In the PENGUIN STUDY NOTES series and originally published in 1986 as part of STEINBECK'S OF MICE AND MEN AND PEARL, a study guide to the latter, aimed at those preparing for the GCSE examination. It includes character studies and summaries of the plot with discussions of the major themes, as well as a background to John Steinbeck.

Although best remembered today for his novels, Thomas Hardy thought of himself as a poet forced by circumstance to write fiction for a living. This generous selection of nearly two hundred poems includes such familiar pieces as During Wind and Rain, Channel Firing, Afterwards, The Darkling Thrush, and The Oxen, but it will also acquaint readers with many less-celebrated works, among them To Lizbie Browne, After the Last Breath, My Spirit Will Not Haunt the Mound, The Haunter, Old Furniture, A Procession of Dead Days, The Harbour Bridge, At a Country Fair, Last Love-Word, Waiting Both, and Proud Songsters. With an introduction and annotations by Robert Mezey, this Penguin Classics edition will help readers to recognize Hardy as one of the greatest English poets of this century.

Nick's grandfather Geordie lies dying. As Nick watches, Geordie starts to relive the horrors surrounding his brother's death and his own terrible experiences during the First World War. Meanwhile, Nick and his wife Fran are trying to unite their increasingly fractious young family, despite the discovery of an obscene Victorian drawing which reveals the tragic history of their house and casts a terrifying shadow over the family.

Robert Graves' superb autobiography tells the story of his life at public school and as a young officer during the First World War. 'It is a permanently valuable work of literary art, and indispensable for the historian either of the First World War or of modern English poetry... Apart, however, from its exceptional value as a war document, this book has also the interest of being one of the most candid self-portraits of a poet, warts and all, ever painted. The sketches of friends of Mr Graves, like T.E. Lawrence, are beautifully vivid' — Times Literary Supplement.

Rosie Parker is no more than a child when her mother dies during the war. Left to the less-than-tender mercies of her father Cole and her brutish step-brothers Seth and Norman, she sees the arrival of housekeeper Heather Farley as a possible replacement mother and her salvation. But when Thomas Farley comes looking for his sister several years later, he discovers Heather has left the Parkers in mysterious circumstances, abandoning her small son. As the terrible truth about Heather's disappearance comes to light, Rosie is compelled to leave the farm and make her own way in the world. And if that means being exposed as the daughter of a murderer, that's a risk she'll have to take ... Rosie is the compelling story of how love and tenderness can grow, like wild roses, out of the most barren ground.

«This all-new Signet Classic contains many of T.S. Eliot's most important early peoms, leading to perhaps his greatest masterpiece, «The Waste land», which has long been regarded as one of the fundamental texts of modernism. By combining poetic elements from many diverse sources with bits of popular culture and common speech linked in a fragmented narrative, Eliot recreated the chaos and disillusionment of Europe in the aftermath of WWI. — «The Wast Land» is a modernist literary masterpiece. — Contains a number of early poems, including Spleen, The Death of St. Narcissus, The Love Song of J. Prufrock, Preludes, Gerontion, The Hippopotmaus, and Sweeny Among the Nightingales. — T.S Eliot is the winner of the 1948 Nobel Prize for Literature, and is one of America's greatest poets. — Edited and with an Introduction by Helen Vendler, a foremost scholar of moderism at Harvard University who writes regularly for the «New Yorker» and «The New Republic». — Vendler is also the author of books on other essential poets, including W.B. Yeats, Wallace Stevens, John Keats, George Herbert, and the forthcoming The Art of Shakespeare's Sonnete.»

What did happen to Miss Quested in the Marabar Caves? This tantalizing question provides the intense drama at the centre of Forster's last and greatest novel, of racial tension in colonial India. After a mysterious incident during their visit to the Marabar Caves, the charming Dr Aziz is accused of assaulting Adela Quested, a naïve young Englishwoman. As he is brought to trial the fragile structure of Anglo-Indian relations collapses and the racism inherent in colonialism is exposed — a theme which still has powerful, dangerous realities today. Yet the novel is also, in Forster's words, 'about something wider than politics ... about the universe as embodied in the Indian earth and the Indian sky'.

«The French Riviera: home to the Beautiful People. And none are more beautiful than Cécile, a precocious seventeen-year-old, and her father Raymond, a vivacious libertine. Charming, decadent and irresponsible, the golden-skinned duo are dedicated to a life of free love, fast cars and hedonistic pleasures. But then one long, hot summer Raymond decides to marry, and Cécile and her lover Cyril feel compelled to take a hand in his amours, with tragic consequences. «Bonjour Tristesse» scandalized 1950s France with its portrayal of teenager terrible Cécile, a heroine who rejects conventional notions of love, marriage and responsibility to choose her own sexual freedom.»

«The greatest works of comedy from the Bard, this book features «The Taming of the Shrew, A Midsummer Night's Dream, Twelfth Night» and «The Tempest».»

«The greatest works of tragedy from the Bard, this book features «Hamlet, Othello, King Lear» and «Macbeth».»

Since its publication twenty years ago, J. M. Roberts's monumental History of the World has remained the unrivaled World History of our day (A.J.P. Taylor), selling more than a quarter of a million copies worldwide. Now in an equally masterful performance, Roberts displays his consummate skills of exposition in telling the tale of the European continent, from its Neolithic origins and early civilizations of the Aegean to the advent of the twenty-first century. A sweeping and entertaining history, The Penguin History of Europe comprehensively traces the development of European identity over the course of thousands of years, ranging across empires and religions, economics, science, and the arts. Roberts's astute and lucid analyses of the disparate spheres of learning that have shaped European civilization and our understanding of it make The Penguin History of Europe a remarkable journey through the last two centuries.

Draw me a star. And the artist drew a star. It was a good star. Draw me a sun, said the star. And the artist drew a sun. And on the artist draws, bringing the world to life picture by beautiful picture until he is spirited across the night sky by a star that shines on all he has made. In Draw Me a Star, Eric Carle celebrates the imagination in all of us with a beguiling story about a young artist who creates a world of light and possibility. A remarkable, quintessentially simple book encompassing Creation, creativity, and the cycle of life within the eternal.

In this classically simple tale of the disastrous impact of outside life on a secluded community in Dorset, now in a new edition, Hardy narrates the rivalry for the hand of Grace Melbury between a simple and loyal woodlander and an exotic and sophisticated outsider. Betrayal, adultery, disillusion, and moral compromise are all worked out in a setting evoked as both beautiful and treacherous. The Woodlanders, with its thematic portrayal of the role of social class, gender, and evolutionary survival, as well as its insights into the capacities and limitations of language, exhibits Hardy's acute awareness of his era's most troubling dilemmas.

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.

A riveting tale of international intrigue-and a dangerous Cold War love triangle-set in Afghanistan.

Jemima Jones is overweight. About seven stone overweight. Treated like a slave by her thin and bitchy flatmates, lorded over at the Kilburn Herald by the beautiful Geraldine (less talented, better paid), her only consolation is food. That and a passion for her charming, sexy colleague Ben. Her life needs to change and soon. But can Jemima reinvent herself? Should she? This is a novel about attraction, obsession and the meaning of true love.

Call him Bachman or call him King, the bard of Bangor is going to hit the charts hard and vast with this white-knuckler knockout. The action is fierce and Bachman's imagination proves boundless. Everything is normal on a summer day in Wentworth, Ohio — the paperboy is making his rounds, frisbees are flying, barbecues are being contemplated. The only thing that doesn't quite fit is the red van idling up the hill on Poplar Street. Soon it will roll and the killing will begin. And by the time night falls, the survivors of Poplar Street will find themselves in another world...

She purrs like a kitten... but watch out when she roars.