Penguin Modern Classics: The Graduate

With an introduction by Hanif Kureishi.

As far as Benjamin Braddock’s parents are concerned, his future is sewn up. Now he has graduated from college, he will go to Yale or Harvard, get a good job and enjoy a life of money, cocktails and pool parties in the suburbs, just like them. For Benjamin, however, this isn’t quite enough. When his parents’ friend Mrs Robinson, a formidable older woman, strips naked in front of him and they begin an affair, it seems he might have found a way out. That is, until her daughter Elaine comes into the picture, and things get far more complicated.

Told with wry, deadpan humour, this brilliant anti-establishment fable was the basis for Mike Nicholas’ acclaimed film starring Dustin Hoffman, and is a classic of the 1960s counterculture.

He writes with this lovely, spare style’ Nick Hornby