Peter Owen Publishers: 107 books

The first fully-rounded portrait of the man behind the Gunpowder Plot   For hundreds of years Guy Fawkes has been portrayed as perhaps too extreme a figure-a rabid, bloodthirsty Catholic who not only tried to bomb British Parliament but threatened the English way of life. This biography...

A bloody, atmospheric modern classic of crime literature and one of the most haunting and terrifying thrillers to come out of Europe in recent years   Written in the spirit of the sensational murder story and combined with a rich Gothic atmosphere, this tale, now translated into 11...

A landmark study of Virginia Woolf, now back in printRecollections, anecdotes and first-hand impressions—including pieces from some of the leading lights of the Bloomsbury Group—are gathered together in this perceptive and profound volume. Many pieces were specially written for the original...

The companion volume to The Darker Sex and The Dreaming Sex, this absorbing anthology of early women's crime fiction belongs on the bookshelf of any serious crime fan Many of the leading writers of crime fiction are women—Agatha Christie, Ruth Rendell et al—but it still comes as a surprise...

Set in an unspecified but eerily familiar time and landscape, this is the story of Mark, a protagonist who struggles against the machinations of a hostile society and bureaucracy. Suffering at first from the persecution of his father as a conscientious objector, his life quickly comes under the...

The first English translation of a major European literary figure and Nobel Prize nominee's most significant work of prose to date, this tense, cerebral, fascinating novel is the perfect introduction to Kaplinski   A semi-autobiographical Bildungsroman, set in the early 1960s, this...

Young Albert Weiss was spared the horrors of Auschwitz when his parents threw him and his brother from the transport train. Years later, with the help of other survivors of the holocaust, he explores the myriad ways of confronting not just the evil that robbed him of his childhood, but the guilt he...

An engaging and often hilarious survey of the far-from-fusty extra-curricular activities of some of philosophy’s finest practitioners   Philosophers Behaving Badly examines the lives of eight great philosophers—Rousseau, whose views on education and the social order seem curiously...

The detailed memoirs and letters of a gifted and prolific chronicler provide an insider’s view of life for the top echelons of society in the 16th century   Sophia, Electress of Hanover (1630–1714), granddaughter of James I, and mother of George I, is best remembered as the link...

An extraordinary evocation of the desert and its people by a woman who dressed as a man in order to travel alone and unimpeded throughout North Africa   In 1897 Isabelle Eberhardt, at the age of 20, left an already unconventional life in Geneva for the Morroccan frontier. Gripped by...

Bentinho Santiago, cosseted only child of a rich widow, lives next door to Capitu, the daughter of a lowly government official. As childhood friendship turns to adolescent love, an obstacle to the union exists in the form of a vow made by Bentinho's mother before his birth: her son is to be a priest....

Ranjit Singh has been largely written out of accounts of India's past by British historians, yet he was one of the most powerful and charismatic figures in Indian history. He unified the warring chiefdoms of the Punjab into an extraordinary northern empire, built up a formidable army, kept the British...

In exploring Royal dynamics, Inheritance sheds light on problems found in any familyOn its first publication in the 1990s, Dennis Friedman's Inheritance caused a furor in England as he traced the many problems of the Royal family as it was then back to Queen Victoria's nursery, unveiling a host...

Now available for the first time in English, this important addition to the Roth canon is rich in irony and exemplary of Roth's keen powers of social and political observation A novel fragment that was discovered among Joseph Roth's papers decades after his death, this book chronicles the...