MODERN CLASSICS

In these dark, dreamlike love stories with a twist, Ludmilla Petrushevskaya tells of strange encounters in claustrophobic communal apartments, ill-fated holiday romances, office trysts, schoolgirl crushes, tentative courtships, rampant infi

Credited with inventing the modern horror tradition, H. P. Lovecraft remade the genre in the early twentieth century, discarding ghosts and witches and instead envisaging mankind at the mercy of a chaotic and malevolent universe. This sele

Brimming with gluttony, booze and lust, Roger Micheldene is loose in America. Supposedly visiting Budweiser University to make deals for his publishing firm in England, Roger instead sets out to offend all he meets and to seduce every woman

There is only one book to a man' Steinbeck wrote of East of Eden, his most ambitious novel. Set in the rich farmland of Salinas Valley, California, this powerful, often brutal novel follows the intertwined destinies of two families - the Tr

'It would not do to be found in the desert under these circumstances: firing wildly into the cactus from a car full of drugs' Fear and Loathing at Rolling Stone showcases the evolution of the writer of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and He

In 1929 Robert Graves went to live abroad permanently, vowing 'never to make England my home again'. This is his superb account of his life up until that 'bitter leave-taking': from his childhood and desperately unhappy school days at Chart

The first rock-star writer' Guardian With ‘long hair in the wind, beards and bandanas flapping, earrings, chain whips … and Harleys flashing chrome’, the Hell’s Angels erupted into 1960s America, paralysing whole towns with fear. Determine

Despised for his weakness and regarded by his family as little more than a stammering fool, the nobleman Claudius quietly survives the intrigues, bloody purges and mounting cruelty of the imperial Roman dynasties. In I, Claudius he watches

Gandhi's non-violent struggles against racism, violence, and colonialism in South Africa and India had brought him to such a level of notoriety, adulation that when asked to write an autobiography midway through his career, he took it as an

It's New York in the 1940s, where the martinis flow from cocktail-hour to breakfast at Tiffany's. And nice girls don't, except, of course, Holly Golightly. Pursued by Mafia gangsters and playboy millionaires, Holly is a fragile eyeful of ta

Told with deadpan humour and bitter irony, Kurt Vonnegut's cult tale of global destruction preys on our deepest fears of witnessing Armageddon and, worse still, surviving it... Dr Felix Hoenikker, one of the founding 'fathers' of the atomi

In his final years, Freud devoted most of his energies to a series of highly ambitious works on the broadest issues of religion and society. As early as 1908, he produced a powerful paper on the repressive hypocrisy of 'civilized sexual mo

Hans Fallada's Alone in Berlin begins in Berlin, 1940, and the city is filled with fear. At the house on 55 Jablonski Strasse, its various occupants try to live under Nazi rule in their different ways: the bullying Hitler loyalists the Pers

The Grapes of Wrath is a landmark of American literature. A portrait of the conflict between the powerful and the powerless, of one man’s fierce reaction to injustice, and of one woman’s stoical strength, the novel captures the horrors of t