Books in the Penguin Modern Classics series

Portrays the picaresque adventures of Munoo, a young boy who is forced to leave his hill village to fend for himself and discover the world. This book describes the fight for survival that illuminates, with raw immediacy, the grim fate of the masses in pre-Partition India.

When John Franklin brings his plane down into Occupied France at the height of the Second World war, there are two things in his mind - the safety of his crew and his own badly injured arm. It is a stroke of unbelievable luck when the family of a French farmer risk their lives to offer the airmen protection. During the hot summer weeks that follow, the English officer and the daughter of the house are drawn inexorably to each other...

Perhaps the funniest travel book ever written, Remote People begins with a vivid account of the coronation of Emperor Ras Tafari - Haile Selassie I, King of Kings - an event covered by Evelyn Waugh in 1930 as special correspondent for The Times. It continues with subsequent travels throughout Africa, where natives rub shoulders with eccentric expatriates, settlers with Arab traders and dignitaries with monks. Interspersed with these colourful tales are three 'nightmares' which describe the vexations of travel, including returning home.

As well as the nine essays on his country's psyche and history that make up 'The Labyrinth of Solitude', this highly acclaimed volume also includes 'The Other Mexico', Paz's heartfelt response to the government massacre of over three hundred students in Mexico City in 1968, and 'Return to the Labyrinth of Solitude', in which he discusses his famous work with Claude Fell. The two final essays contain further reflections on the Mexican government.

An inability to control his fantasies sends Gilbert Pinfold, a well-known author, cruising on a Ceylon-bound liner to recuperate. Yet, to his horror, the hallucinations increase and life on board becomes very embarrassing. This curious and diverting novel throws new light on Evelyn Waugh's remarkable talent.

Growing up in Kenya in the early twentieth century, the brothers Matu and Muthegi are raised according to customs that, they are told, have existed since the beginning of the world. But when the 'red' strangers come, sunburned Europeans who seek to colonize their homeland, the lives of the two Kikuyu tribesmen begin to change in dramatic new ways. Soon, their people are overwhelmed by unknown diseases that traditional magic seems powerless to control. And as the strangers move across the land, the tribe rapidly finds itself forced to obey foreign laws that seem at best bizarre, and that at worst entirely contradict the Kikuyu's own ancient ways, rituals and beliefs.

It's 1959 and Harry 'Rabbit' Angstrom, one time high school sports superstar, is going nowhere. At twenty-six he is trapped in a second-rate existence - stuck with a fragile, alcoholic wife, a house full of overflowing ashtrays and discarded glasses, a young son and a futile job. With no way to fix things, he resolves to flee from his family and his home in Pennsylvania, beginning a thousand-mile journey that he hopes will free him from his mediocre life. Because, as he knows only too well, 'after you've been first-rate at something, no matter what, it kind of takes the kick out of being second-rate'.Includes an afterword by the author.

Middle-aged, brilliant and bored, Roger Lambert is a professor of Divinity at a New England university. Firmly convinced that religious belief can only justified by recourse to pure faith, he is dismissive when visited by a gangling student who claims, with evangelical zeal, that computer technology is on the brink of proving the existence of God. But when his unhappy wife flings herself into an affair with the younger man, and Roger's faith in his own placid life is thrown into question. With his marriage close to collapse, he finds himself increasingly drawn to his own half-niece, the nineteen-year-old Verna, in this cunning and comic exploration of religion, uncertainty and passion.

Claudius has survived the murderous intrigues of his predecessors to become, reluctantly, Emperor of Rome. Here he recounts his surprisingly successful reign: how he cultivates the loyalty of the army and the common people to repair the damage caused by Caligula; his relations with the Jewish King Herod Agrippa; and his invasion of Britain. But the growing paranoia of absolute power and the infidelity of his promiscuous young wife Messalina mean that his good fortune will not last forever. In this second part of Robert Graves's fictionalized autobiography, Claudius - wry, rueful, always inquisitive - brings to life some of the most scandalous and violent times in history.Includes an introduction by Barry Unsworth, as well as explanatory footnotes.

As Minister for Culture, the Honourable M. A. Nanga is 'a man of the people', as cynical as he is charming, and a roguish opportunist. At first, the contrast between Nanga and Odili, a former pupil who is visiting the ministry, appears huge. But in the 'eat-and-let-eat' atmosphere, Odili's idealism soon collides with his lusts - and the two men's personal and political tauntings threaten to send their country into chaos. Published, prophetically, just days before Nigeria's first attempted coup in 1966, A Man of the People is an essential part of his body of work dealing with modern African history.

Presents a story that integrates ethics, metaphysics, epistemology, politics, economics, and sex. This novel presents a panorama of human life - from the productive genius who becomes a worthless playboy to the great steel industrialist who does not know that he is working for his own destruction to the philosopher who becomes a pirate.

When a history professor - Alfred Clayton, the hero of John Updike's fifteenth novel - is asked to record his impressions of the Ford Administration, he recalls a turbulent piece of personal history as well: his unfinished book on 19th-century president James Buchanan.

Retells the tale of King Solomon and a child claimed by two mothers.

In 1940s Shanghai, beautiful young Jiazhi spends her days playing mahjong and drinking tea with high society ladies. But China is occupied by invading Japanese forces and things are not always what they seem in wartime. Jiazhi s life is a front. A patriotic student radical, her mission is to seduce a powerful employee of the occupying government and lead him to the assassin s bullet. Yet as she waits for him to arrive at their liaison, Jiazhi begins to wonder if she is cut out to be a femme fatale and coldly take Mr Yi to his death. Or is she beginning to fall in love with him?A passionate tale of espionage, deception and love, Lust, Caution is accompanied here by four further dazzling short stories by Eileen Chang.

Eileen Chang is one of the great writers of twentieth-century China, where she enjoys a passionate following both on the mainland and in Taiwan. At the heart of Chang's achievement is her short fiction tales of love, longing, and the shifting and endlessly treacherous shoals of family life. Written when she was still in her twenties, these extraordinary stories combine an unsettled, probing, utterly contemporary sensibility, keenly alert to sexual politics and psychological ambiguity, with an intense lyricism that echoes the classics of Chinese literature. Love in a Fallen City, the first collection in English of this dazzling body of work, introduces readers to the stark and glamorous vision of a modern master.

In a small Pennsylvania town in the late 1940s, schoolteacher George Caldwell yearns to find some meaning in his life. Alone with his teenage son for three days in a blizzard, Caldwell sees his son grow and change as he himself begins to lost touch with his life. Interwoven with the myth of Chiron, the noblest centaur, and his own relationship to Prometheus, The Centaur is one of John Updike's most brilliant and unusual novels.

Of the Farm recounts Joey Robinson's visit to the farm where he grew up and where his mother now lives alone. Accompanied by his newly acquired second wife, Peggy, and an eleven-year-old stepson, Joey spends three days reassessing and evaluating the course his life has run. But for Joey and Peggy, the delicate balance of love and sex is threatened by a dangerous new awareness.

Between 1920 and 1934, Gerald Brenan lived in the remote Spanish village of Yegen and South of Granada depicts his time there, vividly evoking the essence of his rural surroundings and the Spanish way of life before the Civil War. Here he portrays the landscapes, festivals and folk-lore of the Sierra Nevada, the rivalries, romances and courtship rituals, village customs, superstitions and characters. Fascinating details emerge, from cheap brothels to archaeological remains, along with visits from Brenan s friends from the Bloomsbury group Lytton Strachey and Virginia Woolf among them. Knowledgeable, elegant and sympathetic, this is a rich account of Spain s vanished past.

This collection of new translations brings together the small proportion of Kafka's works that he himself thought worthy of publication. It includes Metamorphosis, his most famous work, an exploration of horrific transformation and alienation; Meditation, a collection of his earlier studies; The Judgement, written in a single night of frenzied creativity; The Stoker, the first chapter of a novel set in America and a fascinating occasional piece, and The Aeroplanes at Brescia, Kafka's eyewitness account of an air display in 1909. Together, these stories reveal the breadth of Kafka's literary vision and the extraordinary imaginative depth of his thought.

In 1949, two young Cuban musicians, brothers Cesar and Nestor, leave Havana for New York. By day they work hard, by night they are the Mambo Kings: packing out clubs, dance halls and theatres with their sensuous, pulsing Latin music. This is the story of Cesar and Nestor and their changing fortunes as they try to make it big in America.

Quentin is a successful lawyer in New York, but inside his head he is struggling with his own sense of guilt and the shadows of his past relationships. One of these an ill-fated marriage to the charming and beautiful Maggie, who went from operating a switchboard to become a self-destructive star - a singer everyone wanted a piece of. After the Fall is often seen as the most explicitly autobiographical of Arthur Miller's plays, and Maggie as an unflinching portrait of Miller's ex-wife Marilyn Monroe, only two years after her suicide. But in its psychological acuity and depth, and its brilliant, dreamlike structure, it is a literary, and not just biographical, masterpiece.

Tennessee Williams's controversial Hollywood screenplay Baby Doll opens with Archie Lee's teenage bride driving him to distraction, as she has refused to consummate their marriage until the day of her twentieth birthday. Enter wily Sicilian Silva Vaccaro, Archie's rival both in the cotton business and for the affections of the flirtatious Baby Doll, and things reach breaking-point. This volume also contains Something Unspoken, a brilliantly comic study of a wealthy, manipulative Southern spinster, and Summer and Smoke, a sexually charged portrayal of Alma, a sensitive, unmarried minister's daughter, and her childhood love, the wild, sensual doctor's son John.

Contains the complete novels of George Orwell: Animal Farm, Burmese Days, A Clergyman's Daughter, Coming up for Air, Keep the Aspidistra Flying and Nineteen Eighty-Four.Includes explanatory notes on the etymology of the language 'Newspeak'.

This collection of essays contains some of the most important pieces of criticism of the twentieth century, including the classics 'The Aesthetics of Silence', a brilliant account of language, thought and consciousness, and 'Trip to Hanoi', written during the Vietnam War. Here too is an excoriating account of America's identity and future, a robust and surprising discussion of pornography and other richly rewarding writings on art, film, literature and politics.

Beginning as surprisingly formal notes from the road to his friends Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac, the letters gradually deepen in substance and style. Burroughs's letters show the development of both the man and the writer, vividly documenting his (often turbulent) personal and cultural history. The collection provides a key to opening up and contextualizing Burroughs's fiction, but more than that it shows how letter-writing was itself integral to his life and creative process.

Walter Benjamin - philosopher, essayist, literary and cultural theorist - was one of the most original writers and thinkers of the twentieth century. This new selection brings together Benjamin's major works, including 'One-Way Street', his dreamlike, aphoristic observations of urban life in Weimar Germany; 'Unpacking My Library', a delightful meditation on book-collecting; the confessional 'Hashish in Marseille'; and 'The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction', his seminal essay on how technology changes the way we appreciate art. Also including writings on subjects ranging from Proust to Kafka, violence to surrealism, this is the essential volume on one of the most prescient critical voices of the modern age. Contains: 'Unpacking My Library'; 'One-Way Street'; 'The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction'; 'Brief History of Photography'; 'Hashish in Marseille'; 'On the Critique of Violence'; 'The Job of the Translator'; 'Surrealism'; 'Franz Kafka' and 'Picturing Proust'.

In the essays collected here William Langewiesche considers how flying has altered not only how we move about the earth, but also how we view our world and our place in it. With vivid descriptions of the aesthetics and excitement of flight, Langewiesche also writes of the risks that go with this beauty: the perils of air traffic control, and the dangers of nervous passengers and bad weather. Full of spare and elegant prose, Aloft is a fascinating journey into the new, profound dimension that flight has added to the human experience.

Using details of the ancient Scandinavian legends that were the inspiration for Hamlet, John Updike brings to life Gertrude's girlhood as the daughter of King Rorik, her arranged marriage to the man who becomes King Hamlet, and her middle-aged affair with her husband's younger brother. As only he could, Updike recasts a tale of medieval violence and presents the case for its central couple that Shakespeare only hinted at. Gertrude's warmth and lucidity, Claudius's soldierly yet peaceable powers of command are seen afresh against a background of fond intentions and familial dysfunction, on a stage darkened by the ominous shadow of a sullen, disaffected prince.