Books published by Random House

Shortlisted for the Orange Prize for Fiction Twenty-three-year-old Zhuang (or Z as she calls herself - Westerners cannot pronounce her name) arrives in London to spend a year learning English. Struggling to find her way in the city, and through the puzzles of tense, verb and adverb; she falls for an older Englishman and begins to realise that the landscape of love is an even trickier terrain...Xiaolu Guo was named as one of Granta's Best of Young British Novelists

A journey along the greatest land route on earth, from the master of travel writing Colin ThubronOn buses, donkey carts, trains, jeeps and camels, Colin Thubron traces the drifts of the first great trade route out of the heart of China into the mountains of Central Asia, across northern Afghanistan and the plains of Iran into Kurdish Turkey. Covering over 7000 miles in eight months Thubron recounts extraordinary adventures - a near-miss with a drunk-driver, incarceration in a Chinese cell during the SARS epidemic, undergoing root canal treatment without anaesthetic in Iran - in inimitable prose. Shadow of the Silk Road is about Asia today; a magnificent account of an ancient world in modern ferment.'It is hard to think of a better travel book written this century' Times

From the author of the Man Booker longlisted The Underground RailroadA pandemic has devastated the planet, sorting humanity into two types: the uninfected and the infected, the living and the living dead. The worst of the plague is now past, and Manhattan is slowly being resettled. Armed forces have successfully reclaimed the island south of Canal Street aka Zone One and teams of civilian volunteers are clearing out the remaining infected stragglers . Mark Spitz is a member of one of these taskforces and over three surreal days he undertakes the mundane mission of malfunctioning zombie removal, the rigours of Post-Apocalyptic Stress Disorder, and attempting to come to terms with a fallen world. But then things start to go terribly wrong

WITH INTROUCTIONS BY EAVAN BOLAND AND MAUD ELLMANThe serene and maternal Mrs Ramsay, the tragic yet absurd Mr Ramsay, together with their children and assorted guests, are holidaying on the Isle of Skye. From the seemingly trivial postponement of a visit to a nearby lighthouse Virginia Woolf constructs a remarkable and moving examination of the complex tensions and allegiances of family life. One of the great literary achievements of the twentieth century, To the Lighthouse is often cited as Virginia Woolf's most popular novel.The Vintage Classics Virginia Woolf series has been curated by Jeanette Winterson, and the texts used are based on the original Hogarth Press editions published by Leonard and Virginia Woolf.

VIVIDLY EVOKING IRELAND AND LIVERPOOL, RAINBOW'S END IS A WARM AND ENGROSSING SAGA FROM A RISING STAR. Tracing the stories of two quite diffrent girls: Ellen Docherty, in Liverpool, bringing up her younger sister and brother single-handedly, and Maggie McVeigh, in the Dublin tenements, finding a better life working for the Nolan family, and falling in love with Liam, the eldest son, RAINBOW'S END follows two girls on their struggle for happiness. But the First World War changes everything -and unearths a long-buried link between the families.

The year is 1925, and in Liverpool, Rose Ryder worships her father, a tram-driver. She nurses a secret dream of driving trams too, even though it's not considered a job for women. Meanwhile, in Dublin, Colm O'Neill is happily settled - until his father gets a job working on the Liverptool-Birkenhead tunnel, and takes Colm across the water with him. When tragedy strikes and her beloved father is killed, Rose and her mother scrape a living by turning their home into a boarding house. And it is their boarding house which Colm and his father come to when they arrive in Liverpool...