When it comes to drumming, Leah Burke is usually on beat - but real life isn't always so rhythmic. An anomaly in her friend group, she's the only child of a young, single mum, and her life is decidedly less privileged. And even though her mom knows she's bisexual, she hasn't mustered the courage to tell her friends - not even her openly gay BFF, Simon.

This book tells the story of Freddie Mercury, one of the greatest rock stars of all time. Learn about his early years as a shy young boy from Zanzibar. Discover how he became the lead singer of one of the most famous rock bands in history, Queen. Penguin Readers is a series of popular classics, exciting contemporary fiction, and thought-provoking non-fiction written for learners of English as...

Elle has one more year of high school left and she has never been kissed. When she decides to make a kissing booth for the school carnival, she kisses Noah, her best friend Lee's brother, and her life changes. But Noah is older than Elle, and Lee will not be happy. Will Elle listen to her head or her heart? Penguin Readers is a series of popular classics, exciting contemporary fiction, and...

A poignant meditation on the nature of desire, and the enduring power of love, Gabriel García Márquez's Love in the Time of Cholera is translated from the Spanish by Edith Grossman in Penguin Modern Classics. Florentino Ariza is a hopeless romantic who falls passionately for the beautiful Fermina Daza, but finds his love tragically rejected. Instead Fermina marriesdistinguished doctor Juvenal...

From 1979 to 1989 Soviet troops engaged in a devastating war in Afghanistan that claimed thousands of casualties on both sides. While the Soviet Union talked about a 'peace-keeping' mission, the dead were shipped back in sealed zinc coffins. Boys in Zinc presents the honest testimonies of soldiers, doctors and nurses, mothers, wives and siblings who describe the lasting effects of war. Weaving...

A six-figure offer. A family mystery to solve. A town of buried secrets. When Auto mechanic Sawyer Taft's estranged grandmother offers her a six-figure contract to participate in debutante season, Sawyer's first instinct is to run a mile. But then she realizes her grandmother's offer might mean solving the biggest mystery of her life - her father's identity. So she signs on the dotted line and...

You do not mess with Jack Reacher. He is as close to untraceable as a person can get. A loner comfortable in his anonymity and solitude. So when a member of his old Army unit finds a way to contact him, he knows this has to be serious. You do not mess with the Special Investigators. In the past the elite team always watched each other's backs. Now one of them has shown up dead in the...

'A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction' Ranging from the silent fate of Shakespeare's gifted (imaginary) sister to Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë and the effects of poverty and sexual constraint on female creativity, A Room of One's Own, based on a lecture given at Girton College, Cambridge, is one of the great feminist polemics. Published almost a decade...

Over the past 75 years, a new canon has emerged. As humans have driven the living planet to the brink of collapse, visionary thinkers around the world have raised their voices to defend it. Their words have endured, becoming the classics that define the environmental movement today. In these galvanising speeches and essays, George Monbiot calls on humanity to stop averting its gaze from the...

The first novel from one of Italy’s most innovative writers of the 20th century 'The seething cauldron of life, the infinite stratification of reality, the inextricable tangle of knowledge are what Gadda wants to depict.' Italo Calvino At the height of Fascist rule in Italy and following the death of his mother, Carlo Emilio Gadda began work on his first novel, The Experience of Pain. This...

The Penguin Modern Classics edition of Ryszard Kapuscinski's The Emperor is translated by William R. Brand and Katarzyna Mroczkowska-Brand, with an introduction by Neal Ascherton. After the deposition of Haile Selassie in 1974, which ended the ancient rule of the Abyssinian monarchy, Ryszard Kapuscinski travelled to Ethiopia and sought out surviving courtiers to tell their stories. Here, their...

"Milad is five years old and excited for his school trip to a theme park on the outskirts of Jerusalem, but tragedy awaits: his bus is involved in a horrific accident. His father, Abed, rushes to the chaotic site, only to find Milad has already been taken away. Abed sets off on a journey to learn Milad's fate, navigating a maze of physical, emotional, and bureaucratic obstacles he must face as...

Waging Heavy Peace is the remarkable memoir of rock icon Neil YoungNeil Young is a singular figure in the history of rock and pop culture in the last four decades, inducted not once but twice into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Reflective, insightful and disarmingly honest, Waging Heavy Peace is his long-awaited memoir. From his youth in Canada to his crazy journey out to California, through...

Audrey and Ivy, determined to bring their fellow student Lola Radcliffe's killer to justice, find themselves in the middle of another mystery when a friend disappears in suspicious circumstances. Their only clue is a mysterious card left by the enigmatic Magpie Society. With time running out and the police baffled, Audrey and Ivy must delve deeper than ever into the dark secrets that their...

Today many of us live indoor lives, disconnected from the natural world as never before. And yet nature remains deeply ingrained in our language, culture and consciousness. For centuries, we have acted on an intuitive sense that we need communion with the wild to feel well. Now, in the moment of our great migration away from the rest of nature, more and more scientific evidence is emerging to...

A searing account of George Orwell's observations of working-class life in the bleak industrial heartlands of Yorkshire and Lancashire in the 1930s, The Road to Wigan Pier is a brilliant and bitter polemic that has lost none of its political impact over time. His graphically unforgettable descriptions of social injustice, cramped slum housing, dangerous mining conditions, squalor, hunger and...

Theodore Finch is fascinated by death, and he constantly thinks of ways he might kill himself.Violet Markey lives for the future, counting the days until graduation, when she can escape her Indiana town and her aching grief in the wake of her sister's recent death.

We used to think of failure as a problem, to be avoided at all costs. Now, we're often told that failure is desirable - that we must ‘fail fast, fail often’. The trouble is, neither approach distinguishes the good failures from the bad. As a result, we miss the opportunity to fail well. Here, Amy Edmondson – the world’s most influential organisational psychologist – reveals how we get failure...

Kafka's gripping work of psychological horror, with a new introduction and notes by Carolin Duttlinger 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...

In 12 Rules for Life, acclaimed public thinker and clinical psychologist Jordan B. Peterson offered an antidote to the chaos in our lives: eternal truths applied to modern anxieties. His insights have helped millions of readers and resonated powerfully around the world. Now in this long-awaited sequel, Peterson goes further, showing that part of life's meaning comes from reaching out into...