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The Fall (Penguin Modern Classics)
A philosophical novel described by fellow existentialist Sartre as ‘perhaps the most beautiful and the least understood’ of his novels, Albert Camus’ The Fall is translated by Robin Buss in Penguin Modern Classics.
Jean-Baptiste Clamence is a soul in turmoil. Over several drunken nights in an Amsterdam bar, he regales a chance acquaintance with his story. From this successful former lawyer and seemingly model citizen a compelling, self-loathing catalogue of guilt, hypocrisy and alienation pours forth. The Fall (1956) is a brilliant portrayal of a man who has glimpsed the hollowness of his existence. But beyond depicting one man’s disillusionment, Camus’s novel exposes the universal human condition and its absurdities – for our innocence that, once lost, can never be recaptured …
Albert Camus (1913-60) is the author of a number of best-selling and highly influential works, all of which are published by Penguin. They include The Fall, The Outsider and The First Man. Awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1957, Camus is remembered as one of the few writers to have shaped the intellectual climate of post-war France, but beyond that, his fame has been international.
If you enjoyed The Fall, you might like Jean-Paul Sartre’s Nausea, also available in Penguin Modern Classics.
‘An irresistibly brilliant examination of modern conscience’
The New York Times‘Camus is the accused, his own prosecutor and advocate. The Fall might have been called “The Last Judgement” ‘
Olivier Todd₨ 640.00The Fall (Penguin Modern Classics)
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The Merchant of Venice (Penguin Black Classics)
The Signet Classics edition of William Shakespeare’s black comedy. A complex play that combines pathos and humor, The Merchant of Venice also introduces one of Shakespeare’s most memorable villains, the Jewish moneylender Shylock, who famously demans a “pound of flesh” for what he is owed.
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A Farewell to Arms
A Farewell to Arms is the unforgettable story of an American ambulance driver on the Italian front and his passion for a beautiful English nurse. Set against the looming horrors of the battlefield – the weary, demoralized men marching in the rain during the German attack on Caporetto; the profound struggle between loyalty and desertion—this gripping, semiautobiographical work captures the harsh realities of war and the pain of lovers caught in its inexorable sweep. Ernest Hemingway famously said that he rewrote his ending to A Farewell to Arms thirty-nine times to get the words right.
₨ 640.00A Farewell to Arms
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Frankenstein
Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is a combination of Gothic novel and science fiction. It unfolds the story of a scientist Victor Frankenstein who creates a hideous monster from pieces of corpses and brings it to life. But the monster eventually becomes the source of his misery and demise.
The plot of the novel is epistolary. The story is narrated through the first-person accounts of Captain Walton, Victor Frankenstein, and the monster himself. Moreover, Frankenstein is also a frame story. It means a story framed or surrounded by another story or a series of stories.
₨ 640.00Frankenstein
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Penguin Select Classics: The Diary Of A Young Girl
“I’ve found that there is always some beauty left—in nature, sunshine, freedom, in yourself; these can all help you.’
Anne begins her diary entries at the age of thirteen in June 1942, recording all her experiences until August 1944. All people have the right to freedom, but Anne wasn’t sure that idea included her. During WWII, Anne and her family were forced to go into hiding like many other Jews.
Vivid snippets of two years of living in an annexe, without seeing the sun, are journalled by Anne. From their bones dwindling to her emotional growth all is reflected in her writings. She writes of her passion for literature and art, her desire to travel, the struggles of family ties in hiding: showing her incredible emotional resilience.
How does she keep her spirits alive through imagination, hold onto the hopes of free life, when they weren’t allowed to bring attention to themselves?
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Penguin Select Classics: Frankenstein
“Nothing is so painful to the human mind as great and sudden change.”
The world of Frankenstein explores the depths of human nature and the consequences of great and sudden change.
Victor Frankenstein, a Swiss student of natural science breathes life into a creature made from stolen body parts. Initially seeking love and companionship, the monstrous creation instead incites revulsion in all who encounter it.
Plagued by loneliness and despair, the creature turns against its creator, leading to a devastating climax that claims lives.
Frankenstein serves as a cautionary tale, warning against the perils of scientific and creative ambition, the corrupting influence of unchecked progress, and the dangers of knowledge without true understanding.
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Interpreter of Maladies
Pulitzer-winning, scintillating studies in yearning and exile from a Bengali Bostonian woman of immense promise.A couple exchange unprecedented confessions during nightly blackouts in their Boston apartment as they struggle to cope with a heartbreaking loss; a student arrives in new lodgings in a mystifying new land and, while he awaits the arrival of his arranged-marriage wife from Bengal, he finds his first bearings with the aid of the curious evening rituals that his centenarian landlady orchestrates; a schoolboy looks on while his childminder finds that the smallest dislocation can unbalance her new American life all too easily and send her spiralling into nostalgia for her homeland…Jhumpa Lahiri’s prose is beautifully measured, subtle and sober, and she is a writer who leaves a lot unsaid, but this work is rich in observational detail, evocative of the yearnings of the exile (mostly Indians in Boston here), and full of emotional pull and reverberation.
₨ 720.00Interpreter of Maladies
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Kafka on the Shore
Kafka on the Shore, a tour de force of metaphysical reality, is powered by two remarkable characters: a teenage boy, Kafka Tamura, who runs away from home either to escape a gruesome oedipal prophecy or to search for his long-missing mother and sister; and an aging simpleton called Nakata, who never recovered from a wartime affliction and now is drawn toward Kafka for reasons that, like the most basic activities of daily life, he cannot fathom. Their odyssey, as mysterious to them as it is to us, is enriched throughout by vivid accomplices and mesmerizing events.
Cats and people carry on conversations, a ghostlike pimp employs a Hegel-quoting prostitute, a forest harbors soldiers apparently unaged since World War II, and rainstorms of fish (and worse) fall from the sky. There is a brutal murder, with the identity of both victim and perpetrator a riddle—yet this, along with everything else, is eventually answered, just as the entwined destinies of Kafka and Nakata are gradually revealed, with one escaping his fate entirely and the other given a fresh start on his own.
₨ 800.00Kafka on the Shore
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Murakami : What i talk about when i talk about Running
In 1982, having sold his jazz bar to devote himself to writing, Murakami began running to keep fit. A year later, he’d completed a solo course from Athens to Marathon, and now, after dozens of such races, not to mention triathlons and a dozen critically acclaimed books, he reflects upon the influence the sport has had on his life and—even more important—on his writing.
Equal parts training log, travelogue, and reminiscence, this revealing memoir covers his four-month preparation for the 2005 New York City Marathon and takes us to places ranging from Tokyo’s Jingu Gaien gardens, where he once shared the course with an Olympian, to the Charles River in Boston among young women who outpace him. Through this marvelous lens of sport emerges a panorama of memories and insights: the eureka moment when he decided to become a writer, his greatest triumphs and disappointments, his passion for vintage LPs, and the experience, after fifty, of seeing his race times improve and then fall back.
By turns funny and sobering, playful and philosophical, What I Talk About When I Talk About Running is rich and revelatory, both for fans of this masterful yet guardedly private writer and for the exploding population of athletes who find similar satisfaction in running.
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Murakami: A Wild Sheep Chase
Quirky and utterly captivating, A Wild Sheep Chase is Murakami at his astounding best.
An advertising executive receives a postcard from a friend and casually appropriates the image for an advertisement. What he doesn’t realize is that included in the scene is a mutant sheep with a star on its back, and in using this photo he has unwittingly captured the attention of a man who offers a menacing ultimatum: find the sheep or face dire consequences. Thus begins a surreal and elaborate quest that takes readers from Tokyo to the remote mountains of northern Japan, where the unnamed protagonist has a surprising confrontation with his demons.
₨ 800.00Murakami: A Wild Sheep Chase
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A Horse Walks into a Bar
The award-winning and internationally acclaimed author of the To the End of the Land now gives us a searing short novel about the life of a stand-up comic, as revealed in the course of one evening’s performance. In the dance between comic and audience, with barbs flying back and forth, a deeper story begins to take shape–one that will alter the lives of many of those in attendance.
₨ 800.00A Horse Walks into a Bar
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The Discomfort of Evening
WINNER OF THE 2020 INTERNATIONAL BOOKER PRIZE
I thought about being too small for so much, but that no one told you when you were big enough … and I asked God if he please couldn’t take my brother Matthies instead of my rabbit. ‘Amen.’
Jas lives with her devout farming family in the rural Netherlands. One winter’s day, her older brother joins an ice skating trip; resentful at being left alone, she makes a perverse plea to God; he never returns. As grief overwhelms the farm, Jas succumbs to a vortex of increasingly disturbing fantasies, watching her family disintegrate into a darkness that threatens to derail them all.
₨ 800.00The Discomfort of Evening
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The Bastard of Istanbul
A “vivid and entertaining” (Chicago Tribune) tale about the tangled history of two families, from the author of The Island of Missing Trees (a Reese’s Book Club Pick)
“Zesty, imaginative . . . a Turkish version of Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club.” —USA Today
As an Armenian American living in San Francisco, Armanoush feels like part of her identity is missing and that she must make a journey back to the past, to Turkey, in order to start living her life. Asya is a nineteen-year-old woman living in an extended all-female household in Istanbul who loves Jonny Cash and the French existentialists. The Bastard of Istanbul tells the story of their two families–and a secret connection linking them to a violent event in the history of their homeland. Filed with humor and understanding, this exuberant, dramatic novel is about memory and forgetting, about the need to examine the past and the desire to erase it, and about Turkey itself.
₨ 800.00The Bastard of Istanbul
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The Death of Murat Idrissi
Two venturesome women on a journey through the land of their fathers and mothers. A wrong turn. A bad decision.
They had no idea, when they arrived in Morocco, that their usual freedoms as young European women would not be available. So, when the spry Saleh presents himself as their guide and saviour, they embrace his offer. He extracts them from a tight space, only to lead them inexorably into an even tighter one: and from this far darker space there is no exit.
Their tale of confinement and escape is as old as the landscapes and cultures so vividly depicted in this story of where Europe and Africa come closest to meeting, even if they never quite touch.₨ 800.00The Death of Murat Idrissi
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Fahrenheit 451
Nearly seventy years after its original publication, Ray Bradbury’s internationally acclaimed novel Fahrenheit 451 stands as a classic of world literature set in a bleak, dystopian future. Today its message has grown more relevant than ever before.
Guy Montag is a fireman. His job is to destroy the most illegal of commodities, the printed book, along with the houses in which they are hidden. Montag never questions the destruction and ruin his actions produce, returning each day to his bland life and wife, Mildred, who spends all day with her television “family.” But when he meets an eccentric young neighbor, Clarisse, who introduces him to a past where people didn’t live in fear and to a present where one sees the world through the ideas in books instead of the mindless chatter of television, Montag begins to question everything he has ever known.
₨ 800.00Fahrenheit 451
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Shuggie Bain
WINNER OF THE BOOKER PRIZE
NATIONAL BESTSELLER
FINALIST FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARDShuggie Bain is the unforgettable story of young Hugh “Shuggie” Bain, a sweet and lonely boy who spends his 1980s childhood in run-down public housing in Glasgow, Scotland. Thatcher’s policies have put husbands and sons out of work, and the city’s notorious drugs epidemic is waiting in the wings.
₨ 800.00Shuggie Bain
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The Plague (Penguin Modern Classics)
The Plague is Albert Camus’s world-renowned fable of fear and courage The townspeople of Oran are in the grip of a deadly plague, which condemns its victims to a swift and horrifying death. Fear, isolation and claustrophobia follow as they are forced into quarantine. Each person responds in their own way to the lethal disease: some resign themselves to fate, some seek blame, and a few, like Dr Rieux, resist the terror. An immediate triumph when it was published in 1947, The Plague is in part an allegory of France’s suffering under the Nazi occupation, and a story of bravery and determination against the precariousness of human existence. ‘A matchless fable of fear, courage and cowardice’ Independent ‘Magnificent’The Times Albert Camus was born in Algeria in 1913. He studied philosophy in Algiers and then worked in Paris as a journalist. He was one of the intellectual leaders of the Resistance movement and, after the War, established his international reputation as a writer. His books include The Plague, The Just and The Fall, and he won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1957. Camus was killed in a road accident in 1960.
₨ 800.00The Plague (Penguin Modern Classics)
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The Stranger
The classic literary masterpiece The Stranger (Vintage International) is a story about an Algerian, Meursault, the titular character who commits a murder after attending his mother’s funeral. His understanding of the world, his emotional spectrum, and the general absurdities of the time all combine to form a compelling read.
The story is aptly divided into two riveting sections, both told from the perspective of Meursault, who gives us his views before the murder in the first section and later walks us through his state of mind after the murder in the second section. The two parts in this thrilling novel encompass the protagonist’s mindset through the ordeal of grieving for his mother’s death while also coming face to face with his own moral compass for committing a murder.
The Stranger (Vintage International) is often cited as one of the finest examples of the philosophy of the absurd. The sense of culture and various human values interwoven during the turbulent pre-modern era is also best captured in the contents of this novel. This books was published by Vintage as reissue edition in 1989 and is available in paperback. Key Features: This reissue edition is translated by Matthew Ward.
₨ 800.00The Stranger
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Ulysses
The Gabler edition of Ulysses, the greatest 20th-century novel written in English, contains corrections to more than 5,000 errors in earlier editions. Loosely based on the Odyssey, this landmark of modern literature follows ordinary Dubliners in 1904. Capturing a single day in the life of Dubliner Leopold Bloom, his friends Buck Mulligan and Stephen Dedalus, his wife Molly, and a scintillating cast of supporting characters, Joyce pushes Celtic lyricism and vulgarity to splendid extremes. Captivating experimental techniques range from interior monologues to exuberant wordplay and earthy humor. A major achievement in 20th century literature.
₨ 800.00Ulysses
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Do Not Say We Have Nothing
“In a single year, my father left us twice. The first time, to end his marriage, and the second, when he took his own life. I was ten years old.”
Master storyteller Madeleine Thien takes us inside an extended family in China, showing us the lives of two successive generations—those who lived through Mao’s Cultural Revolution and their children, who became the students protesting in Tiananmen Square. At the center of this epic story are two young women, Marie and Ai-Ming. Through their relationship Marie strives to piece together the tale of her fractured family in present-day Vancouver, seeking answers in the fragile layers of their collective story. Her quest will unveil how Kai, her enigmatic father, a talented pianist, and Ai-Ming’s father, the shy and brilliant composer, Sparrow, along with the violin prodigy Zhuli were forced to reimagine their artistic and private selves during China’s political campaigns and how their fates reverberate through the years with lasting consequences.
With maturity and sophistication, humor and beauty, Thien has crafted a novel that is at once intimate and grandly political, rooted in the details of life inside China yet transcendent in its universality.
₨ 800.00Do Not Say We Have Nothing
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White Teeth
NATIONAL BESTSELLER • Set against London’s racial and cultural tapestry, venturing across the former empire and into the past as it barrels toward the future, White Teeth revels in the ecstatic hodgepodge of modern life, flirting with disaster, confounding expectations, and embracing the comedy of daily existence. Zadie Smith’s dazzling debut caught critics grasping for comparisons and deciding on everyone from Charles Dickens to Salman Rushdie to John Irving and Martin Amis. But the truth is that Zadie Smith’s voice is remarkably, fluently, and altogether wonderfully her own.
At the center of this invigorating novel are two unlikely friends, Archie Jones and Samad Iqbal. Hapless veterans of World War II, Archie and Samad and their families become agents of England’s irrevocable transformation. A second marriage to Clara Bowden, a beautiful, albeit tooth-challenged, Jamaican half his age, quite literally gives Archie a second lease on life, and produces Irie, a knowing child whose personality doesn’t quite match her name (Jamaican for “no problem”). Samad’s late-in-life arranged marriage (he had to wait for his bride to be born), produces twin sons whose separate paths confound Iqbal’s every effort to direct them, and a renewed, if selective, submission to his Islamic faith.
₨ 800.00White Teeth
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