Books published by Vintage Publishing

'In August 1981 my bag was packed for my fifth visit to Panama when the news came to me over the telephone of the death of General Omar Torrijos Herrera, my friend and host.

In 1997 it seemed that things in the City could only get better. Barely a year later the City was in tatters. Greed, guile and excess - this definitive insider's account charts an intoxicated decade and cogently reveals just how, and why, the City got it so badly wrong.

For Pip, swimming is a necessity. With a hopeless mother, a drug-addled sister and a best friend more interested in her own love-life than in friendship, swimming provides a welcome escape. But as Olympic stardom beckons, Pip must decide whether her future lies in the water or on land.

In 1933, the delightfully eccentric Robert Byron set out on a journey through the Middle East via Beirut, Jerusalem, Baghdad and Teheran to Oxiana. This title presents a record of his adventures and an account of the architectural treasures of a region.

Smashing through the Arctic Ocean with the crew of a Russian icebreaker, herding reindeer across the tundra with Lapps and shadowing the Trans-Alaskan pipeline with truckers, the author discovers a complex and ambiguous land belonging both to ancient myth and modern controvery.

Faulkner's final novel is a tale of three Mississippi travellers. Ned, Boon and young Lucius travel to Memphis in a stolen car to find love and fortune. Once there, Ned trades in the car for a racehorse, Lucius comes of age, and Boon sets about trying to win the heart of a prostitute named 'Miss Corrie'.

The Running Sky records a lifetime of looking at birds. Begining in summer with clouds of breeding seabirds in Shetland and ending with crepuscular nightjars like giant moths in the heart of England, Tim Dee maps his own observations and encounters over four decades of tracking birds across the globe.

Nothing experienced in human history, before or since, eclipses the terror, tragedy and scale of the Black Death, the disease which killed millions of people in Medieval Europe. By the time it completed its pestilential journey through the British Isles in 1350, the Black Death had left half the population dead.

In sharply evoked settings that range from the wilds of Northern Greece to the beaches of Cape Cod, these intensely dramatic tales chart the metamorphoses of their characters as they fall prey to the gamut of human passions.

Winner of the Prix Goncourt for Biography, 1994, this book explores the life of Georges Perecan, and anguished, comical and endearingly modest man, who worked quietly as an archivist in a medical research library.

From the posing of the very first question in the opening poem, 'Fragment of a Victorian Dialogue', John Fuller's enquiring and elegiac new collection arrives with a sharp sense of mortality, marked by the passing of time.

The memoir behind the documentary One Night in Turin, the inside story of a World Cup that changed our footballing nation forever It was the World Cup semi-finals. On 4th July, 1990, in a stadium in Turin, Gazza cried, England lost and football changed forever.

Aged 30 and editor on a style magazine, her life is a parade of free tickets and gigs, openings and all-nighters, drug and alcohol-induced happiness. But with a little help from Matt - one of life's good guys - she has one last chance to get her life back on track.

Social worker Keith, separated from his wife and their teenage son, is floundering in a world of fraught sexual politics, parental responsibilities and class expectations.

Sara Highbury, forty-eight years old, is the manageress of a boarding house in early 1900s South Africa. She lives her life in the past, haunted by a love affair with a diamond digger called Herbert. One day a young child arrives at Sara's door.

Shortlisted for the Man Booker PrizeAfter a lifetime's struggle with alcohol, critical neglect and depression, in 1840 the nature poet John Clare is incarcerated.

Sixteen-year-old high-school drop-out Bobby moves to Dallas to join his big brother Jim in the jewellery trade. Jim's glamorous girlfriend Lisa is the best saleswoman in the business and from the moment Bobby meets her he falls under her spell. Bobby discovers a new world - glitzy, trashy and hedonistic - where sex and money rule.

Agent Number 67, nicknamed Pygmy for his diminutive size, arrives in the United States from his totalitarian homeland. Along with his fellow operatives, he is planning something big, something truly, truly awful, to bring this big dumb country's fat inhabitants to their knees.

He has lost his wife, his son is in prison and he is about to lose his past. Jake has Alzheimer's. As the disease takes hold of him, the key events of his life shift, and what until recently seemed solid fact melts into surreal imaginings.

'One of the most compassionate of all writers...you feel a kind of agony of helpless tenderness in the writer for all troubled souls' The Times Jude Fawley is a young man who longs to better himself and go to Christminster University.

'Tremendous...utterly absorbing' Independent Proud, passionate Eustacia Vye marries Clym Yeobright in the hope that he will help her escape her cramped rural existence.

Douglas Rushkoff was mugged outside his apartment on Christmas Eve, but when he posted a friendly warning on his community website, the responses castigated him for potentially harming the local real-estate market.

Who was Robin Hood? Romantic legend casts him as hero of the people, living in Sherwood Forest with Friar Tuck, Little John and Maid Marian. This title describes his time as a boy in the greenwood with a half-crazed bandit Robert Hodd - who, following principles of the 'heresy of the Free Spirit', believes himself above God and beyond sin.

Frank and Leon are two men from different times, discovering that sometimes all you learn from your parents' mistakes is how to make different ones of your own.

Offers a collection of short stories that show us exactly what becomes of the broken-hearted. This title reveals the sadness, violence, hurt and terror, and also the redemption and the love.

This is how World Cup Wishes opens, and from here we watch what happens to their wishes and their friendships as life marches on. The four men's bond is deep and solid, but tested by betrayal, death,and distance their alliance comes under pressure.

A collection of George Orwell's correspondence. It provides an eloquent narrative of Orwell's life, from his schooldays to his final illness. It affords a view of his thoughts on matters both personal, political and much in between, from poltergeists, to girls' school songs and the art of playing croquet.

Impatient to see action, his other commitment in life is to his beloved wife, Clara, and when Hal is transferred to Cyprus she and their twin daughters join him. the British are defending the colony against Cypriots - schoolboys and armed guerillas alike - battling for union with Greece. Clara shares Hal's sense of duty and honour;

A title that focuses on the edge of experience in which a person learns to take nothing, but nothing, for granted.

It's the '90s and Dot, Saul and Owen are living together on the fringes of the Hoxton art scene - shoplifting, dole-scrounging, swapping drugs, clothes and beds. Fifteen years later they are drawn back into each other's lives but can they happily relive the past or will they rekindle the passions that nearly destroyed them?