Books published by Vintage Publishing

Even though his server, the criminal Sein Yun, sees compromising the singer as a ticket out of jail, Teza befriends him, risking falling into the trap of forbidden conversation, food and the most dangerous contraband of all, paper and pen. Lastly there's Little Brother, an orphan child growing up inside the walls.

Attila the Hun - godless barbarian and near-mythical warrior king - has become a byword for mindless ferocity.

When Peter Minuit bought Manhattan for $24 in 1626 he showed his shrewdness by also buying the oyster beds off tiny, nearby Oyster Island, renamed Ellis Island in 1770. In 1842, when the novelist Charles Dickens arrived in New York, he could not conceal his eagerness to find and experience the fabled oyster cellars of New York City's slums.

Takes us from London suburbs to Bhutan, Icelandic moonscapes to the Seychelles. This work shows how fishing can take you to the heart of a landscape in a way few other forms of travel can match. A fishing rod can also break the ice with locals, guides, farmers, shopkeepers, taxi drivers and bar-flies.

The nine surviving children of the Hegarty clan gather in Dublin for the wake of their wayward brother Liam. It wasn't the drink that killed him - although that certainly helped - it was what happened to him as a boy in his grandmother's house, in the winter of 1968.

Sisters Three, Five and Six don't have much education, but they know two things for certain: their mother is a failure because she hasn't produced a son, and they only merit a number as a name. Together they find jobs, make new friends, and learn more than a few lessons about life...

Globalisation has created a whole new working class - and they are reliving stories that were first played out a century ago. This title tells the story of this working class alongside the history of the global labour movement, from its formation in the factories of the 1800s through its near destruction by fascism in the 1930s.

Now Kate is forty-three and has given up her university career in London to come home and look after her mother at Firenze, their big house by a lake in Cardiff. Adapting to a new way of life, the connections Kate forges in her new home are to have painful consequences, as the past begins to cast its long shadow over the present...

The author set out for the Congo's eastern border with just a rucksack and a few thousand dollars hidden in his boots with the idea of recreating H M Stanley's famous expedition. This book tells of the author's journey and the story of Congo; as he made his way in an assortment of vessels including a motorbike and a dugout canoe.

One night Mark Cocker followed the roiling, deafening flock of rooks and jackdaws which regularly passed over his Norfolk home on their way to roost in the Yare valley.

Shortlisted for the Samuel Johnson Prize. In this extraordinary saga, Adrian Tinniswood draws on tens of thousands of letters, which survived by chance in an attic, to reveal the remarkable world of the Verneys, a family of Buckinghamshire gentry in the seventeenth century.

In this groundbreaking new book, Mark Garnett charts the changes in British politics, society and culture since 1975. Britain in the early years of the twenty-first century seems a very different and much quieter place, but is it as 'apathetic' as the political commentators argue?

Katherine Swynford was first the mistress, and later the wife, of John of Gaunt, the Duke of Lancaster. This book rescues Katherine from the footnotes of history, highlighting her key dynastic position within the English monarchy.

A Russian Diary is the book that Anna Politkovskaya had recently completed when she was murdered in a contract killing in Moscow.

This particular morning, Gloria finds herself alone in a stranger's apartment with nothing but a torn evening dress and her stockings and panties. When she takes a fur coat from the wardrobe to wear home, she sets in train a series of events that will lead to tragedy.

Julian English is part of the social elite of his 1930s American hometown but from the moment he impetuously throws a cocktail in the face of one of his powerful business associates his life begins to spiral out of control - taking his loving but troubled marriage with it. This is a blackly comic depiction of the fall of Julian English.

A few months after two of his parents had died, Martin Rowson had a dream about the house he grew up in which was crammed with tons and tons of stuff, both physical and emotional. weaving together dreams, family anecdotes and gossip, jokes, advice, history, smells, sounds and sights of the past.

Alfred Day wanted his war. he found the wild, dark fellowship of his crew, and - most extraordinary of all - he found Joyce, a woman to love. Maybe it took him, too. Now in 1949, employed as an extra in a war film that echoes his real experience, Day begins to recall what he would rather forget...

On leaving school a sixteen-year-old boy goes to live with his uncle on a remote Welsh hill-farm.

A skint, clapped-out British philosopher meets an incompetent, freshly released, one-armed, armed robber. Ferociously funny, Fischer combines an extravagant sense of humour with a flair for the grotesque in this heady follow-up to the Booker shortlisted Under the Frog.

Lark and her brother, Termite, who is unable to walk or talk but is deeply loved by his family. The two are raised by their aunt Nonie in place of Lola, their mother, and Termite's father, Corporal Robert Leavitt, who is caught up in the chaos of the Korean War.

Part political thriller, part meditation on the nature of desire and betrayal, this book tells the story of Stefan Vogel, a young man growing up in the former East Germany, whose yearnings for love, glory and freedom express themselves in a lifelong fantasy of going to America. It offers an examination of the architecture of deceit.

Early one morning Arvid finds himself standing outside the bookshop where he used to work, drunk, dirty, with two fractured ribs, and no idea how he came to be there. He does not even recognise his face in the mirror. It is as if he has dropped out of the flow of life.

In this witty and poignant story the railway is pushing its way relentlessly towards the town from Manchester, bringing fears of migrant workers and the breakdown of law and order. Meanwhile Miss Matty Jenkyns nurses her own broken heart after she was forced to give up the man she loved when she was a young girl.

In the course of his famous travels, Gulliver is captured by miniature people who wage war on each other because of religious disagreement over how to crack eggs, is sexually assaulted by giants, visits a floating island, and decides that the society of horses is better than that of his fellow man.

and Jack, Nat's unexpectedly poignant uncle, who lives for fox-hunting. Intimate and disconcerting, compelling and comic, an anatomy of the way things are, South of the River is the big British novel for our times - and a tour de force.

Shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize for Fiction As every schoolboy knows, you can fit the whole of England on the Isle of Wight.

Whether addressing the smothered desire of suburban housewives, the white-collar despair of Manhattan office workers or the heartbreak of a single mother with artistic pretensions, Yates ruthlessly examines the hopes and disappointments of ordinary people with empathy and humour.

The bonds between the couples quickly become intense and passionate but whether this passion is creative or destructive is unclear.In this astonishing novel, widely considered to be D.H.

'Perfectly captures the breathless excitement of adolescent passion' Sarah WatersWhen Olivia turns sixteen she is sent to a Parisian finishing school to broaden her education.