‘Fine teeth, my girl. With teeth like that I’d have gobbled up Paris and the rest of the world.'Gigi, a teenage girl in fin-de-siècle Paris, is being groomed by her family to become a high-class courtesan, just like her aunt and grandmother before her. But despite their best efforts, their timid protégée may have other ideas for her future...Colette's famous novella is a sly and delicate depiction of exploitation and resistance, and is paired here with the...

Colette's irresistible depiction of a childhood in rural France, in a lush new translation‘I will never be able to help anyone imagine the splendour, bound up in my memories’Claudine lives in a large house with a rose-filled garden and a vegetable patch smelling of tomato leaves and apricots. Beyond it is the village, where travelling performers stop for the night and wedding feasts take place under a bright summer moon. Inside her house are Mama, ...

“Two months ago, when I passed my fifteenth birthday, I let my skirts down to my ankles, the old schoolhouse was razed and the schoolmistress changed. The long skirts were demanded by my legs which were attracting attention and already gave me the look of a young woman; the old school was falling to pieces; and as for the teacher, poor good woman, forty, ugly, ignorant, mild and always terrified of the inspectors, the Doctor Duterte, a cantonal delegate, needed her post to give to one of h...

Claudine lives in a small rural village in France and attends the local girls school. Headstrong, rebellious and a lover of mischief, she knows how to fill her days with adventure.Claudine at School is part of the Macmillan Collector’s Library; a series of stunning, pocket-sized classics bound in real cloth with gold foiled edges and ribbon markers. These beautiful books make perfect gifts or a treat for any book lover. This edition is translated from Fren...

Journey through the sexual underworld of Belle Époque Paris in the first new English translation of Colette’s masterpiece in nearly sixty years.Lyrical, allusive, sometimes obscure, yet precise, The Pure and the Impure has elicited equal parts consternation and praise since its publication nearly 100 years ago. Colette herself was unequivocal: “I believe it to be my best book.” Through strikingly vivid and evocative portraits, many of them of her friends a...

Colette's celebrated novels about an older courtesan and her young lover, now in a new translation and published in one volume.Colette’s Chéri (1920) and its sequel, The End of Chéri (1926), are widely considered her masterpieces. In sensuous, elegant prose, the two novels explore the evolving inner lives and the intimate relationship of an unlikely couple: Léa de Lonval, a middle-aged former courtesan, and Fred Peloux, twenty-five years her junio...

Ophelia has a dirty secret. Well, it's not really a secret anymore.Ophelia was born into a family of Hunters, tasked with protecting the humans from the creatures of the night who feast on their fear.Except Ophelia always found the idea of monsters kind of intriguing. She even made the grave sin of committing some X-rated monster thoughts to paper—which in hindsight may not have been the best idea because her parents were mortified—but you...

Hayden Mundy Moore is an expert on everything chocolate, helping clients develop new products and revamp recipes until they're irresistible. But sometimes, a dash of murder finds its way into the mix...Hayden Mundy Moore has bushwhacked through African jungles and haggled in exotic markets to find the finest cacao beans and the most flavorful blends. It's thrilling work but rarely dangerous--until a colleague turns up dead at the exclusive chocolate-themed Lemaître resort spa in Sa...

Claudine at School, first published in 1900, is a sharp, sensuous, and mischievously observant novel of provincial French girlhood. Narrated by the precocious Claudine, it transforms the classroom, the village, and the politics of adolescent friendship into a theatre of desire, rivalry, and social performance. Its style is intimate, ironic, and vividly physical, blending schoolgirl comedy with fin-de-siècle candor about sexuality and power. As the opening work of the Claudine cycle, it sta...

Chéri: spoiled, petulant, beautiful, aged twenty-five. Léa: magnificent, brilliant, remorseless, aged forty-nine. They are in love, but their relationship exists beyond the bounds of social acceptability and must one day come to an end, no matter the cost.A succ**ès de scandale on publication for its depiction of transgressive love, Colette’s celebrated novella is also a profound and compelling exploration of the passage of time, the body and ageing, mirrors, self-percepti...

Colette's subversive and witty tale of a woman's bid for freedom in Belle Époque France, in a fresh new Penguin Classics translation‘It’s definitely me there, covered in purple rouge, eyes ringed with a halo of blue greasepaint that’s beginning to melt’Renée, aged thirty-three and divorced from her serially unfaithful husband, reinvents herself as a dancer and mime artist in France’s music halls. When a wealthy suitor appears promising marriage and...

If there's one thing Verity will consistently do, it's spontaneously make terrible decisions.Sometimes they work out well—so far, smuggling her rescue cat into the shadow realm has been a great success—but more often than not, she ends up with a bigger mess to clean up than she started with.If there's one thing Theon will consistently do, it's plot his brother's demise after losing his spot in the line of succession to King Allerick. It has yet to work out ...