Driven away from his parish by a censorious bishop, Monsignor Quixote sets off across Spain accompanied by a deposed renegade mayor as his own Sancho Panza, and his noble steed Rocinante – a faithful but antiquated SEAT 600. Like Cervantes’s classic, this comic, picaresque fable offers enduring insights into our life and times.

When Father Quixote, a local priest of the Spanish village of El Toboso who claims ancestry to Cervantes’ fictional Don Quixote, is elevated to the rank of monsignor through a clerical error, he sets out on a journey to Madrid to purchase purple socks appropriate to his new station. Accompanying him on his mission is his best friend, Sancho, the Communist ex-mayor of the village who argues politics and religion with Quixote and rescues him from the various troubles his innocence lands him in along the way. Published in 1932, Monsignor Quixote is Graham Greene’s last religious novel, a fond homage to Cervantes, and a sincere exploration into the meaning of faith in the modern world. This edition features a new introduction by John Auchard. For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

*A 2011 National Book Award Finalist* A spellbinding story of renunciation, conversion, and radicalism from Pulitzer Prize-finalist biographer Deborah Baker What drives a young woman raised in a postwar New York City suburb to convert to Islam, abandon her country and Jewish faith, and embrace a life of exile in Pakistan? The Convert tells the story of how Margaret Marcus of Larchmont became Maryam Jameelah of Lahore, one of the most trenchant and celebrated voices of Islam's argument with the West. A cache of Maryam's letters to her parents in the archives of the New York Public Library sends the acclaimed biographer Deborah Baker on her own odyssey into the labyrinthine heart of twentieth-century Islam. Casting a shadow over these letters is the mysterious figure of Mawlana Abul Ala Mawdudi, both Maryam's adoptive father and the man who laid the intellectual foundations for militant Islam. As she assembles the pieces of a singularly perplexing life, Baker finds herself captive to questions raised by Maryam's journey. Is her story just another bleak chapter in a so-called clash of civilizations? Or does it signify something else entirely? And then there's this: Is the life depicted in Maryam's letters home and in her books an honest reflection of the one she lived? Like many compelling and true tales, The Convert is stranger than fiction. It is a gripping account of a life lived on the radical edge and a profound meditation on the cultural conflicts that frustrate mutual understanding.

Maurice Castle is a high-level operative in the British secret service during the Cold War. He is deeply in love with his African wife, who escaped apartheid South Africa with the help of his communist friend. Despite his misgivings, Castle decides to act as a double agent, passing information to the Soviets to help his in-laws in South Africa. In order to evade detection, he allows his assistant to be wrongly identified as the source of the leaks. But when suspicions remain, Castle is forced to make an even more excruciating sacrifice to save himself. Originally published in 1978, The Human Factor is an exciting novel of espionage drawn from Greene’s own experiences in MI6 during World War II, and ultimately a deeply humanistic examination of the very nature of loyalty. This edition features a new introduction by Colm Tóibín. For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

Ziolkowski explores the religious implications of the figure of Don Quixote in Western literature from Cervantes to the present.While scholars and critics in the past have often called attention to the secularizing tendency of modern literature, to the numerous fictional adaptations of the Christ figure on the one hand, and the innumerable literary descendants of Don Quixote on the other, this study is the first to examine a lineage of characters in whom the images of the alleged savior and the mad knight are combined.After considering Don Quixote as the first modern novel, and taking into account its relationship to religion, society, and censorship in seventeenth-century Spain, Ziolkowski traces the history and fate of Don Quixote, the character, through a series of religious transformations over the centuries, focusing on three novels that adapt the Quixote figure: Henry Fielding's Joseph Andrews, Fyodor Dostoevsky's The Idiot, and Graham Greene's Monsignor Quixote. Ziolkowski argues that, given the increased secularization and decline of religious consciousness over the last several centuries, any pursuit of religious values or ideas becomes questionable and this appears &"quixotic&" insofar as it stands in contradiction to the sociohistorical context. He concludes that religious existence, for the few who pursue it in suffering, which means that the religious person feels temporally displaced for adhering to a seemingly obsolete faith and lifestyle.

The story of Henry Pulling, a retired and complacent bank manager, who meets his septuagenarian Aunt Augusta for the first time at what he supposes to be his mother's funeral. She soon persuades Henry to abandon his dull suburban existence to travel her to Brighton, Paris, Istanbul, Paraguay. Through Aunt Augusta, one of Greene's greatest comic creations, Henry joins a shiftless, twilight society; mixes with hippies, war criminals, and CIA men; smokes pot and breaks all currency regulations.

The “strikingly original” debut novel by the masterful British author is “a perfect adventure” of love and smuggling on the English coast (The Nation). Francis Andrews is a reluctant smuggler living in the shadow of his brutish father’s legacy. To exorcise the ghosts of the man he loathes, Andrews betrays his colleagues to authorities and takes flight across the downs. It’s here that he stumbles upon the isolated cottage of a beguiling stranger named Elizabeth—an empathetic young woman who is just as lonely, every bit the outsider as he, and reconciling a troubling past of her own. Andrews, a man on the run from those he exposed, believes he’s found refuge and salvation. But when Elizabeth encourages him to return to the courts of Lewes and give evidence against his accomplices, the treacherous and deadly repercussions may be beyond their control. “The ultimate strengths of [Graham] Greene’s books is that he shows us the hazards of compassion,” a theme that would find its earliest expression in The Man Within, his first published novel (Pico Iyer).