Penguin Books Australia

Women have looked to Jane Austen's heroines as models of appropriate behaviour for nearly two centuries. Who better to understand the heart of a heroine than Austen? In this delightful epistolary "what if," Austen serves as a "Dear Abby" of sorts, using examples from her novels...

Written by a former army lieutenant, civil engineer, and journalist, Backlands is Euclides da Cunha's vivid and poignant portrayal of Brazil's infamous War of Canudos. The deadliest civil war in Brazilian history, the conflict during the 1890s was between the government and the village of Canudos in the northeastern state of Bahia, which had been settled by 30,000 followers of the religious zealot...

First published in 1859, Our Nig is an autobiographical narrative that stands as one of the most important accounts of the life of a black woman in the antebellum North. In the story of Frado, a spirited black girl who is abused and overworked as the indentured servant to a New England family, Harriet E. Wilson tells a heartbreaking story about the resilience of the human spirit.

No understanding of world mythology is complete without acquaintance with Rostam, Iran's most celebrated mythological hero. According to the Shahnameh (the tenth-century Book of Kings ), this titan, magnificent in strength and courage, bestrode Persia for 500 years. While he often served fickle kings—undergoing many trials of combat, cunning, and endurance—he was never their servant and...

One hundred years ago, Selma Lagerlöf became the first woman to win the Nobel Prize in Literature. She assured her place in Swedish letters with this sweeping historical epic, her first and best-loved novel, and the basis for the 1924 silent film of the same name that launched Greta Garbo to stardom. Set in 1820s Sweden, it tells the story of a defrocked minister named Gösta Berling.

A master of gritty naturalism, Theodore Dreiser explores the corruption of the American dream in The Financier . Frank Cowperwood, a fiercely ambitious businessman, emerges as the very embodiment of greed as he relentlessly seeks satisfaction in wealth, women, and power. As Cowperwood deals and double-deals, betrays and is in turn betrayed, his rise and fall come to represent the American success...

Girls! Girls! Those of you who have hearts, and therefore wish for happiness, homes, and husbands by and by, never develop a reputation for being clever.

'A truer prophecy of the future than either Brave New World or The Shape of Things to Come.' - George Orwell

Rasselas, Prince of Abyssinia, leaves the easy life of the Happy Valley, accompanied by his sister Nekayah, her attendant Pekuah, and the much-travelled philosopher Imlac. Their journey takes them to Egypt, where they study the various conditions of men's lives, before returning home in a 'conclusion in which nothing is concluded'. Johnson's tale is not only a satire on optimism, but also an expression...

A haunted castle and a ruined bloodline

Manfred, wicked lord of Otranto Castle, is horrified when his son is crushed to death on his wedding day. But rather than witness the end of his line, as foretold in a curse, he resolves to send his own wife to a convent and marry the intended bride himself.

However, Manfred's lustful greed will be disturbed by the terrifying omens that now haunt his castle:...

William Burroughs' work was dedicated to an assault upon language, traditional values and all agents of control. Produced at a time when he was at his most extreme and messianic, The Job lays out his abrasive, incisive, paranoiac, maddened and maddening worldview in interviews interspersed with stories and other writing.

'I'm asking you, I think very nicely, to keep your hands off my husband'

Over a summer of snatched weekends, furtive phone calls and illicit trysts under the hot sun at Connecticut beach, Sally and Jerry begin a passionate affair. They wish to be together, but both are married to other people - Sally to Richard and Jerry to Ruth, whom he still loves. Ruth and Richard, meanwhile, have a secret of their...

In Journey Through a Small Planet (1972), the writer Emanuel Litvinoff recalls his working class Jewish childhood in the East End of London, a small cluster of streets right next to the City, but worlds apart in culture and spirit. With vivid intensity Litvinoff describes the overcrowded tenements of Brick Lane and Whitechapel, the smell of pickled herring and onion bread, the rattle of sewing machines...

'Nothing short of a revelation . . . I am still haunted by it' Evening Standard