Penguin Group

This is a collection of 100 postcards, each featuring a different and iconic Penguin book jacket. From classics to crime, here are over seventy years of quintessentially British design in one box. In 1935 Allen Lane stood on a platform at Exeter railway station, looking for a good book for the journey to London. His disappointment at the poor range of paperbacks on offer led him to found Penguin Books. The quality paperback had arrived. Declaring that 'good design is no more expensive than bad', Lane was adamant that his Penguin paperbacks should cost no more than a packet of cigarettes, but that they should always look distinctive. Ever since then, from their original — now world-famous — look featuring three bold horizontal stripes, through many different stylish, inventive and iconic cover designs, Penguin's paperback jackets have been a constantly evolving part of Britain's culture. And whether they're for classics, crime, reference or prize-winning novels, they still follow Allen Lane's original design mantra. Sometimes, you definitely should judge a book by its cover.

For decades, Clive Cussler has been delighting readers with novels filled with suspense, action and sheer audacity. Now he does it again, in one of the wildest, most entertaining historical thrillers in years. April 1950: The rusting hulk of a steam locomotive rises from the deep waters of a Montana lake. Inside is all that remains of three men who died forty-four years before. But it is not the engine nor its grisly contents that interest the people watching nearby. It is what is about to come next...1906: For two years, the western states of America have been suffering an extraordinary crime spree: a string of bank robberies by a single man who then cold-bloodedly murders any and all witnesses, and then vanishes without a trace. Fed up by the depredations of 'The Butcher Bandit', the U.S. government brings in the best man they can find — a tall, lean, no-nonsense detective named Isaac Bell who has caught thieves and killers from coast to coast. But he has never had a challenge like this one. From Arizona to Colorado to the streets of San Francisco during its calamitous earthquake and fire, he pursues what is quickly becoming clear to him is the best criminal mind he has ever encountered, and the woman who seems to hold the key to the man's identity. Using science, deduction and intuition, he repeatedly draws near, only to grasp at empty air, but at least he knows his pursuit is having an effect. Because his quarry is getting angry now, and has turned the chase back on him. The hunter has become the hunted. And soon, it will take all of Bell's skills not merely to prevail...but to survive. Filled with intricate plotting, his signature dazzling set pieces, and not one, but two, extraordinary villains, this is the master working at the height of his powers.

This investigation of religion by greatest psychoanalyst of the twentieth-century explores the role faith can take in the life of man, what it can mean to us and why as a species we are inclined towards it. Throughout history, some books have changed the world. They have transformed the way we see ourselves — and each other. They have inspired debate, dissent, war and revolution. They have enlightened, outraged, provoked and comforted. They have enriched lives — and destroyed them. Now Penguin brings you the works of the great thinkers, pioneers, radicals and visionaries whose ideas shook civilization and helped make us who we are.

The Rough Guide to Paris provides accounts on the classic must-see sites like the Arc de Triomphe and the Louvre, as well as delving deeper and allowing you to discover the less clichéd and commercial side of the city, such as the atmospheric streets of the Marais. Packed with practical, perceptive reviews and hand-picked listings of bars, restaurants, accommodation and more; the authors’ recommendations and expert local knowledge will inspire you to experience the best places to eat, stay and party whatever your budget. The guide provides all the info needed to explore every corner of Paris, with individual themed detailed sections; from how to keep the kids’ entertained to making the most of the Gay and Lesbian side of Paris. Covering daytrips from the city there are sections on Disneyland Paris, the famous historical city of Versailles, beautiful Monet’s Garden at Giverny and more. Make the most of your time with The Rough Guide to Paris.

Throughout history, some books have changed the world. They have transformed the way we see ourselves and each other. They have inspired debate, dissent, war and revolution. They have enlightened, outraged, provoked and comforted. They have enriched lives and destroyed them. Now Penguin brings you the works of the great thinkers, pioneers, radicals and visionaries whose ideas shook civilization and helped make us who we are. Offering ancient wisdom on how to use skill, cunning, tactics and discipline to outwit your opponent, this bestselling 2000-year-old military manual is still worshipped by soldiers on the battlefield and managers in the boardroom as the ultimate guide to winning.

'On February 22 we were told that we would be returning to Columbia'. In 1955, eight crew members of Caldas, a Colombian destroyer, were swept overboard. Velasco alone survived, drifting on a raft for ten days without food or water. Marquez retells the survivor's amazing tale of endurance, from his loneliness and thirst to his determination to survive. The Story of a Shipwrecked Sailor was Marquez's first major, and controversial, work, published in a Colombian newspaper, El Espectador , in 1955 and then in book form in 1970.

In these inspiring essays about why we read, Proust explores all the pleasures and trials that we take from books, as well as explaining the beauty of Ruskin and his work, and the joys of losing yourself in literature as a child. Throughout history, some books have changed the world. They have transformed the way we see ourselves — and each other. They have inspired debate, dissent, war and revolution. They have enlightened, outraged, provoked and comforted. They have enriched lives — and destroyed them. Now Penguin brings you the works of the great thinkers, pioneers, radicals and visionaries whose ideas shook civilization and helped make us who we are.

Throughout history, some books have changed the world. They have transformed the way we see ourselves and each other. They have inspired debate, dissent, war and revolution. They have enlightened, outraged, provoked and comforted. They have enriched lives and destroyed them. Now Penguin brings you the works of the great thinkers, pioneers, radicals and visionaries whose ideas shook civilization, and helped make us who we are.

»EXQUISITELY HARROWING... Very strange and brilliantly conceived... A sort of metaphysical murder mystery... The murder will stand among the innumerable murders of modern literature as one of the best and most powerfully rendered». A mysterious and haunting tale of romance and murder, that begins with the marriage of a man and a woman in love. But when he inexplicably mistreats his beloved on the night of the wedding, he is in turn murdered by her brothers, and we are left with a strange sense of inevitability and passions gone terribly awry. From the Paperback edition.

Suddenly, as if a whirlwind had set down roots in the center of the town, the banana company arrived, pursued by the leaf storm. As a blizzard of warehouses and amusement parlours and slums descends on the small town of Macondo, the inhabitants reel at the accompanying stench of rubbish that makes their home unrecognisable. When the banana company leaves town as fast as it arrived, all they are left with is a void of decay. Living in this devastated and soulless wasteland is one last honourable man, the Colonel, who is determined to fulfil a longstanding promise, no matter how unpalatable it may be. With the death of the detested Doctor, he must provide an honourable burial — and incur the wrath of the rest of Macondo, who would rather see the Doctor rot, forgotten and unattended.

For ages, Eddie Drood and his family have kept humanity safe from the things that go bump in the night. But now one of his own has convinced the rest of the family that Eddie’s become a menace, and that humanity needs to be protected from him. So he’s on the run, using every trick in the book, magical and otherwise, hoping he lives long enough to prove his innocence...

Sigmund Freud, the founder of modern psychoanalysis, remade our view of the human mind by exploring the unconscious forces that drive us. This collection of his groundbreaking writings on the psychology of love examines the nature of desire, transgression, fantasy and erotic taboo. United by the theme of love, the writings in the «Great Loves» series span over two thousand years and vastly different worlds. Readers will be transported to different places and introduced to love's endlessly fascinating possibilities and varied forms: romantic love, platonic love, erotic love, gay love, virginal love, adulterous love, parental love, filial love, nostalgic love, unrequited love, illicit love, not to mention lost love, twisted and obsessional love...

Throughout history, some books have changed the world. They have transformed the way we see ourselves and each other. They have inspired debate, dissent, war and revolution. They have enlightened, outraged, provoked and comforted. They have enriched lives and destroyed them. Now Penguin brings you the works of the great thinkers, pioneers, radicals and visionaries whose ideas shook civilization, and helped make us who we are.

Throughout history, some books have changed the world. They have transformed the way we see ourselves — and each other. They have inspired debate, dissent, war and revolution. They have enlightened, outraged, provoked and comforted. They have enriched lives — and destroyed them. Now Penguin brings you the works of the great thinkers, pioneers, radicals and visionaries whose ideas shook civilization, and helped make us who we are. Whether puncturing the lies of politicians, wittily dissecting the English character or telling unpalatable truths about war, Orwell's timeless, uncompromising essays are more relevant, entertaining and essential than ever in today's era of spin.

Describing Tolstoy's crisis of depression and estrangement from the world, «A Confession» is an autobiographical work of exceptional emotional honesty. It describes his search for 'a practical religion not promising future bliss but giving bliss on earth'. Although the Confession led to his ex-communication, it also resulted in a large following of Tolstoyan Christians springing up throughout Russia and Europe. Throughout history, some books have changed the world. They have transformed the way we see ourselves — and each other. They have inspired debate, dissent, war and revolution. They have enlightened, outraged, provoked and comforted. They have enriched lives — and destroyed them. Now Penguin brings you the works of the great thinkers, pioneers, radicals and visionaries whose ideas shook civilization and helped make us who we are.

Throughout history, some books have changed the world. They have transformed the way we see ourselves and each other. They have inspired debate, dissent, war and revolution. They have enlightened, outraged, provoked and comforted. They have enriched lives and destroyed them. Now Penguin brings you the works of the great thinkers, pioneers, radicals and visionaries whose ideas shook civilization, and helped make us who we are.

An ash-gray dog with a white blaze on its forehead burst onto the rough terrain of the market on the first Sunday of December... When a witch doctor appears on the Marquis de Casalduero's doorstep prophesizing a plague of rabies in their Colombian seaport, he dismisses her claims — until he hears that his young daughter, Sierva Maria, was one of four people bitten by a rabid dog, and the only one to survive. Sierva Maria appears completely unscathed — but as rumours of the plague spread, the Marquis and his wife wonder at her continuing good health. In a town consumed by superstition, it's not long before they, and everyone else, put her survival down to a demonic possession and begin to see her supernatural powers as the cause of the town's woes. Only the young priest charged with exorcising the evil spirit recognizes the girl's sanity, but can he convince the town that it's not her that needs healing?

Turgenev's timeless tale of generational collision, in a sparkling new translation When Arkady Petrovich returns home from college, his father finds his eager, naïve son changed almost beyond recognition, for the impressionable Arkady has fallen under the powerful influence of the friend he has brought home with him. A self-proclaimed nihilist, the ardent young Bazarov shocks Arkady's father with his criticisms of the landowning way of life and his determination to overthrow the traditional values of contemporary society. Vividly capturing the hopes and fears, regrets and delusions of a changing Russia around the middle of the nineteenth century, Fathers and Sons is Ivan Turgenev's masterpiece.

Nabokov described this novella, written in Paris in 1939 but only published twenty years later, as 'the first little throb of Lolita'. The plot is similar: a middle-aged man wedding an unattractive widow in order to indulge his paedophilic obsession with her daughter. However, «The Enchanter» has an utterly different atmosphere, as time, place and even names remain a mystery. Nabokov transforms his protagonist's attempts to lull his twelve-year-old step-daughter into a state of 'enchantment' into a graceful, chilling fairytale.

One night a young woman disappears ...In broad daylight a retired teacher is stabbed to death ...In a small-town beauty parlor two women are butchered ...Three baffling cases, linked only by a lack of motive until psychologist Alex Delaware and LAPD Detective Milo Sturgis stumble upon a clue. A stolen luxury car is found undamaged and unblemished — except for a tiny, solitary bloodstain. Soon they uncover other expensive cars 'borrowed' before a killing. Soon the pair are hunting for a multiple killer, from LA high society to its desperate slums, even to New York and a forgotten cold case. However the killer proves to be a fleeting shape-shifter, defying identification. To unmask him, Alex and Milo will have to understand his murderous compulsion.

In 1844, Charles Dickens took a break from novel writing to travel through Italy for almost a year and «Pictures from Italy» is an illuminating account of his experiences there. He presents the country like a magic-lantern show, as vivid images ceaselessly appear before his — and his readers' — eyes. Italy's most famous sights are all to be found here — St Peter's in Rome, Naples, with Vesuvius smouldering in the background, the fairytale buildings and canals of Venice — but Dickens's chronicle is not simply that of a tourist. Avoiding preconceptions and stereotypes, he portrays a nation of great contrasts: between grandiose buildings and squalid poverty, and between past and present, as he observes everyday life beside ancient monuments. Combining thrilling travelogue with piercing social commentary, «Pictures from Italy» is a revealing depiction of an exciting and disquieting journey.

Charles Dickens was the most famous of many travelers of his time who journeyed to America, curious about the revolutionary new civilization that had captured the English imagination. His frank, often humorous descriptions in his 1842 account cover everything from his uncomfortable sea voyage to an ecstatic narrative of his visit to Niagara Falls. Yet Dickens is also critical of American society, its preoccupation with money, and reliance on slavery, as well as the rude, unsavory manners of Americans and their corrupt press. Above all, American Notes is a lively chronicle of what was for Dickens an illuminating encounter with the New World.

Every life is both ordinary and extraordinary, but Logan Mountstuart's — lived from the beginning to the end of the twentieth century — contains more than its fair share of both. As a writer who finds inspiration with Hemingway in Paris and Virginia Woolf in London, as a spy recruited by Ian Fleming and betrayed in the war and as an art-dealer in '60s New York, Logan mixes with the movers and shakers of his times. But as a son, friend, lover and husband, he makes the same mistakes we all do in our search for happiness. Here, then, is the story of a life lived to the full — and a journey deep into a very human heart.

The colonel took the top off the coffee can and saw that there was only one little spoonful left. Fridays are different. Every other day of the week, the Colonel and his ailing wife fight a constant battle against poverty and monotony, scraping together the dregs of their savings for the food and medicine that keeps them alive. But on Fridays the postman comes — and that sets a fleeting wave of hope rushing through the General's aging heart. For fifteen years he's watched the mail launch come into harbour, hoping he'll be handed an envelope containing the army pension promised to him all those years ago. Whilst he waits for the cheque, his hopes are pinned on his prize bird and the upcoming cockfighting season. But until then the bird — like the Colonel and his wife — must somehow be fed...