Penguin Group

The Lost Estate is Robin Buss's translation of Henri Alain-Fournier's poignant study of lost love, Le Grand Meaulnes. This Penguin Classics edition also contains an introduction by Adam Gopnik. When Meaulnes first arrives at the local school in Sologne, everyone is captivated by his good looks, daring and charisma. But when Meaulnes disappears for several days, and returns with tales of a strange party at a mysterious house — and his love for the beautiful girl hidden within it, Yvonne de Galais — his life has been changed forever. In his restless search for his Lost Estate and the happiness he found there, Meaulnes, observed by his loyal friend Francois, may risk losing everything he ever had. Poised between youthful admiration and adult resignation, Alain-Fournier's compelling narrator carries the reader through this evocative and unbearably poignant portrayal of desperate friendship and vanished adolescence. Robin Buss's translation of Le Grand Meaulnes sensitively and accurately renders Alain-Fournier's poetically charged, expressive and deceptively simple style. In his introduction, New Yorker writer Adam Gopnik discusses the life of Alain-Fournier, who was killed in the First World War after writing this, his only novel. Henri Alban-Fournier (1886-1914), better known by the pseudonym Alain-Fournier, was born in La Chapelle d'Angillon, the son of a country school-master. He was educated at Brest and Paris, where he met the original Yvonne, who left a lasting impression on his life and work. Le Grand Meaulnes was published in 1912. Alan-Fournier joined the army as a Lieutenant in August 1914, and was killed in action on the Meuse less than a month later. Les Miracles, a volume of poems and essays, appeared posthumously in 1924.

Zoe Martinique has turned her unusual ability into a career. When she's traveling, she can't be seen which makes her an ideal professional snoop. Industrial espionage, surveillance, whatever. But one night things get out of hand while she's outof — body. She witnesses a murder and a soul stealing, and discovers she has unwelcome company: Trench — Coat, a ghostly killer who can see and hurt her. Teaming up with a blue-eyed police detective, she tries to solve the case and improve her love life. She also enlists the support of her psychic mother and the ghostly couple who haunt her house. And with murderers, kidnappers, and a desperate ex-porn star involved, Zoe needs all the help she can get.

Quentin Jacobsen has spent a lifetime loving Margo Roth Spiegelman from afar. So when she cracks open a window and climbs into his life, he follows. After their all-nighter ends, Q arrives at school to discover that Margo has disappeared.

Sherlock Holmes is not only the most famous character in crime fiction, but arguably the most famous character in all fiction. In sixty adventures that pit his extraordinary wits and courage against foreign spies, blackmailers, cultists, petty thieves, murderers, swindlers, policemen (both stupid and clever), and his arch-nemesis Moriarty, Sherlock Holmes, together with his faithful sidekick Doctor John H. Watson, proves himself to be not only the quintessential detective but also the most engaging and entertaining company any reader could ask for. This beautiful new edition contains a new foreword by Ruth Rendell.

A little learning library using artwork from Eric Carle's classic, The Very Hungry Caterpillar. Introducing first concepts, this wonderful board book collection makes a perfect first library. Each book is filled with Eric Carle's much-loved collage art and large, simple text. Ideal for little hands to hold the sturdy board pages are durable enough to withstand the rough and tumble of toddlers. Preschoolers will love learning with The Very Hungry Caterpillar! Eric Carle is an internationally bestselling and award-winning author and illustrator of books for very young children. Eric lives in Massachusetts with his wife, Barbara. The Carles opened The Eric Carle Museum of Picture Book Art in Massachusetts in 2002. Don't miss all the other Very Hungry Caterpillar and Eric Carle books: The Very Hungry Caterpillar; Eric Carle's Very Special Baby Book; Polar Bear, Polar Bear, What do You Hear?; The Very busy Spider; The Very Quiet Cricket; The Artist Who Painted a Blue Horse; 1, 2, 3 to the Zoo; Baby Bear, Baby Bear, What do you See?; The Very Hungry Caterpillar Pop-Up Book; Polar Bear, Polar Bear, What Do You Hear?; The Very Hungry Caterpillar's Buggy Book; Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See?; The Bad-Tempered Ladbybird; The Very Hungry Caterpillar: Little Learning Library; The Very Hungry Caterpillar: Touch and Feel Playbook; My Very First Book of Words; The Very Hungry Caterpillar Book and Toy; Little Cloud; Today is Monday; My Very First Book of Shapes; The Very Hungry Caterpillar's Sound Book; The Very Hungry Caterpillar; From Head to Toe; The Very Hungry Caterpillar Big Board Book; Draw Me a Star; Mister Seahorse; Do You want to be My Friend?; The Tiny Seed; The Mixed-up Chameleon; The Very Hungry Caterpillar: Book and CD; Baby Bear, Baby Bear, What do you See?; The Very Hungry Caterpillar Board Book and Block Set; Rooster's Off to See the World; Count with the Very Hungry Caterpillar: Sticker Book; My Very First Book of Colours; The Very Hungry Caterpillar: Finger Puppet Book; My Own Very Busy Spider Colouring Book; Slowly, Slowly, Slowly, Said the Sloth; The Very Hungry Caterpillar and Friends: My Very First Annual.

In the degenerate, unliked backwater of Dunwich, Wilbur Whately, a most unusual child, is born. Of unnatural parentage, he grows at an uncanny pace to an unsettling height, but the boy’s arrival simply precedes that of a true horror: one of the Old Ones, that forces the people of the town to hole up by night, fearful for their lives, by day able only to trace the wreckage wrought by the gigantic, unseen monster. In this and other tales of the macabre, H. P. Lovecraft weaves unearthly fantasies of creatures beyond conception – existing between the spaces of the dimensions we know.

Pip's life as an ordinary country boy is destined to be unexceptional until a chain of mysterious events leads him away from his humble origins and up the social ladder. His efforts to become a London gentleman bring him into contact not just with the upper classes but also with dangerous criminals. His desire to improve himself is matched only by his longing for the icy-hearted Estella, but secrets from the past impede his progress and he has many hard lessons to learn.

The epic poem of honor and bravery written by an anonymous fourteenth-century poet, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is recognized as an equal to Chaucer's masterworks and to the great Old English poems, Beowulf included. A green-skinned knight offers the Knights of the Round Table a simple but deadly challenge a challenge taken on by the brave Sir Gawain. A challenge that will force him to choose between his honor and his life...

At once a romantic history of a mighty river, an autobiographical account of Twain's early steamboat days, and a storehouse of humorous anecdotes and sketches, here is the raw material from which Mark Twain wrote his finest novel, «Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.»

After one troubled college-age student disappears and two are found slashed to death, Lucas Davenport finds himself hunting what appears to be a modern-day Jack the Ripper. But Lucas keeps getting the sneaking suspicion that there is something else involved. Something very bad, very dark, and as elusive as a phantom.

The newest title in Natasha Wing's bestselling «Night Before» series! It's the night before New Year's, and the whole family is determined to stay up until midnight! Everyone's stocked up on sparkly streamers and festive party hats, but after a night filled with card games and too many cupcakes, the little ones are getting sleepy... Can they make it until the clock strikes twelve?

First published in 1949, George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four has lost none of the impact with which it first hit readers. Winston Smith works for the Ministry of Truth in London, chief city of Airstrip One. Big Brother stares out from every poster, the Thought Police uncover every act of betrayal. When Winston finds love with Julia, he discovers that life does not have to be dull and deadening, and awakens to new possibilities. Despite the police helicopters that hover and circle overhead, Winston and Julia begin to question the Party; they are drawn towards conspiracy. Yet Big Brother will not tolerate dissent — even in the mind. For those with original thoughts they invented Room 101.

After Charlie convinces Lola to recycle her old toys instead of throwing them away, Lola discovers a recycling competition. If she can recycle one hundred plastic, metal, and paper items, she can get her very own real live tree to plant. But she only has two weeks, so Lola decides to ask her classmates to help. They turn out to be extremely very good recyclers indeed. This adventure is printed on FSC-approved paper and includes recycling tips as well as a tree poster just like Lolaas, so kids can keep track of their recycling projects and help to save the planet all on their own.

Physics of the Impossible takes us on a journey to the frontiers of science and beyond, giving us an exhilarating insight into what we can really hope to achieve in the future. Everyday we see that what was once declared 'impossible' by scientists has become part of our everyday lives: fax machines, glass sky-scrapers, gas-powered automobiles and a worldwide communications network. Here internationally bestselling author Micho Kaku confidently hurdles today's frontier of science, revealing the actual possibilities of perpetual motion, force fields, invisibility, ray guns, anti-gravity and anti-matter, teleportation, telepathy, psychokinesis, robots and cyborgs, time travel, zero-point energy, even extraterrestrial life. And he shows how few of these ideas actually violate the laws of physics. Where does the realm of science fiction end? What can we really hope to achieve? 'Anything that is not impossible, is mandatory!' declares Kaku in this lucid, entertaining and enlightening read.

The Gulag was Russia’s forgotten holocaust. The largest network of concentration camps ever created, it murdered millions and haunted all those who came out alive. Here, for the first time, is the full, moving story of its countless victims: how they lived, laboured, suffered – and survived to bear witness to one of history’s most terrible crimes.

When it comes to the mating game, Jane's still learning how to play. As a teenager she watched her elder brother falling in and out of love. Now she's embarking on her own affairs. There's the boyfriend with the irritatingly beautiful ex; the worldly Older Man; the commitment-phobe who calls her honey but never uses her name. Plenty of fish in the sea — but how do you find a man worth catching? When she finally resorts to 'How to Meet and Marry Mr Right', a hilarious guide to hunting out and reeling in the man of your dreams, Jane discovers that with love, life and men, a girl doesn't need rules ...

Leo Gursky is a man who fell in love at the age of ten and has been in love ever since. These days he is just about surviving life in America, tapping his radiator each evening to let his upstairs neighbour know he's still alive, drawing attention to himself at the milk counter of Starbucks. But life wasn't always like this: sixty years ago in the Polish village where he was born Leo fell in love with a young girl called Alma and wrote a book in honour of his love. These days he assumes that the book, and his dreams, are irretrievably lost, until one day they return to him in the form of a brown envelope. Meanwhile, a young girl, hoping to find a cure for her mother's loneliness, stumbles across a book that changed her mother's life and she goes in search of the author. Soon these and other worlds collide in The History of Love, a captivating story of the power of love, of loneliness and of survival.

Olga Chekhova was a stunning Russian beauty and a famous Nazi-era film actress who was closely associated with Hitler; she was also the niece of playwright Anton Chekhov. After fleeing Bolshevik Moscow for Berlin in 1920, she was recruited by her composer brother Lev, to work for Soviet intelligence. In return, her family were allowed to join her. The extraordinary story of how the whole family survived the Russian Revolution, the civil war, the rise of Hitler, the Stalinist Terror, and the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union becomes, in Antony Beevor's hands, a breathtaking tale of compromise and survival in a merciless age.

A groundbreaking work of science fiction, «The Left Hand of Darkness» tells the story of a lone human emissary to Winter, an alien world whose inhabitants can change their gender. His goal is to facilitate Winter's inclusion in a growing intergalactic civilization. But to do so he must bridge the gulf between his own views and those of the completely dissimilar culture that he encounters. Embracing the aspects of psychology, society, and human emotion on an alien world, «The Left Hand of Darkness» stands as a landmark achievement in the annals of intellectual science fiction.

Pablo Escobar: billionaire drugs baron; ruthless manipulator, brutal killer and jefe of the infamous Medellín cartel. A man whose importance in the international drug trade and renown for his charitable work among the poor brought him influence and power in his home country of Colombia, and the unwanted attention of the American courts. Terrified of the new Colombian President’s determination to extradite him to America, Escobar found the best bargaining tools he could find: hostages. In the winter of 1990, ten relatives of Colombian politicians, mostly women, were abducted and held hostage as Escobar attempted to strong-arm the government into blocking his extradition. Two died, the rest survived, and from their harrowing stories Márquez retells, with vivid clarity, the terror and uncertainty of those dark and volatile months.

‘César Montero was dreaming about elephants. He’d seen them at the movies on Sunday...’ Only moments later, César is led away by police as they clear the crowds away from the man he has just killed. But César is not the only man to be riled by the rumours being spread in his Colombian hometown – under the cover of darkness, someone creeps through the streets sticking malicious posters to walls and doors. Each night the respectable townsfolk retire to their beds fearful that they will be the subject of the following morning’s lampoons. As paranoia seeps through the town and the delicate veil of tranquility begins to slip, can the perpetrator be uncovered before accusation and violence leave the inhabitants’ sanity in tatters?

For four years, while statesmen and generals blundered, the massed armies of Europe writhed in a festival of mud and blood. All the madness, massacres, and mutinies of the foulest war in history are brought home here by action pictures of the day and the text of an uncompromising historian.

'For twenty-one years I have been shuffling back and forth between classrooms and libraries. Now you tell me what the hell it's got me'. That's how Benjamin Braddock talked when he came down from university. Somehow it didn't seem to be what his father expected from a college education, and everyone was really appalled when Ben raped Mrs Robinson (that was her story anyway) and ran off with her daughter in the middle of her wedding to someone else... a brilliantly sordid tale of a young man's search for identity and a portrayal of the worst-behaved yet most sympathetic anti-hero of the day.

Enjoy an irresistible feast of humour and discover the joys of French rural living with Peter Mayle's bestselling, much-loved account of «A Year In Provence». Peter Mayle and his wife did what most of us only imagine doing when they made their long-cherished dream of a life abroad a reality: throwing caution to the wind, they bought a glorious two hundred year-old farmhouse in the Luberon Valley and began a new life. In a year that begins with a marathon lunch and continues with a host of gastronomic delights, they also survive the unexpected and often hilarious curiosities of rural life. From mastering the local accent and enduring invasion by bumbling builders, to discovering the finer points of boules and goat-racing, all the earthy pleasures of Provencal life are conjured up in this enchanting portrait.