English > E. Novels > Popular Penguins

Anthony Burgess's A Clockwork Orange is the shocking seminal novel that spawned one of the most notorious films ever made. Fifteen-year-old Alex and his thrill-seeking gang regularly indulge in ultra-violence, rape and drugs, but when he is caught and brainwashed by a government psychologist Alex finds his new law-abiding life unbearable. Set in a terrifying dystopian future, A Clockwork Orange is a disturbing exploration of morality and free will. First published 1962; this edition with Blake Morrison introduction 1996.

A Room of One's Own grew out of a lecture that Virginia Woolf had been invited to give at Girton College, Cambridge in 1928. Ranging over Jane Austen and Charlotte Bronte and why neither of them could have written War and Peace, over the silent fate of Shakespeare's gifted (and imaginary) sister, over the effects of poverty and chastity on female creativity, she gives us one of the greatest feminist polemics of the century.

Out of his smoke-filled rooms in Baker Street stalks a figure to cause the criminal classes to quake in their boots and rush from their dens of iniquity . . . The twelve mysteries gathered in this first collection of Sherlock Holmes and Dr Watson's adventures reveal the brilliant consulting detective at the height of his powers. Problems involving a man with a twisted lip, a fabulous blue carbuncle and five orange pips tax Sherlock Holmes's intellect alongside some of his most famous cases.

Truman Capote's Breakfast at Tiffany's is a brilliant glimmer of the excitement of 40's New York.
Holly Golightly - brashly beautiful with a slim black dress, a mysterious past and dark glasses over varicoloured eyes - entrances all the men she meets, including the young writer living above her, though her recklessness may yet catch up with her.
Also containing three short stories, this edition shows the elegance and warmth of Capote's writing at its most flawless. First published 1958.

Charles Ryder, a lonely student at Oxford, is captivated by the outrageous and decadent Sebastian Flyte. Invited to Brideshead, Sebastian's magnificent family home, Charles welcomes the attentions of its eccentric, aristocratic inhabitants, gradually becoming infatuated with them and the life of privilege they inhabit - in particular, with Sebastian's remote sister, Julia. But he gradually comes to recognize his spiritual and social distance from them, eventually discovering a world where duty and desire, faith and happiness are in... read more

Arson, murder, sex and hair-raising midnight adventures at a town called Tainuia Junction. It's Friday when the silver-tongued Wes Pennington and his sidekick Cyril Kidman come to town with a trick to play on the local bookmaker. But there's already other skullduggery afoot ...not to speak of the Te Whakinga Kid, a Zorro nut and the wildest comic ever to ride the ranges. First published 1964.

Count Dracula's castle is a hellish world where night is day, pleasure is pain and the blood of the innocent prized above all. Young Jonathan Harker approaches the gloomy gates with no idea what he is about to face . . .And back in England eerie incidents are unfolding as strange puncture marks appear on a young woman's neck . . . But can Harker's fiance be saved? And where is the evil Dracula?

Victor Frankenstein is obsessed with the secret of resurrecting the dead. But when he makes a new man out of plundered corpses, his hideous creation fills him with disgust. Rejected by all humanity, the creature sets out to destroy Frankenstein and everyone he loves. And as the monster gets ever closer to his maker, hunter becomes prey in a lethal chase that carries them to the very end of the earth.

Every major foreign government has a file on British secret agent James Bond. Now, Russia's deadly SMERSH organisation has targeted him for elimination - they have the perfect bait in the irresistible Tatiana Romanova. Her mission is to lure Bond to Istanbul and seduce him while her superiors handle the rest. But when Bond walks willingly into the trap, a game of cross and double cross ensues...

For all the promise of his name, Jack Skeat cannot be a poet. His friend Rex Petley - eel-catcher, girl-chaser, motorbike rider - takes that prize. Is he also a murderer? And why, forty years later, does he drown out on the Gulf? Jack has to find out, and is drawn to examine their lives. Going West has long been regarded as one of the most autobiographical of Maurice Gee's novels.

In this haunting, magical fairytale collection, Oscar Wilde beautifully evokes (among others) the Happy Prince who was not so happy after all, the Selfish Giant who learned to love little children and the Star Child who did not love his parents as much as he should. Each of the stories shines with poetry and magic and will be enjoyed by children.

Truman Capote's In Cold Blood is both a masterpiece of journalism and a powerful crime thriller. Inspired by a 300-word article in The New York Times, Capote spent six years exploring and writing the story of Kansas farmer Herb Clutter, his family and the two young killers who brutally murdered them. In Cold Blood created a genre of novelistic non-fiction and made Capote's name with its unflinching portrayal of a comprehensible and thoroughly human evil First published 1965

Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre to this day entrances readers with its passionate portrayal of a woman struggling to make a life for herself in a cruel and indifferent world. As orphan Jane becomes governess at Thornfield Hall, she falls in love with her employer, Mr Rochester, only to discover that he has a terrible secret, one which may jeopardize their future happiness. Jane Eyre's struggle for independence has echoed with readers ever since.

D. H. Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover scandalized the world when it was first published in paperback, and helped put Penguin Books on trial. The powerful depiction of the sexual liaison of Constance Chatterley with the gamekeeper Mellors, while her invalid husband quietly seethes, brilliantly captures the perennial struggle between the classes and the sexes. First published 1928.

Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita is a dark and daring story of obsessive love and transgression. Humbert Humbert's lust for his pubescent step-daughter, Lolita, shocked readers when it was first published in the 1950s; yet the novel was also celebrated for its beautifully lyrical writing. Almost fifty years after its first publication, Lolita remains a powerful tale of perversion and love gone wrong. First published 1955.

Emma Bovary is beautiful and bored, trapped in her marriage to a mediocre doctor and stifled by the banality of provincial life. An ardent reader of sentimental novels, she longs for passion and seeks escape in fantasies of high romance, in voracious spending and, eventually, in adultery. But even her affairs bring her disappointment and the consequences are devastating.Flaubert's erotically charged novel caused a moral outcry on its publication in 1857. First published 1857.

Jack Kerouac's On the Road rocked the establishment with its seminal, stream-of-consciousness portrayal of 1950s underground America. Amidst a whirlwind of sex, drugs and jazz, writer Sal Paradise and his hero 'the holy con-man with the shining mind', Dean Moriarty traverse the country in search of life and experience. Wild and exuberant, this life-changing novel defined the Beat generation and inspired countless others. First published 1957.

Ken Kesey's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest captured the radical anti-establishment mood of 1960s America. Tyrannical Nurse Ratched rules her psychiatric ward with an iron fist and a penchant for electric shock therapy, so when the boisterous McMurphy arrives - intent on disruption and showing the other patients a good time - a titanic battle of wills emerges. Kesey explores the shadowy boundaries between conformity and individuality, sanity and madness, with devastating effect. First published 1962.

Pipes and kettledrums herald the arrival of gypsies on their annual visit to Macondo, the newly founded village where Jose Arcadio Buendía and his strong-willed wife, Ursula, have started their new life. As the mysterious Melquíades excites Aureliano Buendía's father with new inventions and tales of adventure, neither can know the significance of the indecipherable manuscript that the old gypsy passes into their hands. First published in Spanish 1967; this translation 1970.

While Joan Lindsay's haunting Australian classic Picnic at Hanging Rock is a work of fiction, the story is often considered one of Australia's greatest mysteries. In 1900, a class of young women from an exclusive private school go on an excursion to the isolated Hanging Rock, deep in the Australian bush. The excursion ends in tragedy when three girls and a teacher mysteriously vanish after climbing the rock. Only one girl returns, with no memory of what has become of the others . . .