Category Archives: Travel Guides
The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists
A sustained attack on selfish capitalism, and a Socialist critique of Edwardian England`s social inequality, Robert Tressell`s `The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists` includes an introduction by Tristram Hunt in Penguin Modern Classics. `The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists` tells the story of a group of working men who are joined one day by Frank Owen, a journeyman-prophet with
Nineteen Eighty Four 1984
One of the BBC`s `100 Novels that Shaped the World`”Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past”Hidden away in the Record Department of the sprawling Ministry of Truth, Winston Smith skilfully rewrites the past to suit the needs of the Party. Yet he inwardly rebels against the totalitarian world
Rabbit, Run
The first book in his award-winning “Rabbit” series, John Updike`s “Rabbit, Run” contains an afterword by the author in “Penguin Modern Classics”. It`s 1959 and Harry `Rabbit` Angstrom, one time high school sports superstar, is going nowhere. At twenty-six he is trapped in a second-rate existence – stuck with a fragile, alcoholic wife, a house
Fortress Besieged
Set on the eve of the Sino-Japanese war, Fortress Besieged recounts the exuberant misadventures of the hapless hero Fang Hung-chien, who after aimlessly studying in Europe at his family`s expense returns to Shanghai armed with a bogus degree from a fake university. On the liner back, Fang`s life becomes deeply entangled with those of two
The Hearing Trumpet
A classic of fantastic literature, Leonora Carrington`s `The Hearing Trumpet` is the occult twin to Alice in Wonderland.One of the first things ninety-two-year-old Marian Leatherby overhears when she is given an ornate hearing trumpet is her family plotting to commit her to an institution. Soon, she finds herself trapped in a sinister retirement home, where
The Emperor
The Emperor” is a classic piece of reportage, beginning as it must after the fall of Haile Selassie in 1974, which ended the ancient rule of the Abyssinian monarchy; Ryszard Kapuscinski travelled to Ethiopia and sought out surviving courtiers to listen to their stories. Here, their eloquent and ironic voices depict the lavish, corrupt world
Shah of Shahs
`Shah of Shahs` depicts the final years of the Shah in Iran, and is a compelling meditation on the nature of revolution and the devastating results of fear. In his truly unique voice Kapuscinski describes the tyrannical monarch, who, despite his cruel oppression of the Iranian people, sees himself as the father of a nation,
Another Day of Life
It`s 1975 and in Luanda, the capital of Angola, an apocalyptic atmosphere prevails as the Portuguese residents hurriedly desert the city. Determined to cover events as four hundred years of colonial rule come to an end, Kapuscinski hitched a lift on one of the last Portuguese military aircraft flying to Angola.There he discovered the terrifying
Fair Stood the Wind for France
When John Franklin brings his plane down into Occupied France at the height of the Second World war, there are two things in his mind – the safety of his crew and his own badly injured arm. It is a stroke of unbelievable luck when the family of a French farmer risk their lives to
Things Fall Apart
First published in 1958, Chinua Achebe`s `Things Fall Apart` is one of the modern age`s defining books – the book that marked African independence and in one leap created a powerful, vivid Nigerian literature.The novel tells the story of Okonkwo, an important man in the Obi tribe, in the days when white men were first
Libra
An unparalleled work of historical conjecture, ranging imaginatively over huge tracts of the American popular consciousness, Don DeLillo`s “Libra” contains an introduction by the author in “Penguin Modern Classics”. In this powerful, eerily convincing fictional speculation on the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, Don DeLillo chronicles Lee Harvey Oswald`s odyssey from troubled teenager to
Anthills of the Savannah
Chris, Ikem and Beatrice are like-minded friends working under the military regime of His Excellency, the Sandhurst-educated President of Kangan. In the pressurized atmosphere of oppression and intimidation they are simply trying to live and love – and remain friends. But in a world where each day brings a new betrayal, hope is hard to
A Grain of Wheat
Originally published in 1967, Ngugi wa Thiong`o`s third novel is his best known and arguably most ambitious work. ‘A Grain of Wheat” portrays several characters in a village whose intertwined lives are transformed by the 1952-1960 Emergency in Kenya. As the novel follows the village`s arrangements for Uhuru (independence) Day, this is a story of
The Call of Cthulhu: And Other Weird Stories
Collecting uniquely uncanny tales from the master of American horror, H.P. Lovecraft`s `The Call of Cthulhu and Other Weird Stories` is edited with an introduction and notes by S.T. Joshi in Penguin Modern Classics. Credited with inventing the modern horror tradition, H.P. Lovecraft remade the genre in the early twentieth century. Discarding ghosts and witches,
Seven Gothic Tales: The Roads Round Pisa; The Old Chevalier; the Monkey; The Deluge at Norderney; The Supper at Elsinore; The Dreamers; The Poet
Romantics, adventurers, sensualists, melancholics and dreamers inhabit the bizarre and exotic world conjured up in these seven intricately interwoven tales, whose settings range from Tuscany and Elsinore, to a dhow on its way from Lamu to Zanzibar. Proclaimed a masterpiece on its publication in 1934, this collection is shot through with themes of love and
Season of Migration to the North
`”Season of Migration to the North” is an Arabian Nights in reverse, enclosing a pithy moral about international misconceptions and delusions. The brilliant student of an earlier generation returns to his Sudanese village; obsession with the mysterious West and a desire to bite the hand that has half-fed him, has led him to London and
Bound for Glory
“Bound for Glory” is the autobiography of Woody Guthrie, the founder of modern American folk music. It is a funny, cynical, earthy and tragic account of his life in an Oklahoma oil-boom town, of the Depression that followed, and of his subsequent travels in, on, and under trains, in stolen cars and on his feet,
The Wayward Bus
Drifting through its cast of vivid, earthy characters in a series of impressionistic vignettes, `The Wayward Bus` is John Steinbeck`s Californian Canterbury Tales.`The Wayward Bus` travels through the backroads of the lush California countryside, transporting the lost and the lonely to new destinations. Juan Chicoy is at the wheel, a man of the land, hot-blooded
Once There Was a War
`Do you know it, do you remember it, the drives, the attitudes, the terrors and, yes, the joys?` Thus Steinbeck introduces his collection of poignant and hard-hitting dispatches for the New York Herald Tribune when the Second World War was at its height. He begins in England, recounting the courage of the bomber crews, the
A Russian Journal
Just after the iron curtain fell on Eastern Europe John Steinbeck and acclaimed war (and Magnum) photographer, Robert Capa ventured into the Soviet Union to report for the New York Herald Tribune. This rare opportunity took the famous travellers not only to Moscow and Stalingrad – now Volgograd – but through the countryside of the
