Books published by Vintage Publishing

Brimming with life and drama, this is a magnificent journey into two thousand years of history, from the acclaimed historian of Europe'All roads lead to Rome.' It's a medieval proverb, but it's also true: today's European roads still follow the networks of the ancient empire, stitching together our histories and continuing to inspire our imaginations.Over the two thousand years since they were first built, the roads have been walked by crusaders and pilgrims, liberators and dictators, but also by tourists and writers, refugees and artists. As channels of trade and travel, and routes for conquest and creativity, Catherine Fletcher shows how the roads forever transformed the cultures, and intertwined the fates, of a vast panoply of people across Europe and beyond.Reflecting on his own walk on the Appian Way, Charles Dickens observed that here is 'a history in every stone that strews the ground.' Based on outstanding original research, and brimming with life and drama, this is the first book to explore two thousand years of history through one of the greatest imperial networks ever built.

A young lawyer on an assignment finds himself imprisoned in a Transylvanian castle by his mysterious host. Back at home his fiancee and friends are menaced by a malevolent force which seems intent on imposing suffering and destruction. Can the devil really have arrived on England's shores? And what is it that he hungers for so desperately?

What you create can destroy you. Victor Frankenstein's story is one of ambition, murder and revenge. As a young scientist he pushed moral boundaries in order to cross the final frontier and create life. But his creation is a monster stitched together from grave-robbed body parts who has no place in the world, and his life can only lead to tragedy.

Cathy is a beautiful and wilful young woman torn between her soft-hearted husband and Heathcliff, the passionate and resentful man who has loved her since childhood. The power of their bond creates a maelstrom of cruelty and violence which will leave one of them dead and cast a shadow over the lives of their children.

The story of female footballer Florrie and the amazing hidden history of the Women's game come to life in this debut graphic novel about football, friendship and falling in love.When Florrie's great-niece discovers she was a footballer in the early twentieth century, she unearths a secret history both on and off the pitch.Boxes from the attic contain match reports, photos and love letters, revealing football games and love affairs in Norfolk, London, Paris and Berlin. Florrie's adventures touch on both invented and real events: huge crowds at matches in London and Preston, international fixtures, dances at lesbian club Le Monocle in Paris, and the devastating consequences of the FA's 1921 ban on women's football.This is a story of self-discovery, friendship and queer love, alongside huge (and little known) historical moments for the women's game. In Florrie, Anna Trench brings readers a beautifully drawn, evocative and warm-hearted love-song to a remarkable woman and sport.

The Roma is a profoundly personal portrait of a people and their on-going journey, shedding new light on their history in countries through which they've travelled and in which they've settled, and what it means to be Romani in Europe today. It is a history that is not widely understood, and that invisibility has created a space where fear and hostility continue to thrive. The Roma, as well as being full of fascinating stories and extraordinary individuals, is a powerful corrective to the stereotyping and prejudices that Romani communities still face today.We meet Ceija Stojka, the Roma artist who chronicled her experiences of the Holocaust in Austria; Johann Trollmann, the Sinto boxer who should have become Germany's light-heavyweight champion only to have his win scratched from the record by the Nazis; and Mary Squires, the nineteenth-century Romani who was accused of kidnapping a young woman and sentenced to death only to be exonerated thanks to some detective work by an unconvinced judge.Throughout, Madeline Potter weaves in her travels though contemporary Romani Europe as well as strands of her own journey as a Romani woman in Romania and now the UK. In so doing she deftly blends explorative history with intimate accounts of racism to create a work of history that is also urgent, timely and forward-looking.

Newfoundland, 1919. Buffeted by winds, an unwieldy aircraft - made mainly from wood and stiff linen - struggled to take off from the North American island's rocky slopes. Cramped side by side in its open cockpit were two men, freezing cold and barely able to move but resolute. They had a dream: to be the first in human history to fly, non-stop, across the Atlantic Ocean. But there were three other teams competing against them, and as the waves raged a few miles below, memories of wartime crashes resurfaced . . .It was just over six months since the 'War to End all Wars' had come to its close. Between them, the seven young aviators who would get off the ground for the transatlantic race had already defied death many times. Mining letters, diaries and evocative unpublished photographs, David Rooney's deeply researched account of the audacious contest shows how it was the airmen's thrilling wartime experiences that ultimately led them to the 'Big Hop', and brought old friends together for one more daring adventure.These Atlantic pioneers weren't scientists or stoical upper-class officers. They were ordinary, working men, risking their lives in the name of progress. Unjustly forgotten by history, they nonetheless paved the way for the Earharts and Lindberghs who came after - and ushered in the age of global connection in which we live now. A non-stop flight across the Atlantic might seem routine today; almost a chore. But it is only possible because of those who went first.

'The Susan Sontag of her generation' Deborah LevyThe story of two couples who live in the same apartment in north-east Paris almost fifty years apart. In 2019, Anna, a psychoanalyst, is processing a recent miscarriage. Her husband, David, takes a job in London so she spends days obsessing over renovating the kitchen while befriending a younger woman called Clémentine who has moved into the building and is part of a radical feminist collective called les colleuses. Meanwhile, in 1972, Florence and Henry are redoing their kitchen. Florence is finishing her degree in psychology while hoping to get pregnant. But Henry isn't sure he's ready for fatherhood...Both sets of couples face the challenges of marriage, fidelity, and pregnancy. The characters and their ghosts bump into and weave around each other, not knowing that they once all inhabited the same space. A novel in the key of Éric Rohmer, Scaffolding is about the bonds we create with people, and the difficulty of ever fully severing them; about the ways that people we've known live on in us; and about the way that the homes we make hold communal memories of the people who've lived in them and the stories that have been told there. 'Atmospheric and evocative, the prose elegant and poised' Observer

Claire O'Connor's life has been on hold since she broke up with Tom Morton and moved from cosmopolitan London back home to the rugged west of Ireland to care for her dying father. Now, a couple of years later, Claire learns that Tom has moved nearby for work. She must decide if he has come for her or for himself, and unravel what went wrong in their past. Living in her childhood home brings its own challenges. While she tries to maintain a normal life - obsessing over the internet and trad wives, going to work, and minding her own business - Tom's return stirs up old memories and the stories trapped within the walls of the old house that looms nearby. As the violence of the past collides with the mundane reality of Claire's everyday life, she must confront whether she can escape her history or if she is destined to be immobilized by it forever. Let Me Go Mad in My Own Way explores layers of violence, the lost voices of women, post-colonial repercussions of that violence and the way it can grip generations. Will the secrets revealed alter the course of Claire's future, and can love exist in a place of pain?

Got endometriosis? You should have a baby!Painful post-birth prolapse? Well, you had a baby. Let down by doctors? Try our wellness candle!Episiotomy scar? Why not trim your labia too?It's a stitch-up. And we demand better. As Emma was being sewn up following the birth of her second child, the midwife paused, looked up and said the worst thing anyone has ever said to her: 'Your vagina's fallen out.'After receiving a vague diagnosis of 'prolapse', she spent the next two years being shunted between specialists. The solutions on offer ranged from kegels to hysterectomy and even labia trimming. Some doctors simply shrugged and said there was nothing they could do. Women around her spoke of similar experiences: mothers told that pain was the price of parenthood; trans women blamed for 'wanting a vagina in the first place'; Black women disbelieved and dismissed; intersex people lied to by their doctors. The mesh scandal that injured thousands. The 'love doctor' who performed nonconsensual vaginal surgeries. Over and over again, Emma heard stories of women in pain, bleeding, dying, failed by the professionals who were supposed to help them. Medical misogyny kills, and leaves many more in agony, unable to live full lives. The Stitch-Up tells their stories, and calls for better research, healthcare options, language and treatment, arguing that being female should never be a death sentence.

A CAREER-SPANNING COLLECTION OF INSPIRING, REVELROUS ESSAYS ABOUT ART AND ARTISTS'Like Love may be one of the most movingly specific, the most lovingly unruly celebrations of the ethics of friendship we have' GuardianLike Love is a momentous, raucous collection of essays drawn from twenty years of Maggie Nelson's brilliant work. These profiles, reviews, remembrances, tributes and critical essays, as well as several conversations with friends and idols, bring to life Nelson's passion for dialogue and dissent. The range of subjects is wide - from Prince to Carolee Schneemann to Matthew Barney to Lhasa de Sela to Kara Walker - but certain themes recur: intergenerational exchange; love and friendship; feminist and queer issues, especially as they shift over time; subversion, transgression and perversity; the roles of the critic and language in relation to visual and performance arts; forces that feed or impede certain bodies and creators; and the fruits and follies of a life spent devoted to making.Arranged chronologically, Like Love shows the writing, thinking, feeling, reading, looking and conversing that occupied Nelson while writing iconic books such as Bluets and The Argonauts. As such, it is a portrait of a time, an anarchic party rich with wild guests, a window into Nelson's own development and a testament to the profound sustenance offered by art and artists.Like Love is a portrait of a time, an anarchic party rich with wild guests, a window into Nelson's own development as a writer, and a testament to the profound sustenance offered by art and artists.'Maggie Nelson is one of the most unique voices in non-fiction: enquiring, political, lyrically dazzling, empathetic' Sinéad Gleeson

You can tell a lot about someone from what they misplace.Oddball Mr Daniels has spent his life sorting chaos into order.In the basement of a shabby Town Council building, he has meticulously labelled, guarded and sometimes claimed the lost property of Dobbiston's residents for thirty years; a life's work carried out mostly unnoticed.But when a bored teenager on work experience interrupts his routine, Mr Daniel's underground world is revealed to be both a lonely prison of his own making and a refuge for his peculiar, uncurbed creativity. A place where hit-and-miss experiments to make the elixir of life, or record the music of the spheres, help him to grieve and search for existential truths.Told through Lost Property Office vignettes - a snooker cue love story, a granny's tea cosy and a kid's toy on an intergalactic adventure - local histories are elevated to the momentous and profound, drawn with playful nostalgia and Dooley's deadpan wit.Aristotle's Cuttlefish is an irresistible and witty portrait of a close-knit northern town and the lives those lost and found characters within it.

*** Preorder the brilliant second novel in the Glorious Tuga series, from Costa Prize-winning author, Francesca Segal ***PRAISE FOR WELCOME TO GLORIOUS TUGA:'A much-needed escape, I warmly recommend this beauty' NIGELLA LAWSON'A magical novel, so uplifting, heartwarming, funny' MARIAN KEYES'Brilliantly and thoroughly imagined. I didn't want to go home' NICK HORNBY'Sparkling and sophisticated' JESSIE BURTON

Bestselling historian Peter Moore traces how Enlightenment ideas were exported from Britain and put into practice in America - where they became the most successful export of all time, the American Dream'Absorbing... fascinating... eloquent' THE TIMES'Engaging and thoroughly reader-friendly' TELEGRAPH'Wonderfully absorbing and stimulating' SARAH BAKEWELL'Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness' is the best-known phrase from the Declaration of Independence, one of the most important documents of the eighteenth century and the whole Enlightenment Age. Written by Thomas Jefferson, it is frequently evoked today as a shorthand for that idea we call the 'American Dream'. But this is a line with a surprising history. Rather than being uniquely American, the vision it encapsulates - of a free and happy world - owes a great deal to British thinkers too.Centred on the life of Benjamin Franklin, featuring figures like the cultural giant Samuel Johnson, the ground-breaking historian Catharine Macaulay, the firebrand politician John Wilkes and revolutionary activist Thomas Paine, this book looks at the generation that preceded the Declaration in 1776. It takes us back to a vital moment in the foundation of the West, a time full of intent, confidence and ideas. It tells a whole new story about the birth of the United States of America - and some of the key principles by which we live to this very day.'Deft insights and in clear prose' ALAN TAYLOR'A gripping account' STELLA TILLYARD'Rollicking...compulsive readability' WASHINGTON POST'A great read' LADY HALE

The Emperor of Gladness follows a wayward young man in New England who, out of sheer chance, becomes the caretaker for an 82-year-old widow living with dementia. Hallmarks of Vuong's writing - formal innovation, syntactic dexterity, and the ability to twin grit with grace through tenderness - are on full display in this masterful story of friendship and how much we're willing to risk to possess one of life's most treasured mercies: a second chance.

Early one morning, at the close of St Colibri's carnival, a young female steel-pan player is found dead beneath a cannonball tree. It is a discovery that will transform the lives of everyone on this small island.As the days pass, this shocking event draws together four women. There's Sharleen, a journalist with an eye for the real story. Her childhood friend Tara, a pink-haired, straight-talking local activist. Gigi, the 'notorious' founder of the Port Isabella Sex Workers Collective. And Daisy, first lady of St Colibri, who is haunted by a disappearance in her own family decades ago.In a community in which women's voices are often silenced and violence against them is overlooked time after time, the group soon find themselves compelled to speak out - and to act. But even they could never have foreseen the consequences of their courage...