Malone Dies: Introduced by Claire-Louise Bennett

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The iconic trilogy of novels by the era-defining Nobel laureate, relaunched for a new generation.

'The master innovator of them all.' Guardian

I can't go on, I'll go on.

Molloy: a sordid vagrant riding his bicycle through the countryside, sucking stones, on a quest for his mother. Moran: a private detective sent on his trail, investigating his crimes - but soon to deteriorate alongside him.

Malone: an octogenarian man on his deathbed, naked in piles of blankets, wiling away the time with stories - writing, reminiscing, raging, surviving.

The Unnameable: an armless and legless creature from a nameless place, weeping and watching in his urn, orbited by visitors outside a chop-house.

Together, these selves speak, debate, exist - the prose as alive, or more, than them.

Author Bio

Samuel Beckett is an Irish playwright, theatre director, novelist and poet. Born in Dublin in 1906, he studied French, Italian and English at Trinity College. He moved to Paris in 1928 - where he would spend much of his life, writing mostly in French - to teach English, and worked as a courier for the French resistance during World War II. His most famous play, Waiting for Godot, was first performed in 1953. He then wrote Endgame (1957), Krapp's Last Tape (1958) and Happy Days (1961). A modernist, associated with the 'Theatre of the Absurd', his work eschews conventional plotting or structure, exploring the human condition as bleakly humorous and profound, using laughter as a weapon against despair. Over his career, his work became increasingly experimental and minimalist, stripped down to the most essential elements: Play (1962) places its characters in funeral urns with only their heads visible, and Not I (1972) consists of a mouth speaking in the darkness. In the 1940s and 50s Beckett also published a number of acclaimed novels. He won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1969. Beckett died in 1989 and is buried in Montparnasse Cemetery in Paris.