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Mastery

(2013) Around the globe, people are facing the same problem – that we are born as individuals but are forced to conform to the rules of society if we want to succeed. To see our uniqueness expressed in our achievements, we must first learn the rules – and then how to change them completely.

Charles Darwin began as an underachieving schoolboy, Leonardo da Vinci as an illegitimate outcast. The secret of their eventual greatness lies in a ‘rigorous apprenticeship’: by paying close and careful attention, they learnt to master the ‘hidden codes’ which determine ultimate success or failure. Then, they rewrote the rules as a reflection of their own individuality, blasting previous patterns of achievement open from within.

Told through Robert Greene’s signature blend of historical anecdote and psychological insight and drawing on interviews with world leaders, Mastery builds on the strategies outlined in The 48 Laws of Power to provide a practical guide to greatness – and how to start living by your own rules.

We Are Okay

(2019) Nina LaCour’s award-winning, achingly beautiful novel is now available in paperback!

–Includes a new foreword by Nicola Yoon, #1 bestselling author of The Sun is Also a Star and Everything, Everything–

Winner of the Michael L. Printz Award

“Short, poetic and gorgeously written.” –The New York Times Book Review

“A beautiful, devastating piece of art.” –Bookpage

You go through life thinking there’s so much you need. . . . Until you leave with only your phone, your wallet, and a picture of your mother. Marin hasn’t spoken to anyone from her old life since the day she left everything behind. No one knows the truth about those final weeks. Not even her best friend Mabel. But even thousands of miles away from the California coast, at college in New York, Marin still feels the pull of the life and tragedy she’s tried to outrun. Now, months later, alone in an emptied dorm for winter break, Marin waits. Mabel is coming to visit and Marin will be forced to face everything that’s been left unsaid and finally confront the loneliness that has made a home in her heart.

An intimate whisper that packs an indelible punch, We Are Okay is Nina LaCour at her finest. This gorgeously crafted and achingly honest portrayal of grief will leave you urgent to reach across any distance to reconnect with the people you love.

Praise for We Are Okay

“Nina LaCour treats her emotions so beautifully and with such empathy.” —Bustle

? “Exquisite.” —Kirkus

? “LaCour paints a captivating depiction of loss, bewilderment, and emotional paralysis . . . raw and beautiful.” —Booklist

? “Beautifully crafted . . . . A quietly moving, potent novel.” —SLJ

? “A moving portrait of a girl struggling to rebound after everything she’s known has been thrown into disarray.” —Publishers Weekly

?”Bittersweet and hopeful . . . poetic and skillfully crafted.” —Shelf Awareness

“So lonely and beautiful that I could hardly breathe. This is a perfect book.” —Stephanie Perkins, bestselling author of Anna and the French Kiss

“As beautiful as the best memories, as sad as the best songs, as hopeful as your best dreams.”

—Siobhan Vivian, bestselling author of The Last Boy and Girl in the World

“You can feel every peak and valley of Marin’s emotional journey on your skin, in your gut. Beautifully written, heartfelt, and deeply real.” —Adi Alsaid, author of Never Always Sometimes and Let’s Get Lost

Lola and the Boy Next Door

(2011) Lola Nolan is a budding costume designer, and for her, the more outrageous, sparkly, and fun the outfit, the better. And everything is pretty perfect in her life (right down to her hot rocker boyfriend) until the Bell twins, Calliope and Cricket, return to the negihborhood. When Cricket, a gifted inventor, steps out from his twin sister’s shadow and back into Lola’s life, she must finally reconcile a lifetime of feelings for the boy next door.

The Old Man and the Sea

(1951) Set in the Gulf Stream off the coast of Havana, Hemingway’s magnificent fable is the story of an old man, a young boy and a giant fish. It was The Old Man and the Sea that won for Hemingway the Nobel Prize for Literature. Here, in a perfectly crafted story, is unique and timeless vision of the beauty and grief of man’s challenge to the elements in which he lives.

Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years

2015 A mesmerising mystery story about friendship from the internationally bestselling author of Norwegian Wood and 1Q84

Tsukuru Tazaki had four best friends at school. By chance all of their names contained a colour. The two boys were called Akamatsu, meaning ‘red pine’, and Oumi, ‘blue sea’, while the girls’ names were Shirane, ‘white root’, and Kurono, ‘black field’. Tazaki was the only last name with no colour in it.

One day Tsukuru Tazaki’s friends announced that they didn’t want to see him, or talk to him, ever again.

Since that day Tsukuru has been floating through life, unable to form intimate connections with anyone. But then he meets Sara, who tells him that the time has come to find out what happened all those years ago.

South of the Border, West of the Sun

rowing up in the suburbs in post-war Japan, it seemed to Hajime that everyone but him had brothers and sisters. His sole companion was Shimamoto, also an only child. Together they spent long afternoons listening to her father’s record collection. But when his family moved away, the two lost touch.

Now Hajime is in his thirties. After a decade of drifting he has found happiness with his loving wife and two daughters, and success running a jazz bar. Then Shimamoto reappears. She is beautiful, intense, enveloped in mystery. Hajime is catapulted into the past, putting at risk all he has in the present.

The Orion Mystery

In 1993, German robotics engineer Rudolf Gatenbrink discovered a sealed door within the Great Pyramid of Giza–a door left unopened for 4,500 years. With this discovery, Robert Bauval–who spent the decade prior to the discovery researching the pyramids–and Adrian Gilbert used astronomical data to reveal that more than just tombs, the pyramids were created to serve as a gateway to the stars; in the process, they uncovered what they believe to be the key to the plan that governed the construction of the great pyramids: the Orion Constellation.

Artemis Fowl

(2001) Twelve-year-old villain, Artemis Fowl, is the most ingenious criminal mastermind in history. His bold and daring plan is to hold a leprechaun to ransom. But he’s taking on more than he bargained for when he kidnaps Captain Holly Short of the LEPrecon (Lower Elements Police Reconnaissance Unit). For a start, leprechaun technology is more advanced than our own. Add to that the fact that Holly is a true heroine and that her senior officer Commander Root will stop at nothing to get her back and you’ve got the mother of all sieges brewing!

Jewish State

We shall live at last as free men on our own soil, and die peacefully in our own homes’

Theodor Herzl’s passionate advocacy of the founding of a Jewish state grew out of his conviction that Jews would never be assimilated into the populations in which they lived. Herzl concluded that the only solution for the majority of Jews would be organised emigration to a state of their own.

Herzl’s political and social plea was the result of centuries of restrictions, hostility and pogroms against the Jews of Europe. His revolutionary proposal for the solution to anti-Semitism was a Jewish state, where Jews could live in peace, free from persecution – and this hugely influential essay led directly to the creation of Israel.

GREAT IDEAS. Throughout history, some books have changed the world. They have transformed the way we see ourselves – and each other. They have inspired debate, dissent, war and revolution. They have enlightened, outraged, provoked and comforted. They have enriched lives – and destroyed them. Now Penguin brings you the works of the great thinkers, pioneers, radicals and visionaries whose ideas shook civilization and helped make us who we are.

Wretched of the Earth

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. This Penguin Modern Classics edition is 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. Many of the great calls to arms from the era of decolonization are now of purely historical interest, yet this passionate analysis of the relations between the great powers and the ‘Third World’ is just as illuminating about the world we live in today.

Frantz Fanon (1925-61) was a Martinique-born French author essayist, psychoanalyst, and revolutionary. Fanon was a supporter of the Algerian struggle for independence from French rule, and became a member of the Algerian National Liberation Front. He was perhaps the preeminent thinker of the 20th century on the issue of decolonization and the psychopathology of colonization. His works have inspired anti-colonial liberation movements for more than four decades.

If you enjoyed The Wretched of the Earth, you might like Edward Said’s Orientalism, also available in Penguin Modern Classics.

‘In clear language, in words that can only have been written in the cool heat of rage, he showed us the internal theatre of racism’

Independent