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Uncle Tom’s Cabin
€11,65di Harriet Beecher Stowe
The novel that changed the course of American history
Published in 1852, Harriet Beecher Stowe’s novel was a powerful indictment of slavery in America. Describing the many trials and eventual escape to freedom of the long-suffering, good-hearted slave Uncle Tom, it aimed to show how Christian love can overcome any human cruelty. Uncle Tom’s Cabin has remained controversial to this day, seen as either a vital milestone in the anti-slavery cause or as a patronising stereotype of African-Americans, yet it played a crucial role in the eventual abolition of slavery and remains one of the most important American novels ever written.
For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.
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Boonrod
€12,00by Paola Tonussi
Boonrod is a creature born on the street in Thailand and destined for a vagabond’s life. Everything changes for him thanks to a chance meeting with the boy Atid, who gives him love and a real home. A perfect mutual understanding soon grows between them, a friendship coloured by a sort of nostalgia, suspended, as in a fairy-story, between the enchantment of childhood and the lush beauty of the tropical landscape. This happy interlude comes to an abrupt end when Boonrod, once more on his own, must confront pain and anguish, cruelty and death. Salvation comes at the eleventh hour and he will be given the chance of starting over again, with a new life. “Paola Tonussi, with her writer’s sensibility and sure poetic touch, has succeeded in rendering not only the extraordinary love story that those who share their lives with a dog know well; but also – and astonishingly – to describe through the eyes of ‘man’s best friend’ himself the suffering and atrocity of the DMT, that every year is responsible in China and Korea for the massacre of millions of innocent and vulnerable creatures, snared, tortured and killed to finish on the tables of the grossest form of oriental traditionalism. Paola’s is then a book that scores doubly. Because she extracts from the devotion that has always united men and their dogs a unique voice, that anatomizes the full range of unconditional affection, the courage of bearing witness and the hope of salvation”. (Maria Grazia Filippi, journalist) “a poetic and terrible tale” (Sergio Frigo, writer)
Also available in Italian
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Joseph Knight
€12,00by James Robertson
‘A book of such quality as to persuade you that historical novels are the true business of the writer.’
Daily Telegraph
A gripping, shocking story of history, enlightement and slavery from the bestselling author of THE FANATIC. JOSPEH KNIGHT confirms James Robertson as one of our foremost novelists.
Exiled to Jamaica after the Battle of Culloden in 1746, Sir John Wedderburn made a fortune, alongside his three brothers, as a faux surgeon and sugar planter. In the 1770s, he returned to Scotland to marry and re-establish the family name. He brought with him Joseph Knight, a black slave and a token of his years in the Caribbean.
Now, in 1802, Sir John Wedderburn is settling his estate, and has hired a solicitor’s agent, Archibald Jamieson, to search for his former slave. The past has haunted Wedderburn ever since Culloden, and ever since he last saw Knight, in court twenty-four years ago, in a case that went to the heart of Scottish society, pitting master against slave, white against black, and rich against poor.
As long as Knight is missing, Wedderburn will never be able to escape the past. Yet what will he do if Jamieson’s search is successful? And what effect will this re-opening of old wounds have on those around him? Meanwhile, as Jamieson tries to unravel the true story of Joseph Knight he begins to question his own motivation. How can he possibly find a man who does not want to be found?
James Robertson’s second novel is a tour de force, the gripping story of a search for a life that stretches over sixty years and moves from battlefields to the plantations of Jamaica, from Enlightenment Edinburgh to the back streets of Dundee. It is a moving narrative of history, identity and ideas, that dramatically retells a fascinating but forgotten episode of Scottish history.
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Angels & Insects
€12,00di A.S. Byatt
Like A.S. Byatt’s Booker Prize-winning novel, Possession, these two mesmerising novellas are set in the nineteenth century. In Morpho Eugenia, an explorer realises that the behaviour of the people around him is alarmingly similar to that of the insects he studies. In The Conjugal Angel, curious individuals – some fictional, others drawn from history – gather to connect with the spirit world. Throughout both, Byatt examines the eccentricities of the Victorian era, weaving fact and fiction, reality and romance, science and faith into a sumptuous, magical tapestry.
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The Translator
€12,00di Leila Aboulela
Sammar is a young Sudanese widow, working as an Arabic translator at a British university. Following the sudden death of her husband, and estranged from her young son, she drifts, grieving and isolated. Life takes a positive turn when she finds herself falling in love with Rae, a Scottish academic. To Sammar, he seems to come from another world and another culture, yet they are drawn to each other. ‘The Translator’ is a story about love, both human and divine. Leila Aboulela’s first novel, first published in 1999, was longlisted for the Orange Prize for Fiction and the IMPAC Dublin Award, and was shortlisted for the Saltire Prize. It has subsequently appeared in editions worldwide.
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Age of Iron
€13,50by J.M. Coetzee
Nobel Laureate and two-time Booker prize-winning author of Disgrace and The Life and Times of Michael K, J. M. Coetzee tells the remarkable story of a nation gripped in brutal apartheid in his Sunday Express Book of the Year award-winner Age of Iron.
In Cape Town, South Africa, an elderly classics professor writes a letter to her distant daughter, recounting the strange and disturbing events of her dying days. She has been opposed to the lies and the brutality of apartheid all her life, but now she finds herself coming face to face with its true horrors: the hounding by the police of her servant’s son, the burning of a nearby black township, the murder by security forces of a teenage activist who seeks refuge in her house. Through it all, her only companion, the only person to whom she can confess her mounting anger and despair, is a homeless man who one day appears on her doorstep.
In Age of Iron, J. M. Coetzee brings his searing insight and masterful control of language to bear on one of the darkest episodes of our times.
‘Quite simply a magnificent and unforgettable work’ Daily Telegraph
‘A superbly realized novel whose truth cuts to the bone’ The New York Times
‘A remarkable work by a brilliant writer’ Wall Street Journal
South African author J. M. Coetzee was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2003 and was the first author to win the Booker Prize twice for his novels Disgrace and The Life and Times of Michael K. His novel, Foe, an exquisite reinvention of the story of Robinson Crusoe is also available in Penguin paperback.
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A passage to India
€13,65di E.M. Forster
When Adela and her elderly companion Mrs Moore arrive in the Indian town of Chandrapore, they quickly feel trapped by its insular and prejudiced British community. Determined to explore the ‘real India’, they seek the guidance of the charming and mercurial Dr Aziz, a cultivated Indian Muslim. But a mysterious incident occurs while they are exploring the Marabar caves with Aziz, and the well-respected doctor soon finds himself at the centre of a scandal that rouses violent passions among both the British and their Indian subjects. A masterly portrait of a society in the grip of imperialism, A Passage to India compellingly depicts the fate of individuals caught between the great political and cultural conflicts of the modern world.
A Passage to India, written by E.M. Forster and published in 1924, is one of the most acclaimed novels in English literature. Set against the backdrop of British colonial India, the novel explores complex themes such as colonialism, racial prejudice, cultural misunderstandings, and the challenges of communication between East and West.
Through vivid characters and evocative storytelling, Forster highlights the social and political tensions of the era, delivering a nuanced critique of British imperialism and its impacts. The narrative balances moments of humor, tragedy, and profound philosophical reflection, making it a timeless masterpiece.
This novel is ideal for lovers of classic literature, students of British colonial history, and anyone interested in cross-cultural relationships and postcolonial studies.
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Towards Autonomy
€14,00di Sharon Hartle
Contemporary English Language Teaching is going through a period of change. This is just as true of university language teaching as it is of teaching in other contexts. By looking at language and learning theories alongside the development of both applied linguistics and language teaching in the twentieth century, a clear progression can be seen as one approach takes over from its forerunner, assimilating effective teaching practices and eschewing ineffective ones as it goes. The process, however, is not linear and the situation today reflects that. At this point in time languages are being taught in many different ways, in many different contexts. The specific context of foreign language learning in universities is only one example of these, but as far as methodology is concerned it reflects the trend towards developing autonomous learning, and the move towards creating learner-centred classrooms. These are trends that can be seen fairly generally in language teaching as a whole at this time. In this discussion the aim is to assess the development of classroom practices that are currently in use, to look at their development throughout the history of foreign language teaching from the nineteenth century to the present and to see how the way forward in teaching is moving towards a mixed syllabus focus, where both structural grammar and lexical grammar have their roles, as well as the development of skills and communicative competence. This will be examined in the light of language and learner theories, and current research in the field of language acquisition. Finally, the particular context of university language teaching in Italian university language centres will be considered and ways in which learner autonomy can be implemented successfully in this context will be examined. A blended approach would seem to be the answer, where learner-centred classroom work is combined with autonomous work, and where a balance is achieved between the communicative use of language, on the one hand, and the cognitive analysis of how language works on the other. The roles of both teacher and learner are also discussed as these too have changed over the years, as a result of research findings.
