A young Algerian, Meursault, afflicted with a sort of aimless inertia, becomes embroiled in the petty intrigues of a local pimp and, somewhat inexplicably, ends up killing a man. Once he's imprisoned and eventually brought to trial, his crime, it becomes apparent, is not so much the arguably defensible murder he has committed as it is his deficient character. In the story of an ordinary man who unwittingly gets drawn into a senseless murder on a sun-drenched...

It is one of the most memorable first lines in all of literature: "When Gregor Samsa woke one morning from uneasy dreams, he found himself transformed into some kind of monstrous vermin." So begins Kafka's famous short story, The Metamorphosis . Kafka considered publishing it with two of the stories included here in a volume to be called Punishments. The Judgment explores an enigmatic power struggle between a father and son, while In the Penal Colony...

Al despertar Gregorio Samsa una maąna, tras un sueǫ intranquilo, se encontra en su cama convertido en un monstruoso insecto. A tale of family and alienation featuring a traveling salesman, Gregor Samsa, who awakens in his family home one morning to find himself turned into a giant bug.

Reunited after a forty-year estrangement, Ginny, living in the crumbling family home in rural Britain, and Vivien, who had fled her family's eccentricities for the normalcy of London, struggle to come to terms with their stormy past and hidden family secrets.

Seventeen-year-old Veronica "Ronnie" Miller's life was turned upside down when her parents divorced and her father moved from New York City to Wrightsville Beach, North Carolina. Three years later, she remains angry and alienated from her parents, particularly her father...until her mother decides it would be in everyone's best interest if she and her younger brother spent the summer with him in North Carolina. Ronnie's father, a former concert pianist,...

Arriving in western Ireland to research the Kavanagh ancestry, Father Tim and Cynthia are disrupted by a burglary, a sprained ankle, and local distress over the theft of a cherished painting.

Coming of age during an African revolution, a brilliant university student-turned-fighter eventually flees the escalating violence of his country to resettle in the United States, where he is haunted by his past.

The struggle of three brothers to stay together after their parent's death and their quest for identity among the conflicting values of their adolescent society. When it was first published in 1967, The Outsiders defied convention with its immediate, deeply sympathetic portrayal of Ponyboy and his struggle to find a place for himself in a difficult world. Thirty years later, it speaks to teenagers as powerfully as ever. Puffin is proud to publish...

Three far-flung sisters come home to Martha's Vineyard one last time. Their mother's beach house is the only place any of them ever found true happiness and they need to begin the difficult process of letting go. Memories of their grandmother, mother, and their Irish father, who sailed away the year Dar turned twelve, rise up and expose the fine cracks in their family myth--especially when a cache of old letters reveals enough truth to send them back...