Romain Gary’s bittersweet final masterpiece is “epic and empathetic” (BBC) and “one of his best” (The New York Times)The Kites begins with a young boy, Ludo, coming of age on a small farm in Normandy under the care of his eccentric kite-making Uncle Ambrose. Ludo’s life changes the day he meets Lila, a girl from the aristocratic Polish family that owns the estate next door. In a single glance, Ludo falls in love forever; Lila, on the other hand, disappears...

A classic of modern French literature, the thrilling real-life story of the military hero, ambassador, ladies man, writer, and loving son"I grew up in the certitude that one day I should help give back the earth to those who ennoble it with their courage and warm it with their love."Promise at Dawn begins as the story of a mother’s sacrifice: alone and poor, she fiercely battles to give her son the very best. Romain Gary chronicles his childhood in Russia, ...

90 classic titles celebrating 90 years of Penguin Books‘Why should I bother to invent things? My life has been far more exciting and wonderful than any fairy-tale’In the heart of the English countryside, surrounded by irritatingly polite relatives and hopeless sycophants, Lady L. is celebrating her eightieth birthday. But as the guests disperse, she feels the undeniable pull of a mysterious pavilion in the lush grounds, and the terrible secret she ...

Now back in print, this heartbreaking novel by Romain Gary has inspired two movies, including the Netflix feature The Life AheadMomo has been one of the ever-changing ragbag of whores’ children at Madame Rosa’s boarding house in Paris ever since he can remember. But when the check that pays for his keep no longer arrives and as Madame Rosa becomes too ill to climb the stairs to their apartment, he determines to support her any way he can. This sensitive, s...

Henry Miller's famously banned book is "a matter-of-fact celebration of chucking one's dreary life and following your heart to Paris" (Richard Price).Now hailed as an American classic, Tropic of Cancer, Henry Miller's masterpiece, was banned as obscene in this country for twenty-seven years after its first publication in Paris in 1934. Only a historic court ruling that changed American censorship standards, ushering in a new era of freedom and frankness in...

Bulgaria, 1934. A young man is murdered by the local fascists. His brother, Khristo Stoianev, is recruited into the NKVD, the Soviet secret intelligence service, and sent to Spain to serve in its civil war. Warned that he is about to become a victim of Stalin’s purges, Khristo flees to Paris. Night Soldiers masterfully re-createsthe European world of 1934–45: the struggle between Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia for Eastern Europe, the last desperate gaiety of the beau monde in 1937 P...

Daniel Smith’s Monkey Mind is the stunning articulation of what it is like to live with anxiety. As he travels through anxiety’s demonic layers, Smith defangs the disorder with great humor and evocatively expresses its self-destructive absurdities and painful internal coherence. Aaron Beck, the most influential doctor in modern psychotherapy, says that “Monkey Mind does for anxiety what William Styron’s Darkness Visible did for depression.” Neuro...

The French painter Jean Hélion’s unique and deeply moving account of his experiences in Nazi prisoner-of-war camps prefigures the even darker stories that would emerge from the concentration camps. This serious adventure tale begins with Hélion’s infantry platoon fleeing from the German army and warplanes as they advanced through France in the early days of the war. The soldiers chant as they march and run, “They shall not have me!” but are quickly captured and sent to hard labor.Wr...

The book that helped inspire Anthony Doerr’s All the Light We Cannot SeeAn updated edition of this classic World War II memoir, chosen as one of the 100 Best Spiritual Books of the Twentieth Century, with a new photo insert and restored passages from the original French editionWhen Jacques Lusseyran was an eight-year-old Parisian schoolboy, he was blinded in an accident. He finished his schooling determined to participate in the wo...

"Something heavy is going on -- the past is erupting -- my two lives, night and day, are joining. I need to talk." Irv Yalom's old medical school friend was making a plea for help. In their fifty years of friendship, Bob Berger had never divulged his nocturnal terrors to his close comrade. Now, finally, he found himself forced to.In I'm Calling the Police, Berger recounts to Yalom the anguish of a war-torn past: By pretending he was a Christian, Berger survived the Holocau...

One of The Economist's 2011 Books of the YearFrom the author of Either/Or and The Idiot, Elif Batuman’s The Possessed presents the true but unlikely stories of lives devoted—Absurdly! Melancholically! Beautifully!—to the Russian Classics.No one who read Batuman's first article (in the journal n+1) will ever forget it. "Babel in California" told the true story of various human destinies intersecting at Sta...