Books published by Vintage Publishing

'Astonishing... A marvellous poetic reminder that every place is a universe of magical possibility to the perceptive mind' Damian Le Bas, author of The Stopping Places A smuggler and a deserter, Darran Anderson's grandfathers skirted the Second World War on the fringes of legality.

That night, with the storm howling relentlessly, Grace is woken by a child crying. Grace is desperate to leave, but Charles remains unaffected by the eerie stillness of the house. Is it just Grace's imagination or do the owners, and Charles, have something to hide?THANK YOU FOR STAYING AT THE ANCHORAGE.

'A wonderful discovery' (Ian McEwan), this is a beguiling dystopian tale of a young man confronted with the truth about freedom.

One grey November morning a friend rang Torsten Bergman and told him of a job on a house-conversion. Torsten arrived at the empty house in his decrepit car and got to work retiling the bathroom - the tiles were there already - while he waited for someone to turn up and make it all official. So begins this story of one day in an old man's life...

The updated edition of Julian Barnes' best-loved writing on art, with seven new exquisite illustrated essays'Flaubert believed that it was impossible to explain one art form in terms of another, and that great paintings required no words of explanation.

Read the definitive essay collection from the Sunday Times bestselling author of The Adversary, dubbed 'France's greatest writer of non-fiction' (New York Times)'The most exciting living writer' Karl Ove KnausgaardOver the course of his career, Emmanuel Carrere has reinvented non-fiction writing.

Byatt is a vivid colourist' Sunday Times'A cerebral extravaganza, bristling with ideas' Spectator 'These little stories by one of Britain's foremost grandes dames of the writing world are a delightful surprise, packing a much greater punch than many full-length novels...

An elegantly jubilant and personal new collection celebrating love, life and creativity from award-winning poet and Booker Prize-shortlisted novelist, John FullerIn this personal and characteristically brilliant new collection from John Fuller, an abundance of memories abound.

A collection of the wonderful variety of styles, stories and personalities of our favourite Christmas companions. With a unique perspective atop the tree, Christmas Angels are the ultimate observers of the festive period.

A famous poet, a mysterious death and a story stranger than fiction. - this is the lost life and mytserious death of the 'Female Byron' On 15 October 1838, the body of a thirty-six-year-old woman was found in Cape Coast Castle, West Africa, a bottle of prussic acid in her hand.

It's Christmas at Westbury Manor and amateur detective Hugh Gaveston must unravel a fiendish mystery... Christmas Eve, 1938.

Home is where you start from, but where is a swallow''s real home? And what does ''native'' mean if the English oak is an immigrant from Spain?In ninety richly varied poems and illuminating prose interludes, Ruth Padel''s original new book weaves science, myth, wild nature and human history to conjure a world created and sustained by migration. ''We''re all from somewhere else,'' she begins, tracing the millennia-old journeys of cells, trees, birds and beasts. Geese battle raging winds over Mount Everest, lemurs skim precipices in Madagascar and wildebeest, at the climax of their epic trek from Tanzania, brave a river filled with the largest, hungriest crocodiles in Africa. Human migration has shaped civilisation but today is one of the greatest challenges the world faces. In a series of incisive portraits, Padel turns to the struggles of human displacement - the Flight into Egypt, John James Audubon emigrating to America (feeding migrant birds en route), migrant workers in Mumbai and refugees labouring over a drastically changing planet - to show how the purpose of migration, for both humans and animals, is survival.Poignant, thought-provoking and utterly compelling, here is a magnificent tapestry of life on the move from the acclaimed author of Darwin: A Life in Poems.

'Paris, 4 July 2003: My first Tour de France. I had never seen a bike race. Eight Tours on from Ned's humbling debut, he has grown to respect, mock, adore and crave the race in equal measure.

1903, and Captain Lalande Biran, overseeing a garrison on the banks of the Congo, has an ambition: to amass a fortune and return to the literary cafes of Paris.

This is the story of Christopher Isherwood's parents - their meeting in 1895, marriage in 1903 after his father had returned from the Boer War, and his father's death in an assault on Ypres in 1915, which left his mother a widow until her own death in 1960.

On a late summer's day, a new patient arrives on Sunny's ward, a faded, irascible former ballroom-dance instructor named Julia Dey. Sunny takes it upon herself to pierce the mystery of Julia's reserve, but soon Julia's tightly coiled anger places her at the centre of the ward's tangled life...

A virus is not human, but the reaction to it is a measure of humanity. As he clung to life he found himself reflecting on the fragility of health, not recognized in America as a human right, but without which all rights and freedoms have no meaning.

`It is in very truth a sunny, misty, cloudy, dazzling, howling, omniform Day...¿ ¿ Samuel Taylor Coleridge to William Sotheby, 27 September 1802This anthology of poems and prose ranges from literary weather ¿ Homer¿s winds, Ovid¿s flood ¿ to scientific reportage, whether Pliny on the eruption of Vesuvius or Victorian theories of the death of the sun. It includes imaginary as well as actual responses to what is transitory, and reactions both formal and fleeting ¿ weather rhymes, journals and jottings, diaries and letters ¿ to the drama unfolding above our heads.The entries narrate the weather of a single capricious day, from dawn, through rain, volcanic ash, nuclear dust, snow, light, fog, noon, eclipse, hurricane, flood, dusk, night and back to dawn again. Rather than drawing attention to authors and titles, entries appear bareheaded, exposed to each other¿s elements, as a medley of voices. Rather than adding to our image of nature as a suffering solid, the anthology attends to patterns, events and forces: seasonal and endless, invisible, ephemeral, sudden, catastrophic. And by assembling a chorus of responses (ancient and modern, East and West) to air¿s manifold appearances, Gigantic Cinema offers a new perspective on what is the oldest conversation of all.

A Fairy Tale Revolution is here to remix and revive our favourite stories. Nia demands a single promise from him - that Marcus will never enter her study in the basement, her private space. But when Marcus's curiosity begins to mount Nia feels more and more uneasy. Will he betray her? Can a woman ever have a room of her own?

Jeanette Winterson retells 'Hansel and Gretel'. 'Deep in the wood'Greta lives with her brother Hansel on the edge of a great forest - a forest in danger of destruction. GreedyGuts, their aunt, doesn't appreciate Hansel and Greta's plans to replant trees and save the forest.

Discover a powerful collection of the hardships, hairbreadth escapes, and mortal struggles of enslaved people seeking freedom: These are the true stories of the Underground Railroad.A secret network of safe houses, committees and guides that stretched well below the Mason-Dixon Line into the brutal slave states of the American South, the Underground Railroad remains one of the most impressive and well-organised resistance movements in modern history. It facilitated the escape of over 30,000 slave 'passengers' through America and into Canada during its peak years of 1850-60, and, in total, an estimated 100,000 slaves found their freedom through the network.Abridged from William Still's The Underground Railroad Records - an epic historical document that chronicles the first-hand stories of American slaves who escaped to freedom via the Underground Railroad - Passengers tells of the secret methods, risks and covert sacrifices that were made to liberate so many from slavery. From tales of men murdered in cold blood for their part in helping assist runaways and terrifyingly tense descriptions of stowaways and dramatic escape plans, to stories of families reunited and the moments of absurdity that the Underground Railroad forced its 'passengers' to sometimes endure, Still's narratives testify to the humanity of this vast enterprise. WITH AN INTRODUCTION FROM TA-NEHISI COATES, AUTHOR OF THE WATER DANCER ABRIDGED FROM WILLIAM STILL'S THE UNDERGROUND RAILROAD RECORDS

A raincloud-duck, with the heart of a lion, who struck out into the world on her own...'On the farm, some eggs are hatching. But one duckling looks different from all the others... Cast out and all alone, this odd duckling will need all her bravery and curiosity to survive.

'She looked like a girl who was evening, and an evening that had become a girl...'In the kitchen, in her rags, Cinderella, longs to go to the ball. Cinderella's transformation turns out to be much less about ballgowns, glass slippers and carriages, and much more about finding her truest self.

From the bestselling author of The Robin, The Wren and The Twelve Birds of Christmas. With around 700,000 breeding pairs, the swallow is one of the most familiar birds in Britain. Though we consider the swallow to be ''our'' bird, we also share this beloved creature with millions of others across the globe. Whilst we see it on a daily basis for half the year, the swallow then flies south to Africa, living on only in our memory in the long, dark winter.In The Swallow Stephen Moss documents a year of observing the swallow close to home and in the field to shed light on the secret life of this extraordinary bird. We trace the swallow''s life cycle and journey, including the epic 12,000-mile round trip it takes every year, to enable it to enjoy a life of almost eternal sunshine, and the key part the swallow plays in our traditional and popular culture.With beautiful illustrations throughout, this captivating year-in-the-life biography reveals the hidden secrets of this charismatic and beautiful bird.PRAISE FOR STEPHEN MOSS: ''A superb naturalist and writer'' Chris Packham''Inspired, friendly and blessed with apparently limitless knowledge'' Peter Marren''Moss has carved out an enviable niche as a chronicler of the natural world'' Daily Mail

Outside the classic frames of war and peace, these all-too-human tales - funny, tragic and fateful - tell a wider story of the exuberant dreams, dark fears, grubby ambition and sheer chance which marked Europe's post-war metamorphosis, and the century to come.