Sylvain Tesson, found a radical solution to his need for freedom, one as ancient as the experiences of the hermits of old Russia: he decided to lock himself alone in a cabin in the middle taiga, on the shores of Baikal, for six months. Noting carefully his impressions of the silence, Sylvain Tesson shares with us an extraordinary experience.

Foxcatcher by Mark Shultz — the book behind the hottest film of 2014 starring Steve Carell, Channing Tatum and Mark Ruffalo. On 22nd January 1996 Dave Schultz, Olympic gold medallist and wrestling's golden boy, was shot in the back by John E. du Pont at the famed Foxcatcher estate in Pennsylvania. That started a two day siege at the ranch before the du Pont family heir was finally captured. Foxcatcher is Mark Schultz's vivid portrait of the complex relationship he and his brother had with du Pont, a man whose catastrophic break from reality lead to tragedy. No one knows the inside story of what went on behind the scenes at Foxcatcher Farms — and inside John du Pont's head — better than Mark Schultz, also an Olympic gold medalist and a part of the Foxcatcher team. Now a major motion picture from the director of Moneyball and Capote, this amazing story will be enjoyed by fans of Argo, Captain Phillips and American Hustle. Mark Schultz is an Olympic gold medalist and a national champion in free style wrestling. He lives in Southern Oregon, USA.

Hard-boiled detective fiction at its best: Raymond Chandler's best loved novel, The Big Sleep, published as a Penguin Essential for the first time. I was neat, clean, shaved and sober, and I didn't care who knew it. I was everything the well-dressed private detective ought to be. I was calling on four million dollars. (Los Angeles PI). Philip Marlowe is hired by wheelchair-bound General Sternwood to discover who is indulging in some petty blackmail. A weary, old man, Sternwood just wants the problem to go away. But Marlowe finds he has his work cut out just keeping Sternwood's wild, devil-may-care daughters out of trouble as they prowl LA's dirtiest and darkest streets. And pretty soon, he's up to his neck in hoodlums and corpses...

When Mae is hired to work for the Circle, the world's most powerful internet company, she feels she's been given the opportunity of a lifetime. Run out of a sprawling California campus, the Circle links users' personal emails, social media, and finances with their universal operating system, resulting in one online identity and a new age of transparency. Mae can't believe her great fortune to work for them — even as life beyond the campus grows distant, even as a strange encounter with a colleague leaves her shaken, even as her role at the Circle becomes increasingly public...

The Penguin English Library edition. As usual with the Sherlock Holmes stories it is very hard to say which are the best — but there are many stories here which would get the vote — ranging from The Boscombe Valley Mystery to the wonderful Adventure of Silver Blaze, from the Adventure of the Norwood Builder to A Case of Identity, but above to the uniquely strange and macabre Adventure of the Engineer's Thumb.

The Penguin English Library edition. Many readers would claim that The Adventure of the Copper Beeches or The Man with the Twisted Lip was their favourite Sherlock Holmes story — but then that would be doing an injustice to The Adventure of the Yellow Face and The Problem of Thor Bridge. It is just as well that in the end we do not have to choose — as if we did then there would be no doubt it should be The Adventure of the Six Napoleons.

Twelve bestselling authors, twelve Doctors, twelve brilliant adventures in time and space for all Doctor Who fans! This print anthology features the original eleven eShorts plus a brand-new Twelfth Doctor story by Holly Black.

Mr Jack has been nimble and he's been quick, searching through the history of nursery rhymes and he's found out all kind of plum tales, just like little Jack Horner. He's unearthed the answers to some very curious questions... Who were Mary Quite Contrary and Georgie Porgie? How could Hey Diddle Diddle offer an essential astronomy lesson? And if Ring a Ring a Roses isn't about catching the plague, then what is it really about? The ingenious book delves into the hidden meanings of the nursery rhymes and songs we all know so well and discovers all kinds of strange tales ranging from Viking raids to firewalking and from political rebellion to slaves being smuggled to freedom. Children have always played at being grown up and all kinds of episodes in our history are still being re-enacted today in a series of dark games (Oranges and Lemons traces a condemned man's journey across London to his execution, Goosie Gander is about dragging a hidden Catholic priest to prison) And there are many many more...

Husband and wife team Sam and Remi fargo are in Mexico, when they come upon an astonishing discovery — the skeleton of a man clutching an ancient sealed pot, and within the pot, a Mayan book, larger than anyone has ever seen. The book contains astonishing information about the Mayans, their cities and about mankind itself. The secrets are so powerful that some would do anything to possess them as the Fargos are about to find out. Before their adventures is done, many people will die for that book and Sam and Remi may just be among them...

The girl emerged from the woods, barely alive. Her story was beyond belief. But it was true. Every dreadful word of it. Days later, another desperate escapee is found — and a pattern is emerging. Pairs of victims are being abducted, imprisoned then faced with a terrible choice: kill or be killed. Would you rather lose your life or lose your mind?

April, 1890. London wakes to the shocking news of a mass prison escape. Walter Day and the Scotland Yard Murder Squad now face a desperate race against time: if they don't re capture the four convicted murderers before night settles, they'll vanish into the dark alleys of London's criminal underworld for ever.

Is It Really Too Much To Ask? is the fifth book in Jeremy Clarkson's bestselling The World According to Clarkson series. Well, someone's got to do it: in a world which simply will not see reason, Jeremy sets off on another quest to beat a path of sense through all the silliness and idiocy. And there's no knowing what might catch Jeremy's eye along the way. It could be: the merits of Stonehenge as a business model; why all meetings are a waste of time; the theft of the Queen's cows; one Norwegian man's unique approach to showing his gratitude; fitting a burglar alarm to a tortoise; or how. Lou Reed was completely wrong about what makes a perfect day Pithy and provocative, this is Clarkson at his best, taking issue with whatever nonsense gets in the way of his search for all that's worth celebrating. Why should we be forced to accept stuff that's a bit rubbish? Shouldn't things work? Why doesn't someone care? I mean, is it really too much to ask? It's a good thing we've still got Jeremy out there, still looking, without fear or favour, for the answers. Jeremy Clarkson becomes the hilarious voice of a nation once more in Is It Really Too Much To Ask? Volume 5 of The World According To Clarkson, following bestselling titles The World According to Clarkson, And Another Thing, For Crying Out Loud and How Hard Can It Be? Praise for Clarkson: Brilliant... laugh-out-loud. (Daily Telegraph). Outrageously funny... will have you in stitches. (Time Out). Jeremy Clarkson began his writing career on the Rotherham Advertiser. He now writes for the Sun and the Sunday Times and is the tallest person working in British television.

Here are attempts at human connection, both depraved and sublime, and the grinding struggle to survive against the crushing realities of the Soviet system: in Among Friends, a doting mother commits an atrocious act against her beloved son in an attempt to secure his future; The Time: Night examines the suicide of the great Russian poetess Anna Andreevna with heartbreaking clarity; while in Chocolates with Liqueur the struggle for ownership of an apartment between a nurse and a madman turns murderous. With the satirical eye of Cindy Sherman, the psychological perceptiveness of Dostoevsky, and the bleak absurdities of Beckett, Petrushevskaya blends macabre spectacle with transformative moments of grace and shows just why she is Russia's preeminent contemporary fiction writer. One of Russia's best living writers... her tales inhabit a borderline between this world and the next — The New York Times Ludmilla Petrushevskaya was born in Moscow in 1938 and is the only indisputable canonical writer currently writing in Russian today. She is the author of more than fifteen collections of prose, among them this short novel The Time: Night, shortlisted for the Russian Booker Prize in 1992, and Svoi Krug, a modern classic about 1980s Soviet intelligentsia. Petrushevskaya is equally important as a playwright: since the 1980s her numerous plays have been staged by the best Russian theater companies. In 2002, Petrushevskaya received Russia's most prestigious prize, The Triumph, for lifetime achievement. She lives in Moscow.

When do police helicopters catch criminals? Which borough of London is the happiest? Is czesc becoming a more common greeting than salaam? Geographer James Cheshire and designer Oliver Uberti could tell you, but they'd rather show you. By combining millions of data points with stunning design, they investigate how flights stack over Heathrow, who lives longest, and where Londoners love to tweet. The result? One hundred portraits of an old city in a very new way.

This is the ultimate history of the Blitz and bombing in the Second World War, from Wolfson Prize-winning historian and author Richard Overy. The use of massive fleets of bombers to kill and terrorize civilians was an aspect of the Second World War which continues to challenge the idea that Allies specifically fought a 'moral' war. For Britain, bombing became perhaps its principal contribution to the fighting as, night after night, exceptionally brave men flew over occupied Europe destroying its cities. The Bombing War radically overhauls our understanding of the War. It is the first book to examine seriously not just the most well-known parts of the campaign, but the significance of bombing on many other fronts — the German use of bombers on the Eastern Front for example (as well as much newly discovered material on the more familiar 'Blitz' on Britain), or the Allied campaigns against Italian cities. The result is the author's masterpiece — a rich, gripping, picture of the Second World War and the terrible military, technological and ethical issues that relentlessly drove all its participants into an abyss.

Expo 58 — Good-looking girls and sinister spies: a naive Englishman at loose in Europe in Jonathan Coe's brilliant comic novelLondon, 1958: unassuming civil servant Thomas Foley is plucked from his desk at the Central Office of Information and sent on a six-month trip to Brussels. His task: to keep an eye on The Brittania, a brand new pub which will form the heart of the British presence at Expo 58 — the biggest World's Fair of the century, and the first to be held since the Second World War.As soon as he arrives at the site, Thomas feels that he has escaped a repressed, backward-looking country and fallen headlong into an era of modernity and optimism. He is equally bewitched by the surreal, gigantic Atomium, which stands at the heart of this brave new world, and by Anneke, the lovely Flemish hostess who meets him off his plane. But Thomas's new-found sense of freedom comes at a price: the Cold War is at its height, the mischievous Belgians have placed the American and Soviet pavilions right next to each other — and why is he being followed everywhere by two mysterious emissaries of the British Secret Service? Expo 58 may represent a glittering future, both for Europe and for Thomas himself, but he will soon be forced to decide where his public and private loyaties really lie.For fans of Jonathan Coe's classic comic bestsellers What a Carve Up! and The Rotters' Club, this hilarious new novel, which is set in the Mad Men period of the mid 50s, will also be loved by readers of Nick Hornby, William Boyd and Ian McEwan.'Coe has huge powers of observation and enormous literary panache' Sunday Times'No one marries formal ingenuity with inclusiveness of tone more elegantly' Time Out'Coe is among the handful of novelists who can tell us something about the temper of our times' Observer'Thank goodness for Jonathan Coe, who records what Britain has lost in the past thirty years in his elegiac fiction' Scotland on SundayJonathan Coe was born in Birmingham in 1961. Expo 58 is his tenth novel. The previous nine are all available in Penguin: The Accidental Woman, A Touch of Love, The Dwarves of Death, What a Carve Up! (which won the 1995 John Llewellyn Rhys Prize), The House of Sleep (which won the 1998 Prix Medicis Etranger), The Rotters' Club (winner of the Everyman Wodehouse Prize), The Closed Circle, The Rain Before It Falls and The Terrible Privacy of Maxwell Sim. His biography of the novelist B.S. Johnson, Like a Fiery Elephant, won the 2005 Samuel Johnson Prize for best non-fiction book of the year.

Assassin's Creed: Unity is the seventh title in Oliver Bowden's phenomenally successful Assassin's Creed videogame tie-in series.1789: The magnificent city of Paris sees the dawn of the French Revolution. The cobblestone streets run red with blood as the people rise against the oppressive aristocracy. But revolutionary justice comes at a high price...At a time when the divide between the rich and poor is at its most extreme, and a nation is tearing itself apart, a young man and woman fight to avenge all they have lost.Soon Arno and Élise are drawn into the centuries-old battle between the Assassins and the Templars — a world with dangers more deadly than they could ever have imagined.The immersive story of the Assassins is continued in Oliver Bowden's gripping seventh Assassin's Creed novel, following Renaissance, Brotherhood, The Secret Crusade, Revelations, Forsaken and Black Flag.Oliver Bowden is the pen-name of an acclaimed novelist.

«Chronicle of a Death Foretold is a compelling, moving story exploring injustice and mob hysteria by the Nobel Laureate Gabriel Garcia Marquez, author of One Hundred Years of Solitude and Love in the Time of Cholera. 'On the day they were going to kill him, Santiago Nasar got up at five-thirty in the morning to wait for the boat the bishop was coming on.' Santiago Nasar is brutally murdered in a small town by two brothers. All the townspeople knew it was going to happen — including the victim. But nobody did anything to prevent the killing. Twenty seven years later, a man arrives in town to try and piece together the truth from the contradictory testimonies of the townsfolk. To at last understand what happened to Santiago, and why... «A masterpiece». (Evening Standard). «A work of high explosiveness — the proper stuff of Nobel prizes. An exceptional novel». (The Times). «Brilliant writer, brilliant book». (Guardian). As one of the pioneers of magic realism and perhaps the most prominent voice of Latin American literature, Gabriel Garcia Marquez has received international recognition for his novels, works of non-fiction and collections of short stories. Those published in translation by Penguin include Autumn of the Patriarch, Bon Voyage Mr. President, Collected Stories, The General in his Labyrinth, In the Evil Hour, Innocent Erendira and Other Stories, Leaf Storm, Living to Tell the Tale, Love in the Time of Cholera, Memories of Melancholy Whores, News of a Kidnapping, No-one Writes to the Colonel, Of Love and Other Demons, The Story of a Shipwrecked Sailor and Strange Pilgrims.»

«Nobel Prize winner and author of «One Hundred Years of Solitude» and «Love in the Time of Cholera», Gabriel Garcia Marquez blends the natural with supernatural in «Of Love and Other Demons» — a novel which explores community, superstition and collective hysteria. 'An ash-grey dog with a white blaze on its forehead burst on to the rough terrain of the market on the first Sunday of December'. When a witch doctor appears on the Marquis de Casalduero's doorstep prophesising a plague of rabies in the Colombian seaport, he dismisses her claims — until he hears that his young daughter, Sierva Maria, was one of four people bitten by a rabid dog, and the only one to survive. Sierva Maria appears completely unscathed — but as rumours of the plague spread, the Marquis and his wife wonder at her continuing good health. In a town consumed by superstition, it's not long before they, and everyone else, put her survival down to a demonic possession and begin to see her supernatural powers as the cause of the town's woes. Only the young priest charged with exorcizing the evil spirit recognises the girl's sanity, but can he convince the town that it's not her that needs healing? «Superb and intensely readable». («Time Out»). «A compassionate, witty and unforgettable masterpiece». («Daily Telegraph»). «At once nostalgic and satiric, a resplendent fable». («Sunday Times»). As one of the pioneers of magic realism and perhaps the most prominent voice of Latin American literature, Gabriel Garcia Marquez has received international recognition for his novels, works of non-fiction and collections of short stories. Those published in translation by Penguin include «Autumn of the Patriarch», «Bon Voyage Mr.President», «Collected Stories», «Chronicle of a Death Foretold», «The General in his Labyrinth», «Innocent Erendira and Other Stories», «In the Evil Hour», «Leaf Storm», «Living to Tell the Tale», «Love in the Time of Cholera», «Memories of My Melancholy Whores», «News of a Kidnapping», «No-one Writes to the Colonel», «One Hundred Years of Solitude», «The Story of a Shipwrecked Sailor» and «Strange Pilgrims».»

How does the stuff we see in art galleries or the middle of roundabouts come to be made and valued? Drawing on his life as an artist, Grayson Perry sets off to explore the boundaries and tensions at the heart of modern art, with many visual aids along the way. From the slippery subject of quality to the problem of rebelling in a world that thrives on rebellion to the tricky question of what can or can't be a work of art, Playing to the Gallery hopes to give everyone the essential tools with which to understand and appreciate art.