Pick and Mix Deal - Little Clothbound Classics Summer Collection

Introducing Little Clothbound Classics: irresistible, mini editions of short stories, novellas and essays from the world's greatest writers, designed by the award-winning Coralie Bickford-Smith.

Late into the night we talked of love and its complications

Bonjour Tristesse is the story of seventeen-year-old Cécile, and one long, hot summer that will change her life.

Cécile leads a golden, carefree existence with her widowed playboy father and his mistresses. On holiday on the French Riviera, she is seduced by the sun, the sand and her first lover. But when her father decides to remarry, their perfect world becomes clouded by tragedy.

Françoise Sagan was born in France. Bonjour Tristesse, published in 1954 when she was just nineteen, became a succès de scandale and even earned its author a papal denunciation. Sagan went on to write many other novels, plays and screenplays, and died in 2004.

Translated by Heather Lloyd

Introducing Little Clothbound Classics: irresistible, mini editions of short stories, novellas and essays from the world's greatest writers, designed by the award-winning Coralie Bickford-Smith.

I somehow acquired the feeling that she was less happy than I, less loved

Thirteen stylishly inventive stories make up Nabokov's baker's dozen. From Russia to the Mediterranean, a German lake to new worlds, these tales of memory and escape show elusive glimpses of fleeting happiness, which, like the shimmer of the sea, sparkle brilliantly only to dissolve again.

Vladimir Nabokov, born in St Petersburg, exiled in Cambridge, Berlin and Paris, became the greatest Russian writer of the first half of the twentieth century. Fleeing to the US with his family in 1940, he then became the greatest writer in English of the second half of the century, famous for his novels, stories, an autobiography, poems, plays, essays and reviews.

Introducing Little Clothbound Classics: irresistible, mini editions of short stories, novellas and essays from the world's greatest writers, designed by the award-winning Coralie Bickford-Smith.

You could be lonely as hell in the city, then one day you look around you and you realise everybody else is lonely too

Sam Selvon is one of the greatest chroniclers of West Indian emigration; his evocation of voice, of place, of longing, defining for many the experience of a generation. Describing life in the Caribbean and in London with verve, humour and grace, this collection features many of his most acclaimed stories, including 'The Village Washer', 'The Cricket Match' and ‘My Girl and the City’.

Sam Selvon was born in Trinidad and worked as a wireless operator and reporter. In 1950 he left for the UK, where he established himself as a writer. His best-known novel was The Lonely Londoners.

Introducing Little Clothbound Classics: irresistible, mini editions of short stories, novellas and essays from the world's greatest writers, designed by the award-winning Coralie Bickford-Smith.

Neither sand nor this book has a beginning or an end

Magical books, infinite libraries, parallel worlds, mazes, labyrinths and philosophical paradoxes haunt these spellbinding tales by one of the most uniquely inventive short story writers of the twentieth century.

This collection brings together many of Borges’s greatest and most beloved stories, including 'The Garden of Forking Paths', 'The Book of Sand' and 'Shakespeare's Memory'.

Jorge Luis Borges was born in Buenos Aires in 1899 and educated in Europe. One of the most widely acclaimed writers of our times, he published many collections of poems, essays and short stories, before his death in Geneva in June 1986.

Translated by Andrew Hurley

Introducing Little Clothbound Classics: irresistible, mini editions of short stories, novellas and essays from the world's greatest writers, designed by the award-winning Coralie Bickford-Smith.

It was the height of summer, and there was anger in the rays of the sun

Filled with rich description and luxurious beauty, these ten tales of loss and longing from one of Japan’s greatest writers show the pull between duty and desire, ecstasy and death: a mother lost in mourning, a moonlit journey to fulfil a wish, a night of infidelity, a young lieutenant who ends his life.

Yukio Mishima was a novelist, playwright, poet, actor, bodybuilder and Samurai, whose writing broke social boundaries when Japan was in a state of rapid change. In 1970 he performed seppuku, a ritual suicide, upon himself after initiating a failed military coup. He was nominated for the Nobel Prize for Literature three times.

Translated by Edward G. Seidensticker, Ivan Morris, Donald Keene and Geoffrey W. Sargent

Introducing Little Clothbound Classics: irresistible, mini editions of short stories, novellas and essays from the world's greatest writers, designed by the award-winning Coralie Bickford-Smith.

Like an addict, she looked with faint greed at the roses’ tantalizing perfection

Thirteen short tales from one of the most blistering and innovative writers of the twentieth century.

The small incidents of life become moments of inner revelation in the luminous writing of Clarice Lispector. A woman contemplating a vase of roses after a nervous breakdown; a tangled mother-daughter relationship; a man’s abandonment of a dog; an animal in a zoo: each one leads to mystery and self-discovery, delight and devastation.

The Brazilian novelist and short-story writer Clarice Lispector became famous as ‘Hurricane Clarice’ for her first novel Near to the Wild Heart, published when she was twenty-three. Her trailblazing fiction brought her international renown.

Translated by Katrina Dodson and edited by Benjamin Moser

Introducing Little Clothbound Classics: irresistible, mini editions of short stories, novellas and essays from the world's greatest writers, designed by the award-winning Coralie Bickford-Smith.

They had senselessly begun to abuse each other’s love, tear it into shredsScott Fitzgerald’s exquisite, poignant tales of longing, dreams and regret embody all the dazzle and disillusionment of America’s Jazz Age. 

Spanning the Roaring Twenties from giddy excitement to the Wall Street Crash, these stories portray, among other things, a young girl’s desire to be popular; the curious case of a man who lives backwards; the lost memories of a southern belle; and an American atoning for his dissolute past in Paris.

Scott Fitzgerald, author of The Great Gatsby and Tender is the Night, is regarded as one of the twentieth century’s greatest writers. He was working on his final novel, The Last Tycoon, when he died in Hollywood in 1940.

Introducing Little Clothbound Classics: irresistible, mini editions of short stories, novellas and essays from the world's greatest writers, designed by the award-winning Coralie Bickford-Smith.

She had always thought of love as something confused and furtive, and he made it as bright and open as the summer air

A tale of forbidden passion, Summer depicts a young woman who wants to live and love on her own terms.

Seventeen-year-old Charity Royall is desperate to escape her hard-drinking adoptive father in rural Massachusetts. When a young city architect visits for the summer, it offers her hope for a new life. But will their affair bring her the freedom she craves?

Edith Wharton was famous for her novels including The House of Mirth, Ethan Frome and The Age of Innocence, for which she became the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, in 1921.

Introducing Little Clothbound Classics: irresistible, mini editions of short stories, novellas and essays from the world's greatest writers, designed by the award-winning Coralie Bickford-Smith.

She wanted to swim far out, where no woman had swum before

This candid portrayal of a woman who refuses to accept her allotted role as wife and mother caused an outcry when it was published in 1899.

It is the story of Edna Pontellier, who spends the summer on the Gulf of Mexico with her businessman husband and her two sons. When an illicit romance awakens unfamiliar ideas and longings in Edna, she discovers a new identity for herself, but cannot hope for understanding in the stifling attitudes of Louisiana society.

Katherine O'Flaherty, known by her married name Kate Chopin, is renowned for her novels and short stories depicting the inner lives of unconventional women, mostly set in the American South.

Introducing Little Clothbound Classics: irresistible, mini editions of short stories, novellas and essays from the world's greatest writers, designed by the award-winning Coralie Bickford-Smith.

Maigret looked at the Seine, outside, through the curtain of rain, and thought of the Mediterranean sun

Maigret is going about his work in rainy Paris with his usual pipe and quiet determination – followed closely by Inspector Pyke from Scotland Yard, who has come to study the famous detective’s methods. Then a call from a Mediterranean island sends the two men off to the Côte d’Azur, where they must investigate a strange death amid the eccentric inhabitants of an isolated community.

Georges Simenon was born in Liège, Belgium, in 1903. He is best known in Britain as the author of the Maigret novels, and his prolific output of over 400 novels and short stories has made him a household name in Europe.

Translated by Shaun Whiteside

Introducing Little Clothbound Classics: irresistible, mini editions of short stories, novellas and essays from the world's greatest writers, designed by the award-winning Coralie Bickford-Smith.

I was enjoying the return of silence, the sweetness of the evening and Paris empty. I was happy

Told as a series of confessions, The Fall is a brilliant portrayal of a man who has lost his innocence.  

Jean-Baptiste Clamence, formerly a successful lawyer, is in turmoil. Over several drunken nights he regales a chance acquaintance with his story: of parties and debauchery, of Parisian nights and the Aegean sea, and, ultimately, of the absurdity of his existence.

Albert Camus grew up in a working-class neighbourhood in Algiers. His most important works include The Outsider, The Plague and The Fall. He was killed in a road accident in 1960, and his last unfinished novel, The First Man, appeared posthumously.

Translated by Robin Buss

Introducing Little Clothbound Classics: irresistible, mini editions of short stories, novellas and essays from the world's greatest writers, designed by the award-winning Coralie Bickford-Smith.

The more a man restricts himself the closer he is, conversely, to infinity

Chess is a disturbing, intensely dramatic depiction of the cost of obsession.

It begins as a cruise ship sets sail for Buenos Aires. On board, a group of passengers challenge the world chess champion to a match. At first, they crumble, until they are helped by whispered advice from a stranger in the crowd – a man who will risk everything to win.

Stefan Zweig was born in Vienna to an Austrian-Jewish family and achieved literary fame early with his biographies and novels, most notably Beware of Pity. In 1934 Zweig fled to England, then Brazil, where he wrote this acclaimed novella, shortly before he and his wife killed themselves.

Translated by Anthea Bell