Vintage

Across seven tales, Haruki Murakami brings his powers of observation to bear on the lives of men who, in their own ways, find themselves alone. Here are vanishing cats and smoky bars, lonely hearts and mysterious women, baseball and the Beatles, woven together to tell stories that speak to us all.

Winner of the Wanderlust Adventure Travel Book of the Year at the Edward Stanford Travel Writing Awards 2018 In the great depths surrounding the remote Lofoten islands in Norway lives the Greenland shark. Twenty-six feet in length and weighing more than a tonne, it can live for 200 years. Its fluorescent green, parasite-covered eyes are said to hypnotise its prey, and its meat is so ridd...

`You will have heard of my friend the once celebrated novelist Jocelyn Tarbet, but I suspect his memory is beginning to fade...You'd never heard of me, the once obscure novelist Parker Sparrow, until my name was publicly connected with his. To a knowing few, our names remain rigidly attached, like the two ends of a seesaw. His rise coincided with, though did not cause, my decline... I don't deny there was w...

The author considers the possibility that the Basques may be one of the oldest people in Europe. Whether or not this is so there is no doubt that the region has always been strongly independent. In this book Mark Kurlansky uses and interesting mixture of reportage, photographs, anecdote and recipes to examines the history of the Basque region and the role of the Basque people in European and World history.

Goodbye to Berlin contains six sketches of individual's lives in pre-Hitler Berlin: the author's landlady, Sally Bowles, a working class family and a Jewish family. Many of the characters cross over with the characters portrayed in his other Berlin novel Mr. Norris Changes Trains.

The Danes are the happiest people in the world, and pay the highest taxes. 'Neutral' Sweden is one of the biggest arms manufacturers in the world. Finns have the largest per capita gun ownership after the US and Yemen. 54% of Icelanders believe in elves. Norway is the richest country on earth. 5 % of Danish men have had sex with an animal.

Flying out of India, a light aircraft is hijacked and flown into the high Tibetan Himalayas. The few passengers on board anxiously await their fate, among them Conway, a talented British consul. But on landing they are unexpectedly conducted to a remote valley, a legendary paradise of peace and beauty, known as Shangri-La. Have they been kidnapped? Can they leave? And do they even want to? From the author o...

The Chilean Pablo Neruda (1904-1973) was probably the greatest and certainly the most prolific of twentieth-century Latin American poets. He brought out his first collection at the age of seventeen, and quickly developed an assured and distinctive poetic voice. His third book, Veinte Poemas de Amor y una Cancion Desesperada - Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair- was published in 1924 and attracted inter...

Set in the Gulf Stream off the coast of Havana, Ernest Hemingway's magnificent fable The Old Man and the Sea is the story of an old man, a young boy and a giant fish. Here, is a perfectly crafted story, a unique and timeless vision of the beauty and grief of man's challenge to the elements in which he lives.

Why do road cyclists go to the mountains? After all, cycling up a mountain is hard – so hard that, to many non-cyclists, it can seem absurd. But, for some, climbing a mountain gracefully (and beating your competitors up the slope) represents the pinnacle of cycling achievement. The mountains are where legends are forged and cycling’s greats make their names. Many books tell you where the mountains are...

Vintage Feminism: classic feminist texts in short form WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY JESS PHILLIPS Soldier, criminal, militant, hooligan, revolutionary: these labels Emmeline Pankhurst took up and wore proudly in her long struggle for women's suffrage. This shortened edition of her autobiography tells the inside story of this struggle: the tireless campaigning, the betrayals by men in power, the relentless roun...

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.

Detective Max Camara is under pressure. A renowned paella chef has been found dead; the town hall are set on demolishing El Cabanyal, the colourful fisherman's quarter on Valencia's sea-front; an abortionist has been kidnapped and with the Pope due to visit the city, the police are summoned to offer protection from crowds of the faithful and the danger of anti-religionists alike. When one of Camara's long t...

Norwegian Wood stands with The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle as one of Haruki Muarakami’s best and most popular works. As usual, it deals with the world around us with a sense of melancholy, charm, loss- all weaved through with his irrepressible wit, managing to make the more whimsical aspects of his work seems normal.

Set in a remote fishing village in Japan, The Sound of Waves is a timeless story of first love. It tells of Shinji, a young fisherman and Hatsue, the beautiful daughter of the wealthiest man in the village. Shinji is entranced at the sight of Hatsue in the twilight on the beach and they fall in love. When the villagers' gossip threatens to divide them, Shinki must risk his life to prove his worth.

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...

From the bestselling author of Italian Neighbours, An Italian Education and A Season with Verona In Italian Ways, bestselling writer Tim Parks brings us a fresh portrait of Italy today through a wry account of his train journeys around the country.

It was a cloudless summer day in the year nineteen hundred. Everyone at Appleyard College for Young Ladies agreed it was just right for a picnic at Hanging Rock. After lunch, a group of three of the girls climbed into the blaze of the afternoon sun, pressing on through the scrub into the shadows of Hanging Rock. Further, higher, till at last they disappeared. They never returned. Whether "Picnic at Hanging ...

In an unnamed country, on the first day of the New Year, people stop dying. There is great celebration and people dance in the streets. They have achieved the great goal of humanity: eternal life. Soon, though, the residents begin to suffer. Undertakers face bankruptcy, the church is forced to reinvent its doctrine, and local 'maphia' smuggle those on the brink of death over the border where they can expire...