Downstream, the shortest and most autobiographical of Huysmans’ novels, is the perfect example of what the French naturalists wanted a novel to be. This dark and mordantly comic masterpiece of everyday pessimism about a Parisian clerk seeking spiritual contentment is the perfect introduction to the pleasures of Joris Karl Huysmans (1848–1907), whose exquisite style is ironically the most perfect remedy for any reader’s taedium vitae.

Definitive biography of one of the great late 19th century novelists

As the First World War reaches its final year, an illicit love affair is beginning between a sixteen-year-old boy and a young woman married to a soldier at the front. They meet secretly in her flat on the outskirts of Paris, in cornfields and on river banks. When she receives letters from her husband, they burn them together. Intoxicated by passion, they cannot bear to end their affair, even when it causes a scandal among their friends and neighbours. Instead, they hurtle towards tragedy.

Like Froude's biography of Carlyle, Holroyd's Shaw, and Ellmann's Joyce, Robert Baldick's Life of J.-K. Huysmans has become not just a standard reference work, to be consulted as regularly as the writing of the author whose life it chronicles, but a work of literature in its own right. First published fifty years ago, Baldick's classic biography presents a compelling narrative of Huysmans' life and work in all its various phases - from the Naturalism of the 1870s to the Decadence of the 18...

Sentimental Education begins with the hero - Frederic Moreau - leaving Paris and returning to the provinces and his mother. Part love story, part historical novel and satire it tells of how Moreau is driven by passion for an unattainable older woman. His 'sentimental education' turns out to be more of an anxious quest than a happy one, echoing Flaubert's own life experience of unrequited love. Packed with vivid detail and characterised by its historical authenticity, the book was described...

Sentimental Education - An Autobiographical Novel (Complete Edition) follows Frédéric Moreau, a provincial youth in Paris, through frustrated love, social ambition, and the upheavals surrounding the Revolution of 1848. Flaubert transforms the bildungsroman into an anti-romance: desire is deferred, history is witnessed obliquely, and every ideal is compromised by vanity, money, or inertia. Its cool, exact prose, ironic detachment, and panoramic social observation place it among the foundati...

A poverty-stricken student murders a pawnbroker in St Petersburg, then finds guilt harder to escape than the law.TRANSLATED BY RICHARD PEVEAR AND LARISSA VOLOKHONSKYA troubled young man commits what he believes is the perfect crime: the murder of a vile pawnbroker whom no one will miss. Raskolnikov is desperate for money, but convinces himself that his motive is not merely personal gain, but the benefit of mankind.So begins one of the defining works o...

In this dazzling debut novel, four young brothers in a small Nigerian town encounter a madman, whose prophecy of violence threatens the core of their family Told from the point of view of nine-year-old Benjamin, the youngest of four brothers, The Fishermen is the Cain and Abel-esque story of an unforgettable childhood in 1990s Nigeria. When their father has to travel to a distant city for work, the brothers take advantage of his extended absence to skip school and go fishing. At the forbid...

The basis for the film starring Scarlett Johansson, award-winning author Michel Faber's Under the Skin blends elements of science fiction, grotesque comedy, horror, and thriller into a genre-jumping meditation'' (Washington Post Book World).Isserley cruises the Scottish Highlands picking up hitchhikers. Scarred and awkward, yet strangely erotic and threatening, she listens to her hitchhikers as they open up to her, revealing clues about who might ...

Now a major TV series Winner of the Man Booker Prize 2012 Winner of the 2012 Costa Book of the Year Shortlisted for the 2013 Women’s Prize for Fiction‘Simply exceptional…I envy anyone who hasn’t yet read it’ Daily Mail‘A gripping story of tumbling fury and terror’ Independent on SundayWith this historic win for Bring Up the Bodies, Hilary Mantel becomes the first British author and the first woman to be aw...

*NOW A NETFLIX LIMITED SERIES—from producer and director Shawn Levy (Stranger Things) starring Mark Ruffalo, Hugh Laurie, and newcomer Aria Mia Loberti*Winner of the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award finalist, the beloved instant New York Times bestseller and New York Times Book Review Top 10 Book about a blind French girl and a German boy whose paths collide in occupied France as both try to survive the devastation of World ...

One of the greatest, most entertaining reading experiences in any language, Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time Vol. 1: The Way by Swann's is published in a new translation from the French by Lydia Davis in Penguin Classics.The Way by Swann's is one of the great novels of childhood, depicting the impressions of a sensitive boy of his family and neighbours, brought dazzlingly back to life by the famous taste of a madeleine. It contains the separate shor...