90 classic titles celebrating 90 years of Penguin Books

'What does love fear? Limitation.'

Johannes stealthily pursues Cordelia through the streets of Copenhagen, and through an intricate, manipulative courtship contrives to possess her. Motivated not by love or sex but by sensation and experiment, he seeks to make the object of his desire desire him – and then to retreat. At once a captivating story and philosophical exploration of existence’s entanglements, The Seducer's Diary is also an excoriating reconstruction of Kierkegaard’s own romantic failures.

Søren Kierkegaard (1813-1855) was one of the most passionate and imaginative of all philosophers. In pursuit of the question of existence, he broke off his engagement to Regine Olsen. Over the following decade a series of the most profound and transformative works in modern philosophy poured from him, including Fear and Trembling, The Sickness Unto Death and Either/Or, from which The Seducer’s Diary is taken.