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Mervyn Peake

Gormenghast is the vast, crumbling castle to which the seventy-seventh Earl, Titus Groan, is lord and heir. 
 
Titus is expected to rule this gothic labyrinth of turrets and dungeons (and his eccentric and wayward subjects) according to strict age-old rituals, but things are changing in the castle. Titus must contend with treachery, manipulation and murder as well as his own longing for a life beyond the castle walls. 
 
'A master of the macabre and a traveller through the deeper and darker chasms of the imagination' The Times 
 
'Dark, dense, baroque and hauntingly beautiful. Peake's lush prose and imagery are a pleasure to any lover of the beauty of the written word,' Carlos Ruiz-Zafron, author of The Shadow of the Wind

The Illustrated Gormenghast Trilogy

David Lodge

When the university merged his Department of Linguistics with English, Professor Desmond Bates took early retirement, but he is not enjoying it. He misses the purposeful routine of the academic year, and has lost his appetite for research. 
 
His wife Winifred's late-flowering career goes from strength to strength, reducing his role to that of escort and househusband, while the rejuvenation of her appearance makes him uneasily conscious of the age gap between them. The monotony of his days is relieved only by wearisome journeys to London to check on the welfare of his eighty-nine-year-old father, an ex dance musician who stubbornly refuses to move from the house he is patently unable to live in with safety. 
 
But these discontents are nothing compared to the affliction of hearing loss, which is a constant source of domestic friction and social embarrassment. In the popular imagination, he observes, deafness is comic, as blindness is tragic, but for the deaf person himself it is no joke. It is through his deafness that Desmond inadvertently gets involved with a young woman whose wayward and unpredictable behaviour threatens to destabilise his life completely. 
 
Funny and moving by turns, Deaf Sentence is a brilliant account of one man's effort to come to terms with deafness and death, ageing and mortality, the comedy and tragedy of human lives.

Deaf Sentence

Richard Hoggart

Richard Hoggart's book, The Uses of Literary, established his reputation as a uniquely sensitive and observant chronicler of English working-class life. In this vivid first volume of autobiography he describes his origins in that milieu. Orphaned at an early age, Hoggart grew up in a working-class district of Leeds, in an intimate world of terraced back-to-backs, visits from the local Board of Guardians, clothing checks and potted-meat sandwiches. With affectionate insight he recreates the family circle - a loving grandmother, one domineering and on gentle aunt, and a bibulous, melancholy uncle - and recalls his early schooling, the friends he made and the mentors he admired. Hard-working and articulate, Hoggart did well enough at grammar school to go on to Leeds University. This volume ends as, having earned a higher degree and travelled in Nazi Germany, he prepares to leave Yorkshire, via the Army, for the world beyond. Wry, compassionate, exact, A Local Habitation is a classic recreation of working-class England between the wars.

A Local Habitation

Life and Times, Volume One 1918-40

David Adams Richards

The novel tells the story of Sydney Henderson and his son, Lyle. As a young man, Sydney, believing he has accidentally killed a friend, makes a pact with God, promising never to harm another if the boy's life is spared. In the years that follow the almost pathologically gentle Sydney tries to hold true to his promise - at terrible cost to himself and his family.

Mercy Among The Children

David Boyle

English culture is confused, muddled and often borrowed. The purpose of this book is to give the reader a complete grounding in the idiosyncrasies of the English and to pin down the absurdities and warmth of Englishness at its best. 
 
Featured in this book are such established English cultural behemoths as the Beatles, Big Ben and the Last Night of the Proms alongside less celebrated quirks such as meat pies and the working man’s haven, the allotment. Here we celebrate the bell-ringers and Morris dancers, bowler hats (‘the symbol of respectable Englishness’) and cardigans (‘symbol of staid middle-class solidarity’). We examine the brutality of Punch and Judy and our historic love of fairies, once so much a part of the English psyche that they were described as ‘the British religion’. 
 
At once fond and irreverent, laudatory and curious, How to Be English might just teach us how to be English once again.

How to Be English

Sophie Gee

Discover a dazzling story of risk and dangerous liaisons... 
 
 Beautiful, clever Arabella Fermor is seduced by charming Robert Petre, seventh baron of Ingatestone. Eager to secure herself a rich and handsome husband, Arabella cannot guess that the enigmatic Robert is entwined in a treasonous plot against Queen Anne. 
 
 Watching the pair from the outskirts is a man destined to become the genius of his age - the poet Alexander Pope. In Arabella and Robert's flirtations he has found the tale of temptation, coquetry and danger that might just make his fortune... 
 
**Perfect for fans of Bridgerton** 
 
'Convincing, seductive and utterly absorbing, Sophie Gee's debut will transport its readers' Observer

The Scandal of the Season

Eugene McCabe

A volume containing the novella, "Victims", and stories "Heritage" and "Cancer". The book offers a vision of the situation in Ulster that ranges from childhood confrontations to the force of passion which leads adults to reprisals and murder.

Christ In The Fields

Sam Lock

Samuel Lock's first novel, AS LUCK WOULD HAVE IT, was acclaimed by the critics as one of the most strikingly original first novels for years and went on to win the Sagittarius Award. NOTHING BUT THE TRUTH, Lock's new novel, shares many of its qualities - an exact but curiously mysterious prose style, superb evocation of a time and place (in this case Chelsea's King's Road in the fifties), and range of deliciously eccentric characters. It is the story of Jason Callow, a mildly successful novelist, estranged from his wife and children. As Jason struggles to comprehend and overcome the inner crisis that grips him, he is observed by his neighbours, his family, his friends, all powerless, it seems, to alter the inexorable course of his destiny.

Nothing But The Truth

Fred D'aguiar

Like no poetry you've ever known before, Fred D'Aguiar's novel-in-verse sweeps you up in the scintillating story of a young female slave who falls in love with the son of the plantation owner and runs away with him in search of a new life. En route they are rescued by an old man who has organised a secret underground railroad to help slaves escape, but they become separated from each other: Faith, the woman, is sold back into slavery and Christy, her lover, punished with forced labour. The novel is narrated by their son who is stuck in time until their story is told.    Using the intricate rhyme-scheme of Byron's wonderfully picaresque Don Juan, D'Aguiar wittily plays with language to create poetry that is dazzling in its inventiveness whilst being utterly readable. Despite the seriousness of its subject matter, Bloodlines is full of humour, satire, experiment and, above all, life. Its characters are, like the language, brim-full of energy and very sympathetic as they struggle against vicissitude. Read this book fast like a novel, savour every word like a poem, do both, the choice is yours.

Bloodlines

Jonathan Gathorne-Hardy

Two orphaned boys - one Russian (Ivan), and one British (Michael) -may or may not be brothers, Ivan is brought up brutally on the bleak rural steppes, while Michael is cosseted by his grandmother in the Home Counties. And yet they coexist in a sort of parallel universe' their lives interconnected, physically in the text, as well as throug a common yearning - to discover their origins and purpose in life and to find elusive romantic and emotional fulfilment. Ivan manages to escape from his past and present to find a new life abroad. He is in almost constant motion, where Michael remains more or less rooted to the spot. His journey of discovery is through a strange, obsessive internal landscape. Gathorne-Hardy combines a rare narrative skill with compassion and humour

Particle Theory

A Novel

Jeff Torrington

THE BOOK: A journey down the assembly lines of the Centaur Car Company borders on the surreal and it's studded with bizarre characters. Torrington's jinking, needle sharp wit constrasts brilliantly with the grit and banter of factory life in this enjoyable, energtic and original work of fiction.

The Devil's Carousel

Elaine di Rollo

Lilian and Alice are the bright young twin daughters of the eccentric Mr Talbot, who resides in a huge mansion stuffed full of fossils, inventions, suits of armour, botanical specimens and other specimens of his sprawling collection of curiosities. 
 
When Lilian rebels against Victorian standards of morality she is packed off to India as the bride of a dreary missionary, leaving Alice alone and in danger of falling victim to her father's bizarre and hair-raising schemes. 
 
This lively and entertaining novel follows the two girls on their very different paths to freedom and is set against the tumultuous backdrop of the Indian Mutiny. 
 
Shortlisted for the Saltire First Book prize, the Scottish Arts Council First Book Award and the Guildford Literary Festival First Book Award.

A Proper Education for Girls

John Fuller

Once upon a time in a Middle Eastern land, a fat, sweet-natured little boy grows up as the son of an important ruler. His older brother was apparently still-born and so he is the heir to his father's kingdom. 
 
But far away from the royal palace a lonely prospector happens across a wild creature, half boy, half animal, roaming the forests. Eventually this strange child's adventures lead him to the capital and into the path of a platoon of deserters from Napoleon's army - the flashy, ultimately dangerous, face of Enlightenment thought in this isolated kingdom - with drastic consequences. 
 
With original poems embedded like gems in the text, this is a fable for all ages, full of shivers and delights, sadness and wonder.

Flawed Angel

Kingsley Amis

Brought to you by Penguin. 
 
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. 
 
©Kingsley Amis 1994 (P) Penguin Audio 2020

You Can't Do Both

Rich Cohen

Rich Cohen's maternal grandfather was called Ben Eisenstadt. Ben was one of those Jews that, with an anger bred of exclusion, went on to reshape the world. He did so by inventing Sweet 'n Low, a granulated sweetener which, in its tiny pink packet, is still found on every table in every diner in America. This simple invention spawned one of the great American fortunes. This is the story of that fortune, how it was made and how it remade and tore apart everyone who touched it. 
 
In Sweet and Low, Rich Cohen - the youngest son of Ben's favourite daughter - takes a journey into his own and his family's past. It is a story of family feuds (his mother was eventually disinherited by her mother), eccentricity verging on madness, gangsters, lawyers, corruption, accountants, ex-wives - a quest for a secret history, a black comedy of the American dream.

Sweet and Low

A Family Story

Susan Hill

In 'Sand', sisters Clara and Lizzie recall an extraordinary childhood trip to the beach with their surly mother who, coming across a wailing boy, had calmly handed him her handkerchief; the sacred relic which she kept in her purse at all times, and which had belonged to her beloved late father, which she had - until that moment - guarded with her life. 
 
In 'Elizabeth', 'There's a world beyond yourself you must break through to,' Elizabeth's mother chides, lest her only daughter inherit her own ill-fate: doomed to scrape by on the bottom rung of society, married to a feckless man who would put his own sense of adventure before his wife's ill-health. Timid Elizabeth is initially terrified by the thought of leaving her insular existence, but when tragedy strikes her family, she resolves to follow her mother's advice and break free. 
 
Part of the Storycuts series, these two short stories were previously published in the collection The Boy Who Taught the Beekeeper to Read.

Sand / Elizabeth (Storycuts)

Nicholas Mosley

'On a dark night a person searches on the brightly-lit ground under a lamp-post. A passer-by asks - For what are you searching? The person says - For the keys to my house. The passer-by says - Is this where you lost them? The person says - No I lost them in the dark, but this is where the light is.' 
A retired academic and writer lies in a New York hospital bed. He has come there from his home in London to appear as a pundit on television, only to be knocked down by a car. Formerly an anthropologist, he is now tired of looking for order and reason where he can see none. His views on human nature and war are provocative and he has begun to find himself in demand. The forced inactivity allows him to reflect on the course of his life - the work he has done, the women he has known - and the characters from it begin to gather him: his first wife Valerie, his new wife Veronica, his son Adam. 
He considers his first marriage and the curious version of fidelity they evolved, his days of teaching at Oxford, and the trip to Iran that saw him return with Nadia, a young girl whom he assists in escaping to a different life in England. 
Witty, philosophical, and wise, Nicholas Mosley's latest novel is a timely portrait of one man's attempt to bring order to his disordered existence.

Look At The Dark

John Burnside

As he sets out on his first adventure in life, a young man enters the dark realm of adult violence; a married suburbanite longs for the wide, mysterious world that seems to hover just beyond the next turn in the road; a pair of disturbed twins commit a pointless crime; and the boy of the title story, at once appalled and beguiled by the glamour of others, has all his hopes and expectations exposed by a senseless murder. 
 
Burning Elvis is a book about innocence and fear, about boys and men who have no idea who they are, or what they are supposed to do, but are haunted by a vague apprehension of possible grace. In their differing ways they are lost, scared and, at the same time, caught up in a quest, a search for the real Graceland -- 'an idea of home, something in black and white, the smell of cheap lilac soap and a radio playing in the kitchen...and a mouthful of trick blood on the bathroom floor, to keep the night away.' 
 
Already celebrated as a prodigiously gifted novelist and poet, John Burnside now extends his range to the shorter form, in a collection of stories written with the same beautiful control, the same power to ravish and disturb.

Burning Elvis

Thomas Graham

2019 RUNNER-UP OF THE BODLEY HEAD | FINANCIAL TIMES ESSAY PRIZE 
 
‘In the Andean cultural context, the mouth of the mine is a portal between worlds. Outside, the miners are Catholic. Inside, the human soul has escaped the jurisdiction of God.’ 
 
In this searing investigation, Thomas Graham crosses the Bolivian altiplano and ventures into Siglo XX, once the world’s richest tin mine. Describing the historical and political landscape of this near post-apocalyptic world, he is invited into the local mining community where he uncovers the true costs it has exacted on their lives.

The Sacrifice

How Bolivian miners extract their wealth

Nik Cohn

There will always be an England, no doubt, but what sort of England will it be? Cohn takes a long wild ride through a country he calls the Republic - a nation within a nation, populated by the many millions who have either fallen out of the Britannic mainstream, or chosen to jump. He meets the rising stars of a new culture, and also the casualties. Their collected stories, both weird and wonderful, combine to form a tapestry quite unlike any notion of England that has ever existed before. It is a land made up, among others, of outlaws and insurgents, rampaging natives, second-generation immigrants, visionaries, born-agains, football fans, fetishists, New Age travellers, anarchists, DJs, street-fighters, graffiti artists, Rastas, Odinists, Elvis impersonators, fire-swallowers and even the Antichrist. Loud and angry, and charged with furious energy, their voices define a world cut loose from tradition and all certainty. Gone bananas, in fact. Nik Cohn's republic may not be the only England out there. But it's the most vivid.

Yes We Have No

Rudyard Kipling

John Meade Falkner

To mark the publication of Stop What You're Doing and Read This!, a collection of essays celebrating reading, Vintage Classics are releasing 12 limited edition themed ebook 'bundles', to tempt readers to discover and rediscover great books. 
 
JUST SO STORIES 
INTRODUCED BY PHILIP PULLMAN 
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. 
 
MOONFLEET 
Orphaned John Trenchard grows up in the village of Moonfleet with his aunt, entranced by the local legend of the ghostly Blackbeard, who rises each winter night to search for his lost diamond. While conducting his own hunt for the treasure, John is trapped in the church crypt and discovers the true secret of the village: smuggling. Taken under the wing of the gruff innkeeper and chief smuggler, Elzevir Block, John begins a dangerous adventure which will see him in a hair-raising chase along a precarious cliff path and deciphering a hidden code in an ancient castle. Moonfleet is thrilling story of revenge and betrayal, of loyalty and great sacrifice, but it is above all a story about friendship..

Stop What You’re Doing and Read…To Your Son: Just So Stories & Moonfleet

Anthony Trollope

‘Anthony Trollope knew more about women than any other novelist of his time’ Joanne Trollope 
 
 Trollope observes the romances of two controversial heroines in the first of his Palliser novels. 
 
Alice Vavasor should be married to the sensible, kindly John Grey. But despite what her respectable relations might think, Alice cannot quite reconcile herself to this fate. Once upon a time she was engaged to her wild cousin George, and now he stands in need of her money and, perhaps too, her good influence. Meanwhile Alice's friend Lady Glencora has married the rising politician Plantagenet Palliser, but is still pursued by Burgo Fitzgerald, the handsome rascal she loves. 
 
In this hugely compelling novel,Trollope shows the two women struggling to reconcile heart, mind and moral code whilst enduring the stifling scrutiny of their contemporaries. 
 
WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY D. J. TAYLOR

Can You Forgive Her?

Patrick White

In this book the author addresses the problem of growing old and the "warts of the soul" which, if gouged out, ruin the flesh. We must wait, he says, for the evil in us to die naturally. Presenting a peeled potato, a dance in the kitchen and a visit to the aged mother of a childhood friend, he considers our struggle, our efforts to achieve aesthetic perfection and suggests some resolutions. Patrick White is a Nobel Prize-winning author. His novels include "The Tree of Man", "Voss", "The Vivisector", "A Fringe of Leaves", "The Twyborn Affair" and "Memoirs of Many in One".

Three Uneasy Pieces

David Hughes

Approaching fifty, and warned by his doctor that he's drinking too much and needs to take more exercise, David Hughes is given a dog for his birthday - Dexter, a wire-haired fox terrier. 
 
Hughes' daily walks with Dexter form the spine of Walking the Dog. We eavesdrop on their encounters with fellow dog-walkers ('Hello Hector', 'Hello Chester'...) and on Hughes' thoughts as he plods along carrying a plastic bag of poo. He begins to remember moments from his past, dark memories of murder and violence. He explores his own fantasies and obsessions. From the gentle comedy of the early pages, Walking the Dog is transformed into something deeper and more disturbing. 
 
This will be a landmark book in the field of graphic literature. The drawing is sublime, the imagination extraordinary, the ambition unequalled.

Walking the Dog

An effigy in the woods. A message written in fear. 
 
 
Simon Serrailler is awoken into a hazy dawn by the insistent ringing of his phone. He’s being called out: there’s a body strung up in tranquil Harnham Woods. But on closer inspection it’s an effigy – a carefully made dummy, stirring in the breeze. This is no practical joke, it’s a message. And the next death is only a matter of time. 
 
 
Hill’s elegant prose conceals a blade of menace. Revenge is a compact masterclass in tension: haunted soldiers, buried guilt and the detective who must see through the lies before the next life is lost. 
 
 
‘A case like no other… gripping and humane’ Sunday Times

Revenge

Marta Morazzoni

Alphonse Courrier possesses all the might reasonably make a man content: a prosperous ironmonger's business and a position of respect in his Auvergne village, a dutiful, coolly beautiful wife who runs an irreproachable household, two healthy sons, and a hidden mistress - "the ugliest girl in the village but probably the happiest". 
 
Prying eyes and wagging tongues, however, are the life force in a small community, and though Courrier thinks he can play the village gossips with the same skill he brings to the card table, life has a way of dealing the hand you least expect ...

The Alphonse Courrier Affair

Thomas Mann

A tale of genius in which Thomas Mann explores the artist's relation to life. 
 
First published in 1912, Death in Venice tells how Gustave von Aschenbach, a writer utterly absorbed in his work, arrives in Venice as the result of a 'youthfully ardent thirst for distant scenes', and meets a young boy by whose beauty he becomes obsessed. His pitiful pursuit of the object of his affection and its inevitable and pathetic climax are told here with the particular skill the author has for this shorter form of fiction.

Death In Venice

Roddy Doyle

Two men meet for a pint in a Dublin pub. They chew the fat, set the world to rights, take the piss… They talk about their wives, their kids, their kids’ pets, their football teams and – this being Ireland in 2011–12 –about the euro, the crash, the presidential election, the Queen’s visit. But these men are not parochial or small-minded; one of them knows where to find the missing Colonel Gaddafi (he’s working as a cleaner at Dublin Airport); they worry about Greek debt, the IMF and the bondholders ( whatever they might be); in their fashion, they mourn the deaths of Whitney Houston, Donna Summer, Davy Jones and Robin Gibb; and they ask each other the really important questions like ‘Would you ever let yourself be digitally enhanced?’ 
 
Inspired by a year’s worth of news, Two Pints distils the essence of Roddy Doyle’s comic genius. This book shares the concision of a collection of poems, and the timing of a virtuoso comedian.

Two Pints

Charles Dickens

'Dickens's chilling tale of murder and betrayal' Sunday Times 
 
 'The one great principle of the English law is, to make business for itself' 
 
'Jarndyce and Jardyce' is an infamous lawsuit that has been in process for generations. Nobody can remember exactly how the case started but many different individuals have found their fortunes caught up in it. Esther Summerson watches as her friends and neighbours are consumed by their hopes and disappointments with the proceedings. But while the intricate puzzles of the lawsuit are being debated by lawyers, other more dramatic mysteries are unfolding that involve heartbreak, lost children, blackmail and murder.

Bleak House

Fiona Campbell

Kenji Yamada has a critical wife, a hated mother-in-law and what he thinks is a job for life until his fortieth birthday teaches him otherwise. Initially too embarassed to tell his family that he has been fired, Kenji first befriends a travelling salesman with a passion for Elvis before taking up gambling, but his wife's outrage soon brings an end to this and sends him on a roller-coaster of misadventures. 
 
Via a bizarre chain of happenstance - including being struck by lightning while wielding a golf club - Kenji somehow finds himself responsible for a weirdly believable game show... 
 
Fiona Campbell's novel is a sparkling debut with graphic-novel sharpness, humour and poignancy.

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