Breakfast at Tiffany's. Truman Capote

Immortalised by Audrey Hepburn's sparkling performance in the 1961 film of the same name, `Breakfast at Tiffany's` is Truman Capote's timeless portrait of tragicomic cultural icon Holly Golightly, published in `Penguin Modern Classics`. It's New York in the 1940s, where the martinis flow from cocktail hour till breakfast at Tiffany's. And nice girls don't, except, of course, for Holly Golightly: glittering socialite traveller, generally upwards, sometimes sideways and once in a while - down.

Pursued by to Salvatore 'Sally' Tomato, the Mafia sugar-daddy doing life in Sing Sing and 'Rusty' Trawler, the blue-chinned, cuff-shooting millionaire man about women about town, Holly is a fragile eyeful of tawny hair and turned-up nose, a heart-breaker, a perplexer, a traveller, a tease. She is irrepressibly 'top banana in the shock deparment', and one of the shining flowers of American fiction. This edition also contains three stories: `House of Flowers`, `A Diamond Guitar` and `A Christmas Memory`.

Truman Capote (1924-84) was born in New Orleans. He left school when he was fifteen and subsequently worked for The New Yorker, which provided his first - and last - regular job. He wrote both fiction and non-fiction - short stories, novels and novellas, travel writing, profiles, reportage, memoirs, plays and films; his other works include `In Cold Blood` (1965), `Music for Chameleons` (1980) and `Answered Prayers` (1986), all of which are published in `Penguin Modern Classics`.

If you enjoyed `Breakfast at Tiffany's`, you might like Capote's `In Cold Blood`, also available in `Penguin Modern Classics`. `One of the twentieth century's most gorgeously romantic fictions.` (`Daily Telegraph`). `The most perfect writer of my generation...I would not have changed two words of `Breakfast at Tiffany's`.` (`Norman Mailer`).