Picador Classics

"On a small island in the Tyrrhenian Sea, there lives a boy as innocent of sin and the great world as a seabird. Arturo's mother is dead; his father away - we are never quite sure where. Black-clad women care for him, run the house, give him the freedom to come and go as he likes.Then the father returns from the mainland with a new wife, Nunziata, who is in fact a girl barely older than Arturo himself. At first hatred and contempt are all the boy feels for his stepmother, but she responds differently and soon his hatred is replaced by feelings that are strange to him. On this island, as distant from the real world as the fantastical Bermuda in Shakespeare's The Tempest, Arturo and Nunziata recreate the tragedy and passion that are as old as the history of men and women."--BOOK JACKET.

The Confusions of Young Törless (German: Die Verwirrungen des Zöglings Törleß), or Young Törless, is the literary debut of the Austrian philosophical novelist and essayist Robert Musil, first published in 1906. Musil's novel is ostensibly a Bildungsroman, a story of a young disoriented man searching for moral values in society and their meaning for him. The expressionistic novel, based on Musil's personal experiences at a boarding school in Hranice (in Austria-Hungary, now in the Czech Republic) was written according to Musil "because of boredom". In later life, however, Musil denied that the novel was about youthful experiences of his own. Due to its explicit sexual content, the novel at first caused a scandal among the reading public and the authorities of Austria-Hungary. Later, various prefigurings of Fascism were identified in the text, including the characters of Beineberg and Reiting, who seem to be orderly pupils by day but shamelessly abuse their classmate psychologically, physically and sexually by night.

Northern California, during the violent end of the 1960s. At the start of summer, a lonely and thoughtful teenager, Evie Boyd, sees a group of girls in the park, and is immediately caught by their freedom, their careless dress, their dangerous aura of abandon. Soon, Evie is in thrall to Suzanne, a mesmerizing older girl, and is drawn into the circle of a soon-to-be infamous cult and the man who is its charismatic leader. Hidden in the hills, their sprawling ranch is eerie and run down, but to Evie, it is exotic, thrilling, charged—a place where she feels desperate to be accepted. As she spends more time away from her mother and the rhythms of her daily life, and as her obsession with Suzanne intensifies, Evie does not realize she is coming closer and closer to unthinkable violence, and to that moment in a girl’s life when everything can go horribly wrong.

The Death Ship (German title: Das Totenschiff) is a novel by the pseudonymous author known as B. Traven. Originally published in German in 1926, and in English in 1934, it was Traven's first major success and is still the author's second best known work after The Treasure of the Sierra Madre. Owing to its scathing criticism of bureaucratic authority, nationalism, and abusive labor practices, it is often described as an anarchist novel. (Source: [Wikipedia](