Penguin The Old Nurse's Story Гаскелл Элизабет

At the close of the Second World War, Intelligence Officer Gus Clifton returns to London • On his arm is Krista, the German wife he married secretly in Berlin • For his two sisters, this broken woman is nothing more than the enemy. For Nella, Gus's loyal fiancee, it is a terrible betrayal. As the three women wonder what hold Krista has over decent, honourable Gus, they begin to ask themselves • How far will they have to go to permanently get her out of their home, their future, their England?

A moving nineteenth-century account - lost for many decades - of a Chinese official's all-consuming love for his wife • 'Our passion was so great. Will the Old Man understand and help us once again?' • The Old Man of the Moon is Shen Fu's intimate and moving account of his marriage - from early passion to the trials of poverty and separation - and his great, enduring love for his wife in eighteenth-century China • Introducing Little Black Classics: 80 books for Penguin's 80th birthday. Little Black Classics celebrate the huge range and diversity of Penguin Classics, with books from around the world and across many centuries. They take us from a balloon ride over Victorian London to a garden of blossom in Japan, from Tierra del Fuego to 16th-century California and the Russian steppe

Setting off in his hometown, and ending up 'almost at the end of the world', Paul Theroux's The Old Patagonian Express is a travel writing tour de force from one of the masters of the genre contains a new preface by the author in Penguin Modern Classics • 'The journey, not the arrival, matters' • The Old Patagonian Expresstells of Paul Theroux's train journey down the length of North and South America. Beginning on Boston's subway, he depicts a voyage from ice-bound Massachusetts to the arid plateau of Argentina's most southerly tip, via pretty Central American towns and the ancient Incan city of Macchu Pichu. Shivering and sweating by turns as the temperature and altitude rise and plummet, he describes the people he encountered - thrown in with the tedious, and unavoidable, Mr Thornberry in Limon and reading to the legendary blind writer, Jorge Luis Borges, in Buenos Aires

Lose yourself in the twists and turns of love in the hilarious romantic comedy from the bestselling author of A Cornish Summer • Finding true love's a piece of cake - as long as you're looking for someone else's true love • Polly McLaren is young, scatty and impossibly romantic. She works for an arrogant and demanding boss, and has a gorgeous if never-there-when-you-need-him boyfriend. But the day a handsome stranger recognises her old school scarf, her life is knocked completely off kilter • Adam is American, new to the country and begs Polly's help in finding his missing fiance. Over dinner at the Savoy, she agrees - the girls of St Gertrude's look out for one another. However, the old-girl network turns out to be a spider's web of complications and deceit in which everyone and everything Polly cares about is soon hopelessly entangled

'His characters are marvellous, his insights wonderful ... You don't expect reality but you get something bigger and better' Ruth Rendell • The Old Curiosity Shop was an instant bestseller that, even while it was criticized for its sentimentality, captured the hearts of the nation with its portrayal of little Nell Trent, who is thrown into a terrifying world when her beloved grandfather is unable to pay his debts to the loathsome Quilp. Alongside the pathos of the innocent, tragic Nell are some of Dickens's greatest characters: the ne'er-do'well Dick Swiveller, the mannish lawyer Sally Brass, the half-starved 'Marchioness' and the lustful Quilp himself, a creation of demonic power and cruelty

The hilarious international bestselling novel that has had pensioners ditching their sticks and zimmers to follow the age-defying, youth inducing antics inside The Secret Diary of Hendrik Groen, 83 1/4 Years Old . . . 'Terrific. This geriatric Adrian Mole made me laugh' Woman and Home 'Funny and touching' BBC Radio 4 Meet Hendrik Groen. An octogenarian in a care home who has no intention of doing what he's told, or dying quietly. To that end, he creates the Old-But-Not-Dead Club and with his fellow members sets about living his final years with careless abandon. Such anarchism infuriates the care home director but pleases Eefje, the woman who makes Hendrik's frail heart palpitate. If it's never too late to have fun, then can it ever be too late to meet the love of your life? 'So much more than just a comedy' John Boyne 'A story with a great deal of heart' Graeme Simsion, The Rosie Project 'Amusing and wickedly accurate

'The Boy-scouts mistook my signal, and have killed the postman. I've had very little practice in this sort of thing, you see' • The British short story tradition is probably the richest, most varied and historically extensive in the world. This new anthology celebrates the full diversity and energy of its writers, subjects and tones, from the story's origins with Defoe, Swift and Fielding, to the 'golden age' of the fin de siecle and Edwardian period, ending with the First World War. Including the most famous authors as well as some magnificent, little-known stories never republished since their first appearance in magazines and periodicals, these stories are by turns topical and playful, ghostly and theatrical, rumbustious and sublime • Edited with an introduction by Philip Hensher

The Gambler and Other Stories is Fyodor Dostoyevsky's collection of one novella and six short stories reflecting his own life - indeed, 'The Gambler', a story of a young tutor in the employment of a formerly wealthy Russian General, was written under a strict deadline so he could pay off his roulette debts. This volume includes 'Bobok', the tale of a frustrated writer visiting a cemetery and enjoying the gossip of the dead; 'The Dream of a Ridiculous Man', the story of one man's plan to commit suicide and the troubling dream that follows, as well as 'A Christmas Party and a Wedding', 'A Nasty Story' and 'The Meek One'

The Stone Gods is one of Jeanette Winterson's most imaginative novels -- an interplanetary love story; a traveller's tale; a hymn to the beauty of the world • On the airwaves, all the talk is of the new blue planet - pristine and habitable, like our own 65 million years ago, before we took it to the edge of destruction. And off the air, Billie and Spike are falling in love. What will happen when their story combines with the world's story, as they whirl towards Planet Blue, into the future? Will they - and we - ever find a safe landing place?