Books published by Vintage Publishing

A personal and global history in objects, Gillian Tindall traces the memories and meanings that accrue to the artefacts of human lives through time.

The cyclist Tom Simpson was an Olympic medallist, world champion and the first Briton to wear the fabled yellow jersey of the Tour de France.

This is both the busiest and most deadly frontier in the world, studded with guard-posts, infra-red searchlights and heavily armed patrols.Across it unfolds a war that is scarcely reported - a war that's being fought, with thousands dying and millions of lives blighted, so that Europe and America can get high.

Alan Mackenzie's bad back is ruining both his and his wife Jane's lives. After years of happy marriage, these two attractive and intelligent people have stopped making love and are starting to resent each other.

Richard Wright's memoir of his childhood as a young black boy in the American south of the 1920s and 30s is a stark depiction of African American life and powerful exploration of racial tension. At four years old, Richard Wright set fire to his home in a moment of boredom;

Familiar with his students' hostile attitude towards both his lectures and himself, a senior school teacher reaches a decision that forces an assessment of his choice of life, of his marriage and ultimately of his values and worth in modern society. This is a story of a man lost in a world that no longer recognises either him or his talent.

Published to coincide with the Hungarian Year of Culture in 2003/2004, this anthology comprises a selection of Hungarian prose and poetry from the second half of the 20th century.

In the Emma Lazarus retirement home in uptown Manhattan, the Jewish inmates embark on a chaotic, bitchy production of Hamlet. Comedy and tragedy combine as our hero, Otto Korner, directs his quirky, libidinous fellow residents in the play and looks back over his adventures in Germany, Zurich, Auschwitz and America.

These slow, beautiful stories - resolute and resonant - are small masterpieces: apparently simple but actually crafted with enormous skill and precision.

'Emmy Turner's marriage to a hard-working and dullish lecturer at Convert College suffers from various tensions. Emmy has a highly sensual affair with a non-creating musician-in-residence, and her husband suspects everyone but the right man, going nearly insane with jealousy in the process...

Described by Christopher Howse in the Daily Telegraph as 'a handy crash course in church literacy', the first edition of this unique and accessible guide to the common symbols and meanings in church art and architecture became a bestseller on first publication.

Once the Tates were an attractive family, but now Erica is bored, Brian's career is at a standstill, and the children have become revolting teenagers. Then Erica discovers that her husband is carrying on with one of his students. The author won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for "Foreign Affairs".

*A FINANCIAL TIMES 'BOOKS OF 2021' PICK*Ransom, the new collection from Michael Symmons Roberts, is an intense and vivid exploration of liberty and limit, of what it means to be alive, and searches for the possibility of hope in a fallen, wounded world.

'All eight men and all eight stories stand as beautifully, pitifully, terribly true... Here are Richard Wright's stories of eight men - black men, living at violent odds with the white world around them.

'Wright's unrelentingly bleak landscape was not merely that of the Deep South, or of Chicago, but that of the world, the human heart' James Baldwin Natural disasters, cold-blooded murders, political agitation - all haunt these dark, dramatic novellas set in an American Deep South still corrupted by its slave-owning past.

'Powerful as [Richard Wright] was - is - as a writer, nobody can surpass him in doing certain kinds of writing...

Not a weird box of detergent, but a panicked beige lesbian desperately googling, 'Will my babies love me?' at 3 a.m. A very funny, very honest look at parenting life, from IVF awfulness to crying over the pages of sleep training manuals.

'A joyful, poetic hymn to spring... Dee is one of our greatest living nature writers' ObserverOne December, in midsummer South Africa, Tim Dee was watching swallows. They were at home there, but the same birds would soon begin journeying north to Europe, where their arrival marks the beginning of spring. Greenery recounts how Tim Dee tries to follow the season and its migratory birds, making remarkable journeys in the Sahara, the Straits of Gibraltar, Sicily, Britain, and finally by the shores of the Arctic Ocean in northern Scandinavia. On each adventure, he is in step with the very best days of the year - the time of song and nests and eggs, of buds and blossoms and leafing. 'A masterpiece... I can't imagine I'll ever stop thinking about it' Max Porter'Fascinating, horizon-expanding, life-enhancing' Lucy Jones, author of Losing Eden

Two men meet for a pint in a Dublin pub...In 2012, Roddy Doyle showed us the world anew: through the back-and-forth of two Dublin pub-dwellers. They chewed the fat, set the world to rights, slagged each other unmercifully. And along the way, they chased the ebb and flow and stupidity of the year right to the bottom of their pints.Today, they're still at it - even over Zoom, if needs be. Collected for the first time, here is almost a decade's worth of elections and referendums, births and deaths, football, financial crashes, pandemics and the philosophical questions of life, as told through the wit and warmth of Roddy Doyle's comic genius.Includes: Two Pints, Two More Pints, Two for the Road - and, for the first time in print, Two Pints: The Play and The Zoom Pints

'Terrifying yet funny, surprising yet predictable, simple yet poignant' Chris PackhamA shocking but informative, eye-catching and witty book of maps that illustrate the perilous state of our planet.The maps in this book are often shocking, sometimes amusing, and packed with essential information:· Did you know that just 67 companies worldwide are responsible for 67 per cent of global greenhouse emissions? · Or that keeping a horse has the same carbon footprint as a 23,500-kilometre road trip? · Did you know how many countries use less energy than is consumed globally by downloading porn from the internet?· Do you know how much of the earth's surface has been concreted over?· Or how many trees would we have to plant to make our planet carbon-neutral?Presenting a wealth of innovative scientific research and data in stunning, beautiful infographics, 99 Maps to Save the Planet provides us with instant snapshots of the destruction of our environment. At one glance, we can see the precarious state of our planet - but also realise how easy it would be to improve it Enlightening, a bit frightening, but definitely inspiring, 99 Maps to Save the Planet doesn't provide practical tips on how to save our planet: it just presents the facts. And the facts speak for themselves. Once we know them, what excuse do we have for failing to act?

FROM THE ONE-OF-A-KIND IMAGINATION THAT BROUGHT US SLAUGHTERHOUSE 5 AND CAT'S CRADLE 'Kurt Vonnegut is either the funniest serious writer around or the most serious funny writer' Los Angeles Times Book Review An 'autobiographical collage' of speeches, stories and essays, in Palm Sunday, Kurt Vonnegut writes beguilingly about everything from country music to George Bush, his favourite comedians to his mother's midnight mania, and bittersweet tributes to a dead best friend and a dead marriage. Resonating with his singular voice, this is a self-portrait in writing that showcases why Kurt Vonnegut is as genius an essayist and commentator on American society as he is a novelist.

A MASTERFUL COLLECTION OF TWENTY-FIVE SHORT STORIES FROM THE INIMITABLE AUTHOR OF SLAUGHTERHOUSE 5, KURT VONNEGUT 'Vonnegut is George Orwell, Dr Caligari and Flash Gordon compounded into one writer...a zany but moral mad scientist' Time A diabolical government asserts control by eliminating orgasms.

'Marvellous entertainment' Sunday TimesJust married and newly arrived in Los Angeles are Paul and Katherine Cattleman.