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In a prison in Occupied France during the Second World War, the order is given that every tenth inmate is to be executed. Louis Chavel, a rich lawyer, draws the short straw and barters everything he owns to exchange places with another man and survive. Destitute but free, Chavel later returns to the house that he sold for his life, where he must face the consequences of his cowardice and seek redemption.

After the early death of her philandering husband, Etsuko moves into her father-in-law’s house, where she numbly submits to the old man’s advances. But soon she finds herself in love with the young servant Saburo. Tormented by his indifference, yet invigorated by her desire, she makes her move, with catastrophic consequences.

A band of thirteen-year-old boys reject the stupidity of the adult world. They decide it is illusory, hypocritical and sentimental, and train themselves in a brutal callousness they call ‘objectivity’. When the mother of one of them begins an affair with a ship’s officer, he and his friends idealise the man at first, but it is not long before they conclude that he is, in fact, soft and romantic. They regard this disillusionment as an act of betrayal on his part – and the retribution is deliberate and horrifying.

The story of World War I, through the lives and words of its poets The hundredth anniversary of the outbreak of what many believed would be the war to end all wars is in 2014. And while World War I devastated Europe, it inspired profound poetry―words in which the atmosphere and landscape of battle are evoked perhaps more vividly than anywhere else. The poets―many of whom were killed―show not only the war’s tragedy but also the hopes and disappointments of a generation of men. In Some Desperate Glory, the historian and biographer Max Egremont gives us a transfiguring look at the life and work of this assemblage of poets. Wilfred Owen with his flaring genius; the intense, compassionate Siegfried Sassoon; the composer Ivor Gurney; Robert Graves, who would later spurn his war poems; the nature-loving Edward Thomas; the glamorous Fabian Socialist Rupert Brooke; and the shell-shocked Robert Nichols―all fought in the war, and their poetry is a bold act of creativity in the face of unprecedented destruction. Some Desperate Glory includes a chronological anthology of the poets’ works, telling the story of the war not only through the lives of these writers but also through their art. This unique volume unites the poetry and the history of the war―so often treated separately―granting readers the pride, strife, and sorrow of the individual soldier’s experience coupled with a panoramic view of the war’s toll on an entire nation.

The Reluctant Fundamentalist is Mohsin Hamid’s thrillingly provocative international bestseller, available as a Penguin Essential for the first time. Shortlisted for the Man Booker prize in 2007 Now a major film directed by Mira Nair and starring Kate Hudson and Kiefer Sutherland – Excuse me, sir, but may I be of assistance? Ah, I see I have alarmed you. Do not be frightened by my beard. I am a lover of America …So speaks the mysterious stranger at a Lahore cafe as dusk settles. Invited to join him for tea, you learn his name and what led this speaker of immaculate English to seek you out. For he is more worldy than you might expect; better travelled and better educated. He knows the West better than you do. And as he tells you his story, of how he embraced the Western dream — and a Western woman — and how both betrayed him, so the night darkens. Then the true reason for your meeting becomes abundantly clear …Challenging, mysterious and thrillingly tense, Mohsin Hamid masterly The Reluctant Fundamentalist is a vital read teeming with questions and ideas about some of the most pressing issues of today globalised, fractured world. Masterful …A multi-layered and thoroughly gripping book, which works as a poignant love story, a powerful dissection of how US imperialist machinations have turned so many people against the world superpower – and as a thriller that subtly ratchets up the nerve-jangling tension towards an explosive ending Metro Beautifully written . ..more exciting than any thriller I read for a long time Philip Pullman A brilliant book Kiran Desai Admirably spare and amazingly exciting Rachel Cooke, New Statesman Mohsin Hamid is the author of The Reluctant Fundamentalist, Moth Smoke and How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia. His fiction has been translated into over 30 languages, received numerous awards, and been shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize. He has contributed essays and short stories to publications such as the Guardian, The New York Times, Financial Times, Granta, and Paris Review. Born and mostly raised in Lahore, he spent part of his childhood in California, studied at Princeton University and Harvard Law School, and has since lived between Lahore, London, and New York.

At the centre of this novel are two unlikely friends, Archie Jones and Samad Iqbal. Hapless veterans of World War II, Archie and Samad and their families become agents of England’s irrevocable transformation. A second marriage to Clara Bowden, a beautiful, albeit tooth-challenged, Jamaican half his age, quite literally gives Archie a second lease on life, and produces Irie, a knowing child whose personality doesn’t quite match her name (Jamaican for “no problem”). Samad’s late-in-life arranged marriage (he had to wait for his bride to be born), produces twin sons whose separate paths confound Iqbal’s every effort to direct them to his Islamic faith.

A searing account of George Orwell’s observations of working-class life in the bleak industrial heartlands of Yorkshire and Lancashire in the 1930s, The Road to Wigan Pier is a brilliant and bitter polemic that has lost of its political impact over time. His graphically unforgettable descriptions of social injustice, cramped slum housing, dangerous mining conditions, squalor, hunger and growing unemployment are written with unblinking honesty, fury and great humanity. It crystallized the ideas that would be found in Orwell’s later works and novels, and remains a powerful portrait of poverty, injustice and class divisions in Britain.

In mid 1920s Paris a group of young American expatriates set out for a festival in Pamplona. Among the bullfights and bouts of heavy drinking the relationships between them are tested, with jealousy coming to the fore as well as the protagonists youthful exuberance.

In 1930s America Macon learns about the tyranny of white society from his friend Guitar, though he is more concerned with escaping the familial tyranny of his own father. So while Guitar joins a terrorist group Macon goes home to the South, lured by tales of buried family treasure. But his odyssey back home and a deadly confrontation with Guitar leads to the discovery of something infinitely more valuable than gold: his past and the origins of his true self.

Men Without Women was a milestone in Hemingway’s career. Fiesta had already established him as a novelist of exceptional power, but with these short stories, his second collection, he showed that it is possible, within the space of a few pages, to recreate a scene with absolute truth, bringing to life details observed only by the eye of a uniquely gifted artist. Hemingway’s men are bullfighters and boxers, hired hands and hard drinkers, gangsters and gunmen. Each of their stories deals with masculine toughness unsoftened by woman’s hand. Incisive, hard-edged, pared down to the bare minimum, they are classic Hemingway territory – they helped establish him as one of the great literary authors of the twentieth century, and one of the best American authors of all time.

When inspiration leads Theodore Gumbril to design a type of pneumatic trouser cushion to ease the discomfort of sedentary life, he decides the time has come to give up teaching and seek his fortune in the metropolis. He soon finds himself caught up in the hedonistic world of his friends Mercaptan, Lypiatt and the thoroughly civilised Myra Viveash, and his burning ambitions begin to lose their urgency. . .Wickedly funny and deliciously barbed, Antic Hay epitomises the glittering neuroticism of the twenties.