Penguin Books Ltd

Lee Chong, the owner of the well-stocked grocery store, is also the proprietor of the Palace Flophouse that Mack and his troupe of good-natured 'boys' call home. Dora runs the Bear Flag Restaurant with clockwork efficiency and a generous heart, and Doc, secreted away in his home at Western Biological Laboratories, is the fount of all wisdom.

A collection of short stories, set in the idyllic Salinas Valley in California, where simple people farm the land and struggle to find a place for themselves in the world. This book includes the tales: The Murderer and The Chrysanthemums.

Fauna, the latest madam at the Bear Flag brothel, Doc, still there for everyone else but feeling strangely sad himself, and Suzy, the new hustler in town who might just be the girl to save him.

Explores the effects of invasion on both the conquered and the conquerors. Dealing with the motivations and emotions of the enemy, this title uncovers profound and often unsettling truths both about war and human nature.

In 1940 Steinbeck sailed in a sardine boat with his great friend the marine biologist, Ed Ricketts, to collect marine invertebrates from the beaches of the Gulf of California. The expedition was described by the two men in Sea of Cortez, published in 1941.

Moving through the woods and deserts, dirt tracks and highways to large cities and glorious wildernesses, the author observed America, and the Americans who inhabited it. What he saw was a lonely, generous nation too packed with individuals for single judgements; what he saw made him proud, angry, sympathetic and elated.

Ethan Allen Hawley has lost the acquisitive spirit of his wealthy forebears, a long line of proud New England sea captains and Pilgrims. Scarred by failure, Ethan works as a grocery clerk in a store his family once owned. But his wife is restless and his teenage children troubled and hungry for the material comforts he cannot provide.

An evocation of the suffering and hardship caused by the Great Depression, and a panoramic vision of the struggle for the American Dream. Set against the background of Dust Bowl Oklahoma and Californian migrant life, it tells of Tom Joad and his family, who, like thousands of others, are forced to travel west in search of the promised land.

Jody Tiflin is given a red pony, and later he is promised the colt of a bay mare. Yet both of these gifts bring him tragedy as well as joy, and Jody is taught not only the harsh lessons of life and death, but made painfully aware of the fallibilty of adults.

Drifters in search of work, George and his childlike friend Lennie, have nothing in the world except the clothes on their back - and a dream that one day they will have some land of their own.