The Collected Novels Volume One

From “the ultimate chronicler of twentieth-century man’s consciousness and anxiety,” three classic novels, all of which have been adapted into films (William Golding, Nobel Prize–winning author of Lord of the Flies).

Brighton Rock: Seventeen-year-old Pinkie Brown, raised in the prewar Brighton slums, leads a pack of gangsters whose small-time scams have erupted in murder. The coverup leads Pinkie to a lovestruck young waitress—his new wife, the key witness to his crimes, and, should she live long enough, his alibi. But loitering in the shadows is another woman—one determined to avenge Pinkie’s latest victim.

“Brilliant and uncompromising.” —The New York Times

The End of the Affair: Maurice Bendrix, a writer in Clapham during the Blitz, and Sarah Miles, the bored, beautiful wife of a dull civil servant, begin a series of doomed and reckless trysts. After Maurice miraculously survives a bombing, Sarah ends the affair—quickly and without explanation. It’s only when Maurice crosses paths with Sarah’s husband that he discovers the unexpected fallout of their duplicity.

“One of the most true and moving novels of my time, in anybody’s language.” —William Faulkner, Nobel Prize–winning author of The Sound and the Fury

Our Man in Havana: James Wormold, a cash-strapped vaccuum cleaner salesman in Havana, finds the answer to his prayers when British Intelligence offers him a lucrative job as an undercover agent. To keep the checks coming, he passes along sketches of secret weapons that look suspiciously like vacuum parts. But when MI6 dispatches a secretary to oversee his endeavors, Wormold become the target of an assassin.

“High-comic mayhem . . . weirdly undated . . . [and] bizarrely prescient.” —Christopher Buckley, New York Times–bestselling author of Thank You For Not Smoking