Books published by Vintage Publishing

Anyone who has seen The Lion in Winter will remember the vicious, compelling world of the Plantagenets and readers of the romance of Robin Hood will be familiar with the typecasting of Good King Richard, defending Christendom in the Holy Land, and Bad King John who usurps the kingdom in his absence.

Black Sabbath are one of the most outrageous yet longest-lived bands in the history of rock 'n' roll. This book paints a picture of their colourful early history - interwoven with the most crucial news stories of the time: from Vietnam to Bloody Sunday and the space programme.

Overweight and overwrought, Howard Cleaver, London's most successful journalist, abruptly abandons home, partner, mistresses and above all television, the instrument that brought him identity and power.

One Day As A Tiger tells the story of Martin Hawkins, a brilliant young historian, who turns his back on a promising academic career and returns to the family sheep-farm in Tipperary where he finds himself at odds with his conscientious brother, Pierce.

Jake Richardson, an Oxford don nearing sixty with a lifetime's lechery behind him, is in pursuit of his lost libido and heads off to the consulting room of a miniature sex therapist. As liberationists abuse him, a campus hostess bores him into bed - and even his own wife starts acting oddly - Jake seriously begins to wonder.

Gabe Wallach, freshly discharged from the Korean War army, reeling from his mother's recent death, and thus freed from old attachments, is hungrily seeking new ones.

To love someone, need you know everything about them?When Alice and Joseph meet, they fall quickly into a tentative but serious relationship. When Alice's widowed grandfather begins to tell Joseph about his RAF experiences in 1950s Kenya, something still raw is tapped in Joseph;

Studies the relationship between the environment and human history. This book examines world civilizations from Sumeria to ancient Egypt, from Easter Island to the Roman Empire and it argues that human beings have repeatedly built societies that have grown and prospered by exploiting the Earth's resources.

Gives us an account of the author's early life, up until the time he quit Australia for the United States. Part memoir, part history lesson, part philosophical tract, the author uses his own experiences to examine the nature of art, war, sex, religion-writing and life itself.

Whether walking an abandoned road or considering a friend's suicide, his poems remind us of our abdications, of our collapsed relationships with nature, with history, with ourselves. There are, however, all the vestiges of connective tissue - memories and mementoes, sudden, miraculous leaps of beauty.

Two prostitutes are murdered in Tokyo. Twenty years previously both women were educated at the same elite school for young ladies, and had seemingly promising futures ahead of them. Grotesque is a masterful and haunting thriller, a chilling exploration of women's secret lives in modern day Japan.

'The best thing Martin Amis has done in fiction for years' Literary Review There were conjugal visits in the slave camps of the USSR.

At Edinburgh's Department of Environmental Health, hard-drinking, womanising officer Danny Skinner wants to uncover secrets: 'the bedroom secrets of the master chefs', secrets he believes might just help him understand his self-destructive impulses.

Reveals how NASA cashed in on the Americans' thirst for heroes in an age of discontent and became obsessed with putting men in space. Landing on the moon, it was argued, would be good for the economy, for politics, and for the soul. This book exposes the truth behind one of the most revered fictions of American history.

The suffragettes outraged Victorian society but their personal lives were just as dramatic as their public actions. adn Adela, banished to Australia after a bitter rift. The result is a narrative that reads like a novel, and a brilliant insight into the history of a family that changed the face of British society for ever.

George Davies has a problem: he can't bring himself to hold his newborn son. Ten-year-old George, in the wake of his father's harrowing and unexpected death, is experiencing ominous visions - some friendly, others outright terrifying.

Meet Burt Hecker, aka Eckbert Attquiet, a 63-year-old medieval re-enactor with a momentous nose, who dresses in tunics and drinks too much home-made mead. If only he knew that his son doesn't want to be rescued, or found. This is the story of Burt's painful, hilarious and doomed attempts to come to terms with his own past.

Having found out that she is pregnant by a man he doesn't approve of, he secretly intends to persuade her to terminate the pregnancy: the family doctor stands by to perform the operation on the spot.

In The Day of the Locust a young artist, Tod Hackett, arrives in LA full of dreams. When he meets Faye Greener, an aspiring actress, he is intoxicated and his desperate passion explodes into rage... Miss Lonelyhearts is a decidedly off-kilter, darkly comic tale set in New York in the early 30s.

Discover this extraordinary and beautiful novel from one of America's greatest novelists. In rural Illinois two tenant farmers share much, finally too much, until jealously leads to murder and suicide.

The first volume of John Campbell's biography of Margaret Thatcher was described by Frank Johnson in the Daily Telegraph as 'much the best book yet written about Lady Thatcher'.

Re-examines the mythology and suggests a complex reality behind the idealized picture accepted by Lady Thatcher's early biographers.

Gita Mehta's captivating and enchanting novel tells the story of a retired beurocrat who has escaped the world to spend his twilight years running a guest-house on the banks of the country's holiest river, the Narmada.

From the author of the bestselling Suite Francaise. Ada grows up motherless in the Jewish pogroms of a Ukrainian city in the early years of the twentieth century. In the same city, Harry Sinner, the cosseted son of a city financier, belongs to a very different world.

Poppy Carew has just been dumped by her unscrupulous boyfriend, Edmund, when her beloved and eccentric father dies, leaving Poppy one last request - that she ensure he is buried in style by a 'fun' undertaker - and one large fortune.

A train screeches to a halt in the middle of the English countryside and, observed by her fascinated fellow travellers, a woman climbs down and rushes to the aid of a sheep, stranded on its back and unable to rise.

From her ancestors' view from Edinburgh's Castle Rock in the eighteenth century to her parents' thwarted ambitions in Ontario, and her own awakening in 1950s Canada, Munro effortlessly weaves fact and myth to create an epic story of past and present, proving that fiction has much to tell us about life.

One freezing evening Philibert overcomes his excruciating reitcence to rescue Camille, unconscious, from her garret and bring her into his home. As she recovers Camille learns more about Philibert;

Any book of stories from Bernard MacLaverty is a cause for celebration, but Matters of Life and Death is more than that, as it is - without question - one of the finest contemporary examples of the short story as a genre.

But somehow he ends up earning peanuts in a Suffolk bookshop while his devious and wayward friend Jack, becomes rich and famous as a TV chat-show host. When Jack dies, his widow and publisher commission David to write his biography; David however soon realises that it's finally time he stopped doing what is expected of him.