Penguin Books Australia

  A penetrating study of ordinary people resisting the Nazi occupation—and, true to its title, a dark comedy of wartime manners— Comedy in a Minor Key tells the story of Wim and Marie, a Dutch couple who first hide a Jew they know as Nico, then must dispose of his body when he dies of pneumonia. This novella, first published in 1947 and now translated into English for the first time...

'A cool, patient voice that draws the reader in. von Schirach…has the talent to dazzle.' New York Times Book Review
A private boys' school that harbours a gang of teenage exorcists.
A drug deal that goes bizarrely awry when a dog gets involved.
A couple who like to swing – until one partner hits the wall.
A brutal gang rape whose perpetrators are known but cannot be convicted.
Crimes, bad...

Lorenzo has a few issues. They include the fact that he doesn't have, or want, any friends. Because this is making his parents unhappy, he tells them he has been invited on a skiing holiday with a group from school. In fact, he is planning to spend the week happily ensconced in the cellar of their apartment building with a supply of canned tuna.

Then his estranged older sister Olivia turns up in the...

In this multi-award-winning autobiographical novel, Cristovão Tezza draws his readers into the mind of a young father whose son, Felipe, is born with Down syndrome. From the initial shock of diagnosis, and through his growing understanding of the world of hospitals and therapies, Tezza threads the story of his son's life with his own.

'But what do we really know about other people?'  

Qian Xiaohong is born into a sleepy Hunan village, where the new China rush towards development is a mere distant rumour. A buxom, naïve sixteen-year-old, she yearns to leave behind hometown scandal, and joins the mass migration to the bustling boomtown of Shenzhen. There, she must navigate dangerous encounters with ruthless bosses, jealous wives, sympathetic hookers and corrupt policemen as she...

This new volume of eight short stories, with parallel translations, offers students at all levels the opportunity to enjoy a wide range of contemporary literature without having constantly to refer back to a dictionary.

' Alas for those girls who've refused the truth:

The sweetest tongue has the sharpest tooth.'

'Singer writes with a love and passion unequalled in contemporary fiction'   Washington Post  

'One is forever suspended between laughter and tears by this rich and marvellous novel'   The New York Times

'A burningly radiant, intensely beautiful book. Singer is answering his age like a prophet'  Ted Hughes 

'Singer is a writer of far greater than ordinary power'   The New York Times

It is Warsaw in the 1930s. Aaron Greidinger is an aspiring young writer and the son of a rabbi, who struggles to be true to his art when he is faced with the chance of riches and a passport to America. But as the Nazis threaten to invade Poland, Aaron rediscovers Shosha, his childhood sweetheart - still living on Krochmalna...

With an Introduction by
Colm Tóibín

Translation by
Margaret Sayers Peden

'An existentialist classic . . . Retains a chilling, memorable power'
The New York Times Book Review

With a new Introduction by
Fay Weldon

'A masterpiece' 
Jean Cocteau

As the First World War reaches its final year, an illicit love affair is beginning between a sixteen-year-old boy and the young wife of a soldier at the front. They meet secretly in her flat on the outskirts of Paris, in cornfields and on river banks. When she receives letters from her husband, they burn them together. Intoxicated...

'So many mysteries in one boarding house!'

'Too late, I realized I had been taken to a brothel'

Three sisters live in three flats in an aristocratic palazzo in Cagliari's ancient Castello quarter, where rich and poor are mixed as they used to be in the old downtown quarter. The eldest, Noemi, dreams of lost splendours, while the second, Maddalena, dreams of having a child. The third, known as Countess Butterfingers 'because she's clumsy, hands made of soft cheese, and because the whole of reality...

For the 125th anniversary of Kafka's birth, an astonishing new translation of his best-known stories, in a spectacular graphic package

For all his fame, Franz Kafka published only a small number of stories in his lifetime. This new translation of those stories, by Michael Hofmann, one of the most respected German-to-English translators at work today, makes Kafka's best-known works available to a new...