Pick and Mix Deal - Modern Classics

'It is sometimes advantageous to be unseen, although it is most often rather wearing on the nerves'

Ralph Ellison's blistering and impassioned first novel tells the extraordinary story of a man invisible 'simply because people refuse to see me'. Published in 1952 when American society was in the cusp of immense change, the powerfully depicted adventures of Ellison's invisible man - from his expulsion from a Southern college to a terrifying Harlem race riot - go far beyond the story of one individual to give voice to the experience of an entire generation of black Americans.

This edition includes Ralph Ellison's introduction to the thirtieth anniversary edition of Invisible Man, a fascinating account of the novel's seven-year gestation.

With an Introduction by John F. Callahan

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Product Information:

• 198mm x 27mm x 129mm
• 426g

'They won't know you, the you that's hidden somewhere in the castle of your skin'

Nine-year-old G. leads a life of quiet mischief crab catching, teasing preachers and playing among the pumpkin vines. His sleepy fishing village in 1930s Barbados is overseen by the English landlord who lives on the hill, just as their 'Little England' is watched over by the Mother Country. Yet gradually, G. finds himself awakening to the violence and injustice that lurk beneath the apparent order of things. As the world he knows begins to crumble, revealing the bruising secret at its heart, he is spurred ever closer to a life-changing decision. Lyrical and unsettling, George Lamming's autobiographical coming-of-age novel is a story of tragic innocence amid the collapse of colonial rule.

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Product Information:

• 198mm x 21mm x 129mm
•  269g

As Martin Luther King, Jr. prepared for the Birmingham campaign in early 1963, he drafted the final sermons for Strength to Love, a volume of his best-known lectures. King had begun working on the sermons during a fortnight in jail in July 1962 and A Gift of Love includes these classic sermons, along with two new lectures.

Drawing inspiration from both his Christian faith and the non-violent philosophy of Mahatma Gandhi, A Gift of Love illustrates King's vision of love and peaceful action as social and political forces for change.

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Product Information:

• 198mm x 13mm x 129mm
• 168g

Okonkwo is the greatest warrior alive, famous throughout West Africa. But when he accidentally kills a clansman, things begin to fall apart. Then Okonkwo returns from exile to find missionaries and colonial governors have arrived in the village. With his world thrown radically off-balance he can only hurtle towards tragedy. Chinua Achebe's stark novel reshaped both African and world literature. This arresting parable of a proud but powerless man witnessing the ruin of his people begins Achebe's landmark trilogy of works chronicling the fate of one African community, continued in Arrow of God and No Longer at Ease.
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Product Information:

• 198mm x 129mm x 10mm
• 134g weight

'The story of the negro in America is the story of America ... it is not a very pretty story'

James Baldwin's breakthrough essay collection made him the voice of his generation. Ranging over Harlem in the 1940s, movies, novels, his preacher father and his experiences of Paris, they capture the complexity of black life at the dawn of the civil rights movement with effervescent wit and prophetic wisdom.

'A classic ... In a divided America, James Baldwin's fiery critiques reverberate anew' Washington Post

'Edgy and provocative, entertainingly satirical' Robert McCrum, Guardian

'Cemented his reputation as a cultural seer ... Notes of a Native Son endures as his defining work, and his greatest' Time

Ranging from the age of slavery to contemporary injustices, this groundbreaking history of race, gender and class inequality by the radical political activist Angela Davis offers an alternative view of female struggles for liberation.

Tracing the intertwined histories of the abolitionist and women's suffrage movements, Davis examines the racism and class prejudice inherent in so much of white feminism, and in doing so brings to light new pioneering heroines, from field slaves to mill workers, who fought back and refused to accept the lives into which they were born.

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Product Information:

• 198mm x 15mm x 129mm
• 191g

The world is threatened by encroaching ice, creeping down day by day from the polar ice caps. The imminent catastrophe has thrown the world's governments into chaos, and no one knows whether the disaster has an environmental or nuclear cause, or how soon the end will come. One man pursues his sylph-like, silver-haired ex-fiancée ('the girl') as she flees from country to country, away from her husband; away from the malevolent 'warden' of one of the proto-territories that have sprung up as traditional societies crumble; away from him.
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Product Information:

• 198mm x 129mm x 11mm
• 145g weight

A terrifying psychological trip into the life of one Joseph K., an ordinary man who wakes up one day to find himself accused of a crime he did not commit, a crime whose nature is never revealed to him. Once arrested, he is released, but must report to court on a regular basis - an event that proves maddening, as nothing is ever resolved. As he grows more uncertain of his fate, his personal life - including work at a bank and his relations with his landlady and a young woman who lives next door - becomes increasingly unpredictable. As K. tries to gain control, he succeeds only in accelerating his own excruciating downward spiral.
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Product Information:

• 198mm x 129mm x 12mm
• 208g weight

Living in the Blackwood family home with only her sister Constance and her Uncle Julian for company, Merricat just wants to preserve their delicate way of life. But ever since Constance was acquitted of murdering the rest of the family, the world isn't leaving the Blackwoods alone. And when Cousin Charles arrives, armed with overtures of friendship and a desperate need to get into the safe, Merricat must do everything in her power to protect the remaining family. 

In her final novel, Shirley Jackson displays a mastery of suspense, family relationships and black comedy.
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Product Information:

• 198mm x 129mm x 10mm
• 134g weight

Frantz Fanon's seminal work on the trauma of colonization, The Wretched of the Earth made him the leading anti-colonialist thinker of the twentieth century

Translated from the French by Constance Farrington, with an introduction by Jean-Paul Sartre

Written at the height of the Algerian war for independence from French colonial rule and first published in 1961, Frantz Fanon's classic text has provided inspiration for anti-colonial movements ever since, analysing the role of class, race, national culture and violence in the struggle for freedom. With power and anger, Fanon makes clear the economic and psychological degradation inflicted by imperialism. It was Fanon, himself a psychotherapist, who exposed the connection between colonial war and mental disease, who showed how the fight for freedom must be combined with building a national culture, and who showed the way ahead, through revolutionary violence, to socialism.

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Product Information:

• 198mm x 15mm x 129mm
• 191g

Now recognised as one of the most influential books of the twentieth century, Silent Spring exposed the destruction of wildlife through the widespread use of pesticides. Despite condemnation in the press and heavy-handed attempts by the chemical industry to ban the book, Rachel carson succeeded in creating a new public awareness of the environment which led to changes in government and inspired the ecological movement.
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Product Information:

• 198mm x 129mm x 15mm
• 234g weight

Imagine the world if the Allies had lost the Second World War... Philip K Dick trips the switches of our minds with his vision of the world as it might have been: the African continent virtually wiped out, the Mediterranean drained to make farmland, the United States divided between the Japanese and the Nazis...In the neutral zone that divides the rival superpowers in America lives the author of an underground best-seller. His book - a rallying cry for all those who dream of overthrowing the occupiers - offers an alternative theory of world history. Does 'reality' lie with him, or is his world just one among many others?
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Product Information:

• 198mm x 129mm x 16mm
• 202g weight

Carson McCullers' prodigious first novel was published to instant acclaim when she was just twenty-three. Set in a small town in the middle of the deep South, it is the story of John Singer, a lonely deaf-mute, and a disparate group of people who are drawn towards his kind, sympathetic nature. The owner of the café where Singer eats every day, a young girl desperate to grow up, an angry socialist drunkard, a frustrated black doctor: each pours their heart out to Singer, their silent confidant, and he in turn changes their disenchanted lives in ways the could never imagine. Moving, sensitive and deeply humane, The Heart is a Lonely Hunter explores loneliness, the human need for understanding and the search for love.
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Product Information:

• 198mm x 129mm x 20mm
• 258g weight

Lady Sings the Blues is the inimitable autobiography of one of the greatest icons of the twentieth century. Born to a single mother in 1915 Baltimore, Billie Holiday had her first run-in with the law at aged 13. But Billie Holiday is no victim. Her memoir tells the story of her life spent in jazz, smoky Harlem clubs and packed-out concert halls, her love affairs, her wildly creative friends, her struggles with addiction and her adventures in love. Billie Holiday is a wise and aphoristic guide to the story of her unforgettable life.

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Product Information:

• 198mm x 11mm x 129mm
• 145g

Controversial and compelling, In Cold Blood reconstructs the murder in 1959 of a Kansas farmer, his wife and both their children. Truman Capote's comprehensive study of the killings and subsequent investigation explores the circumstances surrounding this terrible crime and the effect it had on those involved. At the centre of his study are the amoral young killers Perry Smith and Dick Hickcock, who, vividly drawn by Capote, are shown to be reprehensible yet entirely and frighteningly human. 

The book that made Capote's name, In Cold Blood is a seminal work of modern prose, a remarkable synthesis of journalistic skill and powerfully evocative narrative.
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Product Information:

• 197mm x 134mm x 21mm
• 260g weight

‘You have talked so often of going to the dogs – and well, here are the dogs, and you have reached them.’ George Orwell’s vivid memoir of his time among the desperately poor and destitute in London and Paris is a moving tour of the underworld of society. Here he painstakingly documents a world of unrelenting drudgery and squalor – sleeping in bug-infested hostels and doss houses, working as a dishwasher in the vile ‘Hôtel X’, living alongside tramps, surviving on scraps and cigarette butts – in an unforgettable account of what being down and out is really like.
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Product Information:

• 198mm x 129mm x 14mm
• 193g weight

When an unbridled schoolmistress with advanced ideas is in her prime the classroom can take on a new identity and no one can predict what will happen. Jean Brodie is a teacher whose unconventional ideas put her at odds with the other members of staff at the Marcia Blaine School in Edinburgh, as she endeavours to shape the lives of the select group of girls who form her 'set'.
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Product Information:

• 198mm x 129mm x 8mm
• 112g weight

Florentino Ariza has never forgotten his first love. He has waited nearly a lifetime in silence since his beloved Fermina married another man. No woman can replace her in his heart. But now her husband is dead. Finally - after fifty-one years, nine months and four days - Florentino has another chance to declare his eternal passion and win her back. Will love that has survived half a century remain unrequited?
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Product Information:

• 198mm x 129mm x 24mm
• 315g weight

These five rich, witty and magical stories from the author of Out of Africa include one of her most well known tales, ‘Babette’s Feast’, which was made into the classic film. It tells the story of a French cook working in a puritanical Norwegian community, who treats her employers to the decadent feast of a lifetime. There is also a real-life Prospero and his Ariel in ‘Tempests’, a mysterious pearl-fisher in ‘The Diver’ and a brief, tragic encounter in ‘The Ring’. All the stories have a mystic, fairy-tale quality, linked by themes of angels, the sea, dreams and fate. They were among the last to be written by Isak Dinesen, and show her as a master of short fiction.
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Product Information:

• 198mm x 129mm x 15mm
• 191g weight

Both devastating and funny, The Lonely Londoners is an unforgettable account of immigrant experience - and one of the great twentieth-century London novels. This Penguin Modern Classics edition includes an introduction by Susheila Nasta.

At Waterloo Station, hopeful new arrivals from the West Indies step off the boat train, ready to start afresh in 1950s London. There, homesick Moses Aloetta, who has already lived in the city for years, meets Henry 'Sir Galahad' Oliver and shows him the ropes. In this strange, cold and foggy city where the natives can be less than friendly at the sight of a black face, has Galahad met his Waterloo? But the irrepressible newcomer cannot be cast down. He and all the other lonely new Londoners - from shiftless Cap to Tolroy, whose family has descended on him from Jamaica - must try to create a new life for themselves. As pessimistic 'old veteran' Moses watches their attempts, they gradually learn to survive and come to love the heady excitements of London.

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Product Information:

• 198mm x 9mm x 129mm
• 123g

The woman's place of power within each of us is neither white nor surface; it is dark, it is ancient, and it is deep.

The revolutionary writings of Audre Lorde gave voice to those 'outside the circle of this society's definition of acceptable women'. Uncompromising, angry and yet full of hope, this collection of her essential prose - essays, speeches, letters, interviews - explores race, sexuality, poetry, friendship, the erotic and the need for female solidarity, and includes her landmark piece 'The Master's Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master's House'.

'The truth of her writing is as necessary today as it's ever been' Guardian

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Product Information:

• 198mm x 12mm x 129mm
• 161g

'A seminal meditation on race by one of our greatest writers' Barack Obama

'We, the black and the white, deeply need each other here if we are really to become a nation'

James Baldwin's impassioned plea to 'end the racial nightmare' in America was a bestseller when it appeared in 1963, galvanising a nation and giving voice to the emerging civil rights movement. Told in the form of two intensely personal 'letters', The Fire Next Time is at once a powerful evocation of Baldwin's early life in Harlem and an excoriating condemnation of the terrible legacy of racial injustice.

'Sermon, ultimatum, confession, deposition, testament, and chronicle ... all presented in searing, brilliant prose' The New York Times Book Review

'Baldwin writes with great passion ... it reeks of truth, as the ghettoes of New York and London, Chicago and Manchester reek of our hypocrisy' Sunday Times

'The great poet-prophet of the civil rights movement ... his seminal work' Guardian

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Product Information:

• 198mm x 6mm x 129mm
• 80g

'These essays ... live and grow in the mind' James Campbell, Independent

Being a writer, says James Baldwin in this searing collection of essays, requires 'every ounce of stamina he can summon to attempt to look on himself and the world as they are'. His seminal 1961 follow-up to Notes on a Native Son shows him responding to his times and exploring his role as an artist with biting precision and emotional power: from polemical pieces on racial segregation and a journey to 'the Old Country' of the Southern states, to reflections on figures such as Ingmar Bergman and André Gide, and on the first great conference of African writers and artists in Paris.

'Brilliant...accomplished...strong...vivid...honest...masterly' The New York Times

'A bright and alive book, full of grief, love and anger' Chicago Tribune

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Product Information:

• 198mm x 13mm x 129mm
• 168g

The inspiration for the new film from Oscar award-winning director Barry Jenkins

'Achingly beautiful' Guardian

Harlem, the black soul of New York City, in the era of Aretha Franklin and Ray Charles. The narrator of Baldwin's novel is Tish nineteen, and pregnant. Her lover Fonny, father of her child, is in jail accused of rape. Flashbacks from their love affair are woven into the compelling struggle of two families to win justice for Fonny. To this love story James Baldwin brings a spare and impassioned intensity, charging it with universal resonance and power.

'If Beale Street Could Talk affirms not only love between a man and a woman, but love of a type that is dealt with only rarely in contemporary fiction - that between members of a family' Joyce Carol Oates

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Product Information:

• 198mm x 12mm x 130mm
• 147g

James Baldwin's electrifying first novel.

'I had to deal with what hurt me most. I had to deal with my father.'

Drawing on James Baldwin's own boyhood in a religious community in 1930s Harlem, his first novel tells the story of young Johnny Grimes. Johnny is destined to become a preacher like his father, Gabriel, at the Temple of the Fire Baptized, where the church swells with song and it is as if 'the Holy Ghost were riding on the air'. But he feels only scalding hatred for Gabriel, whose fear and fanaticism lead him to abuse his family. Johnny vows that, for him, things will be different. This blazing tale is full of passion and guilt, of secret sinners and prayers singing on the wind.

'His prose hit me, almost winding me with its intensity. I'd never read a novel that described loneliness and desire with such burning eloquence' Douglas Field, Guardian

'A beautiful, enduring, spiritual song of a novel' Andrew O'Hagan

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Product Information:

• 196mm x 15mm x 129mm
• 201g

One of the BBC's '100 Novels That Shaped Our World'

Baldwin's ground-breaking second novel, which established him as one of the great American writers of his time

David, a young American in 1950s Paris, is waiting for his fiancée to return from vacation in Spain. But when he meets Giovanni, a handsome Italian barman, the two men are drawn into an intense affair. After three months David's fiancée returns and, denying his true nature, he rejects Giovanni for a 'safe' future as a married man. His decision eventually brings tragedy.

Filled with passion, regret and longing, this story of a fated love triangle has become a landmark of gay writing. James Baldwin caused outrage as a black author writing about white homosexuals, yet for him the issues of race, sexuality and personal freedom were eternally intertwined.

'Exquisite... a feat of fire-breathing, imaginative daring' Guardian

'Excruciating beauty' San Francisco Chronicle

'Audacious... remarkable... elegant and courageous' Caryl Phillips

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Product Information:

• 198mm x 10mm x 129mm
• 135g

'A masterwork... an almost unbearable, tumultuous, blood-pounding experience' Washington Post

When Another Country appeared in 1962, it caused a literary sensation. James Baldwin's masterly story of desire, hatred and violence opens with the unforgettable character of Rufus Scott, a scavenging Harlem jazz musician adrift in New York. Self-destructive, bad and brilliant, he draws us into a Bohemian underworld pulsing with heat, music and sex, where desperate and dangerous characters betray, love and test each other to the limit.

'In Another Country, Baldwin created the essential American drama of the century' Colm Tóibín

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Product Information:

• 197mm x 20mm x 129mm
• 314g

In this tender, impassioned fourth novel, James Baldwin created one of his most striking characters: a man struggling to become himself.

'Everyone wishes to be loved, but in the event, nearly no one can bear it'

At the height of his theatrical career, the actor Leo Proudhammer is nearly felled by a heart attack. As he hovers between life and death, we see the choices that have made him enviably famous and terrifyingly vulnerable. For between Leo's childhood on the streets of Harlem and his arrival into the world of the theatre lies a wilderness of desire and loss, shame and rage. And everywhere there is the anguish of being black in a society that seems poised on the brink of racial war. In this tender, angry 1968 novel, James Baldwin created one of his most striking characters: a man struggling to become himself.

'The emotion surrounding family attachment... is deeply felt and is one reasons he continues to be read with such intensity' Colm Tóibín

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Product Information:

• 197mm x 23mm x 130mm
• 282g

'This is the work of a born storyteller at the height of his powers' Edmund White, Washington Post

When Arthur Montana, world-renowned 'Emperor of Soul', is found dead in a London pub, his grief-stricken brother looks back over thirty years in the lives of their group of friends: from their childhood spent preaching and singing in Harlem churches, to their struggles with war and poverty, and their encounters with wealth, love and fame.

Set against a vividly drawn background of the civil rights movement of the sixties, Baldwin's last novel is a monumental saga that ranges from New York to Paris, Korea to Africa to portray how profoundly racial politics can shape life, especially in the private business of love.

'Warm, melancholy . . . Hall Montana's voice is the conduit for Baldwin's most distinctive quality as a writer, his abundant tenderness' The New York Times

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Product Information:

• 198mm x 25mm x 130mm
• 422g

‘Everyone’s life begins on a level where races, armies, and churches stop. And yet everyone’s life is always shaped by races, churches, and armies’

In these eight extraordinary stories of love, conflict, desperation and fear, James Baldwin shows people trapped by the roles they must play in society, and those who try and escape them.

From the child in ‘The Rockpile’ whose God-fearing father will not forgive his illegitimacy, to the adolescent who hides his sexuality from his community in ‘The Outing’, and from the down-and-out jazz pianist recovering from addiction in ‘Sonny’s Blues’ to the chilling initiation of a racist in ‘Going to Meet the Man’, these tales, first published in 1965, explore the subtle and profound wounds that discrimination leaves – both in its victims and its perpetrators.

‘He uses words as the sea uses waves’ Langston Hughes

'Few, it seems to me, have driven their words with such passion' Guardian

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Product Information:

• 197mm x 15mm x 130mm
• 192g

‘Baldwin wrote in arias of feeling and thought… [He] proved that if he wrote it down, it could have power beyond the moment.’ – Hilton Als

In this deeply personal book, Baldwin reflects on the experiences that shaped him as a writer and activist: from his childhood in Harlem to the deaths Martin Luther King and Malcolm X. Exploring the visceral reality of life in the American South as well as Baldwin’s impressions of London, Paris and Hamburg, No Name in the Street grapples with the failed promises of global liberation movements in fearless, candid prose.

Timeless, tender and profound, Baldwin’s searing narrative contains the multiplicities of what it means to be Black in America and, indeed, around the world.

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Product Information:

• 198mm x 9mm x 129mm
• 125g