The Driver's Seat

William Shakespeare

Ladybird

With a foreword by Lev Rosen, author of the Evander Mills series and You've Goth My Heart. 'All that glisters is not gold.' Rediscover Shakespeare's tale of bitterness and retribution. Bitterness begets blood. Bassiano is in love with the gorgeous heiress Portia! Alas, he's too poor to pass the suitors' test set by her father. Fortunately, Bassiano's best friend, Antonio, s...

Virgil

Penguin

Crafted during the reign of Augustus Caesar at the outset of the Roman Empire, Virgil's Aeneid is a tale of thrilling adventure, extreme adversity, doomed romance, fateful battles, and profound loss. Through its stirring account of human struggle, meddling gods, and conflicting destinies, the poem brings to life the triumphs and trials that led to one of the most powerful socie...

Caroline Blackwood

Abacus

Caroline Blackwood's masterpiece, shortlisted for the 1977 Booker Prize - a gothic family drama in miniature In her gloomy mausoleum of a home, the terrifying matriarch Great Granny Webster spends her days sitting bolt upright in a Victorian chair, entirely alone except for her one-eyed maid - and her orphaned great-granddaughter, sent to stay for the sea air. She presides ove...

A. A. Milne

Phoenix

Winnie the Pooh is a classic children's book by A.A. Milne that follows the adventures of a honey-loving bear named Winnie-the-Pooh and his friends, including Piglet, Eeyore, Rabbit, Owl, and Christopher Robin, in the fictional Hundred Acre Wood. The stories often center around Pooh's playful attempts to find honey, his simple nature, and the heart-warming friendships between t...

Dylan. Thomas

Ladybird

'A tour de force of oral poetry' Guardian'I could get drunk just on the sound of the words' Sylvia PlathA definitive new edition of Dylan Thomas's beloved radio playIt is spring, moonless night in the small town, starless and bible-black, the cobblestreets silent... In the Welsh seaside town of Llareggub, night is moving in the streets. Its inhabitants are lost in the land of d...

Emily Brontë

Ladybird

'Be with me always - take any form - drive me mad! only do not leave me in this abyss, where I cannot find you! Oh, God! it is unutterable! I cannot live without my life! I cannot live without my soul!' Emily Brontë's novel of impossible desires, violence and transgression is a masterpiece of intense, unsettling power. It begins in a snowstorm, when Lockwood, the new tenant of...

Muriel Spark

Ladybird

'It never really occurred to her that literary men, if they like women at all, do not want literary women but girls.'The May of Teck Club 'exists for the Pecuniary Convenience and Social Protection of Ladies of Slender Means below the age of Thirty Years'. Nevertheless, and though there is a war on, they find the time between elocution lessons to jostle one another over suitors...

Muriel Spark

Ladybird

One of the BBC's '100 Novels that Shaped the World'A Hay Festival and The Poole VOTE 100 BOOKS for Women Selection Muriel Spark's classic The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie features a schoolmistress you'll never forget, in this beautifully repackaged Penguin Essentials edition.'Give me a girl at an impressionable age, and she is mine for life . . .'Passionate, free-thinking and unco...

Muriel Spark

Penguin

Described as 'a metaphysical shocker' at the time of its release, Muriel Sparks' The Driver's Seat is a taut psychological thriller, published with an introduction by John Lanchester in Penguin Modern Classics. Lise has been driven to distraction by working in the same accountants' office for sixteen years. So she leaves everything behind her, transforms herself into a laughing...

Muriel Spark

Penguin

A man of devilish charm and enterprising spirit, Dougal Douglas is employed to revitalize the ailing firm of Meadows, Meade & Grindley. He succeeds, but not quite in the way his employer intended. Strange things begin to happen as Dougal exerts an uncanny influence on the inhabitants of Peckham Rye and brings lies, tears, blackmail and even murder into the lives of all he meets...

Muriel Spark

Virago Modern Classics

'This is the story of a dinner party, a knot of people with pasts and connections which at first seem few but are later found to be many ...The prevailing mood is urbane: the wine is poured, the talk continues, and all the time the ice on which the protagonists' world rests is being thinned from beneath by boiling emotions and ugly motives ...No living writer handles the tensio...

Muriel Spark

Everyman

Sparks most celebrated novel, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, tells the story of a charismatic schoolteachers catastrophic effect on her pupils. The Girls of Slender Means is a beautifully drawn portrait of young women living in a hostel in London in the giddy postwar days of 1945. The Drivers Seat follows the final haunted hours of a woman descending into madness. And The Only ...