Books published by Vintage Publishing

Recycling, buying locally-sourced food and vintage clothing, checking air miles and carbon footprints - our ever-growing obsessions with saving money and preserving the planet is beginning to affect the way many of us shop, travel and eat every day.

It is 1948 and Aleksandr, a major in the MGB (the forerunner of the KGB) is sent to an isolated psychiatric clinic to investigate one of the patients there. The patient is a man long presumed dead - a now severely incapacitated veteran of the Second World War, who seems unable to remember any of his past.

Hilarious, shocking and hugely entertaining, Reheated Cabbage has all the classic Irvine Welsh ingredientsIn Reheated Cabbage you can enjoy Christmas dinner with Begbie and discover how aliens addicted to Embassy Regal have Midlothian under surveillance.

*As featured in a BBC documentary*Born in Milan, Anna del Conte grew up in Italy in a gentler time. Her story is informed and enlivened by the food and memories of her native land - from lemon granita to wartime risotto with nettles, from vitello tonnato to horsemeat roll, from pastas to porcini.

And what can the story of Aladdin teach us about today's world?In this brilliantly original, provocative and witty book, Geoffrey Miller - acclaimed author of The Mating Mind - takes us on a journey through the surreal wonderlands of marketing, advertising, and media to explore the hidden instincts behind our choices.

The Caton sisters were Southern belles descended from the first settlers in Maryland, and were expected to 'marry a Plantation'. This title features a portrait of love between sisters, an unusual story of money and power and a glimpse of how these extraordinary women influenced the social and international relations of their time.

A collection of writings about prejudice, abuse, and neglect, but also about courage, resilience and changing attitudes towards girls.

After finally achieving what had eluded even his grandfather Genghis Khan - the conquest of China - and inheriting the world's largest navy, Khubilai Khan set his sights on Japan.

The five, irreverant, satirical and imaginative stories contained in Diaboliad caused an uproar upon the book's first publication in 1925. Full of invention, they display Bulgakov's breathtaking stylistic range, moving at dizzying speed from grotesque satire to science fiction, from the plainest realism to the most madcap fantasy.

John Cheever's journals reveal the inner life of this remarkable writer and the contradictions that drove him. He loved his wife and their children, but was acutely lonely; he loved women, but he also loved men; he was a great writer, but one whose acute levels of perception often crippled him as a person.

Mr Ahuja, Delhi's Minister of Urban Development, has too much on his hands: thirteen children and another on the way. This uproarious debut follows father and son as they blunder their way over and under the flyovers of the megalopolis in a moving - and fast-moving - comic portrait of modern family life.

A search for this lost text and its poignant, devastatingly simple message begins... This is a beguiling tale of fables, stories within stories, a young man's desperate search for his father's legacy and a young woman's search for the man she loved.

The Observer's chief foreign correspondent Peter Beaumont, takes us into the guts of modern conflict. Unflinching and utterly gripping, The Secret Life of War is a deeply personal and defining vision of the inner, secret nature of modern war.

When Cameron Doomadgee, a 36-year-old member of the Aboriginal community of Palm Island, was arrested for swearing at a white police officer, he was dead within forty-five minutes of being locked up.

John Stone, a man so wealthy that in the years before World War One he was able to manipulate markets, industries and indeed whole countries and continents, has been found dead in mysterious circumstances.

With his livelihood - indeed his life - in jeopardy, Dickens' publisher sets out to unravel the mystery. The trail leads him from bustling West End theatres, through grimy East End backstreets, into the fug of illicit opium dens, as the crime he hopes to solve ensnares him.

Far away from the city of his birth, in a frontier town on the edge of tribal wilderness, a doctor tries to resolve the seemingly unreconcilable demands of his public career and his personal feelings. He believes his exile her to be temporary, and youthful memories of the distant city torment him with an unbearable sense of loss.

With short introductions and discussion topics for each piece there's something here for everyone - from Shakespeare and Black Beauty to Elizabeth Jennings and Bruce Chatwin. All royalties in full will go to The Reader Organisation, the leading UK charity for reading and health.

However, once there Welin discovers that Harriet has left the biggest surprise until last. If you enjoyed Italian Shoes, the new Henning Mankell novel featuring Fredrik Welin, After the Fire, is available now.

Edited and with an introduction by Robert PhelpsThe hundred short stories collected here include such masterpieces as 'Bella-Vista', 'The Tender Shoot' and 'Le K-pi', Colette's subtle and ruthless rendering of a woman's belated sexual awakening.

When David's mother is killed in the Blitz he moves to a new life in Lancashire with his young aunt Jean. As he watches the adult world around him, a fighter pilot wakes to discover his brutal disfigurement in a world he neither recognises nor remembers.

Marina Warner has gathered together a magical collection of fairy tales by the great women storytellers of the 17th and 18th centuries. These are passionate, extraordinary, and occasionally proto-feminist retellings of classic fairy stories by women who ingeniously used the fairy tale genre to comment on their own times and experiences.

In this book Geert Mak returns to the small Frisian village of his childhood, Jorwert (pop. Jowert has more in common with an English village than with Amsterdam, and it's moving story of neighbours and their efforts to preserve their long established way of life is relevant to the changing face of the countryside everywhere in Europe.

Amid the chaos of civilians fleeing west in a provincial German railway station in 1945 Helene has brought her seven-year-old son. It is a great family novel, a powerful portrayal of an era, and the story of a fascinating woman. Shortlisted for the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize 2010.

In a silent valley in southern France stands an isolated stone farmhouse, the Mas Lunel. His sister, Audrun, alone in her bungalow within sight of the Mas Lunel, dreams of exacting retribution for the unspoken betrayals that have blighted her life.

Look at the Birdie evokes a world in which squabbling couples, high school geniuses, misfit office workers, and small-town Lotharios struggle to adapt to changing technology, moral ambiguity, and unprecedented affluence.

Mr Charles Pooter has just moved into a home in Holloway with his dear wife Carrie. Unfortunately neither his friends Mr Cummings and Mr Gowing, nor the butcher, the greengrocer's boy and the Lord Mayor seem to recognise Mr Pooter's innate gentility, and his disappointing son Lupin has gone and got himself involved with a most unsuitable fiancee.

It is London, 1875. At Lady Cornford's famous soiree (sugared almonds and tittle-tattle) everyone is gossiping about Henry Ellis Margam's latest hit, The Widow's Secret. Only a few people know that one of Lady C's guests, the enigmatic Bella Wallis, is in fact the bestselling novelist.

They fall in love and Noel keeps watching. In their final year, the boys room together and as Julius grows closer to Fall, Noel's enthusiasm for their relationship shades into something darker as he imagines himself as a confidante to Julius, sensing that the time has come for him to enter Fall's life forever.

Glamorous Alice Keach is one of 1930s London's foremost hostesses. Despite humble American origins, she has secured her place in high society through marriage to one of England's wealthiest bachelors. But Alice has a secret. Now, a visit from America looks set to blow apart Alice's glittering pre-eminence forever.