Collection: Fiction

For Joyce, literature 'is the eternal affirmation of the spirit of man'. Written between 1914 to 1921, it has survived bowdlerisation, legal action and bitter controversy. An undisputed modernist classic, its ceaseless verbal inventiveness and astonishing wide-ranging allusions confirm its standi...

Review: "Jean Rhys's late, literary masterpiece, Wild Sargasso Sea, was inspired by Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre, and is set in the lush, beguiling landscape of Jamaica in the 1830s. Born into an oppressive, colonialist society, Creole heiress Antoinette Cosway meets a young Englishman who is dra...

A story of Kerewin, a despairing part-Maori artist who is convinced that her solitary life is the only way to face the world. Her cocoon is rudely blown away by the sudden arrival during a rainstorm of Simon, a mute six-year-old whose past seems to hold some terrible trauma.

Working on a manuscript version of this book before he died, Albert Camus provides a moving account of his poverty-stricken childhood in Algeria, the love of his silent mother and the remarkable figure of the old schoolteacher who saved him from ignorance.

Review: "Shipwrecked and cast adrift, Lemuel Gulliver wakes to find himself in Lilliput, an island inhabited by little people, whose six-inch height makes their quarrels over fashion and fame seem ridiculous. His subsequent encounters - with the crude giants of Brobdingnag, the abstracted scienti...

Unfinished at the time of his death, F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Last Tycoon is a story of doomed love set against the extravagance of America's booming film industry. This Penguin Modern Classics edition is edited with an introduction by Edmund Wilson. The studio lot looks like 'thirty acres of fa...

In his fortress at Inuyama, the murderous warlord Iida Sadamu surveys his famous nightingale floor. Constructed with exquisite skill, it sings at the tread of each human foot. No assassin can cross it unheard.Brought up in a remote village among the Hidden, a reclusive and spiritual people, Takeo...

On the hottest day of the summer of 1934, thirteen- year-old Briony Tallis sees her sister Cecilia strip off her clothes and plunge into the fountain in the garden of their country house. Watching her is Robbie Turner, her childhood friend who, like Cecilia, has recently come down from Cambridge....