Muriel Spark's classic The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie features a schoolmistress you'll never forget, in this beautifully repackaged Penguin Essentials edition. 'Give me a girl at an impressionable age, and she is mine for life...' Passionate, free-thinking and unconventional, Miss Brodie is a teacher who exerts a powerful influence over her group of 'special girls' at Marcia Blaine School. They are the Brodie set, the creme de la creme, each famous for something - Monica for mathematics, Eunice for swimming, Rose for sex - who are initiated into a world of adult games and extracurricular activities they will never forget. But the price they pay is their undivided loyalty... The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie is a brilliantly comic novel featuring one of the most unforgettable characters in all literature.

One October evening five London couples gather for a dinner party, enjoying ‘the pheasant (flambe in cognac as it is)’ and waiting for the imminent arrival of the late-coming guest Hilda Damien, who has been unavoidably detained due to the fact that she is being murdered at this very moment. Symposium is Muriel Spark – one of the greatest writers of the twentieth century and author of classics including The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie – at her wicked best.

Romantic, heroic, comic and tragic, unconventional schoolmistress Jean Brodie has become an iconic figure in post-war fiction. Her glamour, unconventional ideas and manipulative charm hold dangerous sway over her girls at the Marcia Blaine Academy - 'the creme de la creme' - who become the Brodie 'set', introduced to a privileged world of adult games that they will never forget. Muriel Spark's The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie was adapted into a successful stage play, and later a film directed by Ronald Neame and starring Maggie Smith.

Passionate, free-thinking and unconventional, Miss Brodie is a teacher who exerts a powerful influence over her group of special girls at Marcia Blaine School. They are the Brodie set, the creme de la creme, each famous for something - Monica for mathematics, Eunice for swimming, Rose for sex - who are initiated into a world of adult games and extracurricular activities they will never forget. But the price they pay is their undivided loyalty. The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie is a brilliantly comic novel featuring one of the most unforgettable characters in all literature.

Passionate, free-thinking and unconventional, Miss Brodie is a teacher who exerts a powerful influence over her group of special girls at Marcia Blaine School. They are the Brodie set, the creme de la creme, each famous for something - Monica for mathematics, Eunice for swimming, Rose for sex - who are initiated into a world of adult games and extracurricular activities they will never forget. But the price they pay is their undivided loyalty. The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie is a brilliantly comic novel featuring one of the most unforgettable characters in all literature.

'You girls are my vocation . . . I am dedicated to you in my prime' Miss Jean Brodie is a schoolmistress with a difference. She is proud, cultured and romantic but her educational ideas are highly progressive and even deeply shocking. So when she decides to transform a group of 'special girls' into the creme de la creme at Marcia Blaine School they are soon known, perhaps suspiciously, as the Brodie set. Introduced to an unsettling world of adult games and curious intrigues, the Brodie Set know that they are privileged. Yet there is a price to pay - they must give Miss Brodie their undivided loyalty...

Described as 'a metaphysical shocker' at the time of its release, Muriel Sparks' The Driver's Seat is a taut psychological thriller, published with an introduction by John Lanchester in Penguin Modern Classics. Lise has been driven to distraction by working in the same accountants' office for sixteen years. So she leaves everything behind her, transforms herself into a laughing, garishly-dressed temptress and flies abroad on the holiday of a lifetime. But her search for adventure, sex and new experiences takes on a far darker significance as she heads on a journey of self-destruction. Infinity and eternity attend Lise's last terrible day in an unnamed southern city, as she meets her fate. One of six novels to be nominated for a 'Lost Man Booker Prize', The Driver's Seat was adapted into a 1974 film, Identikit, starring Elizabeth Taylor. Muriel Spark (1918 - 2006) wrote poetry, stories, and biographies as well as a remarkable series of novels, including The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1961), The Mandelbaum Gate (1965) which received the James Tait Black Prize, and The Public Image (1968) and Loitering with Intent (1981), both of which were shortlisted for the Booker Prize. Spark was awarded the T.S. Eliot Award for poetry in 1992, and the David Cohen Prize for literature in 1997.

The brevity of Muriel Spark's novels is equaled only by their brilliance. These four novels, each a miniature masterpiece, illustrate her development over four decades. Despite the seriousness of their themes, all four are fantastic comedies of manners, bristling with wit. Spark's most celebrated novel, THE PRIME OF MISS JEAN BRODIE, tells the story of a charismatic schoolteacher's catastrophic effect on her pupils. THE GIRLS OF SLENDER MEANS is a beautifully drawn portrait of young women living in a hostel in London in the giddy postwar days of 1945. THE DRIVER'S SEAT follows the final haunted hours of a woman descending into madness. And THE ONLY PROBLEM is a witty fable about suffering that brings the Book of Job to bear on contemporary terrorism. Characters are vividly etched in a few words; earth-shaking events are lightly touched on. Yet underneath the glittering surface there is an obsessive probing of metaphysical questions: the meaning of good and evil, the need for salvation, the search for significance.

The second Jackson Brodie novel (after Case Histories): literary crime from the prizewinning, number-one bestselling author of Big Sky and Transcription. It is summer, it is the Edinburgh Festival. People queuing for a lunchtime show witness a road-rage incident - a near-homicidal attack which changes the lives of everyone involved. Jackson Brodie, ex-army, ex-police, ex-private detective, is also an innocent bystander - until he becomes a murder suspect. As the body count mounts, each member of the teeming Dickensian cast's story contains a kernel of the next, like a set of nesting Russian dolls. They are all looking for love or money or redemption or escape: but what each actually discovers is their own true self.

The fourth Jackson Brodie novel: literary crime from the prizewinning number-one bestselling author of Big Sky and Transcription. A day like any other for security chief Tracy Waterhouse, until she makes a shocking impulse purchase. That one moment of madness is all it takes for Tracy's humdrum world to be turned upside down, the tedium of everyday life replaced by fear and danger at every turn. Witnesses to Tracy's outrageous exchange in the Merrion Centre in Leeds are Tilly, an elderly actress teetering on the brink of her own disaster, and Jackson Brodie, who has returned to his home county in search of someone else's roots. All three characters learn that the past is never history and that no good deed goes unpunished.

Meet Miss Charlotte… a modern Mary Poppins who wears a large hat and a crumpled dress that maker her look like a scarecrow, and she talks to a rock! At a train station on her way to meet her friends Marie and Leo to recover her pet rock, Madame Charlotte accidentally picks up the Prime Minister’s elephant-hide bag instead of her own. As it contains important documents and the politician is due to make an important speech on children’s education, Miss Charlotte – hoping that she might get a ministerial job out of this – embarks on a quest to track him down. Along the way, Miss Charlotte cannot help making speeches on behalf of the country’s leader and putting her own original twist on his boring children’s policy, while attracting at the same time the attentions of the media and the secret service.

Young children will have lots of fun with the Little Miss Pocket Library, a great collection of first stories about six hilarious Little Miss characters! The slipcase, which is packaged in shrink-wrap, includes six durable board book stories about Little Miss Princess, Little Miss Inventor, Little Miss Sunshine, Little Miss Naughty, Little Miss Giggles and Little Miss Chatterbox. The storybooks are made of sturdy board and their small size is great for young children, who can hold and play with them. They'll love looking at the brightly coloured pictures, hearing the stories and enjoying turning the pages themselves. The pocket size of the slipcase makes it perfect to carry around with you for instant entertainment on the go. The back of the books can also be put together to reveal a large picture of the Little Misses featured in the stories.

The second novel in Jean M. Auel's magnificent epic of life 25,000 years ago when two kinds of human beings, Neanderthal and Cro-Magnon, shared the earth. Forced to leave the Clan and her young son, Ayla sets out alone to travel the frigid steppes until she finds the valley of horses. Unable to find people like herself, the Cro-Magnons, she settles there and seeks friendship elsewhere. First she adopts a young filly, then a wounded lion cub. But far to the west, two young Cro-Magnon brothers have begun a journey. One of them is Jondalar, whose destiny is bound inextricably with Ayla's. Jean Auel's imaginative reconstruction of pre-historic life, rich in detail of language, culture, myth and ritual, has become a set text in schools and colleges around the world.

One day humankind discovered aesthetics and we have been preening ourselves ever since. But only a few of us dare to declare that we are more beautiful than the next person. The beauty contest in all its form, whether it be a competition to find the most beautiful woman in the world or to find the man—or woman—with perfectly formed pectorals, must be the most blatant display of peacockesque attention-seeking, unmatched in its glamour, glitz and sheer exhibitionism. Pageant celebrates the culture of the beauty contest, from the well-known spectacles of Miss World and Mr. and Miss Universe to the flamboyance of Alternative Miss World; from subculture contest, such as Miss Hell’s Angels, to the bizarre, for example, the crowning of Miss Sausage Queen to promote Nation Hot Dog Week. In America alone 35,000 beauty pageants are held through the year, but the beauty contest is a truly international phenomenon. Pageant features contest from around the world. An irresistible combination of nostalgia and contemporary kitsch, the book is unique study of our human obsession with the beautiful. * A nostalgic trip through time with pageants such as Miss America and Miss USA and including more unusual contests like Miss Car Wash (California), Miss Kansas Turnpike; Mr. America and Miss Nude UK.

On a blustery March day in the village of Fairacre, Miss Clare sees two strangers, 'pacing slowly, side by side, along the edge of Hundred Acre Field which lay on the other side of Miss Clare's garden hedge...' So begins a story which brings all the villagers of Fairacre together, as they face the prospect of developers who hope to build new houses on the fields adjoining old Mr Miller's farm. Everyone has an opinion - but not everyone is in agreement about the development. Under the watchful gaze of Miss Read, the school teacher, we meet old characters and new, from retired teacher Miss Clare and the surly Mrs Pringle, to the new assistant teacher, Miss Jackson - who brings with her problems of her own...

A brand new collection of short stories featuring the Queen of Crime's legendary detective Jane Marple, penned by twelve remarkable bestselling and acclaimed authors. This collection of twelve original short stories, all featuring Jane Marple, will introduce the character to a whole new generation. Each author reimagines Agatha Christie's Marple through their own unique perspective while staying true to the hallmarks of a traditional mystery. * Naomi Alderman * Leigh Bardugo * Alyssa Cole * Lucy Foley * Elly Griffiths * Natalie Haynes * Jean Kwok * Val McDermid * Karen M. McManus * Dreda Say Mitchell * Kate Mosse * Ruth Ware Miss Marple was first introduced to readers in a story Christie wrote for The Royal Magazine in 1927 and made her first appearance in a full-length novel in 1930's The Murder at the Vicarage. It has been 45 years since Agatha Christie's last Marple novel, Sleeping Murder, was published posthumously in 1976, and this collection of ingenious new stories by twelve Christie devotees will be a timely reminder why Jane Marple remains the most famous fictional female detective of all time.