Books published by Vintage Publishing

Impotent Scottish HR employee David leaves his family and begins a relationship with an American woman named Alice. With David teetering on the brink of unemployment, Alice decides they need help, and a remedy that starts out with sexy bedtime stories ends up right in the thick of Glasgow's swinging scene.

Alma slowly recovers through a brief love affair with an Aboriginal artist, and both women become involved with the Angel Project in Perth, where actors dressed as angels are concealed around the city for the public to discover.

A few months ago fourteen-year-old Ali Banana was apprenticed to a whip-wielding blacksmith in his rural hometown. Burma Boy is a horrific, vividly realised account of the madness, the sacrifice and the dark humour of the Second World War's most vicious battleground.

Penelope has been waiting for her husband Odysseus to return from Troy for many years. Will he overcome the hideous monsters, beautiful witches and treacherous seas that confront him? This rich and beautiful adventure story is one of the most influential works of literature in the world.

WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY MICHAEL MOORCOCKA model of efficiency and order, the aerodrome stands on the hill looking down on the village below. Roy, coming of age in the messy, violent and adulterous world of the villagers, is simultaneously attracted and repelled by this strange place and by the powerful figure of the Air Vice-Marshal.

'My first mistake was to be heterosexual'. Such is one of the complaints in conversations between Henry Hart - who is a father of two young girls - and his friend, Darius Saddler - who is gay and unattached. This book relates the attempts of Hart and Saddler to knit their lives, and to extricate Hart from the problems he has brought upon himself.

It would be impossible to invent a man like Rick Parker, a freakishly fat ginger-haired giant who modelled his personal style on Elvis Presley and wanted to become the next Don King. This title tells the story of two men who never should have met, and when they did, one killed the other.

The men share a taxi and, on impulse, Richard invites Abe into his home- an action that sends ripples not only through his own life and that of his wife, but also through the fragile existence of Abe's younger sister, Kirsty, who is herself unsure of the best way to settle down...

When archaeologist Louise Cantor's son Henrik is found dead in his flat, she refuses to believe it was suicide.

Winner of the Man Booker Prize for Fiction 2011Graham Hendrick, an historian, has left his wife Barbara for the vivacious Ann, and is more than pleased with his new life. Soon Graham is pouncing on old clues, examining her books for inscriptions from past lovers, frequenting cinemas and poring over the bad movies she appeared in.

Discover the first classic Sherlock Holmes novel in this stunning edition, featuring an introduction from Mark Billingham.

Read the masterful story of romance and revolution behind the hit BBC TV series. Les Miserables is a novel peopled by colourful characters from the nineteenth-century Parisian underworld;

'A Scottish classic, a world classic' Ian Rankin, ObserverRobert is a difficult and disturbed young man.

Noble and devout, Ambrosio is the abbot of a Spanish monastery and spends his days in prayer and preaching. However his monastery is harboring a malevolent force in the form of a young monk called Rosario. Rosario attaches himself to the abbot and then one fateful night reveals that he is in fact a beautiful woman in disguise.

'A masterpiece' The TimesAfter the tragic deaths of their parents, Magdalen and Norah discover the devastating news that they are both illegitimate and not entitled to any inheritance.

'The first, the longest, and the best of modern English detective novels' T S EliotWhen Rachel Verinder receives a gift of an astonishing yellow diamond from her bitter old uncle for her eighteenth birthday, she has no idea that the stone brings great danger with it.

Sophia Chrysanthis is initially dazzled when the celebrated German archaeologist, Herr Obermann, comes in search of a Greek bride who can read the works of Homer and assist in his excavations of the city he believes is Ancient Troy.

Isaac Newton (1642-1727), the English genius, made his greatest contributions to original thought before the age of twenty-five, while at home in Lincolnshire escaping the great plague of 1665, a period of which he wrote: 'I was in the prime of age for invention'. This book demonstrates his perceptions, which changed our world forever.

While Ngugi enjoys scouting trips, chess tournaments and reading about Biggles at the prestigious Alliance School near Nairobi, things are changing at home. He arrives back for his first visit since starting school to find his house razed to the ground and the entire village moved up the road closer to a guard checkpoint.

The author fulfilled a lifetime's ambition when he spent fourteen months as the base-camp doctor at Halley, an isolated British research station on the Caird Coast of Antarctica. Following the penguins throughout the year, the author talks about the hardship of living at 50 C below zero and the unexpected comfort that the penguin community bring.

A collection of stories which range from 'Guess Who's Coming to the Dinner', where a father who prides himself on his open-mindedness when his daughters talk about sex, is forced to confront his feelings when one of them brings home a black fella, to a ghost story, 'The Pram', about a Polish nanny who scares her charge's older sisters.

From the author of the bestselling Suite Francaise. In 1903 Leon M - the son of two Russian revolutionaries - is given the responsibility of 'liquidating' Valerian Alexandrovitch Courilof, the notoriously brutal and cold-blooded Russian Minister of Education, by the Revolutionary Committee.

One of Britain's outstanding novelists, Tim Parks is also a provocative, entertaining and accomplished essayist.

But her obscurity gives added piquancy to the memoirs which - her idiosyncratic art theory and philosophy apart - are above all a dramatic eighteenth-century adventure in five acts which reflect her tempestuous involvement with the five 'husbands' of her life, from the brutish Crowther and the dull and the rich but louche Count Chiavari.

WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY TIM BUTCHERThe silence of the jungle is broken only by the ominous sound of drumming. But his decision to hunt down the mysterious Mr Kurtz, an ivory trader who is the subject of sinister rumours, leads him into more than just physical peril.

In a fury of adolescent rage and despair, Antoinette exacts a swift and horrible revenge... Snow in Autumn pays homage to Nemirovsky's beloved Chekhov and chronicles the life of a devoted servant following her masters as they flee Revolutionary Moscow and emigrate to a life of hardship in Paris.

Portrays Elizabeth as both a woman and a queen, an extraordinary phenomenon in a patriarchal age. This book tells of: Elizabeth's long-standing affair with Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester; her dealings with her many suitors; her rivalry with Mary, Queen of Scots; and, her bizarre relationship with the Earl of Essex, thirty years her junior.

In 1851 Chapman brought Marian Evans - the future George Eliot - to London where her arrival caused rows in the household, which included Chapman's wife and also his mistress. The Strand was packed with booksellers, magazine publishers, theatres, clubs, and quack doctors.

George Orwell was first and foremost an essayist. From his earliest published article in 1928 to his untimely death in 1950, he produced an extraordinary array of short non-fiction that reflected - and illuminated - the fraught times in which he lived and wrote. This book charts Orwell's development as a master of the narrative-essay form.

These essays follow Orwell as he demonstrates in piece after piece how intent analysis of a work or a body of work gives rise to trenchant aesthetic and philosophical commentary.