Vintage Deco – serie

'In his blue gardens men and girls came and went like moths among the whisperings and the champagne and the stars'The world and his mistress are at Jay Gatsby's party. But Gatsby stands apart from the crowd, isolated by a secret longing. In between sips of champagne his guests speculate about their mysterious host. Some say he's a bootlegger. Others swear he was a German spy during the war. They lean in and whisper 'he killed a man once'. Just where is Gatsby from and what is the obsession that drives him?VINTAGE DECO: Nine blazing, daring novels to celebrate the 1920s - 100 years on.

'She was a fool and he knew it and because he loved her it had made no difference'Kitty Fane is the beautiful but shallow wife of Walter, a bacteriologist stationed in Hong Kong. Unsatisfied by her marriage, she starts an affair with charming, attractive and exciting Charles Townsend. But when Walter discovers her deception, he exacts a strange and terrible vengeance: Kitty must accompany him to his new posting in remote mainland China, where a cholera epidemic rages...VINTAGE DECO: Nine blazing, daring novels to celebrate the 1920s - 100 years on.

'Now she had taken off her goodness and left it behind her like a heap of rain-sodden clothes, and she only felt joy'Mrs Wilkins and Mrs Arbuthnot, cowed and neglected by their husbands, make a daring plan: they will have a holiday. Leaving a drab and rainy London one April and arriving on the shores of the Mediterranean, they discover a flower-filled paradise of beauty, warmth and leisure. Joined by the beautiful Lady Caroline and domineering Mrs Fisher, also in flight from the burdens of their daily lives, the four women proceed to transform themselves and their prospects.VINTAGE DECO: Nine blazing, daring novels to celebrate the 1920s - 100 years on.

'We can't behave like people in novels, though, can we?'Newland Archer and May Welland are the perfect couple. He is a wealthy young lawyer and she is a lovely and sweet-natured girl. All seems set for success until the arrival of May's unconventional cousin Ellen Olenska, who returns from Europe without her husband and proceeds to shake up polite New York society. To Newland, she is a breath of fresh air and a free spirit, but the bond that develops between them throws his values into confusion and threatens his relationship with May.VINTAGE DECO: Nine blazing, daring novels to celebrate the 1920s - 100 years on.

'We couldn't go on indefinitely being swept off our feet'One of the great literary curios of the twentieth century Save Me the Waltz is the first and only novel by the wife of F. Scott Fitzgerald. During the years when Fitzgerald was working on Tender is the Night, Zelda Fitzgerald was preparing her own story, which strangely parallels the narrative of her husband, throwing a fascinating light on Scott Fitzgerald's life and work. In its own right, it is a vivid and moving story: the confessional of a famous glamour girl of the affluent 1920s and an aspiring ballerina which captures the spirit of an era.VINTAGE DECO: Nine blazing, daring novels to celebrate the 1920s - 100 years on.

'The world wavered and quivered and threatened to burst into flames'In this vivid portrait of one day in a woman's life, Clarissa Dalloway is preoccupied with the last-minute details of a party she is to give that evening. As she readies her house she is flooded with memories and re-examines the choices she has made over the course of her life.VINTAGE DECO: Nine blazing, daring novels to celebrate the 1920s - 100 years on.

'This is a hell of dull talk...How about some of that champagne?'Paris in the twenties: Pernod, parties and expatriate Americans, loose-living on money from home. Jake is wildly in love with Brett Ashley, aristocratic and irresistibly beautiful, with an abandoned, sensuous nature that she cannot change. When the couple drift to Spain to the dazzle of the fiesta and the heady atmosphere of the Bullfight, their affair is strained by new passions, new jealousies, and Jake must finally learn that he will never possess the woman that he loves.VINTAGE DECO: Nine blazing, daring novels to celebrate the 1920s - 100 years on.

'I'm the type which every man imagines he wants, until he gets me; and then he finds he doesn't really, after all'Goodbye to Berlin is the novella that inspired Cabaret, evoking the glamour and sleaze, excess and repression of Berlin society. Isherwood shows the lives of people under threat from the rise of the Nazis: a wealthy Jewish heiress, Natalia Landauer, a gay couple, Peter and Otto, and an English upper-class waif, the divinely decadent Sally Bowles.VINTAGE DECO: Nine blazing, daring novels to celebrate the 1920s - 100 years on.