The Merry-Go-Round in the Sea: Popular Penguins

Randolph Stow

In 1941, Rob Coram is six. The war feels far removed from Geraldton in Western Australia. But when his favourite older cousin Rick leaves to join the army, the war takes a step closer. When Rick returns several years later, he has changed and the old merry-go-round that represents Rob's dream of utopia ...

The Beast Within

Emile Zola

His haunting, impressionistic study of a man's slow corruption by jealousy, Emile Zola's "The Beast Within" (La Bete Humaine) is translated from the French with an introduction and notes by Roger Whitehouse in "Penguin Classics". Roubaud is consumed by a jealous rage when he discovers a sordid secret ab...

Submission

Michel Houellebecq

In a near-future France, Fran ois, a middle-aged academic, is watching his life slowly dwindle to nothing. His sex drive is diminished, his parents are dead, and his lifelong obsession - the ideas and works of the nineteenth-century novelist Joris-Karl Huysmans - has led him nowhere. In a late-capitalis...