Vintage Pozostałe - książki, ebooki i audiobooki

Sadie Smith – a 34-year-old American undercover agent of ruthless tactics and bold opinions – is sent by her mysterious but powerful employers to a remote corner of France.Her mission: to infiltrate a commune of radical activists influenced by the beliefs of an enigmatic elder, Bruno Lacombe. But just as she is certain she’s the seductress and puppet master of those she surveils, Sadie becomes caught in the crossfire between the past and the future… ...

A beautiful deluxe gift edition of Austen’s satirical swipe at the gothic novel with foiled covers, marbled endpapers, sprayed edges, beautiful paper and finished with a silk ribbon.Catherine Morland is a young girl with a very active imagination. Her naivety and love of sensational novels lead her to approach the fashionable social scene in Bath and her stay at nearby Northanger Abbey with preconceptions that have embarrassing and entertaining consequences....

A beautiful deluxe gift edition of Austen’s unsung masterpiece with foiled covers, marbled endpapers, sprayed edges, beautiful paper and finished with a silk ribbon.Fanny Price's rich relatives offer her a place in their home so that she can be properly brought up. However, Fanny's childhood is a lonely one as she is never allowed to forget her position. Her only ally is her cousin Edmund. When her cousins befriend two glamorous new young people who have arrived in the area, ...

Hear the Wind Sing and Pinball, 1973 are Haruki Murakami’s two first novels. Home from college on his summer break, the narrator spends his time drinking beer and smoking with his friend nicknamed the Rat, listening to the radio, thinking about writing and pursuing a relationship with a girl with nine fingers. Three years later he has moved to Tokyo to work as a translator and live with indistinguishable twin girls. But the Rat has remained behind. Haunted by memories of the ...

Prizewinning Yan Lianke returns with a campus novellike no other following a young Buddhist as she journeys through worldly temptationYahui is a young Buddhist at university. But this is no ordinary university. It is populated by every faith in China: Buddhists, Daoists, Catholics, Protestants and Muslims who jostle alongside one another in the corridors of learning, and whose deities are never far from the classroom.Her days are measured out making elaborate religious paperc...

What if you could rewrite your relationship, again and again, until it worked out?‘A cause for celebration’GEORGE SAUNDERS‘A stunner of a debut’NANA KWAME ADJEI-BRENYAH'Hilarious, heart-rending, grotesque, delightful, utterly brilliant' DAISY JOHNSON‘Exhilaratingly good’ KELLY LINKWhen Myriam and Allison fall in love at a show in a run-down punk house, their relationship begins to unfold through a series of hypotheticals:What if they became mothers by finding a baby in an all...

What we experience during adolescence shapes us for life, but psychologist Lucy Foulkes shows that too often we fear, dismiss or even try to prevent aspects of it that are crucial to our development. Drawing on decades of psychological research, and including profoundly moving interviews, Coming of Age gets beneath the recent myths and age-old stereotypes of adolescence to reveal the reasons why teens behave the way they do.Above all, Foulkes shows that adolescents have an ex...

Julio Cortazar's crazed masterpiece, the forbearer of the Latin Boom in the 1960s'Cortazar's masterpiece. This is the first great novel of Spanish America... A powerful anti-novel but, like deeply understood moments in life itself, rich with many kinds of potential meanings and intimations'Times Literary SupplementDazed by the disappearance of his muse, Argentinian writer Horatio Oliveira wanders the bridges of Paris, the sounds of jazz and the talk of literature, life and ar...

THE NEXT SENSATION FROM THE AUTHOR OFI WHO HAVE NEVER KNOWN MENThere’s a voice in Aline’s head: a voice that wants out.Brash, boisterous and sexually adventurous, this voice seems to be the antithesis of Aline, a prim literature professor for whom each day promises to be as quiet and conventional as the last.That is until, after thirty-five years of imprisonment, her alter ego breaks free.Taking on a life of his own, Orlanda – Aline’s second self – slips into the taut, rugged...

Discover the TikTok sensation from the publisher of The Handmaid’s Tale.Deep underground, thirty-nine women are kept in isolation in a cage. Above ground, a world awaits. Has it been abandoned? Devastated by a virus?Watched over by guards, the women have no memory of how they got there, no notion of time, and only vague recollection of their lives before. But, as the burn of electric light merges day into night and numberless years pass, a young girl - the fortieth prisoner -...

This lost classic, a crystal clear eyewitness account of the Holocaust, has been translated into English for the first time, 70 years after it was first published.'A literary diamond... A holocaust memoir worthy of Primo Levi' The Times'A masterpiece' New Statesman**SELECTED AS ONE OF THE 10 BEST BOOKS OF 2024 BY THE NEW YORK TIMES**For many years this powerful classic of Holocaust literature was forgotten. József Debreczeni was a journalist and poet who arrived in Auschwitz ...

Ellen is tired of being overshadowed at work. Tired of watching less competent, entitled suits take the promotions she’s earned. But when one of them pushes her too far, things take a murderous turn. And it turns out the darker Ellen goes, the shinier her future starts to look.Business can be murder, but it turns out murder can also be good business for Ellen. Torn between capitalising on her newfound success and desperately covering her tracks she soon discovers that others ...

A gripping reconstruction of the daring escape to freedom of hundreds of East Germans in the summer of 1989 and how it led to the fall of the Berlin Wall.In August 1989, a group of Hungarian activists did the unthinkable: they entered the forbidden militarised zone of the Iron Curtain - and held a picnic. On wisps of rumour, thousands of East German 'holiday-makers' had made their way to the border, surveilled by lurking Stasi agents. The stage was set for the greatest border...

Love can change your life. Can it survive marriage and middle age?‘Wonderfully wise, moving and heartfelt’ WILLIAM BOYD‘A tender love story’ DAILY TELEGRAPH*LONGLISTED FOR THE DUBLIN LITERARY AWARD 2025*Lily falls in love with Sam the minute she sets eyes on him. It takes Sam a day or two longer. Curious, because Lily has never quite believed in love, while Sam thought he understood it inside out.Lily, a documentary maker, and Sam, a playwright, are both in relationships that...

‘Astounding. Will change how you think about your body and live your life’ CHRIS VAN TULLEKEN‘A great book from a world expert’ TIM SPECTOR‘The best book on immune health I have ever read’ ALICE ROBERTS** A DAILY MAIL BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR 2025 **Is it true that orange juice wards off colds? Are mental health and inflammation really connected? How do we distinguish bogus claims from useful advice – and what can we actually do to support our immune system and stay healthy?Worl...

The global, open internet is fragmenting.As democracies seek to rein in the power of Big Tech, as Silicon Valley pivots to an America-first agenda, as authoritarian regimes such as China and Russia segregate their populations from the rest of the internet, the most powerful tool ever created for bringing the world together risks being dismantled.Taking us behind the scenes at Meta and his interactions with world leaders, Nick Clegg, Meta’s former President, Global Affairs, se...

**SHORTLISTED FOR THE BOOKER PRIZE 2025**A GUARDIAN, OBSERVER, FINANCIAL TIMES, BBC, TIME, VOGUE, MARIE CLAIRE, ESQUIRE and ROLLING STONE BOOK TO READ IN 2025Two people meet for lunch in a Manhattan restaurant. She’s an accomplished actress in rehearsals for an upcoming premiere. He’s attractive, troubling, young – young enough to be her son. Who is he to her, and who is she to him? In this compulsively readable, brilliantly constructed novel, two competing narratives unspool...

'Our very best writer today' Milan KunderaDitie is a pint-sized hotel waiter with big dreams. Between pocketing stolen change from unsuspecting customers and reminiscing on nights spent at the local brothel, he fantasises about his immense - and imagined - riches.Then, ludicrously, Ditie’s dreams start to become reality. Yet while his chaotic adventures lead him to ever more glamorous hotels, beyond the sparkling dining halls, the forces of twentieth-century European history ...

** WINNER OF THE FT SCHRODERS BUSINESS BOOK OF THE YEAR 2025 ****A SUNDAY TIMES, ECONOMIST AND FINANCIAL TIMES BOOK OF THE YEAR 2025**This is the story of the company that is inventing the future.Nvidia is the world’s first $5-trillion company and the most important corporation on Earth. Led by its charismatic CEO, Jensen Huang, it has gone from video game equipment manufacturer to conquering the global market for AI hardware, reinventing the computer and shaping life as we k...

'Many authors know how to make the hairs on the back of your neck stand up. Jo Nesbo's one of the few who keeps them there' Linwood Barclay'A series of spectacular plot twists leads to a thrilling finale. Highly recommended' GuardianTHE MARK OF THE DEVIL.A young woman is murdered in her flat and a tiny red diamond in the shape of a five-pointed star is found behind her eyelid.THE SIGN OF A KILLER.Detective Harry Hole is assigned to the case, alongside his long-time adversary ...

A Sunday Times Best Book of 2025More and more people are being diagnosed with ADHD and autism.More and more people are being diagnosed with mental disorders.Young people are being medicalised for behaviours that might be explained as entirely normal in other parts of the world.Distress has been commodified over many decades by pharmaceutical companies, the media and the psychiatric establishment.So how can we know when distress is normal and when it is something that needs to...

A revelatory account of the racist conspiracy theory that now pervades global politics – from the prize-winning author of the million-copy bestseller How To Be an AntiracistThroughout the world, authoritarian movements are radically reshaping our politics and our lives. At the heart of them all lies ‘great replacement theory’, which insists that peoples of colour, migrants and minorities are being deliberately empowered to displace white majorities.In Chain of Ideas, Ibram X....

A gripping international thriller from the author of THE STAR OF THE NORTHIt's 2018. A desperate, starving 18-year-old North Korean defector makes it to the US consulate in Hanoi, Vietnam. He knows only one Western name. Jenna Williams. He asks to meet her. Jenna works under an alias at the US embassy in Russia arranging university exchanges - the cover for her role as a senior intelligence officer assigned to the CIA's Moscow station. She 37 years old, a Korean-African-Ame...

‘A bookworm’s delight’ Sara Collins‘Funny, warm and charming’ Marian Keyes‘Like butter on toast: perfect’ Caitlin Moran A love letter to all those who come alive when they pull a new treasure off the shelf, stay up late reading just one more page and pack their suitcases with clothes wedged between books instead of the other way around.From well-worn literary classics to steamy bonkbusters, gripping thrillers, young adult novels and other not-so-guilty pleasures Bookish brims...

An erudite and entertaining history of Moscow, a city whose rich past offers crucial insight into contemporary global politicsMoscow stands at the centre of a nation comprising eleven percent of the globe’s landmass, eleven time zones, and nearly one hundred and fifty million people, some thirteen million of whom live in the capital. In A Kingdom and a Village, acclaimed historian Simon Morrison offers a vividly rendered history of Russia’s heart and soul, tracing its transfo...

A tragicomic portrait of one man's unravelling in an absurd, twisted world, Howl is the propulsive new novel from Booker-Prize winner Howard Jacobson. 'The undisputed British master of black comedies' ObserverIn the aftermath of October 7, Ferdinand Draxler walks the streets of London in despair. Everything has changed – the sights, the sound, the spirit. He too is not who he was. Is he at the crossroads of history or is it just a bend in the cul-de-sac of his own gloomy natu...

Society isn’t working for women - or any of us.But what if the rules were different?Imagine a world in which women have all the power. A world in which they work together to shape their societies and their futures.In reality, women's communities have always existed, and continue to thrive. In this vital and groundbreaking book, Megha Mohan goes in search of their roots, discovering a vibrant global history, brought together here for the first time. She also takes us into toda...

With one impatient phone call, a young Christopher Isherwood is drawn into the film industry.On the other end of the line is temperamental Austrian director Friedrich Bergmann. Christopher’s job is to rescue the script of an idiotic love story set in nineteenth-century Vienna, a film called Prater Violet. Meanwhile, in the real Vienna of 1934, the Austrian right crushes a socialist uprising. Bergmann is distraught; his prophecy of a coming war goes unheeded. As tensions on se...

This is a graphic memoir (like a graphic novel, but true – and also a bit graphic).It’s about the delirium, chaos and strangeness of becoming a parent for the first time.It’s for every one who has ever wondered if it’s ok to cry when the baby cries – and also laugh, snort, lie on the floor naked and drool when the baby drools.This is definitely not a parenting manual, but it might be the only book about parenting you’ll ever need....

Twenty years ago Putin's fiercest critic was gunned down. Anna Politkovskaya was one of the great, heroic investigative journalists of the modern era. Shining a light on Russian state corruption, human rights abuses, and the brutal conflict in Chechnya she was renowned for her unwavering commitment to exposing the harsh realities of life in Russia under Vladimir Putin's regime. That was until her violent murder in 2006.In this collection, published ahead of the twentieth anni...

Victorian Egyptologist Clemmie’s dark talents have torn her family apart. Now she has one chance to atone for the past.Clemmie’s gift for reading hieroglyphs shines at the Egyptian relic parties which have made her father the toast of Victorian society. But at one party, the words she interprets from an unusual amulet strike fear into her heart. The childhood game she used to play about the immortal sisters, Isis and Nephthys, takes on a devastating resonance and it is only b...

After a long and happy life with a loving human family, tabby cat Fuuta has passed into the afterlife. But he is not as far from his owner Michiru as it seems. Sometimes the divide between the lands of the living and the dead can be traversed.Eager to see Michiru again, Fuuta interviews for a position at Café Pont, which sits in the liminal space between the two worlds. The café is known for its unique service: its living customers can request meetings with the person they'd ...

This is the iconic Josephine Baker in her own words.Funny, candid and unconventional: the wildly famous but elusive Josephine Baker tells her own story in this enchanting memoir.Baker took Paris by storm in the 1920s, dazzling audiences with her humour, beauty and effervescence on stage. She became an icon. Later, as one of the most recognisable women in the world, she became a spy for the French resistance and was awarded the Légion d’honneur for military service. After the ...

Memory of the Holocaust, the ultimate atrocity of Europe’s civil wars and the paradigmatic genocide, has shaped the Western political and moral imagination in the postwar era. Fears of its recurrence have been routinely invoked to justify Israel’s policies against Palestinians. But for most people around the world – the ‘darker peoples’, in W. E. B. Du Bois’s words – the main historical memory is of the traumatic experiences of slavery and colonialism, and the central event o...

In 1929, Christopher Isherwood leaves England on a one-way ticket to Berlin. He is determined to become a permanent foreigner, to lose himself – and discover his sexuality – in the boy bars of Berlin. The next ten years will be the most memorable of Isherwood’s life. With incredible candour and wit, Isherwood depicts the decadence of the city’s night scene and his route to sexual liberation. Yet something dark looms on the horizon. As the Nazis rise to power, Isherwood recoun...

She can't read his mind. He can't read hers. But you can read both.The iconic '90s rom-com from the number-one bestselling authors. Dating in the 90s sucks. Men are from Mars, women are from Venus and no one is getting a call after the first date.Meet Jack: twenty-seven-year old commitment-phobe and serious partier. He tried love – it didn’t work out. So why bother, when being single is this much fun? Right?Meet Amy: while she’s stuck in dead-end temp jobs, her friends are se...

An utterly absorbing collection of depraved, delectable and enchanting short stories from the queen of weird girl fiction. 'Absolutely obsessed. Savage, strange and spicy' Lucy Rose, author of LambCan 'no' be a declaration of love? What happens when love is savage, dangerous and all-consuming? In this gorgeous and unsettling collection, women navigate the complexities and cruelties of desire across time and place, from a medieval convent to a Victorian parlour to a 1990s high...

Murder isn’t always ugly.Aimée is drop-dead gorgeous, razor-sharp, and lethally efficient. A killer with a cool head and a taste for chaos, she arrives in the backwater town of Bléville – a festering stew of grudges, corruption, and small-town rot – ready to make a killing.It's a game she’s played before: stir up trouble, pit the locals against one another, then disappear with blood on her hands and money in her pocket. But this time, something breaks and the game turns on he...

Corruption, sleaze and violence were woven into the fabric of twentieth-century Sicilian life, as the Mafia rose to dominance. This is the story of one man who stood in opposition.In 1986, the largest Mafia trial in Italy’s history took place in Sicily. The maxi-processo saw 471 men and 4 women take the stand, accused of kidnapping, extortion, drug trafficking and many thousands of murders. Sitting in the gallery was Leonardo Sciascia, then aged sixty-five. One of the greates...

One couple. One past. A million tomorrows. Adam and Jules have been married for 25 years when they discover a time machine in their shed - can it bring back their romantic spark? Or will it unravel everything? Meet Adam and Jules. Married for nearly twenty-five years and stuck in a rut, their future looks, well, boring. Then Adam stumbles across a pile of old mixtapes he and Jules made for each other when they were young and falling in love. He dusts off his vintage stereo, i...

In the aftermath of a national disaster, a couple look back on their marriage and what it cost them in this groundbreaking novel about capitalism’s effect on the human heart*Guardian best translated fiction of 2025*'Buzzes with electricity… intriguing, maddening, exciting. I’m in’ Observer'Like a normal novel with the boring bits taken out' GuardianMaggie and Kurt are struggling to hold their marriage together after their only daughter has left home. They live in an old farmh...

Weddings aren't just about the happy couple… A funny, touching, hopeful gem about love, marriage and second chancesIt’s the day before her daughter’s wedding and things are not going well for Gail Baines.First thing, she loses her job (or quits, depending who you ask). Then her ex-husband Max turns up at her door looking for somewhere to stay. He doesn’t even have a suit. Instead, he’s brought memories – and a cat looking for a new home.Just as Gail is wondering what’s next, ...

Three powerful heroines – a queen, a sorceress and woman made of flowers – plot revenge against the villain who wronged them. A gorgeously dark debut novel inspired by Celtic Britain’s first fantasy fiction.Three powerful heroines – a queen, a sorceress and woman made of flowers – plot revenge against the villain who wronged them. A gorgeously dark debut novel inspired by Celtic Britain’s original fantasy fiction.Man is cruel but the flowers will take their revenge.Three grea...

A philosophical defence of what makes us human – and a powerful argument for reclaiming ourselves in a digital worldDrawing on decades of research, The Extinction of Experience is a philosophical defence of what makes us human – and a powerful, urgent call to reclaim ourselves in a digital world.Human experiences are disappearing.Social media, gaming and dating apps have usurped in-person interaction; handwriting is no longer prioritised in schools; and emotion is sooner expr...

'There is no living writer whose new books I fall on with greater delight than Laurent Binet. . .Perspectives is a proper treat' Naomi Alderman 'A dazzling romp' GuardianFlorence,1557. As dawn breaks, a painter is discovered lying on the floor of a church, stabbed through the heart. Above him, the paintings he laboured over for more than a decade.At his home, a hidden portrait scandalously depicting Maria de Medici, daughter of the Duke of Florence, as a naked Venus. Who is t...

Detective Konrad tries to solve a woman’s murder and find her lost child from fifty years before. For readers of Ann Cleeves, Ian Rankin and Jo Nesbo.'Arnaldur Indridason is a literary phenomenon - and it's easy to see why' HARLAN COBEN'Indridason writes crime novels that are as chilling as the landscape where they're set' ANN CLEEVES'The undisputed King of the Icelandic Thriller' GuardianA lifetime of secrets. A murder that will expose the truth.A woman is found murdered in ...

Every morning before sunrise, Lim Ah Hock opens the shutters of his small kitchen on Carpenter Street, lights an incense stick and prepares the best laksa soup in all of Kuching. According to Lim family legend, the laksa’s secret ingredient – their ancestral broth – was gifted to them by a deity, who promised the family prosperity as long as the broth is passed down through the generations.But Ah Hock is aging, and the broth’s quality is fading. His only son, Wei Ming, has no...

An enchanting fable about love, storytelling and survival, blending historical fantasy, folk tales and queer romance from the award-winning graphic novelist Isabel Greenberg - now a major film starring Emma Corrin, Charli XCX and Richard E. Grant'A feminist fairy-tale... A wondrously intricate book, and a witty attack on the patriarchy, this is an instant classic.' ObserverAn enchanting fable about love, storytelling and survival, blending historical fantasy, folk tales and q...

A couple try to reconnect by getting an implant that allows them to hear each others every thought, but what happens when thoughts turn dark and things turn deadly... A high-concept thriller for fans of Wrong Place, Wrong Time by Gillian McAllister, and authors JP Delaney and Sarah Pinborough.You can hear his every thought. But he can hear yours too...When Elijah suggests going to OneMind to celebrate their ten-year anniversary, Anna is dubious about getting the implant that ...

History isn't what happened. History is just what historians tell us. From the Titanic to the Amazon, the raft of the Medusa to an ecclesiastical court in medieval France where a bizarre case is about to begin, A History of the World in 10½ Chapters presents a surprising, subversive, fictional history of earth told from several kaleidoscopic perspectives.Ambitious yet accessible, witty and playfully serious, this is no ordinary history, but something stranger: a challenge and...

Shortlisted for the International Booker Prize 2020, an enthralling Orwellian novel about the terrors of state surveillance from one of Japan's greatest writers. 'Beautiful... Haunting' Sunday Times 'A dreamlike story of dystopia' Jia Tolentino Hat, ribbon, bird rose. To the people on the island, a disappeared thing no longer has any meaning. It can be burned in the garden, thrown in the river or handed over to the Memory Police. Soon enough, the island forgets it ever existe...

If old age was thought of as an evening, ending in midnight oblivion, they were well into the eleventh hour.Two quarrelsome old men in Chennai, India, experience private tragedy against the backdrop of national calamity. Revisiting the Bombay neighbourhood of Midnight's Children, a magical musician is unhappily married to a multibillionaire. In an English university college, an undead academic asks a lonely student to avenge his former tormentor.These five dazzling works of f...

What will you find in the city?READERS LOVE THE CITY AND ITS UNCERTAIN WALLS‘Felt like stepping into a dream’‘I really loved getting lost in this book’‘Everyone on this planet should read Murakami at least once in their lifetime’‘Riveting and irresistible’‘It’s magical, it’s wise . . . deeply comforting’A love story, a quest, an ode to books and to the libraries that house them, a breathtaking new novel about the boundaries between worlds and individuals, from the Sunday Time...

 After the death of her father, twelve-year-old Tomoko is sent to live for a year with her uncle in the coastal town of Ashiya. It is a year which will change her life.The 1970s are bringing changes to Japan and her uncle's magnificent colonial mansion opens up a new and unfamiliar world for Tomoko; its sprawling gardens are even home to a pygmy hippo the family keeps as a pet. Tomoko finds her relatives equally exotic and beguiling and her growing friendship with her cousin ...

A beautiful deluxe gift edition of Jane Austen's first novel, with foiled covers, marbled endpapers, sprayed edges, beautiful paper and finished with a silk ribbon.Elinor is as prudent as her sister Marianne is impetuous. Each must learn from the other after they are they are forced by their father's death to leave their home and enter into the contests of polite society. The charms of unsuitable men and the schemes of rival ladies mean that their paths to success are thwart ...

In the course of his famous travels, Gulliver is captured by miniature people who wage war on each other because of religious disagreement over how to crack eggs, is sexually assaulted by giants, visits a floating island, and decides that the society of horses is better than that of his fellow man. Swift's tough, filthy and incisive satire has much to say about the state of the world today and is presented here in its unexpurgated entirety.

These two novellas by the inimitable Tanizaki were among his favourites.The Secret History of the Lord of Musashi recounts the dark sexual obsessions of a sixteenth-century warlord, accidentally initiated in his youth into the morbid rites attendant upon battle. Based on invented documents that overlap with historical reality, the story unfolds a masterly balance of irony and melodrama, elegance and brutality.Arrowroot also touches on the pursuit of legend, but in a very diff...

A book that mesmerises with its sense of adventure and epic sweep, this is creative non-fiction at its best' GUARDIANOver the course of one summer, Kapka Kassabova lives with perhaps the last true pastoralists in Europe.She joins the epic seasonal movement of vast herds of sheep, along with shepherds and dogs, to find pasture in the mountains. As she becomes attuned to the sacrifices inherent in this isolated existence, Kassabova finds herself drawn deeper into the tangled re...

‘Scaffolding is like a perfect French movie of a novel…elegant, original and often very funny’ Kevin Barry, New Statesman Books of the YearTwo couples inhabit the same apartment in Paris, almost fifty years apart…2019. When David takes a job in London, Anna is left alone in their Paris apartment. It’s August and the city is deserted but when Clémentine moves into the building, Anna finds herself drawn inextricably into the younger woman’s world…1972. Florence is finishing her...

Travel far enough and you might just find yourself‘Joyous, a modern-day Jane Austen meets The Durrells’ ELIZABETH DAY‘One of my favourite books OF ALL TIME’ MARIAN KEYES‘A much-needed escape’ NIGELLA LAWSON‘Full of humour, intrigue and colour’ SANTA MONTEFIORE Welcome to glorious Tuga – the world’s most remote island and Charlotte Walker’s new home.Charlotte has swapped her grey life in London for a year in this tropical paradise. Officially, she’s there for conservation but ...

* A Financial Times Book of the Year * A Sunday Times and Mail on Sunday Summer Read *HOLD THE POWER AND GLORY OF ANCIENT ROME IN THE PALM OF YOUR HAND.A wild she-wolf tenderly nurses infant twins Romulus and Remus.Marcus Junius Brutus looks out over chaos and conflict, flaunting the bloodied daggers with which he murdered Julius Caesar. Trumpets blare, crowds roar, gladiators enter the grand Colosseum. Let the games begin.Frescoes fade and books vanish, but the story of Rome...

As Seen on BBC Between the CoversA brief visit to a Swiss sanatorium becomes a life-altering seven-year odyssey.Hans Castorp arrives at a sanatorium in the Swiss Alps to visit his cousin, intending to stay for just three weeks. But when he falls ill, he remains and is drawn in by the introspection and erudition that define life in the mountains. As his stay extends to seven transformative years, Hans falls in love and becomes intoxicated with the ideas he hears at the clinic ...

Facts alone are wanted in life': the children at Mr Gradgrind's school are sternly ordered to stifle their imaginations and pay attention only to cold, hard reality. They live in a smoky, troubled industrial town so entertainment is hard to come by and resentments run deep. The effects of Gradgrind's teaching on his own children, Tom and Louisa, are particularly profound and leave them ill-equipped to deal with the unpredictable desires of the human heart. Luckily for them th...

"Ho! ho! I am the Toad, the motor-car snatcher, the prison-breaker, the Toad who always escapes!" Tired of spring cleaning, Mole ventures above ground into the warm sunshine, and happens upon his friend Ratty. Together they picnic on the sparkling, burbling river, brave the sinister Wild Wood in wintertime to visit the bad-tempered Badger, and take to the open road in a caravan with dear, silly old Toad. But when Toad's attention turns to motor cars, his reckless behaviour go...

The midnight hour approaches. You lie in bed and try to sleep, but there is the howling of the wind outside, the creak of a floorboard, the scream of a cat, the ticking clock...Your heart beats, your skin crawls, and despite yourself you reach for this book and enter a world like a nightmare, haunted by dark fears, guilty secrets and the bloody consequences of rage, revenge and obsession.You cannot tear yourself away, these tales will appall and yet enthrall you, for no mere ...

A favourite childhood classic. What little girl can turn a whole household upside down and breathe new life back into a strange, old manor? The wonderfully contrary, strong-willed, angry, misunderstood Mary Lennox. When Mary Lennox is sent to Misselthwaite Manor to live with her uncle, everybody says she is the most disagreeable-looking child ever seen. It is true, too. Mary is pale, spoilt and quite contrary. But she is also horribly lonely. Then one day she hears about a g...

EDITED BY HANS WALTER GABLER WITH INTRODUCTIONS BY SCARLETT BARON AND JOHN BANVILLEIn this powerfully influential series of short stories, James Joyce captures uneasy souls, shabby lives and innocent minds in the dark streets and homes of his native city. In doing so, he conjures uncertainties and desires, illumines moments of joy and sorrow otherwise lost in private memory, and pierces the many mysteries at the heart of things.

SELECTED AND INTRODUCED BY RUTH RENDELLM. R. James wrote his ghost stories to entertain friends on Christmas Eve, and they went on to both transform and modernise a genre. James harnesses the power of suggestion to move from a recognisable world to one that is indefinably strange, and then unforgettably terrifying. Sheets, pictures, carvings, a dolls house, a lonely beach, a branch tapping on a window - ordinary things take on more than a tinge of dread in the hands of the or...

'"Stand firm'" said Peter, "and wave like mad!"' They were not railway children to begin with. When their Father mysteriously leaves home Roberta (everyone calls her Bobbie), Phyllis and Peter must move to a small cottage in the countryside with Mother. It is a bitter blow to leave their London home, but soon they discover the hills and valleys, the canal and of course, the railway. But with the thrilling rush and rattle and roar of the trains comes danger too. Will the brav...

It is said that Charles Dickens invented Christmas, and within these pages you'll certainly find all the elements of a quintessential traditional Christmas brought to vivid life: snowy rooftops, gleaming shop windows, steaming bowls of punch, plum puddings like speckled cannon balls, sage and onion stuffing, miracles, magic, charity and goodwill.This Vintage Classics edition gathers together not only Dickens' Christmas Books ('A Christmas Carol', 'The Chimes', 'The Battle of ...

With a beautiful cover and chapter-heading illustrations throughout from queen of colouring Johanna Basford.The Jungle Book tells the story of the irrepressible Mowgli, who is rescued as a baby from the jaws of the evil tiger, Shere Khan. Raised by wolves and guided by Baloo the bear, Mowgli and his animal friends embark on a series of hair-raising adventures through the jungles of India.