Letter to my mother - Georges Simenon

'As you are well aware, we never loved each other in your lifetime.

Both of us pretended.

' Simenon explores the complexity of parent child relationships and the bitterness of things left unsaid in this stark, confessional piece.

Penguin Modern: fifty new books celebrating the pioneering spirit of the iconic Penguin Modern Classics series, with each one offering a concentrated hit of its contemporary, international flavour.

Here are authors ranging from Kathy Acker to James Baldwin, Truman Capote to Stanislaw Lem and George Orwell to Shirley Jackson; essays radical and inspiring; poems moving and disturbing; stories surreal and fabulous; taking us from the deep South to modern Japan, New York's underground scene to the farthest reaches of outer space.