The Graduate

Charles Webb, Charles Webb

As far as Benjamin Braddock's parents are concerned, his future is sewn up. Now he has graduated from college, he will go to Yale or Harvard, get a good job and enjoy a life of money, cocktails and pool parties in the suburbs, just like them. For Benjamin, however, this isn't quite enough. When his pare...

The Big Sleep

Raymond Chandler

 Raymond Chandler's The Big Sleep is the definitive hardboiled detective story and Philip Marlowe the perfect expression of the cynical, world-weary gumshoe. Hired by the crippled General Sternwood to shake off a blackmailer, Marlowe also has to deal with the general's two rebellious daughters, the gamb...

The Pit and the Pendulum: Popular Penguins

Edgar Allan Poe

Edgar Allan Poe is not only the finest, most terrifying writer of Gothic horror tales ever to have lived, he also wrote extraordinary poems. Here, Poe writes of the torments of ingenious, malevolent persecutors and of a mind's own sickening madness. The Pit and the Pendulum is a collection of works from...

Picasso's Trousers

Nicholas Allan

Whenever Picasso does something different, people say, "No! No! No! Picasso!" But Picasso doesn't listen. Instead, he says..."Yes!" He paints all-blue pictures, all-pink pictures, plus pictures from the front and side all at the same time! He makes art out of bike bits and he can draw pictures in less t...

Riverkeep

Martin Stewart

Fifteen-year-old Wulliam is dreading taking up his family's mantle of Riverkeep, tending the river and fishing corpses from its treacherous waters. But then everything changes. One night his father is possessed by a dark spirit, and Wull hears that a cure lurks deep within the great sea-beast known as t...