Books published by Vintage Publishing

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.

Maugham spent the winter months of 1919 travelling fifteen hundred miles up the Yangtze river. Maugham keenly observes, and gently ridicules, their dogged and oblivious persistence with the life they know.

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.

In this book Stephen Jay Gould explores what the Burgess Shale might tell us about evolution and the nature of history. The Darwinian theory of evolution is a well-known, well-explored area.

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.

Charles Mason (1728 -1786) and Jeremiah Dixon (1733-1779) were the British Surveyors best remembered for running the boundary between Pennsylvania and Maryland that we know today as the Mason-Dixon Line.

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.

He wanted particularly to visit the Georgian mountain tribes - Tush, Khevsurs, Ratchuelians and Svans - to discover if they shared a common mountain culture, and to test the old idea of the Caucasus as an impenetrable barrier from sea to sea.

During the years when Fitzgerald was working on Tender is the Night, Zelda Fitzgerald was preparing her own story, which strangely parallels the narrative of her husband, throwing a fascinating light on Scott Fitzgerald's life and work.

Growing up in sixties Oslo, Barnum lives with an extended, eccentric family and his older half-brother, Fred, who was conceived after the rape of their mother in the dying days of World War II.

Tender Branson, the last surviving member of the Creedish death cult, has commandeered a Boeing 747, emptied of passengers, in order to tell his story to the plane's black box before it crashes.

'Black satire of the highest polish' GuardianWhilst awaiting trial for war crimes in an Israeli prison, Howard W. Can a black or white verdict ever be reached in a world that's a gazillion shades of grey?'After Vonnegut, everything else seems a bit tame' Spectator

Tales of upheaval and confusion, longing and love in the aftermath of the Kobe earthquake. For the characters in after the quake, the Kobe earthquake is an echo from a past they buried long ago.

He himself accidentally killed his own wife and child with the same poem twenty years earlier. Together, the man and the woman must find and destroy all copies of this book, and try not to kill every rude sonofabitch that gets in their way.

A masterpiece of modern literature that mirrors Maugham's own career. Of Human Bondage is the first and most autobiographical of Maugham's novels. After a few months studying in Heidelberg, and a brief spell in Paris as a would-be artist, Philip settles in London to train as a doctor.

In these early Hemingway stories, which are partly autobiographical, men and women of passion live, fight, love and die in scenes of dramatic intensity. They range from haunting tragedy on the snow-capped peak of Kilimanjaro, to brutal America with its deceptive calm, and war-ravaged Europe

The complete short stories of the 20th century's greatest visionary'Kafka is important to us because his predicament is the predicament of modern man' W. Some are well known, others are mere jottings, observations of daily life, given artistic form through Kafka's unique perception of the world.

Ferrari, the name itself evokes the world of speed, a world of fast cars, heroic deeds and glamour. This is the story of the man behind the name. This biography goes back to Enzo Ferrari's origins and traces his remarkable rise to prominence.

a constant companion' Bill Bailey'Extraordinary and beautiful...the most exciting and ambitious work of non-fiction I have read in more than a decade' The Daily TelegraphThis extraordinarily wide-ranging study looks at the dilemmas of life today and shows how they need not have arisen.

An explanation of what happens to us when we die. The author, a surgeon with more than 30 years' experience, describes in detail the processes which take place in the body and sets out to strip away many illusions about death.