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The Call of the Wild
The Call of the Wild
Dec 25, 2025 12:18 AM

Author:Jack London

The Call of the Wild

'The facts of life took on a fiercer aspect and, while he faced that aspect uncowed, he faced it with all the latent cunning of his nature aroused.'

The biting cold and the aching silence of the far North become an unforgettable backdrop for Jack London's vivid, rousing, superbly realistic wilderness adventure stories featuring the author's unique knowledge of the Yukon and the behavior of humans and animals facing nature at its cruelest.

The Penguin English Library - collectable general readers' editions of the best fiction in English, from the eighteenth century to the end of the Second World War.

Reviews

Set in a dystopian future that has seen no girls born for 50 years . . . This promises to be one of the big books of the year. You'd be a fool to miss it

—— Heat

Their first joint book, Eve is forced to decide between love and the fate of humanity

—— OK!

Eve holds the fate of the human race in her hands . . . This chilling dystopia is at heart a love story, and the vivid characterisation has you rooting for the duo from page one

—— CHILDREN'S BOOK OF THE MONTH , The Mail on Sunday

A Hunger Games-esque novel . . . a compelling read

—— The Mail on Sunday

Casts a wide web of intrigue, deception, and hope. A heady page-turner and an enthralling start to a trilogy

—— Kirkus Reviews

Praise for Giovanna:

—— -

A fun read with a big dose of girl power

—— Sun

Praise for Tom:

—— -

Genius

—— Sun

If you loved The Glorious Heresies and are looking for the next terrific Irish author, here be Ciaran McMenamin. . . . a cross between Trainspotting and Douglas Coupland, . . . sprinkled with a warm enveloping humour and compassion. It is that good.

—— Ken Bruen

A ribald, wise-cracking joyride through young lives lit up by clubs, drugs and ecstatic love. Skintown sings of escape, and the loyalty to music and rapture over the politics of hate.

—— Rob Doyle

An exuberant style which vividly captures the wildness of of the 90s rave culture.

—— Belfast Telegraph

[A] lyrical novel… Heart-wrenching and hauntingly beautiful, with dark undertones

—— Rebecca Wallersteiner , The Lady

Subtle and piercing… Phillips keeps on taking risks and telling powerful stories

—— Hirsh Sawhney , Times Literary Supplement

This is a richly detailed, immersive saga that hooks you from the jump and keeps you absorbed even as you spend decades with its character

—— Marie Claire

The best book I’ve read this year

—— Jen Campbell, vlogger & booktuber

In this stunning, generous novel, Mirza looks at the crucial events in an Indian-American Muslim family from many perspectives

—— Refinery29

Mirza's writing is like poetry as she examines just how far the bonds of family can bend

—— Glamour (US)

The great achievement of this novel – as of Vikram Seth’s witty and bounteous classic, A Suitable Boy – is that it traces family troubles that could happen to anybody... touching and unsettling... If this is the standard of Sarah Jessica Parker's list, we can look forward to a feast from Hogarth

—— Bookoxygen

Fatima Mirza is brilliant and this novel will break your heart and make it new again

—— Garth Greenwell

Beautiful, intimate, tender. So vividly told the characters live and breathe

—— Rachel Joyce

A radiant debut novel about the cultural forces that bind and divide members of one close-knit Muslim-American family

—— People, Books of the Year

A Place for Us is a triumph and an inspiration. I wish everyone would read this novel. A chronicle of the shattered expectations and irreconcilable desires within an American-Muslim family, A Place for Us hums with a deep faith in an unknown future, reminding its readers that when we are lost, love gives us a map home

—— Karen Russell, author of Swamplandia!

‘Fatima Farheen Mirza’s A Place For Us is a work of extraordinary and enthralling beauty. It is so deeply imagined, so intimately attentive to and solicitous of the lives it follows, so artful in describing the inseparable human experiences of pride and resentment, humility and loyalty -- and, most of all, love – that it feels not as if we are reading a novel about this Indian Muslim family struggling with tradition and a new culture, but as if we become actual members of the family. It is that immersive, that brilliant, that true’

—— Paul Harding, Pulizer Prize-winning author of Tinkers

[I]t’s groundbreaking to read… That we become so invested in a testament to Mirza’s talent

—— Mail Online

Throughout the course of the novel a complex dynamic of emotion emerges, and the novel unspools with striking maturity

—— Erica Wagner , Harper's Bazaar

With unwavering compassion, this [is a] beautiful heartbreaker

—— People Magazine

Fatima Farheen Mirza’s A Place For Us is a radiant debut. It accretes its power, beauty, and insight through its tender witnessing of private and family life. With her deeply compassionate view, Mirza dignifies terrain often desecrated by contemporary culture: maternity, faith, the bonds of community, the yearning for goodness, and our duty to others. She shows us the destructiveness of our doubt in those we love, and the mercy of forgiveness. Most wondrously, with this felt and moving novel, Mirza creates a place in which rebellion and reverence seem to embrace

—— Charmaine Craig, author of Miss Burma

A Place for Us is a radiantly envisioned, beautifully achieved epic about nearly everything that matters: love, family, faith, freedom, betrayal, contrition, absolution. Fatima Farheen Mirza is a magnificent new voice

—— Anthony Marra, author of A Constellation of Vital Phenomena and The Tsar of Love and Techno

The title of the book echoes a song from West Side Story, itself a retelling of Romeo and Juliet. Here the warring forces are not two families but one, split by the tension between reverence and rebellion. The author's passion for her subject shines like the moon in the night sky, a recurrent image in this ardent and powerful novel

—— Kirkus

Extraordinary in its depth... slow-brewing, affecting

—— Booklist

A brilliant first novel

—— Rose Tremain , Daily Mail

A slick debut pulled off with brio, Swan Song is glamorous, vivid and sometimes even daring in its intelligence

—— Irish Times

A dazzling read

—— Image magazine

Greenberg-Jephcott’s debut is fizzing with energy and ideas…The novel has style and substance in spades.

—— Observer

With a grounding in history, it is a fascinating read about the deepest secrets of an iconic author.

—— Hello!

Intoxicating

—— Prima

Swan Song is utterly divine.It swept me up and I just couldn't put it down ... it is the writing in this debut novel that astounds most of all. It is vivid, addictive and whips up a terrific portrait of a deeply contradictory and complex man, contrasting scenes from his unorthodox childhood with those from the gilded bubble he ended up in that he lanced through his own actions.

—— Victoria Sadler

A sumptuous look at the icons of Manhattan's high society scene in the mid-20th century ... An immersive readthat will have you questioning real histories versus the ones we create for ourselves.

—— History Extra

Ostensibly realistic, it is phantasmagoric… Everything he says bristles with improbable life. Reading it is like watching a movie in which, however much activity there is, the atmosphere dominates the plot

—— Allan Massie , Oldie

A meditative and dreamily lyrical espionage thriller

—— Claire Allfree and Anthony Cummins , Metro

Ondaatje brings Warlight’s seemingly disparate fragments together with such skill that the ending feels not just satisfying but inevitable. The most lovely conjuring trick, it leaves you in awe of the magician. I emerged blinking into the glare of the 21st century, bereft in a way a novel hasn’t left me bereft for a longtime

—— Allison Pearson , Sunday Telegraph

Ondaatje’s onion of a novel, his first since 2011’s The Cat’s Table, combines rich intrigue with a meditation on how we rewrite our memories by examining them… a stunning return.

—— Pat Carty , Hot Press

Magnificent.

—— Jenna Rak , Glamour Magazine

Nothing in the world of this novel is ever redundant; nothing is accidental. Whenever you come across a striking detail…you can be sure it will crop up again, be charged with more significance, be joined with the rest of the story in a long chain of meaning.

—— Tessa Hadley , London Review of Books

Mesmerising.

—— Craig Brown , Mail on Sunday, **Books of the Year**

Ondaatje’s first novel in seven years is also one of his best – a quiet but profoundly powerful book… A superior, espionage novel about the unstable, shape-shifting nature of personal history.

—— Claire Allfree , Metro, **Books of the Year**

The evocation of night journeys through the fog-bound city and along mysterious canals and forgotten rivers is spellbinding.

—— Allan Massie , The Catholic Herald, **Books of the Year**

Michael Ondaatje’s Warlight is one of the best books I’ve read in years. I’d pick it up again in a heartbeat.

—— Chris Catchpole , Q

Ondaatje’s prose is beautiful, and he successfully builds suspense and tension without seeming too heavy-handed

—— Ella Walker , Herald Scotland

Michael Ondaatje is at his best when writing about awkward, quiet types

—— A. S. H. Smyth , Spectator

Brilliant dramatic tale

—— Love it!

Ondaatje’s prose is consistently illuminating. Warlight is a meditation on the purpose and possibilities of storytelling

—— Ben Masters , Literary Review

[T]his elegiac novel combines the stealth of an espionage thriller with the irresolute shift of a memory play, purposefully full of fragments, loss and unfinished stories. Wonderful

—— Claire Allfree , Daily Mail

Warlight is a subtly thrilling story… It's a masterful book

—— Rachel Fellows , Esquire UK

[C]ompulsively and grippingly readable… Ondaatje is a marvelous writer, and Warlight is a novel which will continue to play in the reader’s imagination

—— Allan Massie , The Scotsman

For the lyrical strength of the prose alone, a new Michael Ondaatje novel is always a treat

—— Irish Independent

Warlight is a layered, precisely written, erudite meditation on the damage we do when we make war

—— Morag MacInnes , Tablet

In Warlight we have a writer who knows exactly what he’s doing – and has constructed something of real emotional and psychological heft, delicate melancholy and yet, frequently, page-turning plottiness. I haven’t read a better novel this year

—— Sam Leith , Daily Telegraph

[Ondaatje’s] prose has a haunting musicality, which George Blagden brings out to the full.

—— Christina Hardyment , The Times

Kushner’s writing is the most marvellous I read this year… time and again I found myself rereading paragraphs of The Mars Room for her perfectly turned sentences, the music of her prose

—— Neil D. A. Stewart , Civilian, **Books of the Year**
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