Pocket Penguins

'It was a dark night, with only occasional scattered lights glittering like stars on the plain' The aviator and author of The Little Prince describes vast, otherworldly landscapes, crash landings and magical encounters in his transcendent account of flying over the Sahara and the Andes. Ten new

'Out of the hideously scarred soil of Flanders rose black, splintered trunks of trees' In one of the greatest war memoirs ever written, an ordinary German soldier recalls the horror and bloodlust of combat on the Western Front with brutal, unflinching candour and stark simplicity. Ten new

'When you have caught the rhythm of Africa, you find that it is the same in all her music.' In one of the most passionate memoirs ever written, Karen Blixen recalls running a farm in Africa at the start of the twentieth century, and the love affair that changed her life. A new series of twenty

"I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived." Inspiring, brilliantly written, cantankerous and funny - Walden is both a very

'Twenty-three dagger thrusts went home as he stood there. Caesar did not utter a sound...' This vivid, racy account of the men who wielded absolute power over ancient Rome - including maniacs, tyrants, warriors, sadists and murderers - is the source for nearly everything we know about one of the

'The terrorist and the policeman both come from the same basket.' Set in an Edwardian London underworld of terrorist bombers, spies, grotesques and fanatics, Conrad's dark, unsettling masterpiece asks if we ever really know others, or ourselves. A new series of twenty distinctive, unforgettable

'So Ursula became the child of her father's heart.' The Rainbow tells the story of three generations of the Brangwen family and their struggles with each other and themselves. Beautiful, strange and with a power all its own, The Rainbow redefined the English novel. A new series of twenty

'He too began to chase the great pierrot through the corridors of the chateau...' A novel of desperate yearning and vanished adolescence, the story of Meaulnes and his restless search for a lost, enchanted world has the atmosphere of a dream and the purity of a fairy tale. A new series of

'He scampered over rooftops, swam in deep water, leapt from balconies.' Set in the vanished world of the shtetl of nineteenth-century eastern Europe, this spellbinding fable tells the story of Yasha: magician, mesmerist, juggler, sword swallower, master of escape - and breaker of hearts.

'I slept very comfortably with half a dozen smoke-dried human skulls suspended over my head' The great Victorian scientist's heroic adventures across South-East Asia, from Singapore to the wilds of New Guinea, encountering head-hunters, jungles, birds of paradise and new discoveries that would

'There are quantities of human beings, but there are many more faces, for each person has several.' This dreamlike meditation on being young and alone in Paris is a feverish work of nerves, angst and sublime beauty from one of the twentieth century's greatest poets. A new series of twenty

'The way I need you is a loneliness I cannot bear' Making its twenty-three-year-old author an overnight literary sensation, this story of isolated, lost lives intersecting in a small town in the American South is a masterpiece of humane sensitivity. Ten new titles in the colourful,

'Then he saw the barrel of a gun aimed dead on target - not at him, as he might have expected, but at the clergyman's back.' Set in a crumbling Spanish mansion, this gloriously comic and gothic novel follows the fortunes of an innocent young priest as he enters a world of moral decadence, sexual

'The eyes that glanced at me shone with a pale-green light' A crazed vivisectionist engineers a new super-breed of monstrous 'Beast Men' on a remote Pacific island, in H. G. Wells's Victorian scientific nightmare of man playing god. Ten new titles in the colourful, small-format, portable new

'40,000 francs, which lay before him in a heap of gold and banknotes.' Written in twenty-six days to pay off Dostoyevsky's own roulette debts, The Gambler is a graphic psychological study of addiction, accompanied here by a brilliant short story of excruciating social embarrassment. Ten new

'All the world was mad around her and she herself, agonized, took on the complexion of a mad woman; of a woman very wicked.' In 'the saddest story I have ever heard', a naive American abroad unfolds a devastating tale of two seemingly respectable Edwardian marriages destroyed by infidelity and

'He said that Shamil had ordered Hadji Murat to be taken dead or alive....' Two masterly Russian tales of freedom, fighting and great warriors in the majestic mountains of the Caucasus, inspired by Tolstoy's years as a soldier living amid the Cossack people. A new series of twenty distinctive,

'Her fragrant body and burning red lips' A married couple reveal their darkest sexual fantasies to each other, in this erotic psychodrama of infidelity, transgression and decadence in early twentieth-century Vienna. Ten new titles in the colourful, small-format, portable new Pocket Penguins

'The train ran on without a driver, on and on, like some mindless, unseeing beast...' One of Zola's darkest and most violent works - a tense thriller of political corruption and a graphic exploration of the criminal mind, as a murder is committed on the new railways of the Second Empire. A new

'I pity this house; the curse of God is hanging over it' Two lovers must face tyrants, war, riots, plague and famine as they struggle to be together, in this teeming panorama of seventeenth-century Italian life - the original historical novel. A new series of twenty distinctive, unforgettable

'It flashed upon me suddenly: they were going to shoot me!' This electrifying eyewitness account of the Russian Revolution, written by an American journalist in St Petersburg as the Bolsheviks seized power in 1917, is an unsurpassed record of history in the making.

'Even bigger than Japan is the inside of your head. Don't ever surrender yourself - not to Japan, not to anything' A shy, unworldly young student has his eyes opened to Tokyo's bustling metropolis, in this delicate, bitter-sweet work of innocence and experience from Japan's foremost modern

'The hideous, then unfamiliar shriek of the air-raid sirens sang out over London.' Upper-class rogues, bohemians, dowagers, socialites, bureaucrats and delinquent evacuees prepare for England to change forever, in this hilarious and deadly serious 1942 satire on the 'phoney war'.

'She had felt as if her heart were hiding down there, somewhere, with the quail and the plover and all the little wild things that crooned or buzzed in the sun...' A rapturous work of savage beauty, Willa Cather's 1913 tale of a pioneer woman who tames the wild, hostile lands of the Nebraskan

'I could hear the frost crackling outside. Greenish moonbeams shone through windows covered with patterns of ice...' One of the most moving accounts of being a boy ever written, My Childhood is a both wonderful and harrowing memoir - and one of the great works of Russian literature. A new

'"After all," he said, "you're only a monkey spirit. How can you delude yourself into supposing that you can seize the Jade Emperor's throne?"' Featuring the adventures of the irrepressible, cloud-riding trickster Monkey and his band of unruly disciples, this centuries-old Chinese fantasy blends

'Sally stopped; picked a flower; kissed her on the lips.' On a June morning in 1923, Clarissa Dalloway is preparing for a party and remembering her past. Elsewhere in London, Septimus Smith is suffering from shell-shock and on the brink of madness. Their days interweave and their lives converge

'Dead, she was his ghost' A gripping, intensely atmospheric story of love, espionage and betrayal in wartime Shanghai, Lust, Caution is accompanied here by four more shimmering tales of Chinese life.

'Berlin-west, a morning in May.' An aspiring young Berlin actress turns the tables on her lustful middle-aged admirer, in Nabokov's deadpan, deliciously cruel story of hopeless infatuation and horribly inventive revenge.

Saved, rescued, fished-up, half-drowned, out of the deep, dark river, dry clothes, hair shampooed and set... Set in a 1930s Paris of shabby hotel rooms, seedy bars and drunken encounters, Jean Rhys's semi-autobiographical portrayal of a young woman's sexual encounters is a searingly honest

'Aristocracy, liberalism, progress, principles...useless words! A Russian doesn't need them' This humane, moving masterpiece of families, love, duels, heartache, failure and the clash between generations caused a scandal in nineteenth-century Russia with its portrayal of youthful nihilism. A

''Me have that golden gown!'' A blameless girl and her monstrous relatives clash over love and money in Balzac's matchless portrayal of greed in a French provincial town.

'Now, ill-lit, almost in darkness, the windows of the houses shuttered, the water dank, the scene appeared altogether different, neglected, poor, and the long narrow boots moored to the slippery steps of cellar entrances looked like coffins.' A slow-burning masterpiece of horror recounting a

'Nowhere could she discover the dens of iniquity about which she had dreamed...' Sparkling, darkly humorous tales of high society, playboys, courtesans, peasants, sex and savagery in nineteenth-century France, from the father of the short story. A new series of twenty distinctive, unforgettable