About Salman Rushdie: Salman Rushdie is one of the world’s most acclaimed, award-winning contemporary authors. Translated into over forty languages, his sixteen works of fiction include Midnight’s Children – for which he won the Booker Prize in 1981, the Booker of Bookers on the 25th anniversary of the prize and Best of the Booker on the 40th anniversary – Shame, The Satanic Verses, Quichotte and Victory City. His latest book, Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder was a number one Sunday Times bestseller. A former president of PEN American Center, Rushdie was knighted in 2007 for services to literature and was made a Companion of Honour in the Queen's last Birthday Honours list in 2022.

Salman Rushdie

About Salman Khan: Salman Khan is the founder and CEO of Khan Academy, a nonprofit with the mission of providing a free, world-class education for anyone, anywhere. His lessons on YouTube have revolutionized learning, garnering billions of views globally. Recognized as one of Time’s 100 Most Influential People in the World, Khan is also the founder of schoolhouse.world, Khan Lab School, and Khan World School, and the author of The One World Schoolhouse. He holds three degrees from MIT and an MBA from Harvard Business School.

Salman Khan

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Alfred Assollant

Introducing the Marvellous Captain Corcoran – he is charming to ladies, courteous to true gentlemen, death to pirates and merciless to the English. He speaks several languages, can bend an iron bar with his bare hands, and has adventured his way across the seven seas with his faithful friend Louison by his side. Loyal only to her master, Louison can be a little boisterous, and there’s devil to pay when she misses a meal (she is a tiger, after all). 
 
Corcoran is on the hunt for a lost sacred Hindu text. Once in India, he is soon distracted from his quest by the claims of Prince Holkar, his lotus-eyed daughter, and their daring stand against the English occupying forces. 
 
Beloved by many French schoolchildren (including the young Jean-Paul Sartre) at the turn of the century, the marvellous Corcoran has been too long forgotten. Sam Miller (author of Strange Kind of Paradise: India through Foreign Eyes) has loving translated these wild, funny, unabashedly romantic adventures from the French for the first time so that the Captain and his charming Louison can be embraced by a new generation of readers, young and old.

The Marvellous (But Authentic) Adventures of Captain Corcoran

Alexandre Dumas

**AS SEEN ON WRITE AROUND THE WORLD WITH RICHARD E GRANT** 
 
A brilliant story of intrigue, retribution, revenge and redemption. 
 
Imprisoned for a crime he didn't commit, Edmond Dantès spends fourteen bitter years in a dungeon. When his daring escape plan works, he uses all he has learnt during his incarceration to mastermind an elaborate plan of revenge that will bring punishment to those he holds responsible for his fate. No longer the naïve sailor who disappeared into the dark fortress all those years ago, he reinvents himself as the charming, mysterious and powerful Count of Monte Cristo... 
 
 'Dumas is a master of ripping yarns full of fearless heroes, poisonous ladies and swashbuckling adventurers' Guardian

The Count of Monte Cristo

Rafael Sabatini

WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY BEN KANE 
 
Oliver Tressilian, a Cornish gentleman, is blessed with 'youth, wealth, and good digestion'. He is betrayed by his half-brother and becomes a renegade and Barbary corsair winning the title of Sakr-el-Bahr - hawk of the sea. This is the thrilling, full-blooded adventure of how a man wronged became the scourge of the Mediterranean and the terror of Christians...

The Sea-Hawk

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

‘One word of truth shall outweigh the whole world’ Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn 
 
In the first month of the First World War the Russian campaign against the Germans creaks into gear. Crippled by weak, indecisive leadership the Russian troops battle desperately, even as the inevitability of failure and their own sacrifice dawns. Solzhenitsyn’s astounding work of historical fiction is a portrait of pre-revolutionary Russia, a tragic war story, and an epic novel in the great Russian tradition.

August 1914

H. Rider Haggard

Allan Quatermain is a Victorian Indiana Jones - he triumphs over deserts, snowy mountains, tribal warfare and witches, and unearths the mythical treasure of King Solomon's mines. 
 
 This faithful but unpretending record of a remarkable adventure is hereby respectfully dedicated by the narrator to all the big boys and little boys who read it. I offer apologies for my blunt way of writing. I can but say in excuse of it that I am more accustomed to handling a rifle than a pen. This is the strange history of our journey into the heart of Kukuanaland; a trek into the interior of the dark continent to find a lost friend and discover the diamond mines of King Solomon.In the course of a long life of close shaves, I never had such shaves as those which I have recently experienced. 
 
- Allan Quatermain, of Durban, Natal, Gentleman 
 
 ‘One of the great page-turners in English literature’ Guardian

King Solomon's Mines

Read the thrilling Victorian blockbuster, with an introduction from Booker prize-winning author Margaret Atwood. 
 
A note from The Editor: 
 
I feel it incumbent upon me to explain how this wonderful and mysterious history found its way into my hands. I received a letter and two parcels- one a manuscript, the other containing a scarab and an ancient sherd - from a brief acquaintance of mine called Mr Horace Holly. Mr Holly and his ward Leo Vincey had passed through a most uncommon African adventure, a tale of a nature so marvellous that I fear the reader might disbelieve it. To me the story seems to bear the stamp of truth upon its face. But I must leave the reader to form his own judgment... And with this explanation I introduce the world to Ayesha - She-who-must-be-obeyed - and the Caves of Kôr.

Ernest Hemingway

Ernest Hemingway's adventure novel set on the verge of the tropics. 
 
'Listen,' I told him. 'Don't be so tough so early in the morning. I'm sure you've cut plenty of people's throats. I haven't even had my coffee yet.' 
 
Harry Morgan is a tough guy making his living during the Depression from his motor boat in Key West, Florida. Although he normally takes out fishing parties, sometimes his boat can be put to other uses. If the money offered is worth his while, Harry will run guns, rum and men to and from Cuba. But he is playing a dicey game. Hemingway's hardest hero risks not just his living, but his life. 
 
'Absorbing and moving. It opens with a fusillade of bullets, reaches its climax with another, and sustains a high pitch of excitement throughout' Times Literary Supplement

To Have and Have Not

All for one, and one for all! 
 
The young D'Artagnan and the legendary musketeers Athos, Porthos and Aramis are 'the inseparables' - ready to sacrifice everything in a duel or game of dice in order to defend their honour or that of the King and Queen of France. Handsome and hot-tempered, they dive into raging battles or back-street conspiracies with gusto, especially if by their daring deeds they can thwart the wicked devices of their arch-enemy, Cardinal Richelieu, and his mysterious accomplice, Milady de Winter. 
 
'Pure swashbuckling pleasure' Daily Telegraph 
 
TRANSLATED BY WILL HOBSON 
 
VINTAGE FRENCH CLASSICS - six masterpieces of French fiction in gorgeous new gift editions.

The Three Musketeers

Vintage Classics French Series

Thomas Savage

Discover Thomas Savage's dark poetic tale of a small town in early 20th century America that inspired the Golden Globe winning film. 
 
Phil and George are brothers and joint owners of the biggest ranch in their Montana valley. 
 
Phil is the bright one, George the plodder. Phil is tall and angular; George is stocky and silent. Phil is a brilliant chess player, a voracious reader, an eloquent storyteller; George learns slowly, and devotes himself to the business. They sleep in the room they shared as boys, and so it has been for forty years. 
 
When George unexpectedly marries a young widow and brings her to live at the ranch, Phil begins a relentless campaign to destroy his brother's new wife. But he reckons without an unlikely protector. 
 
From its visceral first paragraph to its devastating twist of an ending, The Power of the Dog will hold you in its grip. 
 
WITH AN AFTERWORD BY ANNIE PROULX 
 
'With its echoes of East of Eden and Brokeback Mountain, this satisfyingly complex story deserves another shot at rounding up public admiration' Guardian

The Power of the Dog

**NOW THE WINNER OF THE 2022 BEST DIRECTOR OSCAR AND TWO 2022 BAFTA AWARDS**

H.E. Bates

Heroic and moving accounts of the R.A.F. in war time by the author of Fair Stood the Wind for France and The Darling Buds of May 
 
'After 60 years of writing and reading, I would place H.E. Bates as one of the best short-story writers of my time' Graham Greene 
 
First published under the pseudonym of Flying Officer X, H. E. Bates’s stories of the heroic exploits of British bomber crews during the Second World War created a sensation when they appeared in 1942, selling over two million copies all over the world. Bates lived among the painfully young pilots and recorded their lives, and those of their loved ones, with an emotional attention that deeply moved the generation that lived through the war, and an intensity that reverberates down the decades.

How Sleep the Brave

Complete Stories of Flying Officer 'X'

Graham Greene

WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY MONICA ALI 
 
The love affair between Maurice Bendrix and Sarah, flourishing in the turbulent times of the London Blitz, ends when she suddenly and without explanation breaks it off. After a chance meeting rekindles his love and jealousy two years later, Bendrix hires a private detective to follow Sarah, and slowly his love for her turns into an obsession.

The End of the Affair

A poignant story of the inability to capture lost youth, by the Nobel Prize-winning author of A Farewell to Arms. 
 
'Luck is a feast which doesn't stay in one place' 
 
Richard Cantrell is an American colonel living in Venice just after the Second World War. The fighting has left him scarred and embittered, a middle-aged man with a heart condition. It seems that only the love of Renata, a nineteen-year-old countess can save him. But Cantrell is living in the shadow of war, every move he makes dictated by old battle instincts, and it is possible that for him the longed-for peace may have come too late. 
 
'The most important author since Shakespeare' New York Times

Across the River and into the Trees

Nevil Shute

'Probably more people have shed tears over the last page of A Town Like Alice than about any other novel in the English language... remarkable' Guardian 
 
 Jean Paget is just twenty years old and working in Malaya when the Japanese invasion begins. 
 
When she is captured she joins a group of other European women and children whom the Japanese force to march for miles through the jungle - an experience that leads to the deaths of many. 
 
Due to her courageous spirit and ability to speak Malay, Jean takes on the role of leader of the sorry gaggle of prisoners and many end up owing their lives to her indomitable spirit. While on the march, the group run into some Australian prisoners, one of whom, Joe Harman, helps them steal some food, and is horrifically punished by the Japanese as a result. 
 
After the war, Jean tracks Joe down in Australia and together they begin to dream of surmounting the past and transforming his one-horse outback town into a thriving community like Alice Springs... 
 
With an introduction by Eric Lomax, author of The Railway Man

A Town Like Alice

(Vintage Classics Shute Series)

Hammond Innes

The Soviets have cut off food and fuel supplies to West Berlin in a final attempt to force a stranglehold over the city. The Allied response is the Berlin airlift: thousands of planes carrying supplies - a lifeline to the people of the city. 
A chance for heroism perhaps, but not for Neil Fraser or Bill Saeton. One is an ex-RAF pilot on the run from the law, the other will stop at nothing to build the perfect aircraft engine. In an abandoned hangar in the British countryside, tensions rise to boiling point.

Air Bridge

Thomas Berger

'I am a white man and never forget it, but I was brought up by the Cheyenne Indians from the age of ten.' So starts the story of Jack Crabb, the 111-year old narrator of Thomas Berger's masterpiece of American fiction. As a "human being", as the Cheyenne called their own, he won the name Little Big Man. He dressed in skins, feasted on dog, loved four wives and saw his people butchered by the horse soldiers of General Custer, the man he had sworn to kill. 
 
As a white man, Crabb hunted buffalo, tangled with Wyatt Earp, cheated Wild Bill Hickok and survived the Battle of Little Bighorn. Part-farcical, part-historical, the picaresque adventures of this witty, wily mythomaniac claimed the Wild West as the stuff of serious literature.

Little Big Man

W. Somerset Maugham

When war broke out in 1914, Somerset Maugham was dispatched by the British Secret Service to Switzerland under the guise of completing a play. Multilingual, knowledgeable about many European countries and a celebrated writer, Maugham had the perfect cover, and the assignment appealed to his love of romance, and of the ridiculous. The stories collected in Ashenden are rooted in Maugham's own experiences as an agent, reflecting the ruthlessness and brutality of espionage, its intrigue and treachery, as well as its absurdity.

Ashenden

Kurt Vonnegut

‘Black satire of the highest polish’ Guardian 
 
Whilst awaiting trial for war crimes in an Israeli prison, Howard W. Campbell Jr sets down his memoirs on an old German typewriter. He has used such a typewriter before, when he worked as a Nazi propagandist under Goebbels. Though that was before he agreed to become a spy for US military. Is Howard guilty? Can a black or white verdict ever be reached in a world that’s a gazillion shades of grey? 
 
‘After Vonnegut, everything else seems a bit tame’ Spectator

Mother Night

Günter Grass

To compensate for his unusually large Adam's apple - source of both discomfort and distress - fourteen year old Joachim Mahlke turns himself into athlete and ace diver. Soon he is known to his peers and his nation as 'The Great Mahlke'. But to his enemies, he remains a target. He is different and doomed in a country scarred by the war. 
 
Cat and Mouse was first published in 1961, two years after Gunter Grass' controversial and applauded masterpiece, The Tin Drum. Once again Grass turns his attention on Danzig. With a subtle blend of humour and power, Cat and Mouse ostensibly relates the rise of Mahlke from clown to hero. But Mahlke's outlandish antics hide the darkness at the heart of a nation torn by Nazi violence, the war and its aftermath.

Cat and Mouse

WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY STELLA RIMINGTON 
 
It lies somewhere beneath the snow, high in the Dolomites: Nazi gold, tainted with the blood of murdered men. Only a few know its secrets, and one by one they come in search of it – a hot-tempered Italian Comtessa, a racketeering pimp, a Greek criminal, a film-maker and a hapless writer. A tense battle of wits leads to an explosive finale in Innes’ classic tale of revenge and deadly greed.

The Lonely Skier

The spectre of another world war haunts journalist Walter Craig and disturbs the peace of his seaside holiday. But below the Cornish cliffs, hidden by churning seas, the enemy is very real indeed, and much closer than anyone could suspect. Craig and his singularly resourceful fisherman friend alone discover the terrible truth - a potentially devastating threat to Britain’s merchant ships - and alone must risk their lives against the might of the German navy. This is a classic wartime adventure from the master of suspenseful storytelling.

Wreckers Must Breathe

What could link the slick world of London boardrooms, an isolated island race in the Maldives and the mysterious voyages of a battered ship skippered by a brooding alcoholic? It falls to Geoffrey Bailey to unlock the mystery, but first he must overcome both family tragedy and the unpredictable treacheries of land, sea and big business.

The Strode Venturer

Read Kurt Vonnegut's powerful masterpiece, which is as timely now as when it was first published. 
 
Billy Pilgrim – hapless barber's assistant, successful optometrist, alien abductee, senile widower and soldier – has become unstuck in time. Hiding in the basement of a slaughterhouse in Dresden, with the city and its inhabitants burning above him, he finds himself a survivor of one of the most deadly and destructive battles of the Second World War. But when, exactly? How did he get here? And how does he get out? 
 
Travel through time and space on the shoulders of Vonnegut himself. This is a book about war. Listen to what he has to say: it is of the utmost urgency. 
 
‘An extraordinary success. A book to read and reread. He is a true artist’ New York Times Book Review 
 
This series of war novels from Vintage Classics presents eight powerful stories about the horror and waste of war - each a passionate plea to prevent its repetition.

Slaughterhouse 5

Vintage Quarterbound Classics

Erskine Childers

The first modern spy novel and a must-read for espionage junkies and fans of James Bond and John Le Carré. 
 
 When Carruthers receives a letter from his friend Davies suggesting a Baltic sailing trip, the vision of a manned yacht, A1 scenery and excellent duck shooting quickly works its charm. But Carruthers hopes for a holiday are quickly dashed. There has been suspicious German activity along the coast. The Medusa, manned by the sinister Dollman, has already tried to destroy Davies. What are the Germans up to? Nothing less than a plot to invade Britain. And only these two courageous Englishmen can stop them. 
 
Published in 1903, The Riddle of the Sands is considered the first modern spy novel.

The Riddle of the Sands

Hemingway’s enduring story of resilience and solitude: One of the most powerful tales of courage and endurance ever written 
 
An ageing fisherman sets out alone into the Gulf Stream, determined to prove that his strength and skill have not left him. When he hooks a great marlin, he begins a struggle that will test his pride and his place in the world. Simple, powerful and deeply moving, The Old Man and the Sea captures what it means to persist – even in the face of inevitable loss. 
 
BRIEF ENCOUNTERS: classic novellas and captivating stories, to be read in a single sitting or savoured over days

The Old Man and the Sea

Nevil Shute wrote this prophetic novel just before the start of the Second World War. In it he describes the devastation that results from an aerial bomb attack on Southampton that destroys the city's infrastructure and leaves the inhabitants at the mercy of cholera and further assaults. The story follows the trials and tribulations of the Corbett family as they try to get to safety.

What Happened to the Corbetts

After Philip Stenning is involved in a near-fatal plane crash, he feels he owes a debt of gratitude to the man who rescued him. However, his mysterious saviour is an escaped convict, and his determination to help him leads Stenning into a tense and dramatic adventure of intrigue, drug-running and murder.

Marazan

Through a series of mishaps, Henry Warren, a recently divorced City financier, ends up in hospital in a Northern town ruined by the closure of its shipyard. Moved by the fate of the town's inhabitants, Warren risks his fortune and reputation to save the shipyard and restore the town to its former prosperity. In seeking to change the fate of the town, he radically changes his own.

Ruined City

Michael Ondaatje

Booker prize winning author Michael Ondaatje invites you on a brutal, beautiful journey into the American West. . . 
 
At twenty-one years old, Billy the Kid has killed a man for each year he’s been alive. 
 
Roaming the blasted planes of the Wild West, he moves between friends, foes and lovers, fighting to keep just one step ahead of the law. Yet in this twisted wasteland – a country of mad dogs, of sweat and gore and blinding heat – the sheriffs play dirty too.Melding prose, poetry, imagined interviews and ephemeral photography, Ondaatje weaves together a lyrical reinterpretation of Billy’s short, infamous existence, forming a portrait of a young man, and a young country, borne out of violence, threaded through with disaster, yet rich in wonder. 
 
‘Ondaatje’s language is clean and energetic, with the pop of bullets. This is literature, art.’ Annie Dillard 
 
'Ondaatje’s eye for detail is wonderful and he uses it poetically, with superb restraint' Larry McMurtry

The Collected Works of Billy the Kid

Pierre Boulle

The Bridge on the River Kwai tells the story of three POWs who endure the hell of the Japanese camps on the Burma-Siam railway - Colonel Nicholson, a man prepared to sacrifice his life but not his dignity; Major Warden, a modest hero, saboteur and deadly killer; Commander Shears, who escaped from hell but was sent back. 
 
Ordered by the Japanese to build a bridge, the Colonel refuses, as it is against regulations for officers to work with other ranks. The Japanese give way but, to prove a point of British superiority, construction of the bridge goes ahead - at great cost to the men under Nicholson's command.

The Bridge On The River Kwai

Bitter and impassioned, The Tin Drum delivers a scathing dissection of Germany and Poland under the Nazis. 
 
On his third birthday Oskar decides to stop growing. Haunted by the deaths of his parents and wielding his tin drum Oskar recounts the events of his extraordinary life; from the long nightmare of the Nazi era to his anarchic adventures in post-war Germany. 
 
'Grass is one of the master fabulists of our age' The Times 
 
TRANSLATED BY BREON MITCHELL 
 
WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY THE AUTHOR 
 
This series of war novels from Vintage Classics presents eight powerful stories about the horror and waste of war - each a passionate plea to prevent its repetition.

The Tin Drum

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