Bakha is a young man, proud and even attractive, yet none the less he is an outcast in India's caste system: an Untouchable. This novel describes a day in the life of Bakha, sweeper and toilet-cleaner…
This is the story of how Mahatma Gandhi's struggle for independence from the British came to a typical village, Kanthapura, in South India. This edition includes extensive notes on Indian myths, relig…
Shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize: A “rich, Chekhovian novel” about family and forgiveness from the acclaimed author of Fire on the Mountain (The New Yorker).
'It was as if a curtain had fallen, hiding everything I had ever known,' says Anna Morgan, eighteen years old and catapulted to England from the West Indies after the death of her beloved father. Work…
“In the summer of 1947, when the creation of the state of Pakistan was formally announced, ten million people—Muslims and Hindus and Sikhs—were in flight. By the time the monsoon broke, almost a milli…
In what is one of the finest autobiographies to come out of the First World War, the distinguished poet Edmund Blunden records his experiences as an infantry subaltern in France and Flanders. Blunden …
In the winter of 1926, when everybody everywhere sees nothing but good things ahead, Joe Trace, middle-aged door-to-door salesman of Cleopatra beauty products, shoots his teenage lover to death. At th…
Academics hail it as the beginning of modernism, but to readers around the world—even those daunted by Moby-Dick—Bartleby the Scrivener is simply one of the most absorbing and moving novellas ever. Se…
Shelve Bartleby, the Scrivener: A Story of Wall Street
Nightwood, Djuna Barnes' strange and sinuous tour de force, "belongs to that small class of books that somehow reflect a time or an epoch" (TLS). That time is the period between the two World Wars, an…
Five disparate voices inhabit Ali Smith's dreamlike, mesmerising Hotel World, set in the luxurious anonymity of the Global Hotel, in an unnamed northern English city. The disembodied yet interconnecte…
The 1947 Partition of India is the backdrop for this powerful novel, narrated by a precocious child who describes the brutal transition with chilling veracity. Young Lenny Sethi is kept out of school …
When Adela Quested and her elderly companion Mrs Moore arrive in the Indian town of Chandrapore, they quickly feel trapped by its insular and prejudiced 'Anglo-Indian' community. Determined to escape …
"There are writers—Tolstoy and Henry James to name two—whom we hold in awe, writers—Turgenev and Chekhov—for whom we feel a personal affection, other writers whom we respect—Conrad for example—but who…
Opening in Calcutta in the 1960s, Amitav Ghosh's radiant second novel follows two families—one English, one Bengali—as their lives intertwine in tragic and comic ways. The narrator, Indian born and En…
The last of the four novels Jean Rhys wrote in interwar Paris, Good Morning, Midnight is the culmination of a searing literary arc, which established Rhys as an astute observer of human tragedy. Her e…
Mohun Biswas has spent his 46 years of life striving for independence. Shuttled from one residence to another after the drowning of his father, he yearns for a place he can call home. He marries into …
Set in the wake of the Mau Mau rebellion and on the cusp of Kenya's independence from Britain, A Grain of Wheat follows a group of villagers whose lives have been transformed by the 1952–1960 Emergenc…
Saleem Sinai is born at the stroke of midnight on August 15, 1947, the very moment of India’s independence. Greeted by fireworks displays, cheering crowds, and Prime Minister Nehru himself, Saleem gro…
Jaya's life comes apart at the seams when her husband is asked to leave his job while allegations of business malpractice against him are investigated. Her familiar existence disrupted, her husband's …
Written by an anonymous 14th-century poet, this epic poem is recognized as an equal of Chaucer's masterworks and of the great Old English poems, including "Beowulf." This edition includes a Preface by…
'Yayati', Girish Karnard's first play, was written in 1960 and won the Mysore State Award in 1962. It is based on an episode in the Mahabharata, where Yayati, one of the ancestors of the Pandavas, is …
Selected Tales contains some of the most timeless and enchanting folk and fairy tales collected by the Brothers Grimm, translated with an introduction by David Luke in Penguin Classics.
The action of this play takes place in late August 1833 at a hedge-school in the townland of Baile Beag - an Irish speaking community in County Donegal. The 'scholars' are a cross-section of the local…
Chandran is a good-natured, popular, rather dreamy student who works hard to pass his exams. Newly graduated, he is unsure how he wants to spend his future. And then, one evening, walking by the river…
Translated into and performed in several Indian and foreign languages, Shantata! Court Chalu Ahe is one of the best known works of Vijay Tendulkar. In some ways typical, in others uncharacteristic, th…
