
A play: in a bare room after some unexplained catastrophe, blind, chair-bound Hamm and his servant Clov, who cannot sit down, play out their last moves while Hamm's parents live in two dustbins.
Explore books like this on the map
A play: Winnie, buried to her waist in a mound of scorched earth, chatters cheerfully through her day with her toothbrush and handbag while her husband Willie crawls about behind.

Two tramps wait by a country road for a Godot who does not come, in a play that decided what modern theatre would even be for.

A play: after the death of his sister Drusilla, the young emperor Caligula decides that men die and are not happy, and sets out to use his absolute power to live by that truth.

Aston brings Davies, an old tramp, home to his cluttered room in West London, and Davies starts playing Aston off against his brother Mick to keep his place.

A play: a theatre company rehearsing a Pirandello comedy is interrupted by six strangers, a family of characters abandoned by their author, who demand that their unfinished drama be staged.

Four plays, among them No Exit, in which three dead strangers are shown into a windowless drawing room in hell, and Dirty Hands, about a young communist ordered to kill a party leader.

When his wife remarks that his nose tilts to the right, Vitangelo Moscarda realises that everyone sees a different man, and sets out to destroy every one of the Moscardas others believe in.

Stanley, a former pianist lodging in a seaside boarding house, is visited by two strangers, Goldberg and McCann, who insist on throwing him a birthday party.

A play: on the eve of the First World War, young Ellie Dunn arrives at old Captain Shotover's ship-shaped house in Sussex, where his daughters and their guests play at love while the old order drifts.

A man wakes up as a giant insect and his family's initial horror gives way to resentment, neglect, and the everyday cruelty of people who stop seeing you as human.

Cash's first book, interlinked stories in which rebellious schoolgirls, internet strangers and a biblical plague of talking frogs turn up in a world that is absurd and knows it.

A play: in Harry Hope's dive saloon in 1912, a roomful of drunks living on pipe dreams wait for Hickey, the salesman whose yearly binge they love, and this time he arrives sober.