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José Saramago

What if, one day, Europe was to crack along the length of the Pyrenees, separating Spain and Portugal from the rest of Europe? 
 
In Saramago's fable, a new island is sent spinning through the ocean like a great stone raft. While the authorities panic and tourists flee, three men, two women and a dog are drawn together by omens that burden them with a peculiar responsibility. In this magical realist tale, the six take to the road, finding themselves adrift in a world now unfamiliar and forced to reckon with their relationships, human psychology and the shakiness of belief itself.

The Stone Raft

Haruki Murakami

Enter the surreal and enchanting world of Haruki Murakami 
 
Toru Okada's cat has disappeared. 
 
His wife is growing more distant every day. 
 
Then there are the increasingly explicit telephone calls he has recently been receiving. 
 
As this compelling story unfolds, the tidy suburban realities of Okada's vague and blameless life, spent cooking, reading, listening to jazz and opera and drinking beer at the kitchen table, are turned inside out. He embarks on a bizarre journey, guided by a succession of characters, each with a tale to tell. 
 
'Mesmerising, surreal, this really is the work of a true original' The Times 
 
VINTAGE JAPANESE CLASSICS series - five masterpieces of Japanese fiction in gorgeous new gift editions.

The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle (Vintage Classics Japanese Series)

Julio Cortázar

‘A deeply touching, enjoyable novel, beautifully written and fascinatingly mysterious and intricate in its designs’ New York Times 
 
In a city that could be Paris, London or Vienna, a loose-knit group of travellers, artists, and dreamers gather – drawn together by a cryptic passage from a book. Among them are the exiled writer Juan, the elusive Hélène, and the troubled Celia, each slipping between reality and illusion as their lives intertwine. Conversations turn into riddles, encounters take on the weight of fate, and a dark undercurrent of violence pulses beneath it all. 
 
Both playful and disorienting, 62: A Model Kit is Julio Cortázar’s most enigmatic puzzle – an intricate, hypnotic novel that challenges the very nature of storytelling.

62: A Model Kit

Isabel Allende

As a girl, Clara del Valle can read fortunes, make objects move as if they had lives of their own, and predict the future. 
 
Following the mysterious death of her sister, Rosa the Beautiful, Clara is mute for nine years. When she breaks her silence, it is to announce that she will be married soon to the stern and volatile landowner Esteban Trueba. 
 
Set in an unnamed Latin American country over three generations, The House of the Spirits is a magnificent epic of a proud and passionate family, secret loves and violent revolution. 
 
'Extraordinary... Powerful... Sharply observant, witty and eloquent' New York Times 
 
'Intensely moving. Both entertaining and deeply serious' Evening Standard 
 
'The only cause The House of the Spirits embraces is that of humanity, and it does so with such passion, humor, and wisdom that in the end it transcends politics&hellip;The result is a novel of force and charm, spaciousness and vigor' Washington Post

The House of the Spirits

Vintage Quarterbound Classics

In an unnamed country, on the first day of the New Year, people stop dying. There is great celebration and people dance in the streets. They have achieved the great goal of humanity: eternal life. Soon, though, the residents begin to suffer. Undertakers face bankruptcy, the church is forced to reinvent its doctrine, and local 'maphia' smuggle those on the brink of death over the border where they can expire naturally. 
 
Death does return eventually, but with a new, courteous approach – delivering violet warning letters to her victims. But what can death do when a letter is unexpectedly returned?

Death at Intervals

Mervyn Peake

'The Gormenghast Trilogy is one of the most important works of the imagination to come out of [this] age' Anthony Burgess 
 
BOOK TWO OF THE GORMENGHAST TRILOGY 
 
Enter the world of Gormenghast...the vast crumbling castle to which the seventy-seventh Earl, Titus Groan, is Lord and heir. Gothic labyrinth of roofs and turrets, cloisters and corridors, stairwells and dungeons, it is also the cobwebbed kingdom of Byzantine government and age-old rituals, a world primed to implode beneath the weight of centuries of intrigue, treachery, manipulation and murder. 
 
Gormenghast is more than a sequel to Titus Groan - it is an enrichment and deepening of that book.The fertility of incident, character and rich atmosphere combine in a tour de force that ranks as one of the twentieth century's most remarkable feats of imaginative writing.

Gormenghast

A collection of masterful short stories in Julio Cortazar's sophistocated, powerful and gripping style. 
 
'Julio Cortázar is truly a sorcerer and the best of him is here, in these hilariously fraught and almost eerily affecting stories' Kevin Barry 
 
A grieving family home becomes the site of a terrifying invasion. A frustrated love triangle, brought together by a plundered Aztec idol, spills over into brutality. A lodger’s inability to stop vomiting bunny rabbits inspires a personal confession. 
 
As dream melds into reality, and reality melts into nightmare, one constant remains throughout these thirty-five stories: the singular brilliance of Julio Cortazar’s imagination. 
 
WITH A NEW INTRODUCTION BY KEVIN BARRY 
 
‘Anyone who doesn't read Cortázar is doomed’ Pablo Neruda

Bestiary

The Selected Stories of Julio Cortázar

Salman Rushdie

The novel that set the stage for his modern classic, The Satanic Verses, Shame is Salman Rushdie’s phantasmagoric epic 
 
Omar Khayyam Shakil had three mothers who shared everything. They shared the symptoms of pregnancy, they shared the son that they all claim to have borne on the same night. Raised at their six breasts, Omar's mothers teach him to live a life without shame. And it is training that proves very useful when he leaves his mothers’ fortress and makes the fateful mistake of falling in love. For he finds himself an unwitting player in an ongoing duel between the families of two men – one a celebrated wager of war, the other a debauched lover of pleasure – living in a world caught between honour and humiliation, where a moment of shame could prove fatal. 
 
‘Shame is every bit as good as Midnight's Children. It is a pitch-black comedy of public life and historical imperatives’ The Times

Shame

Erin Morgenstern

A beautiful hardback edition of the modern fantasy classic, from the bestselling author of The Starless Sea. 
 
'The only response to this novel is simply: wow. It is a breathtaking feat of imagination, a flight of fancy that pulls you in and wraps you up in its spell' The Times 
 
The circus arrives without warning. 
 
It is simply there, when yesterday it was not. Against the grey sky the towering tents are striped black and white. A sign hanging upon an iron gates reads: 
 
Opens at Nightfall 
Closes at Dawn 
 
Full of breath-taking amazements, Le Cirque des Rêves seems to cast a spell over all who wander its circular paths. But behind the glittering acrobats, fortune-tellers and contortionists a fierce competition is underway. 
 
Celia and Marco are two young magicians in the Circus, who have been trained since childhood for a deadly duel. With the lives of everyone at the Circus of Dreams at stake, they must test the very limits of the imagination, and of their love. 
 
The circus is open. 
Get ready to enter the fantastical world of the Night Circus. 
 
'Lush, evocative, dreamlike...a magical, coming-of-age story' Sunday Times 
 
'A beguiling, gripping read... Morgenstern has crafted a thrilling and transporting tale' Economist 
 
Vintage Quarterbound Classics: Bound to be beautiful

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