Now a major BBC drama starring Forest Whitaker, Jonathan Rhys Meyers and Laurence Fishburne

Tracing his ancestry through six generations - slaves and freedmen, farmers and blacksmiths, lawyers and architects - back to Africa, Alex Haley discovered a sixteen-year-old youth, Kunta Kinte. It was this young man, who had been torn from his homeland and in torment and anguish brought to the slave markets of the New World, who held the key to Haley's deep and distant past.

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award

Taking the April 2003 rejection by Israel's Supreme Court of a petition to ban flechette use rounds in the densely populated Gaza Strip as its point of departure, this innovative and interdisciplinary book offers the only in-depth study on flechette weapons conducted to date. Its timeliness is demonstrated in the 2009 Goldstone Report's call for an urgent UNGA discussion on such weapons' future legality. The book's first part reviews flechette weapon development and use during the Vietnam War as well as the consequent efforts to ban them. It then turns to the Israeli case: the use in Lebanon, the Gaza Strip and the resulting Supreme Court petition. The book's third and main part dissects the prolonged debate over banning flechettes while resting on unique primary sources such as Israeli post mortem reports together with an ample legal and military-medical literature. The book thus provides one of the most comprehensive explorations available of the distinctions separating legal from illegal conventionalweapons.

This classic story of a shipwrecked mariner on a deserted island is perhaps the greatest adventure in all of English literature. Fleeing from pirates, Robinson Crusoe is swept ashore in a storm possessing only a knife, a box of tobacco, a pipe-and the will to survive. His is the saga of a man alone: a man who overcomes self-pity and despair to reconstruct his life; who painstakingly teaches himself how to fashion a pot, bake bread, build a canoe; and who, after twenty-four agonizing years of solitude, discovers a human footprint in the sand... Consistently popular since its first publication in 1719, Daniel Defoe's story of human endurance in an exotic, faraway land exerts a timeless appeal. The first important English novel, "Robinson Crusoe" has taken its rightful place among the great myths of Western civilization.

Victory was the last of Conrad's novels to be set in the Malay Archipelago. It tells the story of Axel Heyst who, damaged by his dead father's nihilistic philosophy, has retreated from the world of commerce and colonial exploration to live alone on the island of Samburan. But Heyst's solitaryexistence ends when he rescues an English girl from her rapacious patron and brings her back to the island. She in turn recalls him to love and life, until the world breaks in on them once more with tragic consequences. In this love story Conrad created two of his psychologically most complex andcompelling characters in a narrative of great erotic power.This new edition uses the first edition text and includes a new chronology and bibliography.

The Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Empire Falls delivers his most intimate novel yet: "An astute portrait of a 30-year marriage, in all its promise and pain…. His honest, heartfelt storytelling—like a cooling breeze off a certain New England shoreline—has never felt fresher" (People).

For Griffin, all paths, all memories, converge at Cape Cod.  The Cape is where he took his childhood summer vacations, where he and his wife, Joy, honeymooned, where they decided he’d leave his LA screenwriting job to become a college professor, and where they celebrated the marriage of their daughter Laura’s best friend. But when their beloved Laura’s wedding takes place a year later, Griffin is caught between chauffeuring his mother’s and father’s ashes in two urns and contending with Joy and her large, unruly family. Both he and she have also brought dates along. How in the world could this have happened? By turns hilarious, rueful, and uplifting, That Old Cape Magic is a profoundly involving novel about marriage, family, and all the other ties that bind.

Look for Richard Russo's new book, Somebody's Fool, coming soon.

A stunning novel of the present moment that takes us into the hearts and minds of those who use terrorism as an ideal and a way of life, and those who aspire to the frightening power of wealth. Abandoning a life he felt was not his own, Willie Chandran (the hero of Half a Life) moves to Berlin where his sisterís radical political awakening inspires him to join a liberation movement in India. There, in the jungles and dirt-poor small villages, through months of secrecy and night marches, Willie - a solitary, inward man - discovers both the idealism and brutality of guerilla warfare. When he finally escapes the movement, he is imprisoned for the murder of three policemen. Released unexpectedly on condition he return to England, he attempts to climb back into life in the West, but his experience of wealth, love and despair in London only bedevils him further. 'Magic Seeds' is a moving tale of a man searching for his life and fearing he has wasted it, and a testing study of the conflicts between the rich and the poor, and the struggles within each. Its spare, elegant prose sizzles with devastating psychological analysis, bleak humour and astonishing characters. Only V. S. Naipaul could have written a novel so attuned to the world and so much a challenge to it.

'Wars are not won by evacuations'

'We can take it!'

'Westward look, the land is bright'

This collection of speeches from one of the great modern orators includes Churchill's famous words on the declaration of war with Germany, as well as his rousing call to the British in June 1940 after Dunkirk, and his immortal tribute to the young men fighting in the Battle of Britain.


GREAT IDEAS. Throughout history, some books have changed the world. They have transformed the way we see ourselves - and each other. They have inspired debate, dissent, war and revolution. They have enlightened, outraged, provoked and comforted. They have enriched lives - and destroyed them. Now Penguin brings you the works of the great thinkers, pioneers, radicals and visionaries whose ideas shook civilization and helped make us who we are.

It Is 1988, The Year In Which America Is Whipped Into A Frenzy Of Prurience By The Impeachment Of A President, And In A Small New England Town, It Is The Last Year Of The Life Of The Forcibly Retired, Disgraced, Widowed Professor Coleman Silk, Whose Own Tragic Exposure Is Played Out Against The Background Of The Clinton Revelations.Coleman'S Secret Has Been Kept For Fifty Years From His Wife, His Four Children, His Colleagues, And His Friends, Including The Writer Nathan Zuckerman, Who Sets Out - After Coleman'S Suspicious Death In A Car Crash With His Mistress - To Understand How His Eminent, Upright Man, Esteemed As An Educator For Nearly All His Life, Had Fabricated His Identity And How That Cannily Controlled Life Came Unravelled. Set In 1990S America Where Conflicting Moralities And Ideological Divisions Are Made Manifest Through Public Denunciation And Rituals Of Purification, The Human Stain Concludes Philip Roth'S Eloquent Trilogy Of Post-War American Lives That Are As Tragically Determined By The Nation'S Fate As By The 'Human Stain' That So Ineradicably Marks Human Nature.

'You are hereby ordered to fall upon the rebels, the MacDonalds of Glencoe, and to put all to the sword under seventy.' This was the treacherous and cold-blooded order ruthlessly carried out on 13 February 1692, when the Campbells slaughtered their hosts the MacDonalds at the Massacre of Glencoe. It was a bloody incident which had deep repercussions and was the beginning of the destruction of the Highlanders. John Prebble�s masterly description of the terrible events at Glencoe was praised as �Evocative and powerful� in the Sunday Telegraph.

Een in Europa wonende Amerikaanse psychiater trouwt met een van zijn patienten, wier schizofrenie hij weet te genezen, hetgeen echter tot zijn eigen ondergang leidt.

Daisy Miller, The last of the Valerii, The real thing, The lesson of the Master

Winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature 1954

Story of a group of young and not-so-young people living within reach of the Golden Gate Bridge, California, written in narrative verse