Penguin Books Ltd: 3539 books

While society generally espouses the value of logic and certainty, we grow because we doubt. Humans have not spent millennia traversing oceans and experimenting with explosives because of confidence in their beliefs. Culture and science are rooted in unknowns, and when we accept doubt we are more...

Margaret Mahy was a wizard of words and a spinner of magical stories. She was New Zealand's best known author for children, wrote more than 200 books and often appeared in a purple wig or a penguin suit while she delighted audiences with vivacious readings of her stories. But who was Margaret Mahy?...

Karl Chandler is a funny bugger and so are his mates. In fact, our local talent has been killing it in clubs and festivals the world over. Lucky for us, these comics have worked around their hectic schedules setting their alarm clocks for before midday and logging off Twitter to cough up some of the...

This new edition of the bestselling guide contains a supplementary chapter, plus fully updated booklists. 'No matter where they go, children lost in books will always find their way home.' Your child deserves the best reading teacher in the world. And the one person who will read more than anyone...

At the turn of the twentieth century, London was a breeding ground for the avant-garde. Modernist writers like T.S. Eliot, W.B. Yeats and Ezra Pound became infatuated with the Orient. Pound in particular was inspired by the clarity and precision of Eastern poetry to rethink the nature of an English...

As England suffered heavy casualties at the front during World War One, the nation closed ranks against outsiders at home. England sought to reaffirm its racial dominance at the heart of the empire, and the Chinese in London became the principal scapegoat for anti-foreign sentiment. A combination...

'One of the better books on our time and the fools we have lately survived. Like War and Peace and the Iliad, it is abundant, instructive, exhilarating and cathartic.' BOB CARR From the suicide bombing of Glasgow Airport and the flooding of England to the horse flu and the Chinese earthquake and the...

Travelling through the wartorn Balkans with her husband on what proved to be a wholly useless diplomatic mission to Constantinople, Mary Wortley Montagu (1689-1762) left a vivid, informative, clever account of her adventures in the mysterious, sophisticated culture of Ottoman palaces, bathing places...

Penguin Specials are designed to fill a gap. Written to be read over a long commute or a short journey, they are original and exclusively in digital form. In this Special, Colin Smith and John Bierman make the battle of Alamein come alive. A turning point in the Second World War, the battle...

Travelling physician, salesman, author and self-made man, Dr Chase dispensed remedies all over America during the late nineteenth century, collecting recipes and domestic tips from the people he met along the way. His self-published books became celebrated US bestsellers and were the household Bibles...

Equality at work expert Ann Francke reveals how to understand and tackle the damaging consequences of gender imbalance in the workplace Gender balance is first and foremost a business issue. McKinsey estimates we could add 28 trillion to global GDP if we achieved gender equality everywhere...

After decades of prosperity Australians are now worried about their jobs, their incomes and their future. The mining boom, said to explain Australia's past success, is declared to be over. Unemployment has increased, carmakers have folded, the government is running a huge deficit. In a striking analysis,...

What do we actually cook? And how do we make decisions about what to cook and eat when surrounded by overwhelming messages in the media? Here writer and social researcher Rebecca Huntley attempts to answer these questions, and to show that the 'cooking' that's presented in food media (like MasterChef) is less valuable than 'food wisdom': understanding how to prepare food on a daily basis.

In these witty, outrageous ten laws, the well-beloved gadfly, sage and wordsmith Bob Ellis investigates dislocation and security, competence and charisma, youth and old age. He explains why bicycles encourage premarital sex, moving house too many times drives humans mad, 'the rising price of a roof...