Penguin Group

When Alice steps through the looking-glass, she enters a very strange world of chess pieces and nursery rhyme characters such as Humpty Dumpty, Tweedledee and Tweedledum and the angry Red Queen. Nothing is what it seems and, in fact, through the looking-glass, everything is distorted.

This selection of Kafka's shorter prose writings includes one of the few works published during his lifetime: the harrowing story of Gregor Samsa's overnight transformation into a verminous insect, his record of the effect of this sudden metamorphosis on himself and the reaction of his family. It conveys with an unsettling mixture of subjective involvement and objective detachment the complex feelings of guilt, affection, responsibility and self-doubt that characterise Kafka's perception of intimate emotional relationships — themes that are continued in the quasi-fictional story The Judgement and the quasi-autobiographical Letter to his Father. Issues of guilt, punishment and penance are also treated with startling brutality in the story set in a tropical penal colony that describes in horrific detail a machine designed to inflict an ingenious and barbaric form of execution on victims of a summary and arbitrary justice — a machine, however, that in this instance destroys not its intended victim, but its zealous operator and, simultaneously, itself. Kafka's enigmatic fables deal, often in dark and quirkily humorous terms, with the insoluble dilemmas of a world in which there appears to be no reassurance, no reliable guidance to resolving our existential and emotional uncertainties and anxieties.

Who is more deadly? An enemy? A friend? Or a lover? Bonnie Graham is in her friend's flat. She is alone, except for the dead body lying in a pool of blood. What happened? What will she do? And is any or all of it her fault? Bonnie is a music teacher who has spent a long, hot summer in London rehearsing with a band. It was supposed to be fun, but the tricky knots of the band's friendships unravel with each passing day. What was meant to be a summer of happiness, music and love turns deadly as lovers betray, passions turn homicidal and friendship itself becomes a crime. Someone in the band must be a killer. Is it Bonnie? And if not — who is it?

When Sam and Eddie Hart opened Barrafina, their no-reservations tapas bar and restaurant in London's Soho, they had no idea how successful it would be. Four years on and it is always packed, always stylish, always lively. And so is the food: together with their Basque-born head chef Nieves Barragan Mohacho, the Harts are cooking the best Spanish food in London today. In this cookbook, they share their secrets and recipes: this is not difficult, fancy restaurant food, but gutsy, fresh, sometimes delicate, sometimes hearty food, that a home cook will be able to prepare easily. First, there is food to eat with your hands: fried pimientos de Padron, salt cod fritters and delicias, the Spanish equivalent of Devils on Horseback. Then cold meats; on to fish and shellfish — from simple razor clams on the grill, to more sophisticated dishes such as turbot with cavolo nero; rice dishes and paellas; big dishes of roast and braised meat — from suckling pig for a special occasion to rabbit stew or roast cumin-rubbed pork with quince sauce; and, desserts in the form of chocolate and almond tarts, cakes and the classic Crema Catalana. There is everything here to help you recreate great Spanish food at home. With over 120 recipes, Nieves, Sam and Eddie will whisk you through step-by-step instructions, showing you everything, from how to make the more difficult things, such as arrocina beans with chorizo, morcilla and pork belly, to how to cook a simple but perfect tortilla.

Since its original publication nearly thirty years ago, Getting to Yes has helped millions of people learn a better way to negotiate. One of the primary business texts of the modern era, it is based on the work of the Harvard Negotiation Project, a group that deals with all levels of negotiation and conflict resolution. Getting to Yes offers a proven, step-by-step strategy for coming to mutually acceptable agreements in every sort of conflict. Thoroughly updated and revised, it offers readers a straight-forward, universally applicable method for negotiating personal and professional disputes without getting angry-or getting taken.

Written in mischievous and magically flowing prose, Ada or Ardor: A Family Chronicle — Nabokov's other great love story — offers even more sexual and imaginative surprises than Lolita. A romance that follows Ada from her first childhood meeting with Van on his uncle's country estate, in a 'dream-bright' America, through eighty years of rapture, Nabokov's 'longest, richest, most ambitious novel' also becomes, as Brian Boyd says, a great many other things: 'myth, fairy tale, utopian idyll, family chronicle, personal memoir, historical romance, erotic catalogue ... picture gallery and filmic folly'.

Cas Perry doesn't want a relationship. When her father walked out on her and her mother she decided relationships, love, marriage, the whole shegang, simlpy weren't worth the heartache. But is Cas, immoral most of the time and amoral when it comes to business, going too far with her new TV programme, Sex with an Ex? Unfeeling and unscrupulous, she ruthlessly manipulates everyone she comes into contact with. Until she meets Darren. A babe. Trouble is, he's a highly principled babe. He believes in love, marriage, fidelity and constancy, so can he believe in Cas? Is it possible the world is a better place than she imagined? And if it is, after a lifetime of playing games, is this discovery too late?

Alice Loudon couldn’t resist abandoning her old, safe life for a wild affair. And in Adam Tallis, a rugged mountaineer with a murky past, she finds a man who can teach her things about herself that she never even suspected. But sexual obsession has its dark side – and so does Adam. Soon both are threatening all that Alice has left. First her sanity. Then her life.

In this magisterial examination of the Presidency over the course of the 20th Century, the author explores the history of the world's greatest elective office and the role each incumbent has played in changing the scope of its powers. Using individual presidential portraits of each of the presidents of the past century Graubard asks, and answers, a wide variety of crucial questions about each President. What intellectual, social and political assets did they bring to the White House, and how quickly did they deplete or mortgage that capital? How well did they cope with crises, foreign and domestic? How much attention did they pay to their election pledges after they were elected? How did they use the media, old and new? Above all, how did they conduct themselves in office and what legacy did they leave to their successors? Graubard provides original analysis in each case, and reaches many surprising conclusions.

The Queen of Storytellers is back — with a triumphant tale of one woman's struggle over adversity. In 1786, a fisherman's daughter from Cornwall called Mary Broad was sentenced to be hung for theft. But her sentence was commuted, and she was transported to Australia, one of the first convicts to arrive there. How Mary escaped the harsh existence of the colony and found true love, and how she was captured and taken back to London in chains, only to be released after a trial where she was defended by no less than James Boswell, is one of the most gripping and moving stories of human endeavour (based on an amazing true story) you will ever read.

'We fed the monster until it blew up... ' While Wall Street was busy creating the biggest credit bubble of all time, a few renegade investors saw it was about to burst, bet against the banking system — and made a fortune. From the jungles of the trading floor to the casinos of Las Vegas, this is the outrageous story of the misfits, mavericks and geniuses who, against all odds, made the greatest financial killing in history.

Tiffany Case is the sort of beautiful, devil-may-care blonde who could get a man into deep trouble — if he wanted. She stands between James Bond and the leaders of a diamond-smuggling ring that stretches from Africa via London to the States. Bond uses her to infiltrate this gang, but once in America the hunter becomes the hunted. Bond is in real danger until help comes from an unlikely quarter.

John Smith is not your average teenager. He regularly moves from small town to small town. He changes his name and identity. He does not put down roots. He cannot tell anyone who or what he really is. If he stops moving those who hunt him will find and kill him. But you can't run forever. So when he stops in Paradise, Ohio, John decides to try and settle down. To fit in. And for the first time he makes some real friends. People he cares about — and who care about him. Never in John's short life has there been space for friendship, or even love. But it's just a matter of time before John's secret is revealed. He was once one of nine. Three of them have been killed. John is Number Four. He knows that he is next...

A woman finds herself filling a pit in the forest in the middle of the night; a family lock each other in their bedrooms to battle a strange plague; a wizard punishes two beautiful ballerinas by turning them into one hugely fat circus performer; a colonel is warned not to lift the veil from his dead wife's face; and, a distraught father brings his daughter back to life by eating human hearts in his dreams. In these blackly comic tales of revenge, disturbing deaths and haunting melancholy, Ludmilla Petrushevskaya blends miracles and madness in the darkest of modern fairy tales.

M looked coldly across the desk. It was going to be dirty work and Bond, because he belonged to the Double 0 section, had been chosen for it. 'You've got to kill this sniper. And you've got to kill him before he gets Agent 272. Is that understood? So, it was to be murder.

June the first, a bright summer's evening, a Monday... And into the busy, bustling homes at 66 Star Street slips, unseen, a mysterious visitor. As the couples, flatmates and repentant singletons of No 66 fall in and out of love, clutch at and drop secrets, laugh, cry and simply try to live, no one suspects the visitor patiently waiting in the wings. For soon, really very soon, everything is going to change...

Get ready to throw the best bake sale ever with thirteen of Jamie's Favourite sweet treats. These biscuits, brownies, cupcakes, muffins and chocolates will fly off your stand in no time flat, and you'll raise loads of money for Comic Relief along the way. And, because you'll have baked all this yourself, you'll get to enjoy the best bit of all: licking the bowl! Everyone wins! Retailing at GBP3, GBP2.50 will go straight to Comic Relief to do good works across the whole of the UK and Africa. So start making, start baking and start raising loads of cash! The scrummy recipes are: Almond and Pine Nut Cookies; Chocolate Rocky Road; Lemon Butter Biscuits; Beautiful Black Forest Cupcakes; Butternut Squash Muffins with a Frosty Top Sea Salt; Caramel Chocolate Cake Carrot; Honey Cake Blueberry Bakewell Tart Sticky; Toffee Cupcakes Children's Party Cake; Chocolate Brownies Sticky Rhubarb; and, Ginger Cake Home-Made Fudge.

Jeremy Clarkson had a dream... A world where the nonsensical made sense, the idiotic was abolished and the sheer bloody brilliant was embraced. In How Hard Can It Be? our hero embarks on a quest to set the world to rights. Again. En-route he discovers how rhubarb will become the new crack, that a comb over will end anyone's quest for global domination and what unites a Filipino chambermaid in Abergavenny with Prince Andrew. For anyone who's ever woken up and thought the time has come to stop the nonsense and celebrate the sensational, read on. Because seriously, how hard can it be?

Spanning 1979-1987, The Fry Chronicles charts Stephen's arrival at Cambridge up to his thirtieth birthday. Heartbreaking, a delight, a lovely, comfy book. (The Times). Perfect prose and excruciating honesty. A grand reminiscence of college and theatre and comedyland in the 1980s, with tone-perfect anecdotes and genuine readerly excitement. What Fry does, essentially, is tell us who he really is. Above all else, a thoughtful book. And namedroppy too, and funny, and marbled with melancholy. (Observer). Arguably the greatest living Englishman. (Independent on Sunday). Extremely enjoyable. (Sunday Times). Fry's linguistic facility remains one of the Wildean wonders of the new media age. The patron saint of British intelligence. (Daily Telegraph).

Richard lands in East Asia in search of an earthly utopia. In Thailand, he is given a map promising an unknown island, a secluded beach — and a new way of life. What Richard finds when he gets there is breathtaking: more extraordinary, more frightening than his wildest dreams. But how long can paradise survive here on Earth? And what lengths will Richard go to in order to save it?

Seventeen-year-old Amy joins her parents as frozen cargo aboard the vast spaceship Godspeed and expects to awaken on a new planet, three hundred years in the future. Never could she have known that her frozen slumber would come to an end fifty years too soon and that she would be thrust into the brave new world of a spaceship that lives by its own rules. Amy quickly realizes that her awakening was no mere computer malfunction. Someone--one of the few thousand inhabitants of the spaceship--tried to kill her. And if Amy doesn't do something soon, her parents will be next. Now Amy must race to unlock Godspeed's hidden secrets. But out of her list of murder suspects, there's only one who matters: Elder, the future leader of the ship and the love she could never have seen coming.

Malcolm Pembroke has the gold — and five ex-wives and nine children. When his least likable ex-wife meets violent death, Malcolm begins to worry about his own neck. Malcolm calls on his son Ian to protect him from his nearest — if not always dearest — relatives, and Ian comes up with the critical clue in the dark Pembroke past of greed, hate, lust and revenge.

This devastating and inspiring book, by one of the world's leading economic thinkers, lays out not only the course of the financial crisis which began in 2007, but its underlying causes, and shows why much more radical reforms are needed than are currently being contemplated if we are to avoid similar 'systemic' crises in the future. It shows why the bailout has been only marginally effective and how it could have been much more so, and outlines the enormous opportunity — not yet taken — to design a new global financial architecture. It is highly critical of many of the actions not only of George Bush's administration, but also of Barack Obama's. It shows why the bulk of the cost of recovery should be borne by those in the financial sector — not just for reasons of natural justice, but for compelling economic reasons also. More than any of this, it reminds readers to think constantly about what economies are for, and the human purposes they serve. Freefall is an instant classic, combining an enthralling whodunit account of the current crisis with a bracing discussion of the broader economic issues at stake.

From his prison cell, Jasper Dean tells the unlikely story of his scheming father Martin, his crazy Uncle Terry and how the three of them upset — mostly unintentionally — an entire continent. Incorporating death, parenting (good and bad kinds), one labyrinth, first love, a handbook for criminals, a scheme to make everyone rich and an explosive suggestion box, Steve Toltz's «A Fraction of the Whole» is a hilarious, heartbreaking story of families and how to survive them.