90 classic titles celebrating 90 years of Penguin Books

Priests with shotguns, scheming lovers and a necrophiliac gravedigger haunt the fables of Emilia Pardo Bazán, the formidable Spanish aristocrat, intellectual and feminist. These stories paint a rich and variegated image of Old Spain – sometimes tender, often provocative, always entertaining. But if you decide to visit, beware the Lady Bandit, whose strong, rough hands might grab your neck, and squeeze and squeeze and squeeze . . .

From New York Times bestselling author Julia Quinn comes the second novel in the beloved Regency-set world of her charming, powerful Bridgerton family, now a series created by Shonda Rhimes for Netflix.

Anthony Bridgerton needs a wife.

Having spent his twenties in a rakish pursuit of pleasure (whilst taking care to ensure the financial security of his mother and seven younger siblings and mother) he knows it's high time he settled down and ensured the continuation of the Bridgerton line.

Edwina Sheffield is considered the most beautiful debutante of the current season. She is also sweet, innocent and eminently biddable - Anthony is sure she'll make a perfectly acceptable wife and vows to make her his.

The only obstacle in his way is Edwina's older sister, Kate. Kate is determined to do all she can to allow her sister the chance to marry for love rather than convenience. And the roguish viscount is beginning to think he may have met his match in Kate's keen wit and sharp tongue. Until, that is, he makes the mistake of kissing her...

It’s the summer of 1929 and Mhairi MacKinnon is in need of a husband. As the eldest girl among nine children, her father has made it clear that he can’t support her past the coming winter. Options are limited on the island of St Kilda, but the MacKinnons’ neighbour, Donald, has a business acquaintance on Harris also in need of a spouse and offers to chaperone Mhairi there on his final crossing of the year.

She returns an engaged woman, but is in love with the wrong man – one who can never be hers. As she dreads the spring, when she will be sent from home to become a stranger’s wife, word arrives that St Kilda is to be evacuated.

The lovers are granted a few more stolen hours together, but those last days on St Kilda also bring heartache for Mhairi and her friends. And, when a dead body is discovered on the abandoned isle, they all find themselves under the shadow of suspicion . . .

1917. On a battlefield near the River Escaut, John lies in the aftermath of a blast, unable to move or feel his legs. Struggling to focus his thoughts, he is lost to memory – a chance encounter in a pub by a railway, a hot bath with his lover on a winter night, his childhood on a faraway coast – as the snow falls.

1920. John has returned from war to North Yorkshire, near another river – alive, but not still whole. Reunited with Helena, an artist, he reopens his photography business and endeavours to keep on living. But the past erupts insistently into the present, as ghosts begin to surface in his pictures: ghosts whose messages he cannot understand.

So begins a narrative that spans four generations, moments of connection and consequenceigniting and re-ignitingas the century unfolds. In luminous moments of desire, comprehension, longing, transcendence, the sparks fly upward, working their transformations decades later.

Held is a novel like no other, by a writer at the height of her powers: affecting and intensely beautiful, full of mystery, wisdom and compassion.

Harry Pierpont and John Dillinger were die-hard and deadly partners who made national headlines with their daring bank hold-ups and gun battles -- and they had a lot of laughs while they were at it. They were known as the Dillinger Gang but at its heart was "Handsome Harry" Pierpont -- tough, fearless, intelligent, and sworn to live by no law but his own. Presented as his intimate "confessions," Harry's story takes us from his teenage days as a small-time crook to his fateful meeting with the equally young Dillinger to the pinnacle of his notoriety, and to his final hours in the penitentiary death house.

Crafted in James Carlos Blake's signature style of fast-paced violence, sizzling sex, and darkly raucous humor, Handsome Harry re-creates a thrilling chapter from the chronicles of American crime.