Books published by Vintage Publishing

One girl missing. Another found dead. Only one detective can solve this case.'One of the greats of modern crime fiction' Sunday TimesWhen a young woman known for drug smuggling goes missing, her elderly grandparents have no choice but to call the retired Detective Konrád.Still looking for his own father's murderer, Konrád agrees to investigate the case.But digging into the past reveals more than he set out to discover, and a strange connection to a little girl who drowned in the Reykjavík city pond decades ago recaptures everyone's attention.A brilliant, chilling tale of broken dreams and children who have nowhere to turn.'The undisputed king of the Icelandic thriller' Guardian'An international literary phenomenon - and it's easy to see why. His novels are gripping, authentic, haunting and lyrical' Harlan Coben

'Brilliant' SUNDAY TIMES'Compelling and unnerving' SPECTATORThis first collection of stories by Lawrence Osborne perfectly showcases his talent for tension, atmosphere - and characters out of their depthA naïve young linguist sent to the forests of Irian Jaya is manipulated into betraying her mission by a ruthless and disturbed pastor. A deaf girl hired as a maid by a wealthy New York couple turns the tables on her obliviously abusive employers and answers blackmail with blackmail. A psychiatrist treating a girl in rural England becomes ensnared in a love affair that threatens to destroy her career; while a young couple on holiday in Oman accidentally witness a killing, which leads to their being hunted as well. An entomologist at a remote hotel in the Andamans survives a tsunami and uses a dead body to further her study of ants.Collected here for the first time, Lawrence Osborne's stories, like his novels - 'elaborate and intricately plotted dances macabres' (The Times) - feel like nightmares set against calmly and meticulously observed backgrounds. With their nods to Daphne du Maurier and Roald Dahl, these nine long-form stories explore characters lost in the shadowed borders between the mundane, the fantastical and the violence of the natural world.

Language and talking is part of what makes us human. It forms the basis of all our lives.Every day we speak to ourselves and to each other, about ourselves and about others. Whether ruminating on a past event alone or gossiping with a group of friends, we move through life in a state of near-constant chatter - even during those moments we profess to wanting nothing more than some peace and quiet.So, why do we do it, and what purpose does talking serve? In this paean to conversation, neuroscientist Shane O'Mara encourages us to marvel at our brains distinct mechanisms for communicating. In the process, he reveals how our unique ability to remember and, critically, our instinct to share memories fashions the world as we know it: a complex social world born out of thoughts and feelings, modified by the stories we tell about ourselves and others, divided by constructed borders and shared cultures, and propelled forward by our longing for a better, alternative tomorrow.Talking Heads is a deep dive into the science of how we talk, why we speak to each other, and what happens when we do. From neurons to nations, this is the story of how conversation shapes us and builds the world around us.

A heartfelt graphic memoir of love, family and fearless womenLives were bent in the furnaces of the twentieth century, but Granny was unbroken. With a stethoscope, a jar of herring and a hearing aid occasionally switched on, she forged an extraordinary life. Elena Zadik ran through the twentieth century without looking back.A refugee twice before she was 17, training in medicine in Sheffield during World War 2, she was as brilliant a doctor as she was terrible a driver (she never took a test). Following her childhood in Ukraine during the Russian civil war in a tiny Jewish family (her parents were first cousins) to a briefly peaceful childhood in Germany, then to the UK as lone teenage refugee in 1937, the story shows Elena breaking glass ceilings to become a doctor. Practising in working class Sheffield she sees terrible deprivation and rejoices at the founding of the NHS, to which she gives 40 years¿ service.She finds belonging in a Lancastrian mill and mining town as a GP, witnessing the destruction of the 1980s on the industry and culture of the town, as her own career and life wanes. Her parents die in Auschwitz, she spends decades fighting for restitution, and then shares the money she finally receives among her nine grandchildren.Miriam, her eldest granddaughter, tells her story reflecting on their unconventional relationship and how trauma travels down through the generations. Elena was an unintentionally hilarious woman, often difficult, always opinionated and deeply resourceful. Her hands (minus her left index finger which she slammed in garage doors) were always busy and form the heart of this timely graphic story of the ordinary extraordinary resilience of women.

**WINNER OF AN ERIC GREGORY AWARD**This searingly powerful first collection about Ukrainian identity is a howl of anguish and an elegant counter-song against totalitarianism'A beautiful, necessary book'ILYA KAMINSKY, author of Deaf Republic'Every poem is a masterpiece'OLIA HERCULES, author of MamushkaWith this searingly powerful first collection, Charlotte Shevchenko Knight gives the current war in Ukraine some much-needed human focus, while examining its brutal aggression within a wider and more accurate historical context.Central to this book is `a timeline of hunger¿, a lyric sequence which examines the legacy of the Holodomor (`death by hunger¿ in Ukrainian) ¿ Stalin¿s man-made famine of the 1930s. This long poem opens in Kyiv in 2021 ¿ `brief visitations / of appetite / I devour / beetroot / its juices / running / down my lips / blood / of the past¿ ¿ and closes in Donetsk in 1929: `we burst the balloon / skin of tomatoes / between our teeth / seeds running down chins / like confetti / & we already know / every meal / should be celebrated.¿ Through the poet¿s sensitive approach to the historical, moving from that genocide of the early 1930s, then on through the Second World War, the Chornobyl disaster, to modern-day invaded Ukraine, we understand that within their `bones Holodomor / lives on¿.Both a howl of anguish and an eloquent counter-song against totalitarianism, this is a book about invasion, war, destruction and death, but also about the bonds of humanity, family and a history of oppression ¿ about staying alive while always hungry.

I used to have this line I saved and brought out for grant applications and writers festivals - that having been Jane Eyre, Anna Karenina and Esther Greenwood all my life, my writing was an opportunity for the reader to have to be me.Irreverent, witty and wise, But the Girl is a coming-of-age story about not wanting to leave your family behindGirl was born on the very day her parents and grandmother immigrated from Malaysia to Australia. The story goes that her mother held on tight to her pelvic muscles in an effort to gift her the privilege of an Australian passport. But it's hard to be the embodiment of all your family's hopes and dreams, especially in a country that's hostile to your very existence.When Girl receives a scholarship to travel to the UK, she is finally free for the first time. In London and then Scotland she is meant to be working on a PhD on Sylvia Plath and writing a postcolonial novel. But Girl can't stop thinking about her upbringing and the stories of the people who raised her. How can she reconcile their expectations with her reality? Did Sylvia Plath have this problem? What even is a 'postcolonial novel'? And what if the story of becoming yourself is not about carving out a new identity, but learning to understand the people who made you who you are?

A surreal novella about the intensity and eroticism of girlhood friendships, the ecstasy of desire and disgust, matriarchal mythmaking and the haunting presence of crows.Seven, who works as a cleaner at a chiropractor¿s office, reencounters Cecilia, a woman who has obsessed her since their school days. As the two of them board the same bus ¿ each dubiously claiming not to be following the other ¿ their chance meeting spurs a series of intensely vivid and corporeal memories.Smart, subversive and gripping, Cecilia is a winding, misty road trip through bodily transformation, inextricable histories of desire and violence, diaspora and obsessive love.

VOLUME TWO OF TWOA genre-defining-and redefining-collection of fiction's boldest, most rebellious, and most prescient genre, featuring a smorgasbord of stories from all over the globe"The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel." Almost forty years ago, William Gibson wrote the line that began Neuromancer and, more importantly, cyberpunk - a movement that would change the face of science fiction.Award-winning anthologist Jared Shurin brings together over a hundred stories from more than twenty-five different countries that both establish and subvert the classic cyberpunk tropes and aesthetic-from gritty, near-future noir to pulse-pounding action. Urban rebels undermine monolithic corporate overlords. Daring heists are conducted through back alleys and the darkest parts of the online world. There's dangerous new technology, cybernetic enhancements, scheming AIs, corporate mercenaries, improbable weapons, and roguish hackers. These tales examine the near-now, extrapolating the most provocative trends into fascinating and plausible futures.We live in an increasingly cyberpunk world-packed with complex technologies and globalized social trends. A world so bizarre than even the futurists couldn't explain it-though many authors in this book have come closer than most. As both an introduction to the genre and the perfect compendium for the lifelong fan, The Big Book of Cyberpunk offers a hundred ways to understand where we are, and where we're going-or simply venture down some dazzling, neon-slicked streets.

Fun, witty and sun-soaked, this is the inimitable Rosemary Tonks for the poolside.Two best friends, Mimi and Caroline, go on holiday to join some friends on a beautiful Italian island. There they find themselves part of an eccentric cast of characters including their debonair host, a relentless venture capitalist and a great comic villain in the form of the local dentist. There is also Beetle, with whom Mimi is completely and simply in love. As everyone relaxes into island living and the demands of real life drift away, the holiday hijinks culminate in a very Mediterranean prank - the cutting down of the dentist's prize lemon tree.'Breakneck romantic escapades of young Tonks-like heroines¿ Paris Review

'I'm thirty, and I'm stuck'Arabella is on an increasingly desperate quest for freedom, from her overbearing father and her overtly absent brother. But her quest for self-actualisation ends up leading her into the orbit of a happily married man. The opening moves of their love affair are a spiky and self-conscious game of chess. Complete with rainy London streets, awful food, devastating kisses and agonising introspection, this is pure Rosemary Tonks.`Writing like this¿is far too beautiful and accomplished to be kept off the shelf. It catches like nothing else the smogs, the rodentine genes, the murky post-War grays, the lurking sexual violence of London¿ Michael Hoffman, Poetry Foundation

Finally back in print, a brilliantly funny and brutal novel from the inimitable Rosemary Tonks, author of The BloaterSophie¿s mother knows exactly how to needle her. Sophie¿s lover Philip knows how to stab her in the heart. She may be clever, charming and smart but is Sophie destined to be an eternal bit-part?After a particular agonising throwaway remark from Philip, Sophie knows she must break away ¿ from her mother, from Philip, from the snobbery of her well-to-do Hampstead Heath upbringing. Being good and agreeable has brought nothing but loneliness, now setting out alone might finally bring freedom.'A bubbly, empathetic and ultimately lovely novel of a belated coming-of-age' New York Times'Nobody writes about angsty women like Tonks' The Millions

I am sitting in bed next to Mariah Carey. She's wearing a pair of tiny boxer shorts and a belly-airing vest. "You can lie down if you want", she says. "I mean it's fine, be comfortable, " so I lean further back into the pillows, feigning being comfortable.As a young intern at Pride magazine, Diana Evans was catapulted into the role of culture editor, and so began her career as a journalist, writing about musicians, dancers and artists, interviewing the likes of Viola Davis, Alice Walker and Edward Enninful.In these portraits of contemporary icons, the author herself remains distant - always the observer. Alongside them, in essays and pieces collected here for the first time, we see her turning the lens to the personal. We watch as she dances across stages in London and travels through Cuba. We sit beside her desk as she develops her voice as a writer, shaped by her love for Jean Rhys, James Baldwin and Toni Morrison. We walk by her side as she captures herself in the world - her family and the midlife sandwich, reflections on fashion, yoga, the British monarchy and lockdowns, and the lasting impact of George Floyd and Grenfell.Crafted over twenty-five years, with the intelligence and sensitivity that Diana Evans is known for, I Want to Talk to You invites you into a conversation about literature, art, identity, and everything in between.

Sunday Times bestseller Tessa Hadley explores the big consequences of small events in this new collection'You've either got it or you haven't. Hadley's got it'FINANCIAL TIMESHeloise's father died in a car crash when she was a little girl; at a dinner party in her forties, she meets someone connected to that long-ago tragedy. Janey's bohemian mother plans to marry a man close to Janey's own age - everything changes when an accident interrupts the wedding party. A daughter caring for her elderly mother during the pandemic becomes obsessed with the woman next door; in the wake of his best friend's death, a man must reassess his affair with the friend's wife. Teenager Cecilia wakes one morning on vacation with her parents in Florence and sees them for the first time through disenchanted eyes.These stories illuminate the enduring conflicts between responsibility and freedom, power and desire, convention and subversion, reality, and dreams.

From the Sunday Times-bestselling author of On Chapel Sands, shortlisted for the Costa Prize for Biography'No one writes art like Laura Cumming' Philip Hoare, author of Albert and the Whale'I will never look at any painting in the same way again' Polly Morland, author of A Fortunate Woman_____________________'We see with everything that we are'On the morning of 12 October 1654, in the Dutch city of Delft, a sudden explosion was followed by a thunderclap that could be heard more than seventy miles away. Carel Fabritius - now known across the world for his exquisite painting, The Goldfinch - had been at work in his studio. He, along with many others, would not survive the day.In Thunderclap, Laura Cumming reveals her passion for the art of the Dutch Golden Age and her determination to lift up the reputation of Fabritius. She reveals the Netherlands, where - wandering the narrow streets of Amsterdam, driving across the flatlands, or pausing at a quiet waterfront - she encounters the rich reality behind the shining beauty of Vermeer and Rembrandt, Hals and de Hooch. She shares too her relationship with her father, the Scottish artist James Cumming, who had his own deep connection to Dutch painting, and who taught her about colour, light and the rewards of looking deeply.This is a book about what a picture may come to mean: how it can enter your life and change your thinking in a thunderclap, a sudden clarity of sight. This is also a book about the precariousness of human life - the way it may be snatched from us in an instant. What can art do to sustain us? The work that survives tells its own compelling story in these pages.

Improve your calm, focus and sense of purpose by harnessing the everyday power of creativity.If you've ever experienced the blissful feeling of being fully immersed in a project, of ideas come to you naturally, or of getting lost in thought when cooking, playing music, or dancing, then you've accessed the flow state. Sometimes we stumble into it by accident, but what if you could access and unlock the healing properties of the flow state whenever you need it?For everyone who has ever struggled with writer's block this may sound too good to be true, but Dr. Julia F. Christensen, neuroscientist and former ballerina, taps into cutting-edge science, research and case studies from everyday people to show us how we can use the arts to alter our emotional state, tap into our ability to focus, release our creativity and improve our overall wellbeing. Using ancient solutions to solve modern problems, Pathway to Flow will show how to harness the flow state at will through seven simple steps and build a routine that will help you be more calm, focused and creative.