Penguin Books Australia

Winner of the NCR Book Award, the Hawthornden Prize and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize

'This is the story of someone who - almost - wasn't there; who vanished into thin air. Her names, dates, family and experiences very nearly disappeared from the record for good . . .'

'Immaculately well done. Tomalin has managed to unearth a wealth of material about the uncharted life of Samuel Pepys'  Craig Brown, Mail on Sunday

'Sex, drink, plague, fire, music, marital conflict, the fall of kings, corruption and courage in public life, wars, navies, public execution, incarceration in the Tower: Samuel Pepys's life is full of irresistible material, and Claire Tomalin seizes...

'A perfect biography: detailed, witty, warm. Tomalin involves us so deeply that Austen's final illness and death come almost as a personal tragedy to the reader'  Dirk Bogarde, Daily Telegraph, Books of the Year

'Truly marvellous. I cannot think that a better life of Jane Austen then Claire Tomalin's will be written for many years. Her readings of the novels are full of brilliant insights. She...

'An extraordinary story, beautifully told. Tomalin is the most empathetic of biographers'  Craig Brown, Mail on Sunday

Paradox ruled Thomas Hardy's life. His birth was almost his death; he became one of the great Victorian novelists and reinvented himself as one of the twentieth-century's greatest poets; he was an unhappy husband and a desolate widower; he wrote bitter attacks on the English class...

'Intelligent, finely made and wonderfully readable. As gripping as the best fiction'  Independent on Sunday

'One of the best biographies I have ever read: a perfect match of author and subject. It should become a classic'  Alison Lurie

Winner of the Whitbread First Book Prize

'As haunting as good fiction: the proper effect of a biography where warm sympathy and precise observation go hand in hard'  Listener

'There has been a lot of fighting hereabouts. The trenches have made themselves rather than been made, and run inconsequently in and out of the big thirty-foot high stacks of bricks; it is most confusing. The parapet of a trench which we don't occupy is built up with ammunition boxes and corpses . . .'

'Both unputdownable and utterly engaging' 
Jonathan Raban, The Times Literary Supplement

Translated by Daphne Woodward

'The author's verbal felicity is amazing . . . we come away awed'
The New York Times

George Orwell was an inveterate keeper of diaries. The Orwell Diaries presents eleven of them, covering the period 1931-1949, and follows Orwell from his early years as a writer to his last literary notebook. An entry from 1931 tells of a communal shave in the Trafalgar Square fountains, while notes from his travels through industrial England show the development of the impassioned social commentator...

Translated by Peter Green

'This is terrifying vision of existence is conveyed with intense poetic power'
Guardian

Translated by Barbara Bray

'A writer of something akin to genius'
Sunday Telegraph

A light...