Vintage Classics – serie

A man is cast by an unfamiliar God into a vast, incomprehensible Hell - a labyrinth library of books containing the stories of every life ever lived.His only way out is to find the single book that tells his own story. But along the seemingly infinite shelves lies every possible combination of letters. Trapped within this maze of meaninglessness, the absurdity of existence becomes impossible to ignore.A life-changing, existential novella, Steven L. Peck's modern classic explores a subversive vision of eternity, taking the reader on a journey through the afterlife of a world where everything everyone believed in turns out to be wrong.Readers are obsessed with A Short Stay in Hell'WHAT THE HELL''My mind is absolutely blown... and I'm absolutely horrified''One of the most haunting, thought-provoking books I've ever read'

This is the story of a quiet man, destined to be a farmer but who becomes an academic. It is book in which nothing and everything happens and is possibly the greatest novel you've never read.'It's simply a novel about a guy who goes to college and becomes a teacher. But its one of the most fascinating things that you've ever come across' Tom Hanks, TimeWilliam Stoner enters the University of Missouri at nineteen to study agriculture. A seminar on English literature changes his life, and he never returns to work on his father's farm. Stoner becomes a teacher. He marries the wrong woman. His life is quiet, and after his death, his colleagues remember him rarely.Yet with truthfulness, compassion and intense power, this novel uncovers a story of universal value - of the conflicts, defeats and victories of the human race that pass unrecorded by history - and in doing so reclaims the significance of an individual life.'A beautiful, sad, utterly convincing account of an entire life' Ian McEwan'A brilliant, beautiful, inexorably sad, wise and elegant novel' Nick HornbyINTRODUCED BY JOHN McGAHERN

Aldous Huxley’s 1932 dystopian classic Brave New World predicts – with eerie clarity – a terrifying vision of the future, which feels ever closer to our own reality.'The best science fiction book ever, definitely the most prescient…’ Yuval Noah Harari, author of Sapiens and Homo Deus ‘A masterpiece of speculation... As vibrant, fresh, and somehow shocking as it was when I first read it’ Margaret Atwood Far in the future, the World Controllers have created the ideal society. Through clever use of genetic engineering, brainwashing and recreational sex and drugs all its members are happy consumers. Bernard Marx seems alone harbouring an ill-defined longing to break free. A visit to one of the few remaining Savage Reservations where the old, imperfect life still continues, may be the cure for his distress...Huxley's ingenious fantasy of the future sheds a blazing light on the present and is considered to be his most enduring masterpiece. WITH INTRODUCTIONS BY MARGARET ATWOOD AND DAVID BRADSHAWA grave warning... Provoking, stimulating, shocking and dazzling' Observer

A charming extraordinary early 20th century novel about family relationships.When the great statesman Lord Slane dies, everyone assumes his dutiful wife will slowly fade away, the paying guest of each of her six children. But Lady Slane surprises everyone by escaping to a rented house in Hampstead where she revels in her new freedom, revives youthful ambitions and gathers some very unsuitable companions. Irreverent, entertaining and insightful, this is a tale of the unexpected joys of growing older.WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY JOANNA LUMLEY

Charles Arrowby has determined to spend the rest of his days in hermit-like contemplation.He buys a mysteriously damp house on the coast, far from the heady world of the theatre where he made his name, and there he swims in the sea, eats revolting meals and writes his memoirs. But then he meets his childhood sweetheart Hartley, and memories of her lovely, younger self crowd in – along with more recent lovers and friends – to disrupt his self-imposed exile. So instead of ‘learning to be good’, Charles proceeds to demonstrate how very bad he can be.‘It isn’t all brainy fantasising in Murdochland; there’s wild swimming, appalling sandwiches, death, madness and sex’ Guardian‘Dazzlingly entertaining and inventive’ The TimesWITH AN INTRODUCTION BY DAISY JOHNSON**WINNER OF THE BOOKER PRIZE**

The classic political study of how elite forces shape mass media.Edward S Herman and Noam Chomsky investigate how an underlying elite consensus structures mainstream media. Here they skilfully dissect the way in which the marketplace and the economics of publishing significantly shape the news.This book reveals how issues are framed and topics chosen, and the double standards underlying accounts of free elections, a free press, and governmental repression between Nicaragua and El Salvador; between the Russian invasion of Afghanistan and the American invasion of Vietnam; between the genocide in Cambodia under a pro-American government and genocide under Pol Pot.What emerges from this ground-breaking work is an account of just how propagandistic our mass media can be, and how we can learn to read them and see their function in a radically new way.

This is a volcanic journey into the soul of a winged red monster named Geryon. It is queer coming-of-age love story, a Greek myth retold, and a modern classic.Tormented as a boy by his brother, Geryon escapes to a parallel world of photography. He falls deeply in love with Herakles, a golden young man, who deserts him at the peak of infatuation. So Geryon retreats ever further into the world created by his camera, fascinated by his wings, his redness and the fantastic accident of who he is. But all is suddenly and irrevocably shattered by Herakles’ return.Autobiography of Red is a deceptively simple narrative filled with currents of meaning, emotion, and the truth about what it’s like to be red. An extraordinary, modern epic poem - moving, disturbing and delightful.'Totally engrossing' Ocean Vuong'This book is amazing - I haven't discovered any writing in years that's so marvellously disturbing' Alice Munro‘A profound love story...sensuous and funny, poignant, musical and tender’ Ruth Padel, New York Times Book Review

A masterwork by the incomparable, genre-defying, wondrous Italo Calvino. You go into a bookshop and buy If on a Winter's Night a Traveller by Italo Calvino. You like it. But there is a printer's error in your copy. You take it back to the shop and get a replacement. But the replacement seems to be a totally different story. You try to track down the original book you were reading but end up with a different narrative again. This remarkable novel leads you through many different books including a detective adventure, a romance, a satire, an erotic story, a diary and a quest. But the real hero of them all is you, the reader.'Breathtakingly inventive' David Mitchell'A writer of dizzying ambition and variety, each of his stories is a fresh adventure into the possibilities of fiction' Guardian

'Extravagantly beautiful... Enormously, achingly alive... A howl of love and rage, playful and funny as well as hard and bitter' New York TimesAs young girls, Nel and Sula shared each other's secrets and dreams in the poor black mid-West of their childhood. Then Sula ran away to live her dreams and Nel got married. Ten years later Sula returns and no one, least of all Nel, trusts her. Sula is a story of fear - the fear that traps us, justifying itself through perpetual myth and legend. Cast as a witch by the people who resent her strength, Sula is a woman of uncompromising power, a wayward force who challenges the smallness of a world that tries to hold her down.'What a force her thoughts have been and how grateful we must be that they were offered to us in this extremely challenging age' Alice Walker, Guardian**AS FEATURED IN OPRAH’S BOOK CLUB**BY THE NOBEL PRIZE-WINNING AUTHOR OF BELOVEDWinner of the PEN/Saul Bellow award for achievement in American fiction

Murakami's surreal, mind-bending masterpiece: a sci-fi pastiche and a Utopian fantasy novel ingeniously woven together.A narrative particle accelerator that zooms between Wild Turkey Whiskey and Bob Dylan. Unicorn skulls and voracious librarians. John Coltrane and Lord Jim. Science fiction, detective story, post-modern manifesto. All this rolled into one rip-roaring novel, End of the World and Hard-boiled Wonderland is the tour de force that expanded Haruki Murakami’s international following.Tracking one man's descent into the Kafkaesque underworld of contemporary Tokyo, Murakami unites East and West, tragedy and farce, compassion and detachment, slang and philosophy.‘A remarkable writer...he captures the common ache of contemporary heart and head’ Jay McInerney‘His fantasies, with their easy reference to western pulp fiction and music, retain a beauty of the mind’ GuardianWITH AN INTRODUCTION BY THE AUTHOR

The death and burial of Addie Bundren is told by members of her family, as they cart the coffin to Jefferson, Mississippi, to bury her among her people. And as the intense desires, fears and rivalries of the family are revealed in the vernacular of the Deep South, Faulkner presents a portrait of extraordinary power - as epic as the Old Testament, as American as Huckleberry Finn.

Toru Okada's cat has disappeared.His wife is growing more distant every day.Then there are the increasingly explicit telephone calls he has recently been receiving.As this compelling story unfolds, the tidy suburban realities of Okada's vague and blameless life, spent cooking, reading, listening to jazz and opera and drinking beer at the kitchen table, are turned inside out, and he embarks on a bizarre journey, guided (however obscurely) by a succession of characters, each with a tale to tell.WITH A NEW INTRODUCTION BY THE AUTHOR 'Visionary...a bold and generous book' New York Times'Murakami weaves textured layers of reality into a shot-silk garment of deceptive beauty' Independent on Sunday'Deeply philosophical and teasingly perplexing, it is impossible to put down' Daily Telegraph'Mesmerising, surreal, this really is the work of a true original' The Times

Discover this profound account of Huxley's famous experimentation with mescalin that has influenced writers and artists for decades.‘Concise, evocative, wise and, above all, humane, The Doors of Perception is a masterpiece’ Sunday TimesIn 1953, in the presence of an investigator, Aldous Huxley took four-tenths of a gram of mescalin, sat down and waited to see what would happen. When he opened his eyes everything, from the flowers in a vase to the creases in his trousers, was transformed. Huxley described his experience with breathtaking immediacy in The Doors of Perception. In its sequel Heaven and Hell, he goes on to explore the history and nature of mysticism. Still bristling with a sense of excitement and discovery, these illuminating and influential writings remain the most fascinating account of the visionary experience ever written.WITH A FOREWORD J.G. BALLARD

The brilliant graphic memoir of growing up in Iran during and after the Islamic revolution.Marjane Satrapi lived through the Iranian Revolution as a little girl. This is her classic memoir-in-comic-strips, the story of a child entangled in the history and politics of her country. It paints an unforgettable portrait of growing up in revolutionary and war-torn Iran, in a family that was both outrageous and ordinary, beset by tragedy and yet buffered by love. Funny, wise, ultimately heartbreaking and told with unforgettable pictures.‘A revelation...you will remember it for a very long time’ Mark Haddon‘The magic of Marjane Satrapi’s work is that it can condense a whole country’s tragedy into one poignant, funny scene after another’ Independent on SundayTHE COMPLETE PERSEPOLIS VOLUMES I & II: Includes The Story of a Childhood and The Story of a ReturnTRANSLATED BY ANJALI SINGH**ONE OF THE GUARDIAN'S 100 BEST BOOKS OF THE 21st CENTURY**

Solzhenitsyn spent eleven years in labour camps and in exile.This book is his masterwork, based on his own experiences as well as the testimony of some 200 survivors. A vast canvas of camps, prisons, transit centres and secret police, of informers and spies and interrogators but also of everyday heroism, it chronicles the story of those who dared to oppose Stalin, and for whom the key to survival lay not in hope but in despair. A thoroughly researched document and a feat of literary and imaginative power, this edition of The Gulag Archipelago was abridged into one volume at the request of the author.'Helped to bring down an empire. Its importance can hardly be exaggerated' Doris Lessing, Sunday Telegraph'Solzhenitsyn’s masterpiece...helped create the world we live in today' Anne ApplebaumWITH AN AFTERWORD BY JORDAN B. PETERSONTHE OFFICIALLY APPROVED ABRIDGEMENT OF THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO VOLUMES I, II & III

In Moscow, truth needs a little help from the devil. In Bulgakov’s allegorical masterpiece of Stalin’s regime, the devil is making a personal appearance in Moscow. He is accompanied by a strange retinue of demons, including a naked girl and a huge black cat. As they move through the city, order gives way to chaos: the asylums fill, officials lose control and the forces of law are left bewildered. At the centre of the novel are the Master, a writer devoted to truth, and Margarita, the woman who loves him. Against the absurdity, terror and moral compromise around them, their loyalty becomes one of the few powers able to answer the devil’s onslaught. Behind the demonic spectacle is a novel about what survives when public life is ruled by fear. Bulgakov writes with dazzling comic freedom, but his deepest concern is serious: the courage to love, to imagine and to tell the truth. TRANSLATED BY MICHAEL GLENNY, INTRODUCED BY WILL SELF ‘Stunning, superb...Bulgakov is one of the greatest Russian writers, perhaps the greatest’ Independent ‘A masterpiece – a classic of twentieth-century fiction’ New York Times

**NOW A MAJOR FILM**BY THE AUTHOR OF STONERWill Andrews is no academic. He longs for wildness, freedom, hope and vigour. He leaves Harvard and sets out for the West to discover a new way of living.In a small town called Butcher's Crossing he meets a hunter with a story of a lost herd of buffalo in a remote Colorado valley, just waiting to be taken by a team of men brave and crazy enough to find them. Will makes up his mind to be one of those men, but the journey, the killing, harsh conditions and sheer hard luck will test his mind and body to their limits.

'The novel that I love the most is The Quiet American' Ian McEwan, Sunday Times bestselling author of LessonsInto the intrigue and violence of 1950s Saigon comes CIA agent Alden Pyle, a young idealistic American sent to promote democracy through a mysterious 'Third Force'.As Pyle's naive optimism starts to cause bloodshed, his friend Fowler, a cynical foreign correspondent, finds it hard to stand aside and watch. But even as Fowler intervenes he wonders why: for the greater good, or something altogether more complicated?WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY ZADIE SMITH**One of the BBC's 100 Novels That Shaped Our World**

The book that won Ernest Hemingway the Nobel Prize for Literature'It's silly not to hope. It's a sin he thought'Set in the Gulf Stream off the coast of Havana, Hemingway's magnificent fable is the tale of an old man, a young boy and a giant fish. This story of heroic endeavour won Hemingway the Nobel Prize for Literature. It stands as a unique and timeless vision of the beauty and grief of man's challenge to the elements.'The best story Hemingway has written. No page of this beautiful master-work could have been done better or differently' Sunday Times'The writing is as taut, and at the same time as lithe and cunningly played out, as the line on which the old man plays the fish' Guardian

Noboru spies on his widowed mother, Fusako Kuroda, as she begins a relationship with Ryuji Tsukazaki, a merchant sailor he idolises as a hero.Set in post-war Yokohama, Japan, in the late 1950s, The Sailor Who Fell from Grace from the Sea follows thirteen-year-old Noboru and a secret gang of schoolboys who have sworn to reject the adult world as sentimental and corrupt. Under the cold authority of their leader, they train themselves in what they call ‘objectivity,’ suppressing emotion in favour of ruthless judgement.When Ryuji abandons the sea to pursue a settled life with Fusako, Noboru and the boys see this not as love, but as weakness. The sailor they once revered becomes, in their eyes, a traitor to heroic masculinity. Their disillusionment curdles into a calculated plan to restore what they believe is honour.As twentieth-century Japanese historical fiction grounded in the social aftermath of the Second World War, The Sailor Who Fell from Grace from the Sea builds towards an act of chilling violence, exposing adolescent absolutism, misogyny, and the fragile myth of male heroism.‘Mishima’s greatest novel, and one of the greatest of the past century’ The Times

Geoffrey Braithwaite is a retired doctor haunted by an obsession with the French literary genius, Gustave Flaubert.As Geoffrey investigates the mystery of the stuffed parrot Flaubert borrowed from the Museum of Rouen to help research one of his novels, we learn an enormous amount about the writer’s work, family, lovers, thought processes, health and obsessions. But we also gradually come to learn some important and shocking details about Geoffrey himself.A compelling weave of fiction and imaginatively ordered fact, Flaubert's Parrot is by turns moving and entertaining, witty and scholarly, and a tour-de-force of seductive originality.‘Unputdownable... A mesmeric original’ Philip Larkin‘Delightful and enriching...a book to revel in!’ Joseph Heller‘A wry and graceful book... Unfailingly sharp and often very funny’ Sunday TimesWITH A NEW INTRODUCTION BY THE AUTHOR TO MARK THE 40TH ANNIVERSARY OF FIRST PUBLICATION

For over a hundred years the Pacific island of Pala has been the scene of a unique experiment in civilisation. Its inhabitants live in a society where western science has been brought together with Eastern philosophy to create a paradise on earth. When cynical journalist, Will Farnaby, arrives to research potential oil reserves on Pala, he quickly falls in love with the way of life on the island. Soon the need to complete his mission becomes an intolerable burden and he must make a difficult choice.In counterpoint to Brave New World and Ape and Essence, in Island Huxley gives us his vision of utopia.WITH A BIOGRAPHICAL INTRODUCTION BY DAVID BRADSHAW

‘Black satire of the highest polish’ GuardianWhilst awaiting trial for war crimes in an Israeli prison, Howard W. Campbell Jr sets down his memoirs on an old German typewriter. He has used such a typewriter before, when he worked as a Nazi propagandist under Goebbels. Though that was before he agreed to become a spy for US military. Is Howard guilty? Can a black or white verdict ever be reached in a world that’s a gazillion shades of grey?‘After Vonnegut, everything else seems a bit tame’ Spectator

SISTERHOOD. SECRETS. SURVIVAL.Discover the haunting, heart-breaking post-apocalyptic TikTok sensation, now available in a beautiful hardback gift edition.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 - sits alone an outcast in the corner.Soon she will show herself to be the key to the others' escape and survival in the strange world that awaits them above ground. The woman who will never know men.WITH A NEW INTRODUCTION BY SOPHIE MACKINTOSH, BOOKER PRIZE-LONGLISTED AUTHOR OF THE WATER CUREDiscover the reader obsession.**Orlanda, the next sensation from Jacquline Harpman, is available now**

WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY MONICA ALIThe love affair between Maurice Bendrix and Sarah, flourishing in the turbulent times of the London Blitz, ends when she suddenly and without explanation breaks it off. After a chance meeting rekindles his love and jealousy two years later, Bendrix hires a private detective to follow Sarah, and slowly his love for her turns into an obsession.

Kafka Tamura runs away from home at fifteen, under the shadow of his father's dark prophesy.The aging Nakata, tracker of lost cats, who never recovered from a bizarre childhood affliction, finds his pleasantly simplified life suddenly turned upside down.As their parallel odysseys unravel, cats converse with people; fish tumble from the sky; a ghost-like pimp deploys a Hegel-spouting girl of the night; a forest harbours soldiers apparently un-aged since World War II. There is a savage killing, but the identity of both victim and killer is a riddle - one of many which combine to create an elegant and dreamlike masterpiece.WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY THE AUTHOR'Wonderful... Magical and outlandish' Daily Mail'Hypnotic, spellbinding' The Times'Cool, fluent and addictive' Daily Telegraph

The gripping adventure that invented the mystery of Shangri-La.Flying out of India, a light aircraft is hi-jacked 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 escape? And do they even want to? From the author of Goodbye Mr Chips, this is the epic adventure story of literature's most entrancing utopia and one of our most enduring literary mysteries.

The inspiration for One Battle After AnotherThomas Pynchon's wretchedly funny dystopian thriller, sending up the end days of the American dreamVineland, a zone of blessed anarchy in northern California, is the last refuge of hippiedom, a culture devastated by the sobriety epidemic, Reaganomics, and the Tube. Here, in an Orwellian 1984, Zoyd Wheeler and his daughter Prairie search for Prairie's long-lost mother, a Sixties radical who ran off with a narc.Full of quasi-allegorical characters, elaborate unresolved subplots, corny songs, movie spoofs, and illicit sex, Vineland is vintage Pynchon.'That rarest of birds: a major political novel about what America has been doing to itself, to its children, all these many years' Salman Rushdie

Explosive, subversive, wild and funny, 50 years on the novel's strength is undiminished. Reading Joseph Heller's classic satire is nothing less than a rite of passage.Set in the closing months of World War II, this is the story of a bombardier named Yossarian who is frantic and furious because thousands of people he has never met are trying to kill him. His real problem is not the enemy - it is his own army which keeps increasing the number of missions the men must fly to complete their service. If Yossarian makes any attempts to excuse himself from the perilous missions then he is caught in Catch-22: if he flies he is crazy, and doesn't have to; but if he doesn't want to he must be sane and has to. That's some catch...