Books published by Vintage Publishing

Ever feel like everyone but you has their life under control?Isabella, Mary and Lauren feel like everyone they know has a plan, a good job, and a nice boyfriend.

Born in 1940, one of eight children, Maxine Hong Kingston is the daughter of Chinese immigrants to America. This memoir recalls her first major work "The Woman Warrior" in which she blended Chinese myth with fiction and autobiography to reflect on her mother's past life in China and the experience of immigrants to America.

For seventy years Socrates was a vigorous citizen of Golden Age Athens, philosophising in the squares and public arenas rather than in the courts of kings, before his beloved city turned on him, condemning him to death by poison. Socrates lived in and contributed to a city that nurtured key ingredients of contemporary civilisation.

A boy tends him from a distance, and in this boy he senses the possibility of a different path: of swirls of colour and movement, of his own power and strength - a premonition of what he might create through violence.

As he attempts to negotiate the present, he remembers holidays on the beach with his brothers, his early working life devoted to Communist ideals, courtship, and his relationship with his tough, independent mother - a relationship full of distance and unspoken pain that is central to Arvid's life.

At Niagara Falls, one of the attractions is a red and blue striped hot air balloon offering rides over the rushing water. The balloon is a day-job for Toby O'Hara, a young man whose night-work is to continue to perfect his father's design for a flying machine.

This debut collection from David Malouf, now one of Australia's most highly acclaimed and popular authors, won the Victorian Premier's Literary Award and the Vance Palmer Award and established Malouf's reputation as one of the great writers of contemporary Australian fiction.

Two local prostitutes are found brutally strangled. Serrailler is called back urgently from his sabbatical but by the time he reaches Lafferton another girl has vanished. Then the wife of the Dean at the Cathedral goes missing - has the killer widened their net or is there more than one murderer at large?

Tea-Bag, a young Nigerian girl, has fled a refugee camp in Spain for the promise of a new life in Sweden. Harried by his mother and girlfriend, misunderstood by his publisher and tormented by his stockbroker, Jesper needs a new perspective on life.

Monsieur Grandet is a very rich man whose chief care is his gold. He runs his household with exacting miserly attention and his wife and daughter suffer a Spartan existence. On the evening of his daughter Eugenie's twenty third birthday his foppish nephew Charles suddenly arrives from Paris. Eugenie has never known passion.

Surrounded by quarrelling honeymooners, a freeloading anthropologist and assorted tourists in search of their own personal paradise, and with his father whisked off to hospital after an unfortunate accident, Bernard is beginning to regret ever coming to Haiwaii.

First published in 1965, it tells the story of hapless, scooter-riding young research student Adam Appleby, who is trying to write his thesis but is constantly distracted - not least by the fact that, as Catholics in the 1960s, he and his wife must rely on 'Vatican roulette' to avoid a fourth child.

Polly, Dennis, Angela, Adrian and the rest are bound to lose their spiritual innocence as well as their virginities on the journey between university in the 1950s and the marriages, families, careers and deaths that follow.

When it isn't prison, it's hell. Or at least that's the heartfelt belief of conscripts Jonathan Browne and Mike 'Ginger' Brady. The reckless, impulsive Mike and the more pragmatic Jonathan adopt radically different attitudes to survive this two-year confiscation of their freedom, with dramatic consequences

Set over a long weekend in East Anglia, this is the chilling story of a rivalrous friendship - as told with deceptive casualness by the narrator, Ian. But dangerous tensions quickly emerge, and in the stifling atmosphere of a remote cottage in the hottest days of summer, Ollie and Ian resurrect a bet made twenty years before.

Tells the story of ordinary people who share the ownership of the businesses where they work. This book contains case studies as well as interviews with a range of people, whose inspiring stories of success fly in the face of received wisdom.

From this one simple act, Zeynel becomes a legendary outlaw in the minds of the people, whereas Fisher Selim, passionate about the sea and haunted by a lost love, is cast as an eccentric oddball.

Features poems about love and leaving, of how the rift of departure brings on a kind of haunting - of the people involved and the places where they lived - an emotional trace of departed lives and loves.

I'm looking for someone to give GBP12,000 to but the catch is they have to spend it all on gambling - horses, the dogs, casinos, boxing, golf, footie, that sort of thing - and then write a book about it.

After the Great War, the millions killed on the battlefields were eclipsed by the millions more civilians carried off by disease and starvation when the conflict was over.

Discover the lesser-known but brilliant novel by the hugely under-appreciated Anne Bronte. When Agnes's father loses the family savings, young Agnes determines to make her own living - as a governess.

Manuel Pereira da Ponte Martins, beloved dictator of the state of Teresina in Brazil, develops agoraphobia the day a fortune-teller predicts he will die being torn limb from limb by an angry mob.

Why do women have sex? Is it purely for pleasure or the desire to reproduce? This title intends to investigate the underlying sexual desires of women and identify 237 distinct motivations for sex. It explores the deep-seated psychology and biology of female sexuality.

Lyrical, immediate and heartbreaking, Malouf's fable engraves the epic themes of the Trojan war onto a perfect miniature - themes of war and heroics, hubris and humanity, chance and fate, the bonds between soldiers, fathers and sons, all brilliantly recast for our times.

But then the friend who found her body approaches Detective Erlendur with a tape of a seance that Maria attended before her death and his curiosity is aroused. Driven by a need to find answers, Erlendur begins an unofficial investigation into Maria's death.

Angels of Destruction is the mesmerising story of Norah, a nine-year-old girl who seems to materialise out of thin air when she arrives one bitterly cold night on the doorstep of Margaret Quinn.

With fascinating insight, impeccable research, and captivating writing, controversial psychoanalyst Jeffrey Masson, a new father himself, showcases the extraordinary behaviour of outstanding fathers in the animal kingdom.

Enter the young adult world of Susan Cooper. Then on Midwinter Day, Will wakes up to a different world: silent, covered in snow and ancient forest, a world of another time.

From the author of Half of the Human Race (Channel 4 TV Book Club) comes an intricate and thrilling tale of love and conspiracy in Victorian London. London, 1882.

On 14 September 2003 Baha Mousa, a hotel receptionist, was arrested in Basra by British troops and taken to a military base for questioning. Williams tells the inside story of this crime and its aftermath, exposing the casual brutality, bureaucratic apathy, and instituional failure to hold people criminally responsible for Mousa's death.