Books published by Vintage Publishing

Ten years on from The Woman Who Walked into Doors, Booker Prize-winning author, Roddy Doyle, returns to one of his greatest characters, Paula Spencer. Paula Spencer is turning forty-eight, and hasn't had a drink for four months and five days.

Tells the history of the modest family which rose to become one of the most powerful in Europe. This title explores the intensely dramatic rise and fall of the Medici family in Florence, as well as the Italian Renaissance which they did so much to sponsor and encourage.

The full story of one of France's greatest cinema legends, a clown whose film-making innovation was to turn everyday life into an art form. Jacques Tati's Monsieur Hulot, unmistakable with his pipe, brolly and striped socks, was a creation of slapstick genius that made audiences around the world laugh at the sheer absurdity of life.

This is a book about visionary companies.' Drawing upon a six-year research project at the Stanford University Graduate School of Business, Collins and Porras took eighteen truly exceptional and long-lasting companies and studied each company in direct comparison to one of its top competitors.

The third volume of Somerset Maugham's Collected Short Stories, introduced by the author, contains the celebrated series about Ashenden, a secret service agent in World War I.

This final classic collection of stories reveals Somerset Maugham's unique talent for exposing and exploring the bitter realities of human relationships.

Remarkably accessible and unfailingly stimulating, this collection of essays exhibits the diversity of interests and the depth of knowledge that made Umberto Eco one of the world's leading writers.

WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY DAVID BRADSHAWAnthony Beavis is a man inclined to recoil from life. Realising that his determined detachment from the world has been motivated not by intellectual honesty but by moral cowardice, Anthony attempts to find a new way to live.

Experience the joie de vivre with this revolutionary non-diet book that is changing the way women eat and live everywhere How do French women do it? This is the book that unlocks the simple secrets of 'the French paradox' - how to enjoy food and stay slim and healthy.

Presents essays on Turgenev, Goldsmith, Congreve, Gibbon and Horace Walpole. This title is suitable for for students, common readers and scholars alike.

Victor Mancini has devised a complicated scam to pay for his mother's hospital care: pretend to be choking on a piece of food in a restaurant and the person who 'saves you' will feel responsible for you for the rest of their lives.

A funny look at the social and political dynamic of French village life. Gabriel Chevallier's delightful novel Clochemerle satirizes the titanic confrontation of secular and religious forces in a small wine-growing village in Beaujolais.

The Orientalist unravels the mysterious life of a man born on the border between West and East, a Jewish man with a passion for the Arab world. Tom Reiss first came across the man who called himself 'Kurban Said' when he went to the ex-USSR to research the oil business on the Caspian Sea, and discovered a novel instead.

Bissinger spent a season in Odessa discovering just what makes a town pin its hopes on eleven boys on a football field. He returned with a compassionate but hard-eyed story of a town riven by money, race and class, where a high school can spend more on medical supplies for its athletic program than on its English department.

From the love affair between a missionary and a drunkard to the mystery surrounding a death at sea, this collection gives a warm and humourous insight into life and history of life in the colonies and stands as a superbly entertaining and compelling testament to Maugham's skill and power as a short story writer.

In this ground-breaking book, the Dalai Lama advises us to gain familiarity with the process and practices of death so that, when we are physically weak, our minds can still be focussed in the right direction, and in the right manner.

Do they have features in common and why does religion persist in the face of science? Pascal Boyer shows how experimental findings in cognitive science, evolutionary biology and cultural anthropology are now providing precise answers to these general questions, and providing, for the first time, real answers to the question: Why do we believe?

The characters in this extraordinary book are often - on the surface - depraved, vicious, cowardly and manipulative, but their essential humanity is never undermined. God turns Boab Coyle into a house-fly; The Acid House is a bizarre, disturbing and hilarious collection from one of the most uncompromising and original writers around.

When identical twins, June and Jennifer Gibbons were three they began to reject communication with anyone but each other, and so began a childhood bound together in a strange and secret world.

In this remarkable little book, Andre Comte-Sponville introduces the reader to the western philosophical tradition in a series of sparkling chapters on the 'big questions'.

Honda, a brilliant lawyer and man of reason, is called to Bangkok on legal business, where he is granted an audience with a young Thai princess - an encounter that radically alters the course of his life.

Explains psychological, neuroscientific, and philosophical developments in our understanding of very young children, transforming our understanding of how babies see the world, and in turn promoting a deeper appreciation for the role of parents.

Comte-Sponville offers the reader both a thoughtful and accessible introduction to the history of Western ethics and an exploration of the ways in which the views and claims of the great philosophers can apply - and fail to apply - to our lives today.

In a South Africa torn by civil war, Michael K sets out to take his mother back to her rural home. On the way there she dies, leaving him alone in an anarchic world of brutal roving armies.

McCullin grew up in London during the aftermath of World War II. He has spent a large part of his life photographing wars in the Middle East, Africa and Asia. In this book he writes of the deprivation of his childhood and the much greater misery and horror he has witnessed during his career.

A masterpiece of German modernism and one of the greatest novels of the twentieth century. Adrian Leverkuhn is a young man destined for success.

An immaculate portrait of adolescent love from one of our most beloved novelists. 'One of the last century's greatest woman writers' GuardianWhen sixteen-year-old Portia is orphaned, she is plunged into the sophisticated and politely treacherous world of her wealthy half-brother's home.

Opening with his impoverished childhood in Algiers, Todd brings the historical context to life, shedding light on Camus' later agonising conflict between sympathy for the working class Algerians and for the French colonials with a stake in their adopted land.

Tells the story of Neil Klugman and pretty, spirited Brenda Patimkin, he of poor Newark, she of suburban Short Hills, who meet one summer and fall into an affair that is as much about social class and suspicion as it is about love. This novella is accompanied by five short stories - sometimes iconoclastic, sometimes elegiac.