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Natsume Soseki

Discover the original Japanese Cat classic, now in a vibrant new translation by Nick Bradley, author of The Cat and the City. 
 
'I am a Cat. But I still don't have a name...' 
 
Once a stray kitten, I Am a Cat’s narrator finds himself adopted by a local scholar and thrown headfirst into the absurd upper middle-class world of Meiji-era Japan. Now a noble but somewhat world-weary observer, he has ample opportunity to dissect the strange ways and convoluted conversations of the human race. 
 
First published at the turn of the 20th century, and regarded as one of Japan’s most iconic classics, I Am a Cat is a captivating exploration of identity, society, and the often bewildering nature of the human condition—all seen through the eyes of a very special, uncompromising cat. 
 
‘A biting satire of Meiji-era Japan' Jessie Burton, Guardian 
 
‘Soseki is the representative modern Japanese novelist, a figure of truly national stature’ Haruki Murakami

I Am a Cat

Volume One

David Storey

WINNER OF THE 1976 BOOKER PRIZE 
 
'If you are looking for an intellectual and artistic honesty, a patient thoughtfulness and detailed insight into other lives...this novel will delight and move you' Guardian 
 
In spite of his brilliance, Colin Saville doesn't fit in easily at the grammar school in town - 1940s middle-class society is so different from the mining village of his childhood. He makes tentative friendships and meets girls over long, empty summers but feels like an outsider with them and, increasingly, at home. 
 
Following the pattern of David Storey’s own early years, Saville is a remarkably honest portrait of the tensions between parents and children, the difficulties of making one’s own way in life, and the social divisions that persist still.

Saville

Anita Desai

To the family living in the shabby, dusty house in Delhi, Tara's visit brings a sharp reminder of life outside tradition. For Bim, coping endlessly with their problems, there is a renewal of the old jealousies for, unlike her sister, she has failed to escape. Looking at both the cruelty and the beauty of family life and the harshness of India's modern history, Clear Light of Day brilliantly evokes the painful process of confronting and healing old wounds.

Clear Light of Day

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)

John Williams

By the author of Stoner, the surprise international bestseller 
 
After the brutal murder of his great-uncle, Julius Caesar, Octavian, a shy and scholarly youth of nineteen, suddenly finds himself heir to the vast power of Rome. He is destined, despite vicious power struggles, bloody wars and family strife, to transform his realm and become the greatest ruler the western world had ever seen: Augustus Caesar, the first Roman Emperor. 
 
Building on impeccable research, John Williams brings the legendary figure of Augustus vividly to life, and invests his characters with such profound humanity that we enter completely into the heat and danger of their lives and times.

Augustus

A Novel

Kurt Vonnegut

J'ailbird has the crackle and snap of Vonnegut's early work - his best since Cat's Cradle. Using the laid-back, ironic voice that has become his stademark, Vonnegut combines fiction and fact to construct an ingenious, wry morality play' - Newsweek 
 
Vonnegut's riotous urban fairytale about the various fiascos of the Nixon years - a firm fan favourite 
 
Walter J. Starbuck’s life was on the up. With a Harvard education, a job in federal government and then in Nixon’s White House, everything was going great. Only things took a truly spectacular turn for the worse when his involvement in the Watergate scandal landed him in jail. 
 
Now, as the brave new world of the 1980s dawns, Starbuck is finally free and on his way back into the world. This is the story of the first twenty-four hours after his release, told with Kurt Vonnegut’s razor-sharp wit and satirical bite.

Jailbird

José Saramago

For two years Solomon the elephant has lived in Lisbon. Now King Dom João III wishes to make him a wedding gift for a Hapsburg archduke in Vienna. The only way for Solomon to get to his new home is to walk. So begins a journey that will take the stalwart elephant across the dusty plains of Castile, over the sea to Genoa and up to northern Italy where, like Hannibal's elephants before him, he must cross the snowy Alps. Based on a true story, Saramago’s tale is an enchanting mix of fact, fable and fantasy.

The Elephant's Journey

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

Vasily Grossman

'One of the great novels of the 20th century' Observer 
 
In April 1942, Hitler and Mussolini plan the huge offensive on the Eastern Front that will culminate in the greatest battle in human history. 
 
Hundreds of miles away, Pyotr Vavilov receives his call-up papers and spends a final night with his wife and children in the hut that is his home. As war approaches, the Shaposhnikov family gathers for a meal: despite her age, Alexandra will soon become a refugee; Tolya will enlist in the reserves; Vera, a nurse, will fall in love with a wounded pilot; and Viktor Shtrum will receive a letter from his doomed mother which will haunt him forever. 
 
The war will consume the lives of a huge cast of characters - lives which express Grossman's grand themes of the nation and the individual, nature's beauty and war's cruelty, love and separation. 
 
For months, Soviet forces are driven back inexorably by the German advance eastward and eventually Stalingrad is all that remains between the invaders and victory. The city stands on a cliff top by the Volga River. The battle for Stalingrad - a maelstrom of violence and firepower - will reduce it to ruins. But it will also be the cradle of a new sense of hope. 
 
Stalingrad is a magnificent novel not only of war but of all human life: its subjects are mothers and daughters, husbands and brothers, generals, nurses, political officers, steelworkers, tractor girls. It is tender, epic, and a testament to the power of the human spirit. 
 
'You will not only discover that you love his characters and want to stay with them - that you need them in your life as much as you need your own family and loved ones - but that at the end... you will want to read it again' Daily Telegraph 
 
THE PREQUEL TO LIFE AND FATE NOW AVAILABLE IN ENGLISH FOR THE FIRST TIME, STALINGRAD IS A SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER AND NOW A MAJOR RADIO 4 DRAMA 
 
WINNER OF MODERN LANGUAGE ASSOCIATION "LOIS ROTH AWARD" FOR TRANSLATIONS FROM ANY LANGUAGE

Stalingrad

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

Graham Greene

For Arthur Rowe the charity fête was a trip back to childhood, to innocence, a welcome chance to escape the terror of the Blitz, to forget twenty years of his past and a murder. Then he guesses the weight of the cake, and from that moment on he's a hunted man, the target of shadowy killers, on the run and struggling to remember and to find the truth.

The Ministry of Fear

Toni Morrison

Joe Trace &ndash; in his fifties, door-to-door salesman, erstwhile devoted husband &ndash; shoots dead his eighteen-year-old lover. 
 
At the funeral, his determined, hard-working wife, Violet, who is given to stumbling into dark mental cracks, tries with a knife to disfigure the corpse. Passionate and profound, Jazz brings us back and forth in time, in a narrative assembled from the hopes, fears and realities of black urban life. 
 
'Jazz blazes with an intensity more usually found in tragic poetry of the past.... Morrison's voice transcends colour and creed and she has become one of America's outstanding post-war writers' Guardian 
 
'She wrote about what was difficult and what was necessary and in doing so she unearthed for a generation of people a kind of redemption, a kind of relief' Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, New York Times 
 
BY THE NOBEL PRIZE-WINNING AUTHOR OF BELOVED 
 
**Winner of the PEN/Saul Bellow award for achievement in American fiction**

Jazz

Philip Roth

'A tragedy of classical proportions...a magnificent novel' The Times 
 
Discover the Pulitzer-prize winning novel that confirmed Philip Roth as one of the greatest American writers. 
 
'Swede' Levov is living the American dream. 
 
He glides through life cocooned by his devoted family, lucrative business, sporting prowess and good looks. He is the embodiment of thriving, post-war America, land of liberty and hope. 
 
Until one sunny day in 1968, when Swede's daughter, Merry, commits an outlandishly savage act of political terrorism and the Levov family is plunged into mayhem. Extraordinarily nuanced and poignant, American Pastoral is the first in an eloquent trilogy of post-war American novels that still resonates today. 
_________________ 
 
PRAISE FOR AMERICAN PASTORAL: 
'Angry, grieving, witty, acute' Sunday Times 
'A profound and personal meditation on the changes in the American psyche over the last fifty years' Financial Times 
'A momentous novel' Observer 
'Utterly tragic and compelling' Tatler

American Pastoral

The renowned Pulitzer Prize-Winning novel

Into a white millionaire's Caribbean mansion comes Jadine. Then there&rsquo;s Son. 
 
Jadine is sophisticated, beautiful, a black American graduate of the Sorbonne. Son is a black fugitive from small-town Florida who embodies everything she loathes and desires. As Morrison follows their affair, she charts all the nuances of obligation and betrayal between black and white people, masters and servants, and men and women. 
 
An unforgettable and transformative novel that explores race and gender with scorching insight from the Nobel-prize winning author of Beloved. 
 
**Winner of the PEN/Saul Bellow award for achievement in American fiction** 
 
'Toni Morrison was a quintessential, unabashedly American writer. Like her fellow giant, Walt Whitman, her work was, above all, audacious. She seized the landscape with a flourish and wove it, unwove it and put it back together' Bonnie Greer, Guardian

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