Vintage

When powerful real-estate tycoon Nero Golden immigrates to the States under mysterious circumstances, he and his three adult children assume new identities, taking 'Roman' names, and move into a grand mansion in downtown Manhattan. Arriving shortly after the inauguration of Barack Obama, he and his sons, each extraordinary in his own right, quickly establish themselves at the apex of New York society.

The black and white photographs in this book sum up the vast emptiness full of an astonishing cross-section of the world's nationalities that is Patagonia. The journey invents itself as he pursues a mythical beast through Rio Negro, Chubut and Southern Patagonia. Along the way he is detained by the improbable stories of those he meets.

Did you know that the Japanese have a word to express the way sunlight filters through the leaves of trees? Or that there's a Swedish word that means a traveller's particular sense of anticipation before a trip?

Planet Earth is 4.5 billion years old. In just a fraction of that time, one species among countless others has conquered it. Us. We are the most advanced and most destructive animals ever to have lived.

Think back to when you first flew. When you first left the Earth, and travelled high and fast above its turning arc. When you looked down on a new world, captured simply and perfectly through a window fringed with ice.

On the eve of Angolan independence, Ludo bricks herself into her apartment, where she will remain for the next thirty years. She lives off vegetables and pigeons, burns her furniture and books to stay alive and keeps herself busy by writing her story on the walls of her home. The outside world slowly seeps into Ludo's life through snippets on the radio, voices from next door, glimpses of a man fleeing his p...

A book of unabashedly British baking by London's foremost bakers The Fluffy Vanilla Fairy Cakes with Chocolate Fudge Icing take you straight back to childhood. Retro throwbacks like Fig Rolls and Jammy Dodgers are perfect for elevenses. And traditional teatime treats like Victoria Sponge and Treacle Tarts are given a mouth-watering modern makeover. With over 120 recipes, British Baking is a must-have.

The Quiet American is Graham Greene’s fictional account of the violence and intrigue of mid twentieth century Vietnam. Pyle, a young idealistic American has been sent to promote democracy through a mysterious ‘Third Force’, but his naïve optimism starts to cause bloodshed. Fowler, a friend of Pyle, but a Brit and a cynical foreign correspondent, finds it hard to just stand aside and watch without interv...

When the renowned aviation hero and rabid isolationist Charles A. Lindbergh defeated Franklin Roosevelt by a landslide inthe1940 presidential election, fear invaded every Jewish household in America. Not only had Lindbergh publicly blamed the Jews for pushing America towards a pointless war with Nazi Germany, but, upon taking office as the 33rd president of the United States, he negotiated a cordial 'unders...

The Worldwide Bestseller If you're lost, they'll find you...Evie Boyd is fourteen and desperate to be noticed. It's the summer of 1969 and restless, empty days stretch ahead of her. Until she sees them.

Roland Barthes is knocked down in a Paris street by a laundry van. It's February 1980 and he has just come from lunch with Francois Mitterrand, a slippery politician locked in a battle for the Presidency. Barthes dies soon afterwards.

Now a major film directed by Danny Boyle reuniting the cast of Trainspotting. Years on from Trainspotting, Sick Boy is back in Edinburgh after a long spell in London. Having failed spectacularly as a hustler, pimp, husband, father and businessman, Sick Boy taps into an opportunity which to him represents one last throw of the dice. However, to realise his ambitions within the Adult industries, Sick Boy must...

A haunting tale of war, love and loss from the author of Birdsong and A Week in December. The Sunday Times bestseller. On a small island off the south coast of France, Robert Hendricks - an English doctor who has seen the best and the worst the twentieth century had to offer - is forced to confront the events that made up his life. His host is Alexander Pereira, a man who seems to know more about his guest ...

The Republic of Gilead offers Offred only one function: to breed. If she deviates, she will, like dissenters, be hanged at the wall or sent out to die slowly of radiation sickness. But even a repressive state cannot obliterate desire - neither Offred's nor that of the two men on which her future hangs. Brilliantly conceived and executed, this powerful evocation of twenty-first century America gives full rei...

This is a book about memory, nature and nation, and how it might be possible to reconcile death with life and love. As a child, Helen Macdonald was determined to become a falconer, learning the arcane terminology and reading all the classic books. Years later, when her father died and she was struck deeply by grief, she became obsessed with the idea of training her own goshawk. She bought Mabel for £800 ...

Per Pettersen's Out Stealing Horses is a beautiful novel, with its beguiling prose communicating loss and melancholy that even translation cannot tarnish. In 1948, when he is fifteen, Trond spends a summer in the country with his father. The events - the accidental death of a child, his best friend's feelings of guilt and eventual disappearance, his father's decision to leave the family for another woman - ...

The setting is a comedy club in a small Israeli town. An audience that has come expecting an evening of amusement instead sees a comedian falling apart on stage; an act of disintegration, a man crumbling, as a matter of choice, before their eyes. They could get up and leave, or boo and whistle and drive him from the stage, if they were not so drawn to glimpse his personal hell. Dovaleh G, a veteran stand-up...

How do you remember the summers of your childhood? For Laurie Lee they were flower-crested, heady, endless days. Here is an evocation of summer like no other - a remote valley filled with the scent of hay, jazzing wasps, blackberries plucked and gobbled, and games played until the last drop of dusk. Lee's joyful and stirring writing captures the very essence of England's golden season. Selected from the boo...

Salman Rushdie, a self-described 'emigrant from one place and a newcomer in two', explores the true meaning of home. Writing with insight, passion and humour, he looks at what it means to belong, whether roots are real and homelands imaginary, what it is like to reconfigure your past from fragments of memory and what happens when East meets West. Selected from the books Shame, Imaginary Homelands and East, ...

Lampedusa's masterpiece, one of the finest works of twentieth century fiction, is set amongst an aristocratic family, facing social and political changes in the wake of Garibaldi's invasion of Sicily in 1860. At the head of the family is the prince, Don Fabrizio. Proud and stubborn, he is accustomed to knowing his own place in the world and expects his household to run accordingly. He is aware of the change...