Books published by Vintage Publishing

From the first landings on the moon to the implications of our cyber worlds, this unusual and intriguing book takes a provocative look at our fascination with space. Rocket Dreams is a fast-moving, fact-filled study of how all the dreams that went in to moonflight in the '60s have found new homes and mutated into new fascination with space.

A companion volume to Being an Actor, Callow's classic text about the experience of acting in the theatre, Shooting the Actor reveals the truth about film acting.

The Mayborn family has cast its shadow over the small town of Loomis for generations. Accompanied by rumours of unnatural family unions, the Mayborns have sunk from their position as powerful landowners to become a white trash clan of pariahs.

In this remarkable book, Jane Miller writes about the experience of being a daughter and a sister, about the intensities of family life and the illuminations that come from the last days of parents.

While the world around him races faster and faster toward the millennium, Steven turns to the simple consolations of nineteenth-century life. But so thoroughly does Steven embrace the life of John Trow that even Steven begins to wonder if he is just playing a part, or whether the unquiet spirit of John Trow is taking him over.

Marina Picasso remembers being six years old and standing awkwardly in front of the gates of Picasso's grand house near Cannes. It was this that caused Marina's brother to commit suicide and when her father died Marina found herself in the ironic position of being one of the major heirs to Picasso's estate.

Alongside the names of James Hadley Chase and Erle Stanley Gardner we must now add that of John Hartley Williams - though Mystery in Spiderville is no run-of-the-mill hard-boiled thriller.

When Roz Rosenzweig, self-described spitfire and loud n' proud New York Jew, meets Edwin Anderson at a party in the 1970s in her friend's Manhatten apartment, she has trouble believing that the earnest Nebraskan is for real. But Roz is quickly attracted to Edwin and is more happy than stunned when their improbable courtship results in marriage.

Orphaned at a cruelly young age, little Hugo Dinsmore is torn from his pampered life and plunged into the nightmare world of brutish country relatives, a world where his refined ways and small stature are a constant source of mockery and torment.

The story of seven friends from Oxford and their adventures in the world of the media in the 1980s, Smashing People is written with a wickedly funny eye for the absurdities of journalism and publishing and a profound wisdom about the ways of the human heart.

When Frederick is invited to fly out to the film world's party of the year on the remote Pacific island of Makulalanana, knowing that Sophie and Matt will be there, he hires 'Miss Melissa', a hooker, to play the part of his gorgeous new girlfriend.

Impassioned, witty and polemical, At Your Own Risk is Derek Jarman's defiant celebration of gay sexuality. In At Your Own Risk, Derek Jarman weaves poetry, prose, photographs and newspaper extracts into a rich tapestry of gay experience in the UK.

In the autumn of 1502 three giants of the Renaissance period - Cesare Borgia, Leonardo da Vinci and Niccolo Machiavelli - set out on one of the most treacherous military campaigns of the period.

You found Wally - hallelujah! Now to find Jesus... God may move in a mysterious way, but his son is a real devil to track down. Seek and ye shall find Jesus in a multitude of unexpected places - crowded rock concerts, bustling supermarkets and packed weddings, to name but a few.

In the intense August heat, three local kids, Matthew, Andy and Josh, spend their time exploring the woods and secret places of Deloume Road and ignoring the ghostly boy Miles Ford, who's almost invisible anyway.

A discourse on the connection between sex, eroticism and love in literature by the Nobel Prize-winning poet and essayist.

The result is an incisive and marvellously well-observed journal by a born writer and naturalist, a voyage of exploration among the people, places and fading wildlife of this most exotic and mysterious of continents.

Yeats is Dead begins with Roddy Doyle and ends with Frank McCourt. In between, thirteen other Irish writers spin an increasingly elaborate tale of murder, mayhem and literary shenanigans in present-day Dublin.

WINNER OF THE NOBEL PRIZE IN LITERATUREThese are beguiling, provocative stories about manipulative men and the women who outwit them, about destructive marriages and curdled friendships, about mothers and sons, about moments which change or haunt a life.

A collection of her own sharp, funny and stimulating essays on our attitudes to food and eating is accompanied and amplified by a fascinating selection of extracts from novels, tracts, songs, self-help books, poetry and biography.

From James's 'inadvised' relationships with a series of favourites and Gentlemen of the Bedchamber to his conflicts with a Parliament which refused to fit its legislation to the Monarch's will, Stewart lucidly untangles the intricacies of James's life.

Doctors and patients alike trust the medical profession and its therapeutic powers; Alarming and optimistic, Taking the Medicine is essential reading for anyone interested in how and why to trust the pills they swallow.

Sweet Water and Bitter is the extraordinary sequel to Britain's abolition of the slave trade in 1807. The last legal British slave ship left Africa that year, but other countries and illegal slavers continued to trade.

The Lotus Quest unveils a stunning vision of Japan's feudal era, as Griffiths visits shrines, ruins, gardens and wild landscapes, and meets priests and archaeologists, philosophers and anthropologists, gardeners and botanists, poets and artists, and even dines on the lotus in a Tokyo cafe.

When he lands in Harare North, our unnamed protagonist carries nothing but a cardboard suitcase full of memories and a longing to be reunited with his childhood friend, Shingi. He ends up in Shingi's Brixton squat where the inhabitants function at various levels of desperation.

Forged in the Dustbowl of the 1930s, in an America crippled by the Great World Recession, this humble man found solace in song, and soon those songs became the voice of the People - men and women who had seen their lives deracinated and destroyed by the vicissitudes of global economic forces beyond their control.

'Listen, you son of a bitch, life isn't all a goddam football game! Life is rejection and pain and loss...'A Fan's Notes - the horrible and hilarious account of a long failure. And so we follow his boozy trail through two failed marriages, many bars and intermittent visits to Avalon Valley - a private home for the mentally ill.

In this remarkable book, Belfast-born Derek Lundy uses the lives of three of his ancestors as a prism through which to examine what memory and the selective plundering of history has made of the truth in Northern Ireland. The lives of Robert Lundy, William Steel Dickson and Billy Lundy encapsulate many themes in the Ulster past.

In just four months in 2009, Sri Lanka's 26 year-old desperate civil war came to a brutal and bloody end on a desolate stretch of beach in the island's north east.

'A poignant celebration of human resilience' Khaled Hosseini, author of The Kite RunnerDear Zari gives voice to the secret lives of women across Afghanistan and allows them to tell their stories in their own words: from the child bride given as payment to end a family feud;