Books published by Vintage Publishing

In a makeshift hospital in a refugee camp on the outskirts of Beirut, Yunis, an aging Palestinian freedom fighter, lies in a coma.

In its depiction of the universal trials of adolescent life and growing into adulthood - here compounded by being an outsider both abroad and at home, and by living in a state where you have no right to show your hair, wear make-up, run in public, date, or question authority - it's raw, honest, and incredibly illuminating.

Sacco gradually realized that Neven's own story - a microcosm of the Balkan conflict itself - might be the most compelling of all. Through Neven, Sacco tells the story of the warlords and gangsters who ran the country during the war, but all the time he - and the reader - never know whether Neven is telling the truth.

Charles Waterton was the first conservationist who fought to protect wild nature against the destruction and pollution of Victorian industrialisation. Using his surviving papers, Julia Blackburn has redressed the balance in a biogr aphy that restores Waterton to his place as the first conservationist of the modern age.

'This brilliant collection of essays should be a feast for his admirers, as well as for those who approach his dazzling oeuvre for the first time-Calvino is not only constantly and supremely intelligent; he is constantly and supremely faithful to his narrative imagination' Guardian

A vivid, believable love story between an older woman and a younger man. Lea de Lonval is a magnificent and aging courtesan facing the end of her career.

*As featured in a BBC documentary*In this book Anna Del Conte has collected together the best of her delicious recipes along with tips, anecdotes and reminiscences about her life in Italy and London.

From the Iranian hostage crisis through the Gulf War and the World Trade Centre bombing, the West has been haunted by a spectre called 'Islam'. As portrayed by the news media - and by a chorus of government, academic and corporate experts - 'Islam' is synonymous with terrorism and religious hysteria.

The novel that set the stage for his modern classic, The Satanic Verses, Shame is Salman Rushdie's phantasmagoric epic Omar Khayyam Shakil had three mothers who shared everything.

Startling in its revelations, disturbing in its implications - a thriller of gripping intensity and immense literary power. the hurried flight of a sinister stranger: terrible events long buried in Annie Raft's memory - until she sees her daughter in the arms of the man she believes responsible for the killings...

[after Alexander Portnoy (1933-)]:A disorder in which strongly-felt ethical and altruistic impulses are perpetually warring with extreme sexual longings, often of a perverse nature. Portnoy's Complaint tells the tale of young Jewish lawyer Alexander Portnoy and his scandalous sexual confessions to his psychiatrist.

Jeremy is a child-like, painfully shy batchelor who has never left home. He lives on the third floor of his mother's boarding house and spends his days cutting up coloured paper to make mosaic sculptures, until the day his mother dies and the beautiful Mary Tell arrives to turn his world upside down.

Detailing Lance Armstrong's battle with life-threatening testicular cancer and his return to professional cycling, it became a huge bestseller, appealing to fans of cycling as well as cancer survivors inspired by his full and dramatic recovery.

A collection that features such stories as: When a man's favourite elephant vanishes, the balance of his whole life is subtly upset; a couple's midnight hunger pangs drive them to hold up a McDonald's; a woman finds she is irresistible to a small green monster that burrows through her front garden; and, more.

Patrick Doyle is a twenty-nine-year-old teacher in an ordinary comprehensive school. Isolated, frustrated and increasingly bitter at the system he is employed to maintain, he begins his rebellion, fuelled by drink and his passionate, unrequited love for a fellow teacher.

Peter Lime is trained to hunt down his prey and catch them on film. When a fire destroys his home, but not all of his photographs, Lime sets out to discover a motive and finds himself drawn into the complex and terrifying web of international terrorism.

This is a guide to France intended for the traveller who wants to get to know French people as individuals, for the negotiating businessman and for students who wishes to discover in-depth aspects of their lives. It looks at what makes up the national character of France.

The second collection of blazingly original short stories from Booker prize-winning, Sunday Times-bestselling author Ian McEwan. A two-timing pornographer becomes the unwilling object of one of his victim's vengeful fantasies.

A story, in which the author takes us on a journey through his childhood and adolescence, along Jerusalem's war-torn streets in the 1940s and '50s, and into the infernal marriage of two kind, well-meaning people: his fussy, logical father, and his dreamy, romantic mother.

Realising that his life is devoid of meaning, he grows determined to transcend his trivial existence and search for a greater purpose. In the economic boom years of 1920s' America, Babbitt became a symbol of middle-class mediocrity, and his name an enduring part of the American lexicon.

The notion of identity - personal, religious, ethnic or national - is one that has given rise to heated passions and crimes throughout the history of mankind.

Wise, often funny, sometimes heartbreaking, Persepolis tells the story of Marjane Satrapi's life in Tehran from the ages of six to fourteen, years that saw the overthrow of the Shah's regime, the triumph of the Islamic Revolution and the devastating effects of war with Iraq.

Finding her way through the labyrinthine plots that surrounded the court, she had to live by her wits, surrounded by betrayal and suspicion, not knowing who to trust with her desire to be queen, or her desire to be a lover...

There are ninety-nine names for God in the Koran, is it possible that there is a secret one-hundredth name? There are ninety-nine names for God in the Koran, and merely to know this most secret hundredth name will, Balthasar believes, ensure his salvation.

Here, drawing on a novelists insight into art, literature and psychology, Iris Murdoch conducts an ongoing debate with major writers, thinkers and theologians - from Augustine to Wittgenstein, Shakespeare to Sartre, Plato to Derrida - to provide fresh and compelling answers to these crucial questions.

A biography of Bruce Chatwin, based on private notebooks, diaries, letters and hundreds of interviews. It illuminates the many sides of Chatwin, from Sotheby's director, archaeologist, "Sunday Times" journalist and traveller to devoted husband and active gay, socialite and loner.

From the Booker Prize winning author of Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha and The Commitments: the story of an ordinary woman whose extraordinary character will stay with you long after reading. 'He loved me and he beat me.

As the first novel opens, Titus, heir to Lord Sepulchrave, has just been born: he stands to inherit the miles of rambling stone and mortar that stand for Gormenghast Castle. Inside, all events are predetermined by a complex ritual, lost in history, understood only by Sourdust, Lord of the Library.

Elizabeth Costello is an Australian writer of international renown. Her life has become a series of engagements in sterile conference rooms throughout the world - a private consciousness obliged to reveal itself to a curious public: the presentation of a major award at an American college where she is required to deliver a lecture;

Elegant, provocative and hugely entertaining, Kingsley Amis's memoirs are filled with anecdotes, experiences and portraits of famous friends, family, acquaintances (and a few eminent foes).