Books published by Vintage Publishing

It's not the dream that matters, it's the telling of the dream - the words you choose, the risks you take in externalising your mindThis is a dreamlike portrait of a body in struggle to connect with itself and others. As the narrator contends with chronic pain, and with a pandemic raging in the background, she sets out to examine the literal and symbolic role of the mouth in the life of a writer. Merging dreams and dailies, Pathemata recounts the narrator's tragicomic search to alleviate her suffering, a search that eventually becomes a reckoning with various forms of loss - the loss of intimacy, the loss of her father and the loss of a pivotal friend and mentor. In exacting, distilled prose, her account blurs the lines between embodied, unconscious and everyday life. With characteristic precision, humour and compassion, Nelson explores the limits of language to describe experience, while also offering a portrait of an unnerving and isolating time in our shared history. A stunning new, original experiment in interiority by the adored author of Bluets and The Argonauts, Pathemata is a personal and poetic reckoning with pain and loss, both physical and emotional, as well as an uncanny meditation on love, affliction and resilience.

Witness the best and the worst of humanity in The Bells of Nagasaki. . . On 9th August 1945, the Japanese city of Nagasaki is hit by an atomic bomb. Forty thousand people are killed instantly. Doctor Takashi Nagai is not one of them. Pulling himself, broken and bloodied, from the wreckage that was once the city's university hospital, Takashi bundles together a tattered group of survivors. Doctors, nurses, students, each with their own injuries and losses, their own bone-chilling fears for the future, they work tirelessly at the impossible task of aiding the countless wounded and easing the deaths of the dying. They remain determined to heal their fallen city, to find solace and hope among the rubble, even as a strange and growing sickness begins to claim them, one by one. Eyewitness to one of the most fatal events in human history, this is Takashi's record, written from his sickbed - a chilling historical document, and undeniable evidence of the capacity for human kindness. 'A book that everyone should read' The Times

'Don't worry, I'm here in the house where every room has a name, but children's names are often forgotten.'Uplifting and heart-breaking, this lyrical evocation of a childhood on the edge of society marks the arrival of a vital new voice. MINX reveals the vibrant but precarious world of a multi-racial Romani family: a world of grandfathers brewing moonshine in marrows, basement reggae parties, and a mother struggling to support her two daughters on the proceeds of her shadowy profession. Their powerful bond helps the sisters survive when they're taken into care, in a children's home that forcibly separates them. With a verve and playfulness that belies their pain, these poems explore what it means to belong. Through daring experiments with form and narrative, MINX captures how it feels to grow up between a culture whose traditional ways are being lost and a wider society that despises them.

Far-right groups are now the most regular perpetrators of terrorist activity in the UK according to Prevent and are more visible than ever: on the streets, in the corridors of power. But how much do we really know about the myriad shadowy political collectives that have insinuated themselves into every stratum of British society?Harry Shukman, a researcher with HOPE not hate, set out to explore this secretive world that seemingly hides from us in plain sight. He spent a year living under an assumed name, wearing a hidden camera, and infiltrating the extreme right-wing groups that are deliberately eroding principles about what is acceptable in public debate, promoting racist ideology and actively seeking to overturn democracy around the world. From joining a shadowy network called the Basketweavers to canvassing for Britain First, Shukman encounters neo-Nazi thugs and antisemitic conspiracy theorists, before uncovering a race science network funded by a US tech CEO and eugenicist sympathisers close to the very heart of our government.Year of the Rat explores the historical context for these beliefs and looks at the wider European situation, with Shukman travelling to Poland, Tallinn and Greece. With the threat of discovery always looming, what Shukman exposes is chilling, but he writes with real compassion, humanity and humour. This is an urgent and vital read for anyone who wants to understand the current political climate.

A guide to the art of journaling - and a meditation on the central questions of life - by the bestselling author of Between Two KingdomsFor as long as she can remember, Suleika Jaouad has kept a journal. She has used it to mark life's biggest occasions and to ride its roughest waves. It has buoyed her through illness, through heartbreak, and the deepest oceans of uncertainty. And Suleika is not alone. For so many people, journaling is a process of discovery, sometimes vulnerable and terrifying, always transformative. The Book of Alchemy is based on the premise that journaling is an essential tool for navigating the challenges of modern life. We live in a world where we're not only forced to grapple with personal peaks and valleys but also global upheavals far beyond our control-political, social, economic, technological, environmental. More than ever, we need a space for puzzling through. Designed to be a companion through challenging times, The Book of Alchemy will explore the art of journaling, offering encouragement, direction, and support to those looking for a way to navigate the in-between. It is designed to expand that space, giving readers tools to engage with discomfort, to ask questions, to peel back the layers, to uncover their truest self - and in doing so, to find clarity and calm, to hold the astonishingly beautiful and the often unbearable facts of life in the same palm. "Not only beautiful but exceedingly helpful. I recommend it to every dreamer, with the highest respect and joy." Elizabeth Gilbert, author of Eat Pray Love

In the rain-slicked, neon glowing streets of a 1970s continental metropolis, a man called François makes a snap decision that will change his life for goodFrançois, in his fifties, living alone and low on cash, does not have the life he dreams of.With a cigarette stuck to the corner of his mouth and wearing his perpetual black suit, he has carried out the same morning routine for 17 years: entering the lottery with his lucky numbers, then knocking back a pint of beer at Café Monico before his shift as the delivery driver for a dry cleaners.His days are brightened only by newsagent Maryvonne and her young daughter. He dreams of winning the lottery to give them a better life.When a routine delivery leads him to knock on the door of a countryside mansion, he enters the scene of a crime whose remains consist of a dozen bodies and a bag full of banknotes. What François chooses to do next could change his fate for good...Visually stunning, atmospheric and replete with the smoking irony of European noir, Dry Cleaned is a masterful tale about an anti-hero radically stepping out of his routine.

When Joan Vole, an indie folksinger forever teetering on the edge of fame, sexually assaults a fan onstage, she fears it will doom her career. She abandons her beloved Martin parlour guitar and flees New York, seeking refuge at a writing camp for teenagers in rural Virginia where phones are forbidden.With the threat of an internet storm looming over her, Joan is forced to examine her toxic relationship to artmaking and the sexual kink she has been hiding for decades, while finding new hope in her students and a deepening intimacy with a nonbinary cartoonist called Sparrow.Suffused with flashbacks that evoke a musical underworld as seductive as it is seedy, we are immersed in Joan's relationships. From her complicated friendship with Paige, the teenage runaway she mentored whose success has outstripped hers, to the secret ex-boyfriend who inspired Joan's biggest hit, which cemented her status as a queer icon after she implied it was about a woman.Lydi Conklin boldly explores queer appropriation, fame hunger, cancel culture, trans nonbinary identity and how to make art without ego, all the while asking how Joan might forge a new future for herself.A propulsive character study of a flawed and fascinating artist, Songs of no Provenance is a visceral, gutsy and profound debut novel about love, self-acceptance and clawing oneself to safety.

Multi-prizewinning and internationally acclaimed Yan Lianke -- 'China's most controversial novelist' (New Yorker) -- returns with a campus novel like no other following a young Buddhist as she journeys through worldly temptationTo tell the truth, religious faith is really just a matter of believing stories. The world is governed by stories, and it is for the sake of stories that everyone lives on this earth.Yahui is a young Buddhist at university. But this is no ordinary university. It is populated by every faith in China: Buddhists, Daoists, Catholics, Protestants and Muslims who jostle alongside one another in the corridors of learning, and whose deities are never far from the classroom.Her days are measured out making elaborate religious papercuts, taking part in highly charged tug-of-war competitions between the faiths and trying to resist the daily temptation to return to secular life and abandon the ascetic ideals that are her calling. Everything seems to dangle by a thread. But when she meets a Daoist student called Mingzheng, an inexorable romance of mythic proportions takes hold of her.In this profoundly otherworldly novel, Chinese master Yan Lianke remakes the campus novel in typically visionary fashion, dropping readers into an allegorical world ostensibly far from our own, but which reflects our own questions and struggles right back at us.** Beautiful edition illustrated throughout with beautiful original papercuts **'One of China's greatest living authors' Guardian'His talent cannot be ignored' New York Times'China's foremost literary satirist' Financial Times

Diaspora is witnessing a murder without getting blood on your shirt.***WINNER OF THE FORWARD PRIZE FOR BEST FIRST COLLECTION******FINALIST FOR THE SUNDAY TIMES YOUNG WRITER OF THE YEAR AWARD******WINNER OF THE SKY ARTS AWARD FOR POETRY***'Exceptional... Mehri is a truly transnational poet of the twenty-first century'BERNARDINE EVARISTO, author of Girl, Woman, Other'A once in a generation poet'CALEB FEMI, author of PoorThe definition of diaspora is the dispersion of people from their original homeland. But what does it mean to write diaspora poetry? Momtaza Mehri's debut collection poses this question, taking us from Mogadishu to Naples, Lampedusa to London. Mixing her own family's experience with the stories of many others across nineteenth- and twentieth-century Somalia, Bad Diaspora Poems confronts the ambivalent nature of speaking for those who have been left behind.We meet the poet, the translator, the refugee, the exile, and the diaspora kid attempting to transcend their clichéd angst. Told in lyric, prose and text messages, and taking place in living rooms and marketplaces, on buses and balconies, on transatlantic journeys and online, these are essential poems about our diasporic age.