Books published by Vintage Publishing

The twentieth century has been called 'the American Century'. And who were these men in their private lives?Compulsively readable, packed with unforgettable characters as well as stories, lessons and revelations, American Caears is essential reading for our times.

'Tired of walking in the dream I have returned to the country where I was born half a century ago' - The Higgins family is now dispersed; ' he finds this problematical peace, sharing a bungalow near Brittas in Co Wicklow in an awkward two year tenancy with a school mistress with back back trouble.

They find their way to New York and discover cramped West Village kitchens, rowdy cocktail parties stocked with the sharp-witted and glamorous, taxis that can take you anywhere at all and long talks along the Hudson River as the lights of the Empire State Building blink on above.

Yossarian Slept Here is a daughter's darkly funny, poignant memoir about growing up a Heller - from her colourful family members and her parents' tumultuous marriage, to her father's celebrity friends and the family's eccentric neighbours.

In this delightful sequel to Peeling the Onion, Gunter Grass writes in the voices of his eight children as they record memories of their childhoods, of growing up, of their father, who was always at work on a new book, always at the margins of their lives.

This spirited and quirky penman has always set himself apart form the general grind of Irish writing and its set themes, to run along the line of the exposed nerve-system.No other Irish writer has been so obsessed with the terrain inconnu of lost or thwarted love as this odd-man-out.

SHORTLISTED FOR THE WILLIAM HILL SPORTS BOOK OF THE YEARHow did one man go from Nazi Youth indoctrination to English footballing icon?Bert Trautmann is a football legend. He is famed as the Manchester City goalkeeper who broke his neck in the 1956 FA Cup final and played on.

Through the story of his grandparents and parents, and his brothers' involvement in the violent Mau Mau uprising, Ngugi deftly etches a tumultuous era, capturing the landscape, the people and their culture, and the social and political vicissitudes of life under colonialism and war.

Sebastian and Oskar have been friends since their days studying physics at university, when both were considered future Nobel Prize candidates. But their lives took divergent paths, as did their scientific views.

Living a flawed, bittersweet version of the idyll she dreamed of in her twenties, in a tumbledown urban cottage by the Thames, with a son, a cat and a horse in a livery fifty miles away, she wondered whether middle age was the beginning of the end.

Great-grandson of a crofter and son-in-law of a Duke, Harold Macmillan (1894-1986) was both complex as a person and influential as a politician. Marked by terrible experiences in the trenches in the First World War and by his work as an MP during the Depression, he was a Tory rebel - an outspoken backbencher. This book tells his story.

Drawing on material, from furious royal proclamations to the private letters of pirates and their victims, as well as Islamic accounts, this title provides perspectives of the corsairs and an insight into what it meant to sacrifice all you have for a life so violent, so uncertain and so alien that it sets you apart from the rest of mankind.

The contrast with Britain's European neighbours, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Greece, Russia, is dramatic - all have been convulsed by external warfare, revolution and civil war and experienced fundamental change to their ruling elites or social and economic structures.

As Tubby's life fragments under the weight of his self-obsession, he embarks - via Kierkegaard, strange beds from Rummidge to Tenerife to Beverly Hills, a fit of literary integrity and memories of his 1950s South London boyhood - on a picaresque quest for his lost contentment.

When Vic Wilcox (MD of Pringle's engineering works) meets English lecturer Dr Robyn Penrose, sparks fly as their lifestyles and ideologies collide head on. What, after all, are they supposed to learn from each other? But in time both parties make some surprising discoveries about each other's worlds - and about themselves.

Philip Swallow, Morris Zapp, Persse McGarrigle and the lovely Angelica are the jet-propelled academics who are on the move, in the air and on the make in David Lodge's satirical Small World.

The restrictions of a wartime childhood in in London and subsequent post-war shortages have done little to enrich Timothy's early youth. But everything changes when his glamorous older sister, Kath, invites him to spend the summer at Heidelberg.

Edward has no recollection of who she is or why she has left him a love letter. With Thubron's customary clarity he draws a bleak, amnesiac world in which a young man must face again old griefs and linger 'like a coward, just this side of knowing'. On the other side, the memory of a destructive, obsessive relationship looms.

It is run by the unlikely partnership of balmy Miss Padsoe and young, cockney Miss Baker - divided by class and age, they are determined to dislike each other. Through their tale and the interwoven tribulations of two young lovers, Gibbons's sparkling novel explores the heart of friendship and what unites us.

Duff Cooper's classic biography charts the remarkable progress of Talleyrand; Talleyrand held high office in five successive regimes from France's Ancient Regime, into the Revolution of 1789, Robespierre's Terror, Napoleon's epic wars, and on through restored kings to more revolution.

'Only one thing was clear and certain - that at all costs he was going home, home to his own beloved master...'The Hunter children must go abroad for the summer, so they reluctantly leave their three pets in the care of a friend.

The wider world beckoned from the white ships sailing past Rangitoto Island, but the dream was also here on the Takapuna shoreline of Auckland, where the artist Melior Farbro grew his vegetables and let Cecilia Skyways follow her own form of Zen Buddhism in his garden hut.

Elizabeth of York would have ruled England, but for the fact that she was a woman. Heiress to the royal House of York, she schemed to marry Richard III, the man who had deposed and probably killed her brothers, and it is possible that she then conspired to put Henry Tudor on the throne. This book is a portrait of this beloved queen.

One-time doctor and fugitive from the Monmouth rebellion, Peter Blood escaped from slavery to become the terror of the Caribbean. Winning invaluable treasures, rescuing his crew from almost certain death and saving an English settlement are all in a day's work for fiction's boldest adventurer.

The Sopranos are back: out of school and out in the world, gathered in Gatwick to plan a super-cheap last-minute holiday reunion. Pitch perfect, darkly comic and brimming with life - in all its squalor, rage, tears and laughter - this is an unforgettable story of female friendship. Longlisted for the 2010 Man Booker Prize.

Features feel-good food for cooks and eaters that solves all your everyday cooking quandaries, from what to cook for Sunday lunch or how to give children food they'll eat, to how to rustle up an impromptu dinner party menu or a gluten-free cake.

Edward Lannion, the young master of Hatting Hall, is about to marry Marian Fox. Edward and Marian, the couple at the centre of the story, are led by events to learn the truth about themselves; It is Jackson who must intervene in the story to set the two young lovers onto the right path.

This volume includes virtually all her published shorter prose pieces and a number of prose works not published until after her death. Here are her famous as well as her lesser-known stories, crucial memoirs, literary and travel essays, book reviews and her original draft of 'Brazil'.

They are Twirlymen. Having himself failed through a combination of injury and indolence to become a leg-spinner of renown, Amol Rajan pays homage to that most eccentric of all sporting heroes - the spin bowler.

A New York Times Bestseller. Great white sharks are enigmas. This godforsaken island is home to a handful of shark-obsessed scientists, ready to endanger their lives just to get close. This is a riveting adventure about great white sharks and the power they have over us.