Books published by Vintage Publishing

Following the death of his parents in a car crash, eleven-year-old Alex Dove is torn from his life on a remote farm in Tasmania and sent to school in England. When he returns to Australia twelve years later, the timeless beauty of the land and his encounter with a young woman whose own life has been marked by tragedy, persuade him to stay.

On the run from the police and unable to recognise even his faithful servant Lugg or his own fiancee, Campion struggles desperately to put the pieces together while the very fate of England is at stake. As urbane as Lord Wimsey...as ingenious as Poirot... Meet one of crime fiction's Great Detectives, Mr Albert Campion.

After another body, private detective Albert Campion nearly makes a fourth... Both the skeleton and the corpse have died with suspicious convenience for Georgia Wells, a monstrous but charming actress with a raffish entourage.

Arthur and George grow up worlds apart in late nineteenth-century Britain: Arthur in shabby-genteel Edinburgh, George in the vicarage of Staffordshire village. Arthur is to become one of the most famous men of his age, while George remains in hard-working obscurity. But as the new century begins, they are brought together by a sequence of events.

In 1958, as the snow fell across Nebraska, 19-year-old Charlie Starkweather and his 14-year-old girlfriend, Caril Ann, climbed into a stolen car and blazed into history with a string of bloody murders that stunned America.

Identical twins, Georgia and Bessi, live in the loft of 26 Waifer Avenue. It is a place of beanbags, nectarines and secrets, and visitors must always knock before entering. Forced to create their own identities, the Hunter children build a separate universe. It is when the reality comes knocking that the fantasies of childhood start to give way.

'This is a vicious, furious book, unapologetically not of this age - it is also horribly funny and unflinchingly honest' New StatesmanDavid Kepesh, white-haired, and now in his sixties, is an eminent cultural critic on NPR radio and a formidable lecturer at a New York college.

In this new edition of The Fifth Essence, retitled Quintessence after the now widely accepted term for dark matter, Krauss shows how the dark matter problem is now connected with two of the hottest areas in recent cosmology: the fate of the universe and the "cosmological constant."

Sick of life? Murdered, you will be of greater interest than ever you were in life. Our hero meticulously plans his own demise, except for one detail: what if he suddenly decides he wants to live?'Kurkov's eye for the absurdities of Ukrainian life is as sharp as ever' - Sunday Telegraph

This gripping nineteenth-century adventure stars Jorgen Jorgenson, who ran away to sea at fourteen and began a brilliant career by sailing to establish the first colony in Tasmania.

A compelling and authoritative study of the brain - its past, present and future. He also investigates how brains develop from a single fertilised egg to the incredibly complex organ that each human possesses. Against this background he asks the challenging question: what does the future hold for the human brain?

A masterful collection of short stories from the prize-winning and bestselling Rose Tremain. Wallis Simpson, the twice-divorced American for whom Edward Vlll abdicated the throne, is on her deathbed in her Paris flat, closely guarded by her lawyer who will not allow her any visitors.

Since 1972 Mark Cocker has been a member of a community of obsessional people, almost all male, who sacrifice most of their spare time, a good deal of money, sometimes their chances of a partner or family, even occasionally their lives, to watch birds.

The Dark Room tells the stories of three ordinary Germans: Helmut, a young photographer in Berlin in the 1930s who uses his craft to express his patriotic fervour; and, fifty years later, Micha, a young teacher obsessed with what his loving grandfather did in the war, struggling to deal with the past of his family and his country.

Maugham's studies of the lives and masterpieces of ten great novelists are outstanding examples of literary criticism at its finest. Afforded here are some of the formulae of greatness in the genre, as well as the flaws and heresies which enfeeble it. Written by a master of fiction, Ten Novels and Their Authors is a unique and invaluable guide.

Newly arrived in New York, Ito is a literate yet tongue-tied sushi chef who recites haiku in his head as he labours over restaurant shopping-lists.

Sonny Gee is six years old when his mother abandons him. Forced together and immediately locked in conflict, an inarticulate tenderness develops between the old man and the boy.

Every year, millions of women have their lives turned inside out by the experience of pregnancy. This book takes a critical look at the powerful vested interests in the pregnancy business and at the social message coming at women: an amalgam of sentimentality, psychologically dangerous half-truths and conflicting ideologies.

With a novelist's eye for detail and colour, Gita Mehta writes of the continent of contradictions that is host to one-sixth of the world's population. It has the world's largest film industry, and the world's oldest religions. Now as never before, the world wants to know what contemporary India is all about.

In this remarkable new assessment of the Fourth Crusade, Jonathan Phillips follows the fortunes of the leading players and explores the conflicting motives that drove the expedition to commit the most infamous massacre of the crusading movement.

Discover William Maxwell's classic, heart-breaking portrait of an ordinary American family struck by the 1918 Spanish Flu pandemic'A story of such engaging warmth that it would thaw the heart of any critic... Will melt many a reader to tears' TIMEElizabeth Morison is an ordinary woman.

Jane Shutt is a down-to-earth Yorkshire woman who leads an extraordinary life as one of Britain's leading shamanic healers. In The Spirits are Always with Me, Jane Shutt explains what shamanism really is, and how it is especially relevant to us in the modern world as we seek to connect with our roots and with our own sense of inner purpose.

Avalon is Britain's very own Atlantis - a mystical kingdom rich in myth and lore. Legends tell how the body of King Arthur was taken to Avalon, where he would wait till his nation's hour of need -The truth is that Avalon was a very real place with a turbulent history of its own.

From the author of the acclaimed Revolution in the Head, Ian MacDonald takes us on a journey through the music of the sixties and seventies. Combining a close reading of the music with a detailed understanding of the times, this collection confirms Ian MacDonald's reputation as one of Britain's most important music journalists.

Shows how we similarly all have the natural ability to turn the lead of our confused minds into the gold of insightful clarity. This book shows how we can learn to see ourselves as we really are and learn to disengage from those emotional patterns that undermine our lives.

Lucian Freud is not only the most celebrated artist working in England, but one of the most private.

Witnesses of War is the first work to show how children experienced the Second World War under the Nazis. As they absorbed the brutal new realities of German occupation, Polish boys played at being Gestapo interrogators, and Jewish children at being ghetto guards or the SS.

The third novel of the Pyat quartet finds Maxim Arturovitch Pyatnitski scheming his way from New York to Hollywood, Cairo to Marrakesh, from cult success to the utter limits of sexual degradation, leaving a trail of mechanical and human wreckage as he crashes towards an appointment with the worst nightmare of this century.

But his feelings for her, and for her handsome teenage son, are complicated by the sudden arrival on his doorstep of the celebrated Australian novelist Elizabeth Costello, who threatens to take over the direction of his life and the affairs of his heart.

Brian Marley, a divorced Englishman, is alone in the vilest jungle on earth, about to die live on television. When Brian contacts the outside world, the Headmaster is outraged to find an embattled New Labour MP unchallenged by a hapless Tory Party.