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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Bernard Malamud

This is a book about heroism - of sorts.  Roy Hobbs has an immense natural gift for playing baseball. He could become one of the great ones of the game, a player unmatched in his time - a hero. But his first hard-won big chance ends violently, at the hands of a crazy girl, and then it is years before he gets another shot. At last, in a few short seasons, or never, he must achieve the towering reputation that he feels is his right.

The Natural

Joe Simpson

Touching the Void is the heart-stopping account of Joe Simpson's terrifying adventure in the Peruvian Andes. He and his climbing partner, Simon, reached the summit of the remote Siula Grande in June 1995. A few days later, Simon staggered into Base Camp, exhausted and frost-bitten, with news that that Joe was dead. 
 
What happened to Joe, and how the pair dealt with the psychological traumas that resulted when Simon was forced into the appalling decision to cut the rope, makes not only an epic of survival but a compelling testament of friendship.

Touching The Void

Maurice Herzog

One of the finest mountaineering books. A phenomenal tale of strength and valour. 
 
WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY JOE SIMPSON 
 
In 1950, no mountain higher than 8,000 meters had ever been climbed. Maurice Herzog and other members of the French Alpine Club resolved to try. This is the enthralling story of the first conquest of Annapurna and the harrowing descent. With breathtaking courage and grit manifest on every page, Annapurna is one of the greatest adventure stories ever told. 
 
As well as an introduction by Joe Simpson, this new edition includes 16 pages of photographs, which provide a remarkable visual record of this legendary expedition. 
 
The distinguished French mountaineer Maurice Herzog was leader of the 1950 expedition to Annapurna. He was one of the two climbers to reach the summit.

Annapurna

The First Conquest of an 8000-Metre Peak

Charles Sprawson

A new re-issue of the cult swimming classic, a beautiful read filled with detailed description and powerful prose. 
 
WITH A NEW INTRODUCTION BY AMY LIPTROT 
 
‘A luminously romantic history of swimming’ Guardian 
 
Haunts of the Black Masseur is a dazzling introduction to the great swimming heroes, from Byron leaping into the surf at Shelley's funeral to Hart Crane diving to his death in the Bay of Mexico. Bursting with anecdotes, Charles Sprawson leads us into a watery world populated by lithe demi-gods – a world that has obsessed humans from the ancient Greeks and Romans, to Yeats, Woolf, Fitzgerald and Hockney. 
 
Original, enticing and dripping with references to literature, film, art and Olympic history, this cult swimming classic pays sparkling tribute to water and the cultural meanings we attach to it. 
 
‘This splendid and wholly original book is as zestful as a plunge in champagne’ Iris Murdoch

Haunts of the Black Masseur

The Swimmer as Hero

Roger Deakin

Waterlog celebrates the magic of water and the beauty of wild Britain. 
 
In 1996 Roger Deakin set out to swim the British Isles. He swam in the sea, in rivers, in streams, tarns, lakes, lochs, ponds, lidos, swimming pools, fens, dykes, moats, aqueducts, waterfalls, flooded quarries and even canals. This funny, wise, delightful book documents his journey. It inspired a movement, creating wild swimmers out of many readers. 
 
Detained by water bailiffs in Winchester, intercepted in the Fowey estuary by coastguards, mistaken for a suicide on Camber sands, confronting the Corryvreckan whirlpool in the Hebrides, Deakin discovered just how much of an outsider the native swimmer is to his landlocked, fully-dressed fellow citizens. 
 
Waterlog is a personal journey, a bold assertion of the native swimmer's right to roam, and an unforgettable celebration of the magic of water. 
 
INTRODUCED BY OLIVIA LAING 
 
'A delicious, cleansing, funny, wise and joyful book, so wonderfully full of energy and life’ Jane Gardam' 
 
'Roger Deakin is the perfect companion for an invigorating armchair swim' Daily Telegraph

Waterlog

A Swimmer's Journey Through Britain

C L R James

'To say "the best cricket book ever written" is piffingly inadequate praise' Guardian 
 
'Great claims have been made for [Beyond a Boundary] since its first appearance in 1963: that it is the greatest sports book ever written; that it brings the outsider a privileged insight into West Indian culture; that it is a severe examination of the colonial condition. All are true' Sunday Times 
 
C L R James, one of the foremost thinkers of the twentieth century, was devoted to the game of cricket. In this classic summation of half a lifetime spent playing, watching and writing about the sport, he recounts the story of his overriding passion and tells us of the players whom he knew and loved, exploring the game's psychology and aesthetics, and the issues of class, race and politics that surround it. 
 
Part memoir of a West Indian boyhood, part passionate celebration and defence of cricket as an art form, part indictment of colonialism, Beyond a Boundary addresses not just a sport but a whole culture and asks the question, 'What do they know of cricket who only cricket know?

Beyond A Boundary

Ernest Hemingway

This is Hemingway's East African safari journal. 
 
'All I wanted to do was get back to Africa' 
 
Green Hills of Africa is Ernest Hemingway's lyrical journal of a month on safari in the great game country of East Africa, where he and his wife Pauline journeyed in December 1933. Hemingway's well-known interest in - and fascination with - big-game hunting is magnificently captured in this evocative account of his trip. It is an examination of the lure of the hunt and an impassioned portrait of the glory of the African landscape and of the beauty of a wilderness that was, even then, being threatened by the incursions of man. 
 
'In a class by itself - the country at all hours shines bright and clear in these pages' Daily Telegraph 
 
'The best-written story of big-game hunting anywhere' New York Times

Green Hills of Africa

Is there anything quite so exhilarating as swimming in wild water? This is a joyful swimming tour of Britain, a frog’s-eye view of the country’s best bathing holes – the rivers, rock pools, lakes, ponds, lochs and sea that define a watery island. Charming, funny, inspiring, an assertion of the native swimmer's right to roam, a celebration of the magic of water – this book will indeed make you want to strip off and leap in. 
 
Selected from the book Waterlog by Roger Deakin 
 
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: 
Eating by Nigella Lawson 
Liberty by Virginia Woolf 
Summer by Laurie Lee 
Desire by Haruki Murakami

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