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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George Orwell

A dystopian masterpiece - the powerful and prophetic novel that defined the twentieth century. 
 
The year is 1984. War and revolution have created an unrecognisable world. Great Britain, now known as Airstrip One, is ruled by the Party, led by Big Brother. Mass surveillance is total and The Thought Police ensure no individual thinking is allowed. 
 
Winston Smith works at The Ministry of Truth, carefully rewriting history. But Winston dreams of freedom, and of rebellion. It is here that he falls in love with Julia, and starts a secret, forbidden affair with her - but in this world nothing can be kept secret, and they are forced to face consequences more terrifying than either of them could have ever imagined. 
 
'A profound, terrifying, and wholly fascinating book' New Yorker 
 
'No novel of the past century has had more influence than George Orwell&rsquo;s 1984' Atlantic 
 
WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY ROBERT HARRIS

1984

E. R. Braithwaite

WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY CARYL PHILLIPS 
 
In 1945, Rick Braithwaite, a smart, highly educated ex-RAF pilot, looks for a job in British engineering. He is deeply shocked to realise that, as a black man from British Guiana, no one will employ him because of the colour of his skin. In desperation he turns to teaching, taking a job in a tough East End school, and left to govern a class of unruly teenagers. With no experience or guidance, Braithwaite attempts to instill discipline, confound prejudice and ultimately, to teach.

To Sir With Love

Laurens Van Der Post

Laurens van der Post was fascinated and appalled at the fate of this remarkable people.  Ostracised by all the changing face of African cultural life they retreated deep into the Kalahari desert. His fascinating attempt to capture their way of life and the secrets of their ancient heritage provide captivating reading and a unique insight into a forgotten way of life.

The Lost World of the Kalahari

With 'The Great and the Little Memory'

Patrick Modiano

WINNER OF THE NOBEL PRIZE IN LITERATURE 
 
Missing, a young girl, Dora Bruder, age 15. 
 
One winter night in 1941, a Jewish girl runs away from her Paris boarding school. Stumbling across her disappearance listed in an old newspaper, Patrick Modiano finds himself propelled on a quest to exhume her fate. 
 
His search will go on to last a decade. Little more will be found, just fragments of a lost family history, a sense of the dark streets of occupied Paris, Dora’s name on a list of those sent to Auschwitz. And the spectre of Modiano’s own troubled past, from which he can no longer look away. 
 
‘One of France’s most important novelists’ The New York Times 
 
'[A] spokesman for the disappeared’ Guardian

The Search Warrant

Dora Bruder

John Fowles

Two years after The Collector had brought him international recognition and a year before he published The Magus, John Fowles set out his ideas on life in The Aristos. The chief inspiration behind them was the fifth century BC philosopher Heraclitus. In the world he posited of constant and chaotic flux the supreme good was the Aristos, 'of a person or thing, the best or most excellent its kind'.'What I was really trying to define was an ideal of human freedom (the Aristos) in an unfree world,' wrote Fowles in 1965. He called a materialistic and over-conforming culture to reckoning with his views on a myriad of subjects - pleasure and pain, beauty and ugliness, Christianity, humanism, existentialism, socialism

The Aristos

Manuel Puig

Valentin and Molina seemingly share little other than a cell in this queer classic ahead of its time. 
 
'Dazzling... a triumph' Observer 
 
Sometimes they talk all night long. In the still darkness of their Buenos Aires prison cell, Molina re-weaves the glittering and fragile stories of the film he loves, and the cynical Valentin listens. Valentin believes in the just cause that makes all suffering bearable; Molina believes in the magic of love that makes all else endurable. 
 
Though they seemingly share little other than a cell, the two form a bond so intimate - and a relationship so profoundly affecting - that only the other could understand. 
 
'A visionary work that breathed life into certain dimensions of human possibility long before society at large was prepared to imagine them.' Carolina de Robertis, Los Angeles Review of Books

Kiss of the Spider Woman

The Queer Classic Everyone Should Read

Angela Carter

Is Sophie Fevvers, toast of Europe's capitals, part swan...or all fake? 
 
Courted by the Prince of Wales and painted by Toulouse-Lautrec, she is an aerialiste extraordinaire and star of Colonel Kearney's circus. She is also part woman, part swan. Jack Walser, an American journalist, is on a quest to discover the truth behind her identity. Dazzled by his love for her, and desperate for the scoop of a lifetime, Walser has no choice but to join the circus on its magical tour through turn-of-the-nineteenth-century London, St Petersburg and Siberia. 
 
WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY SARAH WATERS 
 
**One of the BBC's 100 Novels That Shaped Our World** 
 
'A spellbinding achievement' Literary Review 
 
'Raunchy, raucous...a rich, turn of the 19th century world, which reeks of human and animal variety' The Times

Nights at the Circus

Margaret Atwood

** THE SUNDAY TIMES NO. 1 BESTSELLER ** 
 
Discover the dystopian novel that started a phenomenon. 
 
Offred is a Handmaid in The Republic of Gilead. She is placed in the household of The Commander, Fred Waterford &ndash; her assigned name, Offred, means &lsquo;of Fred&rsquo;. She has only one function: to breed. If Offred refuses to enter into sexual servitude to repopulate a devastated world, she will be hanged. Yet even a repressive state cannot eradicate hope and desire. As she recalls her pre-revolution life in flashbacks, Offred must navigate through the terrifying landscape of torture and persecution in the present day, and between two men upon which her future hangs. 
 
'A fantastic, chilling story. And so powerfully feminist' Bernadine Evaristo 
 
&lsquo;As relevant today as it was when Atwood wrote it&rsquo; Guardian

The Handmaid's Tale

Vintage Quarterbound Classics

the book that inspired the hit TV series

Kurt Vonnegut

For eight years, big game hunter and war hero Harold Ryan has been presumed dead, lost in the Amazon rainforest while hunting for diamonds. Now he’s back, only to find his wife engaged to a hippy doctor and his son transformed into a pampered sissy. Though his hunting trophies remain, an inexplicable birthday cake sits in the living room bearing a strange icing inscription: Happy Birthday Wanda June. Can the household bear the returning force of Harold’s machismo? And who on earth is Wanda June?

Happy Birthday, Wanda June

Simone de Beauvoir

Laurence is a woman who appears to live an ideal life. 
 
Weekends in the country, weekdays in Paris – her life features all the trappings of 1960s French bourgeoisie. She has money, a handsome husband, two daughters and a lover. She also has a successful career as an advertising copywriter, though her mind unbidden writes copy while she’s at home, and dreams of domesticity in the office. 
 
But Laurence is a woman whose experience of life has always been overwritten by the expectation of perfection. It is only when her 10-year-old daughter, Catherine, starts to vocalise her despair about the unfairness of the world that Laurence begins to act, finally grappling with a life that prizes image over truth. 
 
TRANSLATED BY LAUREN ELKIN

The Image of Her

Jack Hilton

'Witty and unusual' George Orwell 
'Magnificent' W H Auden 
 
A lyrical tour of life as a young working-class man born into the first days of the 20th century, Caliban Shrieks is a lost masterpiece of 1930s British literature. 
 
Caliban Shrieks’ narrator went from a childhood of poverty, yet joy and freedom, to the punishing grind of factory life and the idiocy of being sent blindly into war. He was turned out of the army a vagrant - seeing England from city to city, county to county - before being thrust back into an uncertain cycle of working life as it unfolded in the post-war years. 
 
A story of men and women lost, wandering – and angrily dreaming of a better, fairer England, Hilton’s autobiographical novel is a bold modernist retelling of the myth of how we find ourselves disenfranchised from the world and sold into a slavery of our making.

Caliban Shrieks

Christopher Isherwood

Christopher Isherwood settled in California in 1939 and spent the war years writing for Hollywood, but by 1945 he had all but ceased to write fiction and even abandoned his habit of keeping a diary. Instead he embarked on a life of frantic socialising and drinking. Looking back from the 1970s, Isherwood recreated these years from personal memories to form a remarkably honest mixture of private and social history.

Lost Years

A Memoir 1945 - 1951

Simon Raven

'Brisk, bawdy and reckless' Evening Standard 
 
'A freak writer, he defies classification. In wilder moments he suggests a loose, lunatic collaboration of Trollope, Ouida and Waugh' Observer 
 
The Alms for Oblivion sequence - an extraordinary series of murders, suicides, affairs, fighting, fires and at least one explosion, blackmail, gambling, illness, madness, lots of parties and plenty of sex - draws to a close with two novels about death and retribution. But Simon Raven's achievement and the conflicted, colourful or uniquely vile characters he created are not easily forgotten after the last page is turned. 
 
Volume III includes Bring Forth the Body and The Survivors 
 
'There are some people who consider the greatest cycle of twentieth-century novels to be Anthony Powell's A Dance to the Music of Time. These people are wrong. Widmerpool and his joyless accomplices are as nothing compared to the characters in Simon Raven's majestic, scurrilous and scabrous Alms for Oblivion cycle' Guardian

Alms For Oblivion Volume III

Aldous Huxley

Could drugs offer a new way of seeing the world? In 1953, in the presence of an investigator, Aldous Huxley took four-tenths of a gramme of mescalin, sat down and waited to see what would happen. When he opened his eyes everything, from the flowers in a vase to the creases in his trousers, was transformed. His account of his experience, and his vision for all that psychedelics could offer to mankind, has influenced writers, artists and thinkers around the world. 
 
The unabridged text of The Doors of Perception by Aldous Huxley 
 
VINTAGE MINIS: GREAT MINDS. BIG IDEAS. LITTLE BOOKS. 
 
A series of short books by the world’s greatest writers on the experiences that make us human 
 
Also in the Vintage Minis series: 
Drinking by John Cheever 
Swimming by Roger Deakin 
Eating by Nigella Lawson 
Desire by Haruki Murakami

Psychedelics

Vintage Minis

Thomas Pynchon

Vineland, a zone of blessed anarchy in northern California, is the last refuge of hippiedom, a culture devastated by the sobriety epidemic, Reaganomics, and the Tube. Here, in an Orwellian 1984, Zoyd Wheeler and his daughter Prairie search for Prairie's long-lost mother, a Sixties radical who ran off with a narc. 
 
Vineland is vintage Pynchon, full of quasi-allegorical characters, elaborate unresolved subplots, corny songs ("Floozy with an Uzi"), movie spoofs (Pee-wee Herman in The Robert Musil Story), and illicit sex (including a macho variation on the infamous sportscar scene in V.).

Vineland

Jacqueline Harpman

'THE ’90S GENDER SWAP NOVEL YOU NEED TO READ NOW' (NEW YORK TIMES), FROM THE AUTHOR OF I WHO HAVE NEVER KNOWN MEN 
 
There’s a voice in Aline’s head: a voice that wants out. 
 
Brash, boisterous and sexually adventurous, this voice seems to be the antithesis of Aline, a prim literature professor for whom each day promises to be as quiet and conventional as the last. 
 
That is until, after thirty-five years of imprisonment, her alter ego breaks free. 
 
Taking on a life of his own, Orlanda – Aline’s second self – slips into the taut, rugged body of a young man. As Aline continues unaware, Orlanda follows, dragging gleeful chaos in his wake, vowing to leave both their existences forever altered. 
 
A bewitching fable, an androgynous dream, Orlanda is one woman’s reckoning with all the hidden sides of her soul. 
--- 
READER REVIEWS - JOIN THE ORLANDA OBSESSION: 
'Hilarious, life affirming, haunting…truly perfect in prose, plot, and concept. Just wow' 
'A powerful novel, witty, wicked and teasing' 
'It’s the perfect book' 
'This is the second book I've read by her and it's another masterpiece' 
'Reading this has confirmed Jacqueline Harpman as one of my favourite writers I’ve ever encountered'

Orlanda

JOIN THE OBSESSION 
'These might be the most beautiful books I've ever seen? Get them in an art gallery' 
'The marbled paper, I could cry' 
'Love love love this collection ' 
'I must have all of them' 
'Our beloved classics with sprayed edges too! They are absolutely STUNNING!' 
 
A beautiful deluxe gift edition of Orwell's terrifying, must-read dystopian novel about the erasure of individuality and free thought, with foiled covers, marbled endpapers, sprayed edges, beautiful paper and finished with a silk ribbon. 
 
The year is 1984. War and revolution have created an unrecognisable world. Great Britain, now known as Airstrip One, is ruled by the Party, led by Big Brother. Mass surveillance is total and The Thought Police ensure no individual thinking is allowed. 
 
Winston Smith works at The Ministry of Truth, carefully rewriting history. But Winston dreams of freedom, and of rebellion. It is here that he falls in love with Julia, and starts a secret, forbidden affair with her - but in this world nothing can be kept secret, and they are forced to face consequences more terrifying than either of them could have ever imagined. 
 
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.

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. As well as a family memoir, it is a social history of a period of striking change, and a portrait of the world which shaped Isherwood and which he rejected.

Kathleen and Frank

In his 1932 classic dystopian novel, Brave New World, Aldous Huxley depicted a future society in thrall to science and regulated by sophisticated methods of social control. Nearly thirty years later in Brave New World Revisited, Huxley checked the progress of his prophecies against reality and argued that many of his fictional fantasies had grown uncomfortably close to the truth. Brave New World Revisited includes Huxley's views on overpopulation, propaganda, advertising and government control, and is an urgent and powerful appeal for the defence of individualism still alarmingly relevant today.

Brave New World Revisited

Great Minds. Big Ideas. Little Books. 
 
The twenty books in the Vintage Minis box set bring you the world’s greatest writers on the experiences that make us human. These beautifully designed, entertaining little books explore the whole spectrum of life – from birth to death, and everything in between. 
 
Each short, stylish book sees a great contemporary or classic writer from the award-winning Vintage list take on a different subject. From Murakami on Desire to Eating by Nigella Lawson, Home by Salman Rushdie and Jeanette Winterson on Love, these books cover the human themes closest to our hearts. 
 
Desire Haruki Murakami 
Love Jeanette Winterson 
Babies Anne Enright 
Language Xiaolu Guo 
Motherhood Helen Simpson 
Fatherhood Karl Ove Knausgaard 
Summer Laurie Lee 
Jealousy Marcel Proust 
Sisters Louisa May Alcott 
Home Salman Rushdie 
Race Toni Morrison 
Liberty Virginia Woolf 
Swimming Roger Deakin 
Work Joseph Heller 
Depression William Styron 
Drinking John Cheever 
Eating Nigella Lawson 
Psychedelics Aldous Huxley 
Calm Tim Parks 
Death Julian Barnes

Vintage Minis Box Set

Tom Wolfe

Tom Wolfe's debut collection of essays - a brilliant, form-bending dive into the future of America as it careened through the 1960s 
 
In 1965, Tom Wolfe dropped like a bomb onto the American literary scene with his first book, The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby, an incandescent panorama of American counter-culture, its dances, bouffant hairdos, customised cars and rock concerts. Capturing the energy of the age in its portraits of Phil Spector, Cassius Clay, Las Vegas and the Nanny Mafia – as well as asking, why do doormen hate Volkswagens? – Wolfe’s flamboyant essay collection remains one of the great, revolutionary landmarks of modern non-fiction. 
 
'Journalism, it is said, is the first draft of history. Nobody exemplifies the dictum better than Wolfe, the cultural observer and social critic par excellence' Daily Telegraph

The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby

Laurens van der Post was a long-time friend of Jung and here presents Jung as he knew him: Jung the man, the discoverer and explorer of a new dimension in the human spirit, rather than Jung the psychologist. Calling him a 'universal personality, one of the greatest since the Renaissance', van der Post writes much more than simply a biographical study of Jung. 
 
Jung is a full-scale, unflinching attempt to convey the creative, pioneering greatness of the man and to show how his far-seeing vision has so greatly enlightened and enriched the spiritual poverty of modern man.

Jung and the Story of Our Time

Mark Doty

Why do dogs speak so profoundly to our inner lives? 
 
When Mark Doty decides to adopt a dog as a companion for his dying partner, he finds himself bringing home Beau, a large golden retriever, malnourished and in need of loving care, to join Arden, the black retriever. As Beau bounds back to life, the two dogs become Mark Doty's companions, his solace, and eventually the very life force that keeps him from abandoning all hope during the darkest days - their tenacity, loyalty and love inspiring him when all else fails.

Dog Years

A Memoir

Richard Flanagan

This is a story about the many forms of love and death, of war and truth, as one man comes of age, prospers, only to discover all that he has lost. 
 
In the despair of a Japanese POW camp on the Burma Death Railway, surgeon Dorrigo Evans is haunted by his love affair with his uncle’s young wife two years earlier. Struggling to save the men under his command from starvation, from cholera, from beatings, he receives a letter that will change his life forever. 
 
*WINNER OF THE MAN BOOKER PRIZE 2014* 
 
'An unforgettable story of men at war' The Times 
 
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 Narrow Road to the Deep North

Discover the Booker prize-winning masterpiece

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>

Virginia Woolf's most unusual and fantastic creation, a funny, exuberant tale that examines the very nature of sexuality. 
 
WITH INTRODUCTIONS BY PETER ACKROYD AND MARGARET REYNOLDS 
 
 As his tale begins, Orlando is a passionate young nobleman whose days are spent in rowdy revelry, filled with the colourful delights of Queen Elizabeth's court. By the close, he will have transformed into a modern, thirty-six-year-old woman and three centuries will have passed. Orlando will not only witness the making of history from its edge, but will find that his unique position as a woman who knows what it is to be a man will give him insight into matters of the heart. 
 
 The Vintage Classics Virginia Woolf series has been curated by Jeanette Winterson and Margaret Reynolds, and the texts used are based on the original Hogarth Press editions published by Leonard and Virginia Woolf. 
 
 **One of the BBC’s 100 Novels That Shaped Our World**

Orlando (Vintage Classics Woolf Series)

Discover this profound account of Huxley's famous experimentation with mescalin that has influenced writers and artists for decades. 
 
 ‘Concise, evocative, wise and, above all, humane, The Doors of Perception is a masterpiece’ Sunday Times 
 
In 1953, in the presence of an investigator, Aldous Huxley took four-tenths of a gram of mescalin, sat down and waited to see what would happen. When he opened his eyes everything, from the flowers in a vase to the creases in his trousers, was transformed. Huxley described his experience with breathtaking immediacy in The Doors of Perception. 
 
In its sequel Heaven and Hell, he goes on to explore the history and nature of mysticism. Still bristling with a sense of excitement and discovery, these illuminating and influential writings remain the most fascinating account of the visionary experience ever written. 
 
 WITH A FOREWORD J.G. BALLARD

The Doors of Perception

And Heaven and Hell

Derek Jarman

Read this meditative and inspiring diary of Derek Jarman's famous garden at Dungeness, which is also a powerful account of his life as an HIV positive man in the 1980s. 
 
 In 1986 Derek Jarman discovered he was HIV positive and decided to make a garden at his cottage on the barren coast of Dungeness. 
 
 Facing an uncertain future, he nevertheless found solace in nature, growing all manner of plants. While some perished beneath wind and sea-spray others flourished, creating brilliant, unexpected beauty in the wilderness. 
 
 Modern Nature is both a diary of the garden and a meditation by Jarman on his own life: his childhood, his time as a young gay man in the 1960s, his renowned career as an artist, writer and film-maker. It is at once a lament for a lost generation, an unabashed celebration of gay sexuality, and a devotion to all that is living. 
 
 'An essential - urgent - book for the 21st Century' Hans Ulrich Obrist 
 
 This new edition features an introduction from Olivia Laing, the author of Crudo

Modern Nature

Journals, 1989 – 1990

Norman Mailer

WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY ANDREW O'HAGAN 
 
In the summer of 1976 Gary Gilmore robbed two men. Then he shot them in cold blood. For those murders Gilmore was sent to languish on Death Row - and could confidently expect his sentence to be commuted to life imprisonment. In America, no one had been executed for ten years. 
 
But Gary Gilmore wanted to die, and his ensuing battle with the authorities for the right to do so made him into a world-wide celebrity - and ensured that his execution turned into the most gruesome media event of the decade.

The Executioner's Song

Richard Wright

Bigger Thomas has grown up in Chicago&rsquo;s slums, reckless, angry and adrift. 
 
A respectable job with the affluent Dalton family provides hope but sets him on course for a catastrophic collision between his world and theirs. Hunted by citizen and police alike, and baited by prejudiced officials, Bigger finds himself the cause célèbre in an ever-narrowing endgame. 
 
First published in 1940, Native Son shocked readers with its candid depiction of violence and confrontation of racial stereotypes. It went on to make Richard Wright the first bestselling black writer in America. 
 
&lsquo;In addition to being a masterpiece, a Great American Novel' Guardian 
 
'The most important and celebrated novel of Negro life to have appeared in America' James Baldwin 
 
WITH AN AFTERWORD BY GARY YOUNGE

Native Son

'Cracking entertainment... Dangerously, deliciously addictive' Daily Telegraph 
 
'[Raven is] a freak writer, he defies classification. In wilder moments he suggests a loose, lunatic collaboration of Trollope, Ouida and Waugh' Observer 
 
Enter Alms for Oblivion, Simon Raven's dazzling cycle of ten novels, all telling separate stories but at the same time linked together by the characters they have in common: schoolboys and businessmen, writers and soldiers, prostitutes and patient wives, actresses and models. In the first four novels Raven's wayward band of upper-class anti-heroes lurch from debauched parties to rehearsals for nuclear war; from blackmail to murder; from marriage to adultery and back again. 
 
Volume 1: The Rich Pay Late, Friends in Low Places, The Sabre Squadron and Fielding Gray 
 
'There are some people who consider the greatest cycle of twentieth-century novels to be Anthony Powell's A Dance to the Music of Time. These people are wrong. Widmerpool and his joyless accomplices are as nothing compared to the characters in Simon Raven's majestic, scurrilous and scabrous Alms for Oblivion cycle' Guardian

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