Penguin Journey into Fear Ambler Eric

An Indian clerk, Girija Krishnan, sees the opportunity of his lifetime when he stumbles on an abandoned cache of arms hidden in the Malayan jungle. If he can sell the weapons, he will be able to achieve his lifelong dream of owning a bus company - although the penalty for gun-running is death. Soon his decision becomes the catalyst for a chain of events involving an entrepreneurial Chinese family, a corrupt Colonel and, finally, a naive couple of American tourists who find themselves horribly out of their depth

Poet's Pub is the classic comic novel by Eric Linklater, set in an English pub. When an Oxford poet named Saturday Keith assumes control of the Pelican Pub, what he desires most is the peace and freedom to craft his poems without being disturbed. To his dismay, however, the local watering hole soon becomes an attraction for various eccentric characters ranging from uncouth rogues to members of academia. Comprised of an entertaining series of vignettes that occur at the Pelican Pub in the fictional Downish, Poet's Pub is a humourous collection of stories by award-winner Eric Linklater. Includes a new introduction by Nancy Pearl

Arguing that the slave trade was at the heart of Britain's economic progress, Eric Williams's landmark 1944 study revealed the connections between capitalism and racism, and has influenced generations of historians ever since. Williams traces the rise and fall of the Atlantic slave trade through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to show how it laid the foundations of the Industrial Revolution, and how racism arose as a means of rationalising an economic decision. Most significantly, he showed how slavery was only abolished when it ceased to become financially viable, exploding the myth of emancipation as a mark of Britain's moral progress

Small-time hustler Arthur Abdel Simpson ekes out a living in Athens by robbing gullible tourists. But when an attempted theft backfires, he finds himself out-smarted and blackmailed into driving a highly suspicious car across the border to Istanbul. Then the Turkish secret police get involved, and Simpson becomes embroiled in something far deeper, and more dangerous, than he could imagine. Featuring a heart-stopping jewel heist, this compulsive, morally complex thriller became the basis for the classic film Topkapi

The last time anyone saw Lucia Bernardi, she was driving at top speed away from a Swiss villa - leaving the body of her murdered Iraqi lover behind. Now she has vanished, along with a potentially explosive set of papers, and disgraced journalist Piet Maas has been sent to follow her trail to the South of France. But finding her is just the start of his problems. Soon, amid a cast of con men, secret agents and revolutionaries, he must decide whether to land the scoop of his lifetime - or follow Lucia into ever more dangerous waters

When Kurt Austin rescues the crew of a Scottish trawler, he finds himself trying to save them not once but twice. First, from the violent storm that dashes their vessel into jagged rocks and, second, from the deadly gunmen desperate to get their hands on its lost cargo of stolen Egyptian artefacts • Soon Kurt - with the assistance of resourceful MI5 agent Morgan Manning - is on the hunt for the source of these artefacts. It's a journey that takes them around the world and draws the fury of the mysterious Bloodstone group - an international network of murderous individuals who'll kill anyone in their way • But what do gunmen want with ancient loot? • One thing is for sure, if Kurt is to find out he's going to be in the cross hairs of some ruthless and well-armed foes

The Penguin English Library Edition of Where Angels Fear to Tread by E. M. Forster • 'I had got an idea that everyone here spent their lives in making little sacrifices for objects they didn't care for, to please people they didn't love; that they never learned to be sincere - and, what's as bad, never learned how to enjoy themselves' • E. M. Forster's first novel is a witty comedy of manners that is tinged with tragedy. It tells the story of Lilia Herriton, who proves to be an embarrassment to her late husband's family as, in the small Tuscan town of Monteriano, she begins a relationship with a much younger Italian man - classless, uncouth and highly unsuitable. A subtle attack on decorous Edwardian values and a humanely sympathetic portrayal of the clash of two cultures, Where Angels Fear to Tread is also a profound exploration of character and virtue

Hailed by George Bernard Shaw as 'useful [corrective] to the romantic conception of war', R.C. Sherriff's Journey's End is an unflinching vision of life in the trenches towards the end of the First World War, published in Penguin Classics • Set in the First World War, Journey's End concerns a group of British officers on the front line and opens in a dugout in the trenches in France. Raleigh, a new eighteen-year-old officer fresh out of English public school, joins the besieged company of his friend and cricketing hero Stanhope, and finds him dramatically changed. Laurence Olivier starred as Stanhope in the first performance of Journey's End in 1928; the play was an instant stage success and remains a remarkable anti-war classic • R.C. Sherriff (1896-1975) joined the army shortly after the outbreak of the First World War, serving as a captain in the East Surrey regiment

E.M. Forster's Where Angels Fear to Tread is amongst the greatest twentieth-century literary explorations of vice, virtue and the nature of prejudice, edited with notes by Oliver Stallybrass and an introduction by Ruth Padel in Penguin Classics • On travelling to Italy with her friend Caroline Abbott, the impulsive English widow Lilia Herriton outrages her dead husband's family by meeting and quickly becoming engaged to Gino, a dashing but deeply unsuitable Italian man twelve years her junior. Infuriated, her ex-brother-in-law Philip sets off from England to her new home in the Tuscan town of Monteriano - but, finding himself unable to persuade Lilia to leave her handsome, uncouth new lover, returns to England without her. When Lilia's marriage leads to sudden tragedy, however, Philip and Caroline feel compelled to return once more to Italy, where they are forced to examine their own lives

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 and chatter in Yiddish. He also relates stories of his parents, who fled from Russia in 1914, his experiences at school and a brief flirtation with Communism. Unsentimental, vital and almost dream like, this is a masterly evocation of a long-vanished world

В эпической повести "Сумасшедший дом на краю Земли. Путешествие "Бельгики" в темную антарктическую ночь" Джулиан Санктон рассказывает историю приключений, которые пошли наперекосяк. Поскольку команда балансировала на грани, капитан все больше полагался на двух молодых офицеров, дружба с которыми расцвела в плену - доктора Фредерика Кука, необузданного американца, чья последующая дурная слава затмит его блестящую службу на "Бельгике"; и первого помощника капитана, ставшего вскоре легендарным Руалем Амундсеном, который позже участвовал в гонках. Капитан Скотт на Южном полюсе. Вместе Кук и Амундсен спланировали бы отчаянный побег из-подо льдов, который либо вписал бы их имена в историю, либо обрек бы их на ужасную участь в замерзшем океане • Книга на английском языке

No conflict better encapsulates all that went wrong on the Western Front during World War I than the Battle of the Somme in 1916. The tragic loss of life and stoic endurance by troops who walked towards their death is an iconic image - but this critically-acclaimed bestseller, on the four months of battle, shows the extent to which the Allied armies were in fact able to break through the German front lines again and again • In eight years of research, Hugh Sebag-Montefiore - the author of Dunkirk has found extraordinary new material from Australians, New Zealanders, Canadians, and the British - from heartbreaking diaries and letters to hitherto unseen Red Cross files - recounting their experiences amid the horror of war. It has been hailed as the best book about the battle, which, though not an Allied victory, was the beginning of the slide towards German defeat