Books published by Vintage Publishing

Thomas Macaulay always inspired both admiration and hostility. He introduced English education to India, creating a class of westernised Indians often reviled as 'Macaulay's children', but today many former 'Untouchables' literally worship him as their liberator from caste tyranny. This title tells his story.

With the attentive care of an archaeologist he uncovers and examines fragments - from a personal history or the historic past - and rebuilds the narrative: a fossil in Hitler's stadium, a wedding photograph, marks on the wall where an eighteenth-century priest was shot.

John Fuller's brilliantly inventive fourth novel is a modern romance which playfully explores the world's need for illusion. On the last train leaving the Duchy of Gomsza, before it is seized by civil turmoil, three illusionists - an artist, journalist and a magician reveal their past failures in love and reasons for leaving.

WINNER OF THE WHITBREAD PRIZE AND SHORTLISTED FOR THE BOOKER PRIZE. John Fuller's first novel opens with the arrival of church agent Vane on a remote Welsh island where he is to investigate the disappearance of pilgrims visiting its sacred well. While Vane looks for clues and corpses the local Abbot seaches for the location of the soul.

At seventy, Henri Matisse is a trim, clean old gentleman with a passion for naked women. If there were no Matisse there would be no art as such. MATISSE'S WAR is a minutely researched yet fictional account of Matisse's life during the years 1939-1945.

Weaving together memoir and historical anecdote, he traces his relationship with cars through a lifetime of biography. Learning to drive was no easy matter for Michael: the lessons required military precision when practising how to get in and out of his car correctly.

His first major book of fiction: lyrical, personal, mythical, hilarious and mesmeric stories that shed new light on both the US and the writer through whose eyes we access this compelling and resonant land.

Perfectly preserving the tone and mood of the novel whilst condensing it into two acts, David Malouf, with the gift for language already evident from his novels and poetry, presents afresh the timeless story of Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre, one of the most enduring literary classics of all time.

over the high seas, Malta, the desert battles and in the struggle with Japan. This is the second volume in the unique Freedom's Battle trilogy, which provides intensely vivid accounts of war at sea, in the air and on land.

In a wonderful world shaped by beauty and poetry, ancient traditions and popular intrigue, a young woman at the centre of the eleventh-century Japanese imperial court observes the exotic world around her.

In the spring of 1903 a ship explodes as it docks on the island, drowning many of the passengers and crew in the icy waters of Stolnsay harbour. Young, strawberry-blond-haired Billie Paxton is among the only survivors. Clumsy, illiterate and suddenly alone, Billie will not say why, before the explosion, she jumped from ship to shore.

In the summer of 2000, Rupert Murdoch is weeks away from realising his life's dream. With time running out, Murdoch must beat Gates to the Premier League television rights, then float the world's biggest satellite platform on Wall Street before the market falls over.

A decent, harried young banker travels north to Scotland and his mysteriously troubled sister. Brilliantly structured and tense as a thriller, CRIMNINALS shows how the best intentions can have the worst results - and how families pull together, form themselves anew, and occasionally, tear apart.

Jeremiah Henderson and his woman, Willet Mercer, set their sights on New York City - but making good is easier said than done. Left with no choice but to give in to the pimp who'd like to try Willet on for size before selling her to his clientele, Jeremiah and Willet try to focus on the future.

A collection of stories that features ordinary people - men, for the most part - running from their loves, looking for new hope in a 'bushel of crabs', a cattle ranch, a one-night stand or a whisky glass. It also includes moments of redemption, moments when they stop running and find love, or just a glimmer of self-knowledge.

Acclaimed football writer Matt Dickinson traces the journey of this Essex boy who became the patron saint of English football, peeling away the layers of legend and looking at Moore's life from all sides - in triumph, in failure, in full.

The result is an unearthed treasure trove - poems that find new and thrilling ways of celebrating the natural world and the human condition, poems that dazzle with their visual imagination, poems that show the huge range and depth of the poet's art.

The House That Groaned is a graphic novel that explores bodies and the spaces they inhabit. It is set in an old Victorian tenement housing six lonely individuals who could only have stepped out of the pages of a comic book.

An English geologist working on a Mediterranean island becomes embroiled in a nightmare web of deceit, corruption, lust and tragedy in Tim Parks' mesmeric story of a man whose life will be shattered like the fatal fragment of stone that obsesses him.

They recited poetry, took part in ridiculous antics, indulged in high-minded discussions - with such displays of brilliance that the party became known as the Immortal Dinner. Penelope Hughes-Hallett celebrates this famous evening, setting it against a backdrop of change, reflected in the preoccupations of the illustrious diners.

WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY SIR RANULPH FIENNESThe Last Expedition is Captain Scott's gripping account of his expedition to the South Pole in 1910-12.

The shocking, heart-breaking - and often very funny - true story behind Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit. In 1985 Jeanette Winterson's first novel, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, was published. It was a story of survival. This book is that story's the silent twin.

'The godfather of Scandinavian crime fiction' Jo NesboChief Inspector Jensen is a policeman in an unnamed European country where the government has criminalised being drunk, even in private at home, and where the city centres have been demolished to devote more space to gleaming new roads.

This is a book about universes. It tells a story that revolves around a single extraordinary fact: that Albert Einstein's famous theory of relativity describes a series of entire universes.

In the same way the Romantic writers taught us to look at hills, lakes and rivers, poets Paul Farley and Michael Symmons Roberts write about mobile masts and gravel pits, business parks and landfill sites, taking the reader on a journey to marvel at these richly mysterious, forgotten regions in our midst.

Spirited and courageous, she is determined to fight for 'the greatest cause the world has ever known'. Will Maitland, the rising star of county cricket, is a man of traditional opinions. Buffeted and spun by choice and chance, Connie and Will struggle against the aftershocks of war and the changes it wreaks.

When the Melmottes arrive in London everyone agrees their manners are wanting, their taste is execrable and their lineage and background decidedly shadowy. But their money is far from revolting, and city society quickly makes allowances for the mysterious financier and his family.

Mr Harding is a good man, the warden to an alms house which provides a peaceful home to twelve old men. The young and zealous John Bold is also a good man, but he believes he sees in Harding's comfortable existence an injustice which must be exposed. The law, the church and the self-righteous press all have their say in the scandal that ensues.

As national dramas played out on a small stage thousands of miles from home, Steinberg takes up a remarkable story of a horrific and heart-wrenching war, and of the quest to be human in a world losing its humanity.

The perfect gift for Valentine's DayTRANSLATED BY TOM PAYNE AND INTRODUCED BY HEPHZIBAH ANDERSONThe Art of Love may have been written in the days of gladiators and emperors, but Ovid remains the smartest teacher on the subject of love in all of history, and his advice is enduringly useful and entertaining.