Michael Symmons Roberts’s fourth book of poetry, Corpus, was the winner of the 2004 Whitbread Poetry Award, and was shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize, the Forward Prize, and the Griffin International Prize. His sixth collection, Drysalter, was the winner of both the Forward Prize and the Costa Poetry Prize in 2013. He collaborated with Paul Farley on Edgelands (Cape/Vintage) and will do so again in The Deaths of the Poets (Cape, 2017). He has also worked many times with the composer James MacMillan. He has published two novels, and is Professor of Poetry at Manchester Metropolitan University.

Michael Symmons Roberts

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Anthony Burgess

Michael Byrne is an Irish Don Juan - a composer, a charmer, a bigamist and a thug.  He moves from country to country, from bed to bed, selling his talents and leaving a trail of children in his wake.  His journey takes him from post-Great War London to the centre of Hitler's Third Reich and then he vanishes. His twin sons travel across the troubled face of Europe to pursue their father for one final apocalyptic reckoning.

Byrne

Richard Yates

Young, newly married and intensely ambitious, Michael Davenport is trying to make a living as a writer. His adoring wife, Lucy, has a private fortune that he won't touch in case it compromises his art. She in turn is never quite certain of what is expected of her. All she knows is that everyone else seems, somehow, happier. 
 
In this magnificent novel, at once bitterly sad and achingly funny, Richard Yates again shows himself to be the supreme chronicler of the American Dream and its casualties.

Young Hearts Crying

Hammond Innes

Michael Randall flees to the wild seas around the Shetlands to escape an impossible dilemma. There he finds a North Sea oil rig and the unlikely possibility of a new life. But one stormy night this glimmer of hope for the future, and Randall's life itself, is thrown into jeopardy.

North Star

Amos Oz

One of Amos Oz's earliest and most famous novels, My Michael was a sensation upon its initial publication in 1968 and it has an enduring power to surprise and mesmerize. 
 
‘His characters…ride the river of history’ New Yorker 
 
 'A beautiful work of great depth and lingers in the mind as a lyric song to his country's people as much as a moving love story' Arthur Miller 
 
 1950s Jerusalem. 
 
Hannah Gonen has just married and is thrilled and pained by her young well-meaning husband, Michael. Haunted by her dreams of two boys who disappeared from Jerusalem after the establishment of the state of Israel, Hannah gradually withdraws from her husband into a private world of fantasy and suppressed desires. 
 
 
This 2015 edition includes an updated introduction from the author.

My Michael

Brian Moore

When Michael Dillon is ordered by the IRA to park his car in the carpark of a Belfast hotel, he is faced with a moral choice which leaves him absolutely nowhere to turn. He knows that he is planting a bomb that would kill and maim dozens of people. But he also knows that if he doesn't, his wife will be killed. 
 
See also: Reading in the Dark by Seamus Deane

Lies of Silence

William Maxwell

Discover the tragically beautiful world of So Long, See You Tomorrow, a quietly devastating masterpiece of human frailty and resilience 
 
Away from the quiet farmlands of Illinois, two lonely teenagers – bound by the burden of their home lives – forge a delicate friendship. But when jealousy ignites in one of their families, it leads to unthinkable tragedy, and severs the two boys' bond forever. 
 
Fifty years later, haunted by the past, the narrator seeks to piece together those harrowing events and find redemption for a lifetime of regret. So Long, See You Tomorrow is a haunting exploration of memory, loss, and the enduring quest for forgiveness. 
 
‘One of the great books of our age. It is the subtlest of miniatures that contains our deepest sorrows and truths and love’ Michael Ondaatje

So Long, See You Tomorrow

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

J. M. Barrie

A beautiful deluxe gift edition of the magical classic of the boy who never grew up with foiled covers, marbled endpapers, sprayed edges, beautiful paper and finished with a silk ribbon. 
 
Wendy, Michael and John are fast asleep when the window of their nursery blows open and lets in a very remarkable boy, Peter Pan, and his fairy, Tinker Bell. Peter entices the three children from their beds and out through the window to Neverland. There, they encounter mermaids, fairies, the Lost Boys, the Indian princess Tiger Lily and her tribe, and do battle with a villainous gang of pirates and their leader, the sinister Captain Hook. 
 
This hardback is part of VINTAGE COLLECTOR’S CLASSICS, a series of luxurious books especially crafted for collectors and fans of beautiful special editions. Sumptuous design meets the highest quality production. Discover timeless classics beautifully bound for every bookshelf.

Peter Pan

Heinrich Von Kleist

'I finished it in one sitting. Probably for the tenth time... it carries me along waves of wonder' Franz Kafka 
 
MICHAEL KOHLHAAS HAS BEEN WRONGED. HE WILL HAVE JUSTICE. 
 
Based on the real life of an ordinary horse-dealer cheated by a government official, Michael Kohlhaas is the darkly comical and magnificently weird story of one man's alienation from a corrupt legal system. When his attempts to claim his rights are thwarted by bureaucracy and nepotism, Kohlhaas vows to take justice into his own - increasingly bloody - hands. Will he be remembered as a dangerous enemy of the peace, or a vigilante hero? 
 
Praised by Franz Kafka, Thomas Mann, Susan Sontag, Roberto Bolaño, Werner Herzog, and J. M. Coetzee, this is one of the most influential tales in German literature. In this vital new translation by the renowned poet Michael Hofmann, Kleist's bizarre, brutal and maddening story is urgent today.

Michael Kohlhaas

Newly translated by Michael Hofmann

Rex Warner

WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY MICHAEL MOORCOCK 
 
A model of efficiency and order, the aerodrome stands on the hill looking down on the village below. Roy, coming of age in the messy, violent and adulterous world of the villagers, is simultaneously attracted and repelled by this strange place and by the powerful figure of the Air Vice-Marshal. Soon he is led to leave his family, his friends and his love in order to join the aerodrome and confront the secrets of this mysterious and sinister place...

The Aerodrome

A love story

Patrick White

Eddie Twyborn is bisexual and beautiful, the son of a Judge and a drunken mother. With his androgynous hero - Eudoxia/Eddie/Eadith Twyborn - and through his search for identity, for self-affirmation and love in its many forms, Patrick White takes us into the ambiguous landscapes, sexual, psychological and spiritual, of the human condition.

The Twyborn Affair

John Cheever

In an idyllic American village, elderly romantic Lemuel Sears still has it in him to fall wildly in love with strangers of both sexes. But Sears's paradise is under threat; the pond he loves is being fouled by unscrupulous polluters involved in organised crime. Can Sears thwart the monstrous aspects of late-twentieth-century civilisation and save his beloved village? 
 
Cheever's wry fable of modern American is interlaced with musings on everything from the etiquette of supermarket queues to the evolution of the ice-skate.

Oh What A Paradise It Seems

Discover Michael Ondaatje's debut novel, 'a beautifully detailed story, perhaps the finest jazz novel ever written' Sunday Times 
 
Based on the life of cornet player Buddy Bolden, one of the legendary jazz pioneers of turn-of-the-twentieth-century New Orleans, Coming Through Slaughter is an extraordinary recreation of a remarkable musical life and a tragic conclusion. Through a collage of memoirs, interviews, imaginary conversations and monologues, Ondaatje builds a picture of a man who would work by day at a barber shop and by night unleash his talent to wild audiences who had never experienced such playing. But Buddy was also playing the field with two women, and inside his head was a ticking time-bomb which he was unable to stop.

Coming Through Slaughter

Virginia Woolf

<a href="https://shop.penguin.co.uk/products/virginia-woolf-s-greatest-works-by-vintage-classics?&amp;utm_source=Penguin.co.uk&amp;utm_medium=Linked_text&amp;utm_campaign=Virginia_Woolf_series_page_31_10">Buy all seven titles in this collection for £45</a>

Discover this groundbreaking work of twentieth-century literary fiction about one day in the life of a woman preparing to give a party. 
 
 In this vivid portrait of one day in a woman's life, Clarissa Dalloway is preoccupied with the last-minute details of a party she is to give that evening. As she readies her house she is flooded with memories and re-examines the choices she has made over the course of her life. 
 
 'Mrs Dalloway contains some of the most beautiful, complex, incisive and idiosyncratic sentences ever written in English, and that alone would be reason enough to read it. It is one of the most moving, revolutionary artworks of the twentieth century' Michael Cunningham, author of The Hours

Mrs Dalloway (Vintage Classics Woolf Series)

Graham Greene

WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY PAUL THEROUX 
 
Three men meet on a ship bound for Haiti, a world in the grip of the corrupt 'Papa Doc' and the Tontons Macoute, his sinister secret police. Brown the hotelier, Smith the innocent American and Jones the confidence man - these are the 'comedians' of Graham Greene's title. Hiding behind their actors' masks, they hesitate on the edge of life. And, to begin with, they are men afraid of love, afraid of pain, afraid of fear itself...

The Comedians

Thomas Mann

To unlock his full creative potential, Adrian Leverkühn makes a lethal pact with nature and intentionally contracts syphilis. 
 
A brilliant young composer, Adrian believes that the disease-induced madness will fuel his genius. But while his music reaches new heights, his mind and morality begin to unravel. Mann's interpretation of the Faustian legend is a story of madness and sanity, genius and corruption, intellectual attainment and Germany's moral fall. 
 
'Arguably the great German novel' New York Times

Doctor Faustus

James Kelman

Patrick Doyle is a twenty-nine-year-old teacher in an ordinary comprehensive school. Isolated, frustrated and increasingly bitter at the system he is employed to maintain, he begins his rebellion, fuelled by drink and his passionate, unrequited love for a fellow teacher.

A Disaffection

Jean Giono

Harry Brockway

'And so, with great care, he planted his hundred acorns' 
 
While hiking through the wild lavender in a wind-swept, desolate valley in Provence, a man comes across a solitary shepherd called Elzéard Bouffier. Staying with him, he watches Elzéard sorting and then planting hundreds of acorns as he walks through the wilderness. 
 
Ten years later, after surviving the First World War, he visits the shepherd again. A young forest is slowly spreading over the valley - Elzéard has continued his work. Year after year the narrator returns to see the miracle being created: a verdant, green landscape that is testament to one man's creative instinct. miracle he is gradually creating: a verdant, green landscape that is a testament to one man's creative instinct. 
 
'I love the humanity of this story and how one man's efforts can change the future for so many' Michael Morpurgo, Independent 
 
VINTAGE EARTH is a series of books that reveals our ever-changing relationship with the environment. These are stories old and young, set in worlds real or imagined, that allow us to explore our connection to the natural world. Transformative, wild, surprising and essential, these novels take on the most urgent story of our times.

The Man Who Planted Trees

A novel from the Vintage Earth collection

Murray Bail

'A masterpiece. A novel of high seriousness and higher playfulness' Michael Hulse, Spectator 
 
 On a property in New South Wales, a man named Holland lives with his daughter, Ellen. As years pass and Ellen grows into a beautiful young woman, her father announces his decision: she will marry the first man who can name all the eucalypts, down to the last tree. 
 
 As suitors clamber to meet Holland's challenge, Ellen encounters a strange young man among her father's trees - a storyteller, with enchanting tales of faraway lands. 
 
 'Murray Bail is the warmest and quick-witted of storytellers. You will never forget what is at the heart of this book: one of the great and most surprising courtships in literature' Michael Ondaatje

Eucalyptus

Victor Hugo

Read the masterful story of romance and revolution behind the hit BBC TV series. 
 
Les Misérables is a novel peopled by colourful characters from the nineteenth-century Parisian underworld; the street children, the prostitutes and the criminals. In telling the story of escaped convict Jean Valjean, and his efforts to reform his ways and care for the little orphan girl he rescues from a life of cruelty, Victor Hugo drew attention to the plight of the poor and oppressed. 
 
Sensational, dramatic, packed with rich excitement and filled with the sweep and violence of human passions, Les Misérables is one of the greatest stories ever told. 
 
NOW A MAJOR BBC TV ADAPTATION STARRING DOMINIC WEST, OLIVIA COLEMAN AND DAVID OYELOWO 
 
'There are plenty of translations of this extensive, exuberant novel that cut out anything superfluous. But God is in the detail…This is the one to read’ Jeanette Winterson

Les Miserables

Kingsley Amis

Malcolm, Peter and Charlie and their Soave-sodden wives have one main ambition left in life: to drink Wales dry. But their routine is both shaken and stirred when they are joined by professional Welshman Alun Weaver (CBE) and his wife, Rhiannon.

The Old Devils

Stella Gibbons

A festive treat from a treasured comic writer. It's Christmas-time at Cold Comfort Farm and it's the worst sort of family gathering... 
 
WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY ALEXANDER MCCALL SMITH 
 
The title story tells of a typical Christmas at the farm before the coming of Flora Poste. It is a parody of the worst sort of family Christmas: Adam Lambsbreath dresses up as Father Christmas in two of Judith's red shawls. There are unsuitable presents, unpleasant insertions into the pudding and Aunt Ada Doom orders Amos to carve the turkey, adding: 'Ay, would it were a vulture, 'twere more fitting!' 
 
'Stella Gibbons is the Jane Austen of the 20th century' Lynne Truss, author of the Constable Twitten series.

Christmas at Cold Comfort Farm

The perfect Christmas treat

James Hogg

'A Scottish classic, a world classic' Ian Rankin, Observer 
 
 
Robert is a difficult and disturbed young man. He comes from a troubled family background and turns to his Calvinist faith for solace but finds it hard to get along with other people, particularly his brother and his dissolute father. After he falls in with the mysterious and charming Gil-Martin his actions become more and more extreme. He convinces himself that he is one of the lucky few who have been chosen for heaven and that therefore all his actions automatically right and good...even murder. 
 
WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY LUCY HUGHES-HALLETT

The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner

Rudyard Kipling

'They sing in my head even now... What a wonderful storyteller/poet he was' Michael Morpurgo, Guardian 
 
Have you ever wondered how the leopard got his spots? Or how the camel got his hump? Rudyard Kipling's witty and beautifully written stories explain these secrets and many more and introduce such memorable characters as the Elephant's Child, the Cat that Walked by Himself and the Butterfly that Stamped. 
 
'Quite irresistible' The Times 
 
 WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY PHILIP PULLMAN

Just So Stories

Evan Shepard is a young man with a chequered past when he first meets the Drakes, after his car breaks down outside their house. Behind him, he has a troubled adolescence, a failed marriage and a little daughter, but his meeting with the quiet and beautiful Rachel heralds a new start. However, after their swift marriage, things don't work out quite as planned and the stresses of living with Rachel's family, in their shared house in Cold Spring Harbor, begin to take their toll on the new couple.

Cold Spring Harbor

José Saramago

Watching a rented video, Tertuliano Maximo Afonso is shocked to notice that one of the actors is identical to him in every physical detail. He embarks on a secret quest to find his double and sets in motion a train of events that he cannot control. Saramago's novel explores the nature of individuality and examines the fear and insecurity that arise when our singularity comes under threat, when even a wife cannot tell the original from the imposter...

The Double

(Enemy)

W. Somerset Maugham

Larry Darrell is a young American in search of the absolute. The progress of this spiritual odyssey involves him with some of Maugham's most brillant characters - his fiancee Isabel, whose choice between love and wealth have lifelong repercussions, and Elliot Templeton, her uncle, a classic expatriate American snob. The most ambitious of Maugham's novels, this is also one in which Maugham himself plays a considerable part as he wanders in and out of the story, to observe his characters struggling with their fates.

The Razor's Edge

Robin Davies knows how to look after number one.  Raised in a bland suburb of South London in the 1930s, Robin longs for the freedom to do what he wants.  When he escapes to study in Oxford, he meets Nancy Bennett, a young woman even less worldly than himself.  As Robin stumbles through his rites of passage to adulthood, involving rebellion, self-discovery, sex, war, seduction and the threat of commitment, we come to realise just how far he will go to have his cake and eat it.

You Can't Do Both

Rosemary Tonks

Gut-wrenching, ingenious, absolutely hilarious, this is the rediscovered story of woman's desperate quest for freedom. 
 
'I'm thirty, and I'm stuck' 
 
Arabella is on an increasingly desperate quest for freedom from her overbearing father and her conspicuously absent brother. But her desire for self-actualisation only ends up leading her into the orbit of a happily married man. A spiky, self-conscious love affair begins, complete with awful dinner dates, devastating kisses and agonising introspection. Can Arabella realise what she wants? Can she escape the trap of being sexy, good and likable? 
 
Back in print after many decades, this is an outstanding novel by an extraordinary and little-known writer, the inimitable Rosemary Tonks. 
 
'Salted with wit and peppered with clever images' Guardian 
 
‘At their best, the novels are feats of Tonks’s earlier personality, shining and acrid in its ‘fierce hot-blooded sulkiness’… the glittering triumph of an unscathable ego’ London Review of Books 
 
‘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

The Way Out of Berkeley Square

Brother and sister, Constance and Kenneth Fielding live in calm respectability, just out of reach of London and the Blitz. But when a series of uninvited guests converge upon them – from a Balkan exile to Ken’s old flame and the siblings’ own raffish father – the household struggles to preserve its precious peace. In this full house, in a quiet corner of suburbia, no one expects to find romance.

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