198 x 129 mm

The 120 Days of Sodom by the Marquis de Sade (Penguin Modern Classics) — written in the Bastille in 1785, one of the most notorious works in Western literary history. This Penguin Modern Classics edition presents the text with full scholarly apparatus for serious students of literature and philosophy. Trans. Will McMorran and Thomas Wynn.

Tales from the Decameron by Giovanni Boccaccio (Penguin Classics) — a selection from one of medieval Europe’s greatest literary works, written in the shadow of the Black Death. Boccaccio’s tales range from bawdy comedy to romantic tragedy with a directness and humanity that anticipates the Renaissance. An ideal introduction to this great literary treasury.

Homo Faber by Max Frisch (Penguin Modern Classics) — UNESCO engineer Walter Faber’s rationalist worldview is shattered when coincidences reveal a suppressed truth about his past. A gripping tragedy and parable about the limits of the technological mind, written in prose perfectly calibrated to its narrator. Trans. Michael Bullock.

The Forsyte Saga: Volume 1 by John Galsworthy (Penguin Modern Classics) — opens one of the great English family chronicles. The doomed marriage of solicitor Soames and the independent Irene, against the backdrop of a world between Victorian confidence and Edwardian dissolution. The work that earned Galsworthy the Nobel Prize for Literature.

The Plague by Albert Camus (Penguin Modern Classics) — Camus’s meditation on suffering, solidarity, and the human condition during a bubonic plague in Oran. Read as allegory of the Nazi occupation. Robin Buss’s acclaimed translation captures the measured clarity of Camus’s finest prose.

The Monk by Matthew Lewis (Penguin Classics) — the most extreme and compelling of the original Gothic novels, written when Lewis was nineteen. The saintly monk Ambrosio’s catastrophic fall through the full catalogue of Gothic transgression scandalised readers in 1796 and still fascinates. Essential Gothic literature.