The Ballad of the Sad Café

Introducing Little Clothbound Classics: irresistible, mini editions of short stories, novellas and essays from the world's greatest writers, designed by the award-winning Coralie Bickford-Smith.

Celebrating the range and diversity of Penguin Classics, they take us from snowy Japan to springtime Vienna, from haunted New England to a sun-drenched Mediterranean island, and from a game of chess on the ocean to a love story on the moon. Beautifully designed and printed, these collectible editions are bound in colourful, tactile cloth and stamped with foil.

Few writers have expressed loneliness, the need for human understanding and the search for love with such power and poetic sensibility as the American writer Carson McCullers. The Ballad of the Sad Cafe is her masterpiece: an unruly, bittersweet novella concerning the most unlikely of love triangles.

'The greatest prose writer that the South produced ... She has examined the heart of man with an understanding that no other writer can hope to surpass' - Tennessee Williams