine is drawn to the edge of the well, the farther away she gets from Hester. |
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«The Virgin and the Gipsy» affirms the powers of instinct and intuition in their struggle against the constraints of civilisation and anticipates «Lady Chatterley's Lover» in its theme. Lawrence tells the reverent tale of a young girl's emotional awakening in the elemental presence of a gypsy. This title was first published in 1930.» |
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Nobel-prize winner Francois Mauriac's masterpiece is Therese Desqueyroux, the story of a complex woman trapped by provincial life. First published in 1927, this astonishing and daring novel has echoes of Madame Bovary and has recently been made into a ravishing film starring Amelie actress Audrey Tautou. Therese Desqueyroux walks free from court, acquitted of trying to poison her husband. Everyone knew she'd tried to do it, but family honour was more important than the truth. As she travels home to the gloomy forests of Argelouse, Therese looks back over the marriage that brought her nothing but stifling darkness, and wonders, has she really escaped punishment or is it only just about to begin? Francois Mauriac was born in Bordeaux in 1885. He left his university studies to devote himself to writing, and published a collection of poems, Les Mains jointes (Clasped Hands), in 1909. He married in 1913 and the following year was mobilized to serve in the First World War with the Auxilliary Medical Squad in Thessalonica. Mauriac's major literary breakthrough came in 1922 with a novel called Le Baiser au lepreux (A Kiss for the Leper). His most famous work, Therese Desqueroux, appeared in 1927 and has been made into a film twice: first in 1962, with Emmanuelle Riva in the lead role, and more recently in 2012, in a version starring Audrey Tautou. In 1933 Mauriac was elected a Member of the French Academy and in 1952 he received the Nobel Prize for Literature. He died in Paris in 1970. A great novel... the brilliance of its structure and the elegance of its prose never fail to take my breath away. (Beryl Bainbridge). |
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Jane hasn't lived anywhere longer than six months since her son was born five years ago. She keeps moving in an attempt to escape her past. Now the idyllic seaside town of Pirriwee has pulled her to its shores and Jane finally feels like she belongs. She has friends in the feisty Madeline and the incredibly beautiful Celeste — two women with seemingly perfect lives... and their own secrets behind closed doors. But then a small incident involving the children of all three women occurs in the playground causing a rift between them and the other parents of the school. Minor at first but escalating fast, until whispers and rumours become vicious and spiteful. It was always going to end in tears, but no one thought it would end in murder... |
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Set in Birmingham, The News Where You Are tells the funny, touching story of Frank, a local TV news presenter. Beneath his awkwardly corny screen persona, Frank is haunted by disappearances: the mysterious hit and run that killed his predecessor Phil Smethway; the demolition of his father's post-war brutalist architecture; and, the unmarked passing of those who die alone in the city. Frank struggles to make sense of these absences while having to report endless local news stories of holes opening up in people's gardens and trying to cope with his resolutely miserable mother. The result is that rare thing: a page-turning novel which asks the big questions in an accessible way, and is laugh-out-loud funny, genuinely moving and ultimately uplifting. |
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TIME AND CHANCE, the second part of the trilogy about Henry II and Eleanor of Aquitaine, opens during the glory years of their reign. While Henry redefined the role of medieval kingship, Eleanor gave birth to their children, founding a dynasty that would endure for 300 years. But even in these happy times, shadows were lurking. Battles on two borders. The disastrous appointment of Thomas Becket as Archbishop of Canterbury. And when Henry took lovely young Rosumund Clifford into his bed, little did he realise that in making an enemy of his proud, passionate queen he was making the gravest mistake of all... |
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Voyage In The Dark was first published in 1934, but it could have been written today. It is the story of an unhappy love affair, a portrait of a hypocritical society, and an exploration of exile and breakdown; all written in Jean Rhys' hauntingly simple and beautiful style. Eighteen, on her own and independent as much through circumstance as character, Anna has exchanged the West Indies of her childhood for the cold greyness of England, with its narrow streets and narrower rules. As she drifts towards the demi-monde of 1914 London, she comes to realise that life will never be so free and easy again. Her childish dreams have been replaced by the harsher reality of living in a man's world, where all charity has its price. |
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Fall From Grace is the best-selling thriller by Tim Weaver — featuring missing persons investigator David Raker, a man with a gift for finding the lost and bringing them home, alive or dead. No Goodbye. When Leonard Franks and his wife Ellie leave London for their dream retirement in the seclusion of Dartmoor, everything seems perfect. But then their new life is shattered. Leonard heads outside to fetch firewood from the back of the house — and never returns. No Trace. Nine months later, with the police investigation at a dead end, Leonard's family turn to David Raker — a missing persons investigator with a gift for finding the lost. But nothing can prepare Raker for what he's about to uncover. Nowhere To Hide Because, at the heart of this disappearance lies a devastating secret. And by the time Raker realises what it is, and how deep the lies go, it's not just him in danger — it's everyone he cares about. Praise for Tim Weaver: I couldn't put it down (Sun). His books get better each time — tense, complex, sometimes horrific, written with flair as well as care. (Guardian). Weaver has delivered another cracking crime thriller. (Daily Mail). |
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A translation of the complete Aesopian corpus of fables. The introduction pays particular attention to the transmission of fable stock from sanscrit to Aesop. It also attends to the precise nature of the animals themselves who appear in these fables, and tries to rescue the fables both from a tradition of moralistic interpretation and from the academic perception of the genre as an exclusively populist one. |
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On his twenty-fifth birthday, Leo Vincey opens the silver casket that his father has left to him. It contains a letter recounting the legend of a white sorceress who rules an African tribe and of his father's quest to find this remote race. To find out for himself if the story is true, Leo and his companions set sail for Zanzibar. There, he is brought face to face with Ayesha, She-who-must-be-obeyed: dictator, femme fatale, tyrant and beauty. She has been waiting for centuries for the true descendant of Kallikrates, her murdered lover, to arrive, and arrive he does in an unexpected form. Blending breathtaking adventure with a brooding sense of mystery and menace, She is a story of romance, exploration discovery and heroism that has lost none of its power to enthrall. |
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«The Penguin English Library Edition of A Room with a View by E. M. Forster '»But you do,» he went on, not waiting for contradiction. «You love the boy body and soul, plainly, directly, as he loves you, and no other word expresses it ...» 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 she meets at the Pension Bertolini: flamboyant romantic novelist Eleanor Lavish, the Cockney Signora, curious Mr Emerson and, most of all, his passionate son George. Lucy finds herself torn between the intensity of life in Italy and the repressed morals of Edwardian England, personified in her terminally dull fiancé Cecil Vyse. Will she ever learn to follow her own heart? The Penguin English Library — 100 editions of the best fiction in English, from the eighteenth century and the very first novels to the beginning of the First World War.» |
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