Books published by Vintage Publishing

Design for a Life explains the science of behavioural development - the biological and psychological processes that build a unique adult from a fertilised egg. It explores the developmental cooking processes that give rise to individuals, and considers in turn how these processes have evolved.

Collects poems that engage in a search for meaning and order in the everyday and in the extraordinary - a locust officer tracking swarms in an African desert, a hobbyist building a replica of the world out of matchsticks, and a chance encounter with the French mystic Simone Weil playing video games in a Torquay arcade.

A skeleton is found half-buried in a dried out lake. The bones have been weighed down with an radio transmitter: is this a clue to the victim, and the killer's identity? Detective Erlendur is called in to investigate and discovers that there may be a connection with a group of students who were sent to study in East Germany during the Cold War.

WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY DAVE EGGERSOnce upon a time the Wapshots of St. Botolphs were distinguished for their unshakeable good opinion of themselves.

Winner of the Man Booker Prize for Fiction 2011Staring at the Sun charts the life of Jean Serjeant, from her beginning as a naive, carefree country girl before the war through to her wry and trenchant old age in the year 2020.

Like most women, Hephzibah wants to find love. Looking back on her twenties, the years seem a blur of parties and flings. So, she takes a year off sex to find love. She sips cocktails in Manhattan with a dark-eyed musician, and encounters unexpected temptation back in London.

When Augustin Meaulnes arrives in Francois' home, he changes everything. On one of his escapades, Meaulnes gets lost in the countryside finds himself at an extraordinary party where he meets the girl of his dreams. From this point on he is haunted by her memory and devotes his life, with Francois' willing help, to finding her again.

Much in the same way as neuroscientists are mapping our brains, mathematicians are mapping our behaviour - what we do, who we are, how we work, chat, play and shop - everything that makes us individuals.

The entire enterprise was the conceived by Antony Gormley, and can be seen as a further example of the artist's ability to tap into the public consciousness. The whole event has been remarkably photographed by Clare Richardson and the final edit will be drawn from a selection of 600 of her pictures of 'plinthers and public by day and night.

Hangovers and what to do with them...the perfect gift for every occasion!Hangovers and what to do with them...the perfect gift for every occasion!The morning after - the drilling headache, the waves of nausea, the paranoia, the guilt, the shame - yes, it's the dreaded HANGOVER.

This is the story of Aurora Ortiz, who lives in Madrid, and who, at the age of only thirty, has been widowed and needs to find a job.

There is a sequestered glen off the east coast of the Hudson, New York state, which has long continued under the sway of some witching power; the neighbourhood abounds with tales, haunted spots and twilight superstitions.

The lovers in the age of indifference are tough romantics from every corner of the planet: a marriage splinters during a game of mah jong;

Discussing the fascinating habits of the bug world, this title includes the eccentric behaviour of the bug obsessives themselves. It is suitable for naturalists and those who cares about the crawling, buzzing swarms at our feet.

Having lost ten years to heroin addiction and recovery, the author emerges now as a fully-fledged and significant English poet. This book includes his poems that address Englishness, secular Jewishness, and the childhood pleasures of Oxfordshire - an increasingly deceptive pastoral, stalked and eventually shattered by heroin.

Tourists come to Bangkok for many reasons - a sex change operation, a night with two prostitutes dressed as nuns, and a stay in a luxury hotel. This title takes us to the place where a blend of ancient Buddhist practice and sexual mores has created a version of modernity only superficially indebted to the West.

At the heart of truth lies madness... Two months before Hitler's rise to power, a beautiful young woman is found naked and near death in the woods outside Berlin. There the inheritor of Einstein's genius - his youngest son, Eduard - is writing a book that will destroy his illustrious father and, in the process, change the world.

Winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Best ThrillerSooner or later, everybody pays. Gerry Fegan, a former paramilitary contract killer, is haunted by the ghosts of the 12 people he has slaughtered.

Danny Callaghan is just out of jail and enjoying a quiet drink in a Dublin pub when two men walk in with guns. On impulse, he intervenes to rescue the intended victim, petty criminal Walter Bennett, and finds himself dragged into Dublin's murky underworld.

But that's about to change. One unremarkable Saturday morning Clive sees the biggest alternative-pop star of them all walking down the high street with his dry-cleaning: Lance Webster, disgraced ex-singer of Thieving Magpies ('the biggest British band to emerge from the late-eighties indie-boom' Rolling Stone).

The Russian Revolution is breaking out around him, but Charlie Doig has a private war to fight. With rumours of the Tsar's gold reserves nearby, Charlie resolves once he has revenged Elizaveta to attempt to seize a barge of gold from under the watchful eyes of four different armies.

Everyone knows the story of Mike Tyson's decline and fall, but what happened to the men he defeated during his irrepressible prime? This title deals with these men, tracing their lives from their upbringings and years of promise to their encounters with Tyson. It explores the pain they felt in defeat and their subsequent search for self-respect.

When Norway became a Nazi conquest in April 1940, Ruth's effort to join the rest of her family in Britain became ever more urgent. Ruth Maier kept a diary from 1934 until she was deported to Auschwitz in 1942 at the age of twenty-two.

Now it sent its top man after Farran. This story of violence, cover ups and expediency reveals the full extent and ambition of Jewish terrorist attacks on Britain and throws light on Britain's legacy in the Middle East, with remarkable echoes of today's War on Terror.

Grace Hammer lives a sweet enough life with her four children in London's dank and dirty East End, dipping into the pockets of wealthy strangers foolish enough to venture there. She keeps a clean house and a tight hold on her magpie nature, restricting her interests to wallets and pocket watches - at night she dreams of shiny things.

John Fitzgerald Kennedy, the 35th President of the United States was a virtuous man ensnared by an uncontrollable vice. This book takes inspiration from the tantalising details surrounding President Kennedy's sex life and medical secrets to weave a provocatively intricate portrait of the man's affairs, illness, courage and idealism.

Without deepsmen guarding its shores, no nation can resist invasion - and without princes born of the royal blood, part landsman and part deepsman, no nation can maintain its allies in the ocean.

This novel is a frank and vivid account of sexual awakening. A young woman spending her summer holiday in a seaside town is drawn towards an inevitable sexual encounter with the butcher she is working for. This volume also contains the stories Lucie's Long Voyage and The Fatal Bodice

John Goode is a leftie lecturer who just wants to give his beloved wife and kids a normal life. You know: north London, good schools, nice neighbours, sash windows...

An old man is found murdered in his Reykjavik flat. A cryptic note and a photograph of a young girl's grave are left behind. DID THE DEAD MAN'S PAST COME BACK TO HAUNT HIM? Inspector Erlendur discovers that several decades ago the victim was accused, but not convicted, of an unsolved crime.