Breakfast at Tiffany's

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. Pursued by to Salvatore 'Sally' Tomato, the Mafia sugardaddy doing life in Sing Sing and 'Rusty' Trawler, the bluechinned, cuffshooting millionaire man about women about town, Holly is a fragile eyeful of tawny hair and turnedup nose, a heartbreaker, a perplexer, a traveller, a tease.

She is irrepressibly 'top banana in the shock deparment', and one of the shining flowers of American fiction. 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 nonfiction 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.