90 classic titles celebrating 90 years of Penguin Books

'One of the hidden geniuses of the twentieth century' - Colm Tóibín

A housewife's life is shattered by a sudden epiphany. A simple tale of killing cockroaches fragments into multiple narratives, each uncovering new truths. In this selection of haunting short stories, Lispector reveals the permeable boundaries between past and present, the real and the surreal, showing ordinary moments to contain the deepest existential truths.

Clarice Lispector was a Brazilian novelist and short-story writer. Her innovation in fiction brought her international renown. She was born in the Ukraine in 1920, but in the aftermath of World War I and the Russian Civil War, the family fled to Romania and eventually Brazil. She published her first novel, Near to the Wildheart, in 1943, when she was just twenty-three, and the next year was awarded the Graça Aranha Prize for the best first novel. She died in 1977, shortly after the publication of her final novel, The Hour of the Star.