This Book is Winner Of The Desmond Elliott Prize 2015. Fuller handles the tension masterfully in this grown-up thriller of a fairytale, full of clues, questions and intrigue. (The Times). Extraordinary... From the opening sentence it is gripping. (Sunday Times). 1976: Peggy Hillcoat is eight. She spends her summer camping with her father, playing her beloved record of The Railway Children and listening to her mother's grand piano, but her pretty life is about to change. Her survivalist father, who has been stockpiling provisions for the end which is surely coming soon, takes her from London to a cabin in a remote European forest. There he tells Peggy the rest of the world has disappeared. Her life is reduced to a piano which makes music but no sound, a forest where all that grows is a means of survival. And a tiny wooden hut that is everything.

It's coming — the postponeless Creature. This title features electrifying poems of isolation, beauty, death and eternity from a reclusive genius and one of America's greatest writers. It is one of 46 new books in the bestselling Little Black Classics series, to celebrate the first ever Penguin Classic in 1946. Each book gives readers a taste of the Classics' huge range and diversity, with works from around the world and across the centuries — including fables, decadence, heartbreak, tall tales, satire, ghosts, battles and elephants.

My God! A whole minute of bliss! Is that really so little for the whole of a man's life? It is a poignant tale of love and loneliness from Russia's foremost writer. It is one of 46 new books in the bestselling Little Black Classics series, to celebrate the first ever Penguin Classic in 1946. Each book gives readers a taste of the Classics' huge range and diversity, with works from around the world and across the centuries — including fables, decadence, heartbreak, tall tales, satire, ghosts, battles and elephants.

I'm not myself — I'm somebody else — that's me yonder — no — that's somebody else got into my shoes... I can't tell what's my name, or who I am! Touching and comic short stories from the 19th century American master of the genre. It is one of 46 new books in the bestselling Little Black Classics series, to celebrate the first ever Penguin Classic in 1946. Each book gives readers a taste of the Classics' huge range and diversity, with works from around the world and across the centuries — including fables, decadence, heartbreak, tall tales, satire, ghosts, battles and elephants.

We are bought and sold like apes or monkeys, to be the sport of women, fools, and cowards, and the support of rogues...' Spy, traveller and pioneering female writer Aphra Benn's story of an African prince sold into slavery is considered one of the earliest English novels.

The great Austrian writer Stefan Zweig was a master anatomist of the deceitful heart, and Impatience of the Heart, the only novel he published during his lifetime, uncovers the seed of selfishness within even the finest of feelings. Hofmiller, an Austro-Hungarian cavalry officer stationed at the edge of the empire, is invited to a party at the home of a rich local landowner, a world away from the dreary routine of the barracks. The surroundings are glamorous, wine flows freely, and the exhilarated young Hofmiller asks his host's lovely daughter for a dance, only to discover that sickness has left her painfully crippled. It is a minor blunder that will destroy his life, as pity and guilt gradually implicate him in a well-meaning but tragically wrongheaded plot to restore the unhappy invalid to health.

It would be unfair to expect other people to be as remarkable as oneself. Sharp, hilarious and endlessly insightful, this collection of Oscar Wilde's wit and wisdom spans topics as diverse as art, technology and human nature. It is one of 46 new books in the bestselling Little Black Classics series, to celebrate the first ever Penguin Classic in 1946. Each book gives readers a taste of the Classics' huge range and diversity, with works from around the world and across the centuries — including fables, decadence, heartbreak, tall tales, satire, ghosts, battles and elephants.

'Things are not simple but complex. If he bit Mr. Browning he bit her too. Hatred is not hatred; hatred is also love.' Virginia Woolf's delightful biography of the poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning's spaniel, which asks what it means to be human — and to be dog. It is one of 46 new books in the bestselling Little Black Classics series, to celebrate the first ever Penguin Classic in 1946. Each book gives readers a taste of the Classics' huge range and diversity, with works from around the world and across the centuries — including fables, decadence, heartbreak, tall tales, satire, ghosts, battles and elephants.

But I, being poor, have only my dreams; I have spread my dreams under your feet... By turns joyful and despairing, some of the twentieth century's greatest verse on fleeting youth, fervent hopes and futile sacrifice.

«»... slowly uncoiling their tentacles... and making a soft purring sound to each other.» This is a disgusting account of a school of giant squid attacking a seaside resort, and two other examples of Wells' extraordinary imagination at work — The Magic Shop and The Land Ironclads. This is one of 46 new books in the best-selling Little Black Classics series, to celebrate the first ever Penguin Classic in 1946. Each book gives readers a taste of the Classics' huge range and diversity, with works from around the world and across the centuries — including fables, decadence, heartbreak, tall tales, satire, ghosts, battles and elephants.»

Pale Terror Goes Him, Death and Devastation Follow! This is from the father of American literature, four sparkling comic tales of extraordinary animals and parables subverted. This is one of 46 new books in the best-selling Little Black Classics series, to celebrate the first ever Penguin Classic in 1946. Each book gives readers a taste of the Classics' huge range and diversity, with works from around the world and across the centuries — including fables, decadence, heartbreak, tall tales, satire, ghosts, battles and elephants.

You are electing to join a secret underground movement. Membership will require you to conduct research on your immediate environment and complete a variety of assignments designed to creatively disrupt your everyday life. That is all you need to know for now. All else will be revealed in time. Society wants us to live a planned existence. The path of the wanderer is not this! The path of the wanderer is an experiment with the unknown. To be idle, to play, to daydream. The Wander Society offers us all a way to experience the joys and possibilities of unplanned time.

And when I shall die, take him and cut him out in little stars. This collection of Shakespeare's soliloquies, including both old favourites and lesser-known pieces, shows him at his dazzling best. It is one of 46 new books in the bestselling Little Black Classics series, to celebrate the first ever Penguin Classic in 1946. Each book gives readers a taste of the Classics' huge range and diversity, with works from around the world and across the centuries — including fables, decadence, heartbreak, tall tales, satire, ghosts, battles and elephants.

What matters is to live everything. Live the questions for now. A hugely influential collection for writers and artists of all kinds, Rilke's profound and lyrical letters to a young friend advise on writing, love, sex, suffering and the nature of advice itself. One of 46 new books in the bestselling Little Black Classics series, to celebrate the first ever Penguin Classic in 1946. Each book gives readers a taste of the Classics' huge range and diversity, with works from around the world and across the centuries — including fables, decadence, heartbreak, tall tales, satire, ghosts, battles and elephants.

No true Democracy has ever existed, nor ever will exist. In this selection from The Social Contract, Rousseau asserts that a state's only legitimate political authority comes from its people. One of 46 new books in the bestselling Little Black Classics series, to celebrate the first ever Penguin Classic in 1946. Each book gives readers a taste of the Classics' huge range and diversity, with works from around the world and across the centuries — including fables, decadence, heartbreak, tall tales, satire, ghosts, battles and elephants.

He is fond of enigmas, of conundrums, hieroglyphics; exhibiting in his solutions of each a degree of acumen which appears to the ordinary apprehension praeternatural.

Why do I know a few more things? Why am I so clever altogether? I have never reflected on questions that are none — I have not squandered myself. The first three chapters of Nietzsche's autobiography and his final work before he descended into madness. Critics argue whether the megalomaniacal titles of the chapters are reflective of Nietzsche's humility as a philosopher and his ironic use of autobiography, or whether they betray that his insanity began earlier than previously thought. It is one of 46 new books in the bestselling Little Black Classics series, to celebrate the first ever Penguin Classic in 1946. Each book gives readers a taste of the Classics' huge range and diversity, with works from around the world and across the centuries — including fables, decadence, heartbreak, tall tales, satire, ghosts, battles and elephants.

At the start of it all, Jonathan Pine is merely the night manager at a luxury hotel. But when a single attempt to pass on information to the British authorities — about an international businessman at the hotel with suspicious dealings — backfires terribly, and people close to Pine begin to die, he commits himself to a battle against powerful forces he cannot begin to imagine. In a chilling tale of corrupt intelligence agencies, billion-dollar price tags and the truth of the brutal arms trade, John le Carre creates a claustrophobic world in which no one can be trusted.

We have nothing left in the world but what we can win with our swords. The remarkable account of Hannibal crossing the Alps with his elephants and winning the Battle of the Trebbia. It is one of 46 new books in the bestselling Little Black Classics series, to celebrate the first ever Penguin Classic in 1946. Each book gives readers a taste of the Classics' huge range and diversity, with works from around the world and across the centuries — including fables, decadence, heartbreak, tall tales, satire, ghosts, battles and elephants.