However, they are separated by several miles and to counter this distance, they use love letters and telegraph to convey their emotions. Their resistance bears fruit as they are united only to find out that they are strangers to each other and hence cannot live together.

An Autobiographical Collage of the 1980s Presents a collage of author's own life story, snipped up and stuck down alongside his views on everything from suicidal depression to the future of the planet and Andrew Lloyd Webber.

Anaïs Nin's second volume of erotic short stories after Delta of Venus, Little Birds is broader in scope, encompassing the entire breadth of human sensuality.

Zeno's dizzying 'proofs' that motion is impossible; the extraordinary atomic theories of Democritus; the haunting and enigmatic epigrams of Heraclitus; and the maxims of Alcmaeon: fragmentary as they often are, the thoughts of these philosophers seem strikingly modern in their concern to forge a truly scientific vocabulary and way of reasoning.

The autobiographical Ham on Rye is widely considered his finest novel. A classic of American literature, it offers powerful insight into his youth through the prism of his alter-ego Henry Chinaski, who grew up to be the legendary Hank Chinaski of Post Office and Factotum.

Henry Chinaski, an outcast, a loner and a hopeless drunk, drifts around America from one dead-end job to another, from one woman to another and from one bottle to the next.

Huxley's ingenious fantasy of the future sheds a blazing light on the present and is considered to be his most enduring masterpiece.

As the great story unfolds from its magical opening scenes to its devastating end, it is the Penguin Proust that makes Proust accessible to a new generation.

It is a book about laughter and forgetting, about forgetting and about Prague, about Prague and about the angels.

The Idiot by Fyodor Dostoevsky. An introduction by Agnes Cardinal, Prince Myshkin returns to Russia from an asylum in Switzerland.

Seneca’s letters read like a diary, or a handbook of philosophical meditations. Often beginning with observations on daily life, the letters focus on many traditional themes of Stoic philosophy, such as the contempt of death, the value of friendship and virtue as the supreme good.

Six children - Bernard, Susan, Rhoda, Neville, Jinny and Louis - meet in a garden close to the sea, their voices sounding over the constant echo of the waves that roll back and forth from the shore.