Esther Greenwood is at college and is fighting two battles, one against her own desire for perfection in all things - grades, boyfriend, looks, career - and the other against remorseless mental illness. As her depression deepens she finds herself encased in it, bell-jarred away from the rest of the world. This is the story of her journey back into reality. Highly readable, witty and disturbing, ..

Features the rhythms of 1950s underground America, jazz, sex, generosity, chill dawns and drugs, with Sal Paradise and his hero Dean Moriarty, traveller and mystic, the living epitome of Beat.

Reissue of a novel first published in the 1970s: Hunter S. Thompson's ether-fuelled, savage journey to the heart of the American Dream.

Miller's groundbreaking first novel, banned in Britain for almost thirty years, now reinvigorated in a new Harper Perennial Modern Classics edition.

With his fourth novel, legendary barfly Charles Bukowski follows the path of his alter ego Henry Chinaski through the high school years of acne and rejection, drinking his way through the Depression, and ends at the start of World War 2.

After all their travelling, from the Big Woods and the Prarie, the Ingalls family have found a place to settle - Plum Creek. Now Mary and Laura can go to school as there's a town close by. But how will they settle in such a busy place after the wild lands in which they've grown up?

Meg is the eldest and on the brink of love. Then there's tomboy Jo who longs to be a writer. Sweet-natured Beth always puts others first, and finally there's Amy, the youngest and most precocious. Through sisterly squabbles, their happy times and sad ones too, the sisters discover that growing up is sometimes very hard to do.

Centring on the infamous fire-bombing of Dresden in the Second World War, Billy Pilgrim's odyssey through time reflects the journey of our own fractured lives as we search for meaning in what we are afraid to know.

The Subterraneans haunt the bars and clubs of San Francisco, surviving on a diet of booze and benzedrine, Proust and Verlaine. Living amongst them is Leo, an aspiring writer, and Mardou, half-Indian, half-Negro, beautiful and neurotic. Their bitter-sweet and ill-starred love affair sees Kerouac at his most evocative.

Marcel Proust (1871-1922) spent the last fourteen years of his life writing la recherche du temps perdu . Moncrieff's translation strives to capture the extraordinary blend of muscular analysis with poetic reverie that typifies Proust's style.

The sun-kissed prarie stretches out around the Ingalls family, smiling its welcome after their hard journey across America. But looks can be deceiving and they soon find that they must share the land with wild bears and Indians. Will there be enough land for all of them?

After a few months studying in Heidelberg, and a brief spell in Paris as would-be artist, Philip Carey settles in London to train as a doctor. And that is where he meets Mildred, the loud but irresistible waitress with whom he plunges into a formative, tortured and masochistic affair which very nearly ruins him.

Follows two young men engaged in a passionate search for dharma or truth. Their major adventure is the pursuit of the Zen way, which takes them climbing into the high sierras to seek the lesson of solitude.

The heartrending story of a British boy's four year ordeal in a Japanese prison camp during the Second World War.

Inside the little house in the Big Woods live the Ingalls family: Ma, Pa, Mary, Laura and baby Carrie. Outside the little house are the wild animals: the bears and the bees, the deer and the wolves. This is the tale of how they live together, in harmony mainly, but sometimes in fear.

The narration of a summer motorcycle trip undertaken by a father and his son becomes a text which speaks directly to the confusions and agonies of existence, detailing a personal, philosophical odyssey.

The sultry classic of a journalist's sordid life in Puerto Rico

A dark-haired, olive-skinned boy is forced to fend for himself during the war and wander alone from one Slav village to another, sometimes hounded and tortured, sometimes sheltered and taught. This is a portrayal of the Nazi occupation of Eastern Europe, seen through the eyes of a boy.

* A superb collection of short stories from one of our best-loved writers now reissued with a striking new jacket along with other titles from Margaret Atwood's backlist