Books in the Penguin Modern Classics series

For Chancelade, the world is teeming with beauty, wonder and possibilities. From a small boy playing on the beach, through his adolescence and his first love, to the death of his father and on to the end of his own life, he relishes the most minute details of his physical surroundings - whether a grain of sand, an insect or a blade of grass - as he journeys on a sensory adventure from cradle to grave. Filled with cosmic ruminations, lyrical description and virtuoso games of language and the imagination, Terra Amata brilliantly explores humankind's place in the universe, the relationship between us and the Earth we inhabit and, ultimately, how to live.

When Alistair Cooke retired in March 2004 and then died a few weeks later, he was acclaimed by many as one of the greatest broadcasters of all time. His Letters from America, which began in 1946 and continued uninterrupted every week until early 2004, kept the world in touch with what was happening in Cooke's wry, liberal and humane style. This selection, made largely by Cooke himself and supplemented by his literary executor, gives us the very best of these legendary broadcasts. Over half have never appeared in print before. It is a remarkable portrait of a continent - and a man.

Love gets in the way of progress when Raman, a sign painter, meets Daisy, who wishes to bring birth control to the city of Malgudi.

'Powerful . . . unputdownably gripping' Guardian'The island itself. Its throbbing heat as if in a belljar under the sun, the scorpion in his son's bed, the deafening sound of cicadas'During his first holiday on the island of Porquerolles Dr Mahe caught a glimpse of something irresistible. As the memory continues to haunt him, he falls prey to a delusion that may offer an escape from his conventional existence - or may destroy him. This is the first English translation of The Mahe Circle, Simenon's dark, malevolent depiction of an ordinary man trapped in mundanity and consumed by obsession. 'Extraordinary . . . Simenon is one of the most important writers of the 20th century' Independent

Based on a real-life love triangle and later made into Fran ois Truffaut's famous New Wave film, Henri-Pierre Roche's Jules et Jim is a paean to youth set in free-spirited Paris before the First World War. Jules and Jim live a carefree, bohemian existence: they write in cafes, travel when the mood takes them, and share the women they love without jealousy. Like Lucie, flawless, an abbess, and Odile, impulsive, mischievous, almost feral. But it is Kate - with a smile the two friends have determined to follow always, but capricious enough to jump in the Seine from spite - who steals their hearts most thoroughly. Henri-Pierre Roche was in his mid-seventies when he wrote this, his autobiographical debut novel. The inspiration for the legendary film directed by Fran ois Truffaut, it captures perfectly with excitement and great humour the tenderness of three people in love with each other and with life.This Penguin Modern Classics edition is translated by Patrick Evans with an introduction by Agn s C. Poirier and an afterword by Fran ois Truffaut.Henri-Pierre Roche (1879-1959) was born in Paris. After studying art at the Academie Julian, he became a journalist and art dealer, mixing with the avant-garde artistic set; his friends and acquaintances included the artists Michel Duchamp and Francis Picabia, and in 1905 he introduced Gertrude Stein to Pablo Picasso. In 1916, following his discharge from the French army, Roche went to New York and set up a Dadaist magazine, The Blind Man, with Duchamp and the artist Beatrice Wood. It wasn't until his seventies that he wrote the semi-autobiographical Jules et Jim (1953); his second novel, Les deux anglaises et le continent, was published in 1956.If you enjoyed Jules et Jim, you might like Raymond Radiguet's The Devil in the Flesh, also available in Penguin Modern Classics.'A perfect hymn to love and perhaps to life'Fran ois Truffaut, director of Jules et Jim and The 400 Blows

Tristes Tropiques begins with the line 'I hate travelling and explorers', yet during his life Claude Levi-Strauss travelled from wartime France to the Amazon basin and the dense upland jungles of Brazil, where he found 'human society reduced to its most basic expression'. His account of the people he encountered changed the field of anthropology, transforming Western notions of 'primitive' man. Tristes Tropiques is a major work of art as well as of scholarship. It is a memoir of exquisite beauty and a masterpiece of travel writing: funny, discursive, movingly detailing personal and cultural loss, and brilliantly connecting disparate fields of thought. Few books have had as powerful and broad an impact.