Penguin twentieth-century classics

Aaron Sisson leaves the mining community he has grown up in, abandoning his wife and children. He is obsessed with the decline of humanity from the renaissance to the modern age and the book is about his struggle to find a new world.

Into the world of propriety which composed the rigid code of old New York society returns the Countess Olenska, separated from her European husband and bearing with her an independence and impulsive awareness of life.

Gloria and Anthony Patch party until their money runs out; then their goal becomes Adam Patch's fortune. Gloria's beauty fades and Anthony's drinking takes its horrible toll. Fitzgerald here once again displays a wariness of the upper classes.

Laurie Lee, the acclaimed author of As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning and A Rose for Winter, died in May 1997. Cider With Rosie is his account of growing up in a remote Cotswolds village.

This is a collection of four novels by Anthony Burgess, featuring the poet and social critic, Enderby. These novels are a chronicle of the gross and fitfully inspired poet's triumphs despite all the obstacles in his path.

The theme that draws all of these pieces together is modernity. Woolf was writing in a world that was forever changed by the catastrophe that was World War One.

Twilight in Italy is composed of 7 humorous short pieces. Sea and Sardinia is the record of the week Lawrence spent on the island after he was expelled from England, and Etruscan Places is the last of Lawrence's travel books.

The victim of a series of mix-ups which delay his induction into the army, Joseph finds himself facing a year of idleness. Dangling Man is his journal, a wonderful account of his restless wanderings through Chicago's streets.