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Charles Dickens

WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY SIMON CALLOW 
 
Wealthy old Martin Chuzzlewit is surrounded by a host of grasping, unscrupulous relatives and suspects the family vices of selfishness and greed are already showing in his grandson. The younger Martin is therefore cast out upon the world to learn to fend for himself. Apprenticed to the oily hypocrite Peckniff, he meets both the sweet-tempered Tom Pinch and the irrepressible Mark Tapley, with whom he sets forth to America to find his fortune. Dickens created some of his most gleefully repulsive and enduring characters in this tale of corruption and virtue, murder and unrequited love.

Martin Chuzzlewit

Simon Robson

Catharine wakes to an empty bed. Her husband Tom, a human rights lawyer, is away on business and it's the first time she has woken alone in their cottage since they moved there from London five months ago. 
 
She is, as she confesses, a serious woman; realistic and practical. She has relinquished her hold on past ambitions, her music and her career, in preparation for family life. Now, without distraction, she wonders what she is to do. 
 
Time progresses, and in encounters both real and imagined - with the village's inhabitants, with her best friend Maria and with Tom - Catharine plucks at the fabric of her life until it is threadbare. From assured beginnings the day rushes to a realisation of her very worst fears, and to a denouement of devastating poignancy.

Catch

Julie Myerson

A freezing room in a student house, a sagging mattress on the floor, and two people, one nineteen, the other twenty, kissing passionately. All night. 
 
It is to this scene that, twenty years later, Rosy, the narrator of Julie Myerson's astonishing new novel, returns obsessively. She has just lost a child in a terrible, careless accident, and Tom, her partner, has taken her to Paris to forget about things, to start again. 
 
It has snowed in the night and, waking at dawn, Rosy decides to go for a walk. At the hotel desk there's a note for her: 'I'm waiting for you X.' And he is, sitting in the corner of a café she enters almost at random. They talk. He touches her. She turns away and when she looks again he is gone. 
 
Was he there? Had she dreamed him? And why, when he emails her out of the blue two days later, does he write as though they haven't met for twenty years?

The Story of You

Ann Wroe

Few books have captured the atmosphere of daily medieval life as well or as movingly as A Fool and His Money. Rodez, in southern France, was divided for centuries by a feud between two masters. This partitioned town thus acquired two distinct cultures. The story focuses on the strange case of Peyre Marques, a merchant who forgets where he has buried his gold. To read A Fool and His Money is like opening a shutter on to a sunlit medieval street teeming with characters, talk and noise - all coloured with the vibrancy of truth.  --'Wroe is an excellent historian and an engaging writer with a beady eye for detail and an attractive turn of phrase. Best of all, she conveys a true feeling for the recreation of period and persons and place' Daily Telegraph --'History lives best when it is loved, and nobody who reads this book can doubt the author's love of her subject' Sunday Telegraph

A Fool And His Money

Life in a Partitioned Medieval Town

D H Lawrence

Daniel Defoe

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. 
 
LADY CHATTERLEY'S LOVER 
INTRODUCED BY BLAKE MORRISON 
Clifford Chatterley returns from the First World War as an invalid. Constance nurses him and tries to be the dutiful wife. However, childless and listless she feels oppressed by their marriage and their isolated life. Partly encouraged by Clifford to seek a lover, she embarks on a passionate affair with the gamekeeper, Mellors. Through their liaison Lawrence explores the complications of sex, love and class. Written in 1928 and subsequently banned, Lady Chatterley's Lover is one of the most subversive novels in English literature. 
 
MOLL FLANDERS 
These are the fortunes and misfortunes of Moll Flanders: born in Newgate Prison, twelve years a prostitute, five times a wife (once to her own brother), twelve years a thief and eight years a transported felon in Her Majesty's colony of Virginia. Daniel Defoe's rollicking tale presents life in the prisons, alleyways and underworlds of eighteenth-century London, and gives us Moll - scandalous, unscrupulous and utterly irresistible.

Stop What You’re Doing and Read…Banned Books: Lady Chatterley's Lover & Moll Flanders

C. K. Stead

A chance meeting has New Zealand writer Laszlo Winter thinking back to his time in London in the late 1950s. The Empire might be in a state of collapse, but for young 'colonials', England remains a mythical place that draws them from the farthest corners of the globe. 
 
There was Australian Samantha Conlan, clever, desirable, hopelessly in love with married Jewish New Zealander Freddy Goldstein, who carried with him a dark history. Rajiv, an earnest young Indian at work on a study of Yeats and the Indian mind. The enigmatic Margot, whose bond with her athletic brother Mark troubled Laszlo in ways he didn't quite understand. Heather, the call girl with whom Laszlo exchanged lessons on Shakespeare for lessons in love. 
 
The great writers of the time, and the details of their lives are recorded by Samantha in her idiosyncratic research project that she named her Secret History of Modernism. There was all of that and more, and then there was Laszlo, knocking blindly about among them, despairing at his academic prospects, and gradually realising that he was, would only ever be, a storyteller. Now, years later, from the other side of the world, the people seem to spring to life again, in this beguiling work by one of New Zealand's foremost writers.

The Secret History Of Modernism

Paul Dombey is an ambitious London merchant. He pins all his hopes for the future of his shipping firm on his fragile son whilst his daughter, Florence, goes unnoticed and neglected. It is only when the firm faces ruin, and Dombey is staring at a life of desolate solitude that Florence may finally be valued. Can this heartless businessman be redeemed? Dombey and Son is a delicious and lively satire about pride and its downfall.

Dombey and Son

Graham Greene

This play produced by the Royal Shakespeare Company has as its chief characters A. J. Raffles, the literary creation some seventy odd years ago of E. W. Hornung. The cool daring of the impeccable Amateur Cracksman, always torn between the rival claims of burglary and cricket, ensured his popularity in Edwardian England. Evading the dogged pursuit of Inspector Mackenzie of Scotland Yard, Hornung's character eventually met a hero's death in South Africa in the Boer War. 
 
Graham Greene's The Return of A. J. Raffles begins some months after. Raffles' loyal assistant Bunny still mourns his friend's death in Raffles' chambers in Albany, despite the blandishments of Lord Alfred Douglas. A visitor forces his way in - Raffles has cheated death as he once cheated Inspector Mackenzie - and immediately Lord Alfred sees in the Amateur Cracksman and Bunny heaven-sent instruments to revenge and disgrace of Oscar Wilde on his odious father, the Marquess of Queensberry... 
 
Graham Green never fails to surprise and delight admirers of his comic genius, and the twists and turns of this story of Edwardian high life, when Raffles returns to the scene of his earlier triumphs, provide a richly satisfying entertainment.

The Return Of A. J. Raffles

An Edwardian comedy in three acts based somewhat loosely on E.W. Hornung's characters in The Amateur Cracksman

Adam Foulds

Set in the 1950s, The Broken Word is an extraordinary poetic sequence that animates and illuminates a dark, terrifying period in British colonial history.The combination here of language and imagery that feel utterly contemporary, and subject matter - tribal violence and subsequent retribution - that seems almost Homeric, gives the narrative all the febrile energy of classical drama, re-charged and re-imagined. 
 
Tom has returned to his family's farm in Kenya for the summer vacation between school and university when he is swept up by the events of the Mau Mau uprising. Beginning with sporadic, brutal attacks by dispossessed Kikuyu on the British now occupying their land - attacks often executed with nothing more than traditional panga knives - the conflict escalates as the terrified British stop at nothing to re-impose order, eventually driving most of the Kikuyu population into the prison camps of what has become known as 'Britain's Gulag'. As Tom is propelled into violence and horror the poem mutates into a meditation on the inheritance of conflict, the destruction of innocence and the impossibility of afterwards saying what one has seen. 
 
Written with rigour, intelligence, and a fierce, unsparing clarity, this is profound, lyrical work with that rare confidence and thrilling originality that announce the arrival of a significant new voice.

The Broken Word

Donald Ray Pollock

In 'Holler', when his wife throws him out, Tom shacks up with the family of a casual girlfriend. They leave it to him to bathe, shave and keep a jug of wine within a straw's reach of their disabled patriarch. 
 
In 'I Start Over', retirement has not been living up to Big Bernie's expectations-not the expectations the television advertisements are peddling anyway. He treats himself to a souped-up 1959 Chevrolet, and this indulgence might just be what he needs to start over. 
 
Part of the Storycuts series, this short story was previously published in the collection Knockemstiff.

Holler / I Start Over (Storycuts)

David Lodge

Adrian Ludlow, a novelist with a distinguished reputation and a book on the `A' level syllabus, is now seeking obscurity in a cottage beneath the Gatwick flight path. His university friend Sam Sharp, who has become a successful screen writer, drops in on the way to Los Angeles, fuming over a vicious profile of himself by Fanny Tarrant, one of the new breed of Rotwieler interviewers, in a Sunday newspaper. Together they decide to take revenge on the interviewer, though Adrian is risking what he values most: his privacy. HOME TRUTHS examines with wit and insight the contemporary culture of celebrity and the conflict between the solitary activity of writing and the demands of the media circus.

Home Truths: The Playscript

Tom Brokaw

In this superb book, Tom Brokaw goes out into America, to tell through the stories of individual men and women the story of a generation - America's citizen heroes and heroines who came of age during the Great Depression and the Second World War and went on to build modern America.  This was a generation united by common values - by duty, honour, courage, service and love of family and country. Here you'll meet people like Charles Van Gorder, who set up during D-Day a MASH-like medical facility in the middle of the fighting, and then came home to create a clinic and hospital in his hometown.  You'll hear ex-President George Bush talk about how, as a Navy Air Corps combat pilot, one of his assignments was to read the mail of the enlisted men under him, to be sure no sensitive military information would be compromised.  You'll meet Trudy Elion, winner of the Nobel Prize in medicine, one of the many women in this book who found fulfilling careers in the changed society as a result of the war.  And you'll meet Martha Putney, one of the first black women to serve in the newly formed WACs. In the spirit of Band of Brothers, The Greatest Generation tells the stories of ordinary men and women caught up in extraordinary events - individuals united by a common purpose - working, living and dying in the service of their country.

The Greatest Generation

M. Suddain

John Tamberlain is The Tomahawk, the universe’s most feared food critic – though he himself prefers the term ‘forensic gastronomer’. He’s on a quest, in search of the much-storied Hotel Grand Skies, a secretive and exclusive haven where the rich and famous retreat to bask in perfect seclusion. A place where the waiters know their fish knife from their butter knife, their carotid from their subclavian artery, and are trained to enforce the house rules with brutal efficiency. 
 
Blurring the lines between detective story, horror and sci-fi, Hunters &amp; Collectors is a mesmeric trip into the singular imagination of M. Suddain – a freewheeling talent whose poise, invention and sensational sentences have already earned him comparisons to Vonnegut, Pynchon and Douglas Adams.

Hunters & Collectors

Rose Tremain

From the author of The Gustav Sonata 
 
Fat and fifty, educated only to be a wife and mother, Ruby Constad has reached a point of crisis. Her husband, Leon, lies in a nursing home after a stroke that has left him paralysed; her grown-up children are gone. In her anguish Ruby appeals for help to a half-remembered figure from her colonial Indian girlhood - Sister Benedicta. Gradually the events leading up to Leon's stroke are revealed and a woman emerges whose capacity to love, hope and understand are far greater than she realises. 
 
Over a million Rose Tremain books sold 
 
‘A writer of exceptional talent ... Tremain is a writer who understands every emotion’ Independent I 
 
‘There are few writers out there with the dexterity or emotional intelligence to rival that of the great Rose Tremain’ Irish Times 
 
‘Tremain has the painterly genius of an Old Master, and she uses it to stunning effect’ The Times 
 
'Rose Tremain is one of the very finest British novelists' Salman Rushdie 
 
‘Tremain is a writer of exemplary vision and particularity. The fictional world is rendered with extraordinary vividness’ Marcel Theroux, Guardian

Letter To Sister Benedicta

Read Charles Dickens’s first novel. 
 
 The Pickwick Papers was Dickens' first novel and was a huge success when it was first published. It tells the tale of the irrepressible Mr Pickwick and his fellow Pickwick Club members who travel around the English countryside getting into all kinds of scrapes and adventures. Funny, warm-hearted and full of memorable and engaging characters, this is an enchanting novel that continues to delight readers today. 
 
 ‘I was instantly swept up in Dickens' exploding world of eccentrics and grotesques, at the heart of which a is a huge affection for mankind' Simon Callow

The Pickwick Papers

Katharine Davies

When her twin brother breaks a promise and returns to their childhood home in Sri Lanka on his own, Valentina decides that it's time to make some changes in her life.  She cuts off her hair and takes a job as a gardener (although she'd prefer to be a writer) in a small town near the sea in Wales. And so the story takes us to Illerwick, an alluring, timeless place, and to the people who live there.  Leo Spring, an eccentric musician, lives alone in Beech House with a once beautiful garden that has now become overgrown and wild.  Valentina has come to help Leo restore the neglected garden to its former glory, and she soon falls in love with him.  But Leo is consumed by his unrequited infatuation with Melody, the beautiful headmistress in mourning for her brother who leapt to his death from the cliffs.  Mr Boase, the alcoholic and bullying deputy head, also holds a flame for Melody; and one of her pupils, Fitch, is another who daydreams about her.  As summer draws near, and the garden is gradually transformed, Leo organises a garden party in an attempt to impress Melody.  But on the night of the party, events come to a head, secret passions are revealed, and the characters are jolted into understanding that facing their feelings can be a matter of life or death. A Good Voyage is a magical story that charts the voyages of its characters as they move from the pain and comedy of loss and longing to self-realisation and love.  Katharine Davies writes with an astounding poise and lightness of touch, making this first novel, with its air of disquiet and enchantment, an unforgettable pleasure.

A Good Voyage

Leslie Garis

Leslie Garis's grandparents, Howard and Lillian Garis, were, from the turn of the century to the 1950s, phenomenally productive (and incredibly popular) authors of books for children. Every American child grew up reading the Uncle Wiggily stories, The Bobbsey Twins and Tom Swift. House of Happy Endings tells how in a large romantic house in Amherst, Massachusetts, Leslie Garis, her two brothers, her parents and grandparents aimed to live a life that mirrored the idyllic world the elder Garises created. But inside the Dell all was not right. 
 
Roger Garis's inability to match his parents' success in his own work as playwright, novelist and magazine writer led him to believe that he was a failure as father, husband and son, and eventually deepened into mental illness characterised by raging mood swings, drug abuse and bouts of debilitating and destructive depression. House of Happy Endings is Leslie Garis's mesmerising, tender and harrowing account of growing up in a wildly imaginative, loving, but fatally wounded family.

The House of Happy Endings

A. S. Byatt

In Passions of the Mind, A.S. Byatt writes as an artist and scholar taking the reader on a journey of discovery as she explores the ideas, images and attitudes to language underpinning some of her own fiction, and also the work of Great Victorians and a varied range of twentieth-century women writers. 
 
Fascinated by the coincidence of the symbolic and real which she finds in her favourite writers – Robert Browning, George Eliot and Wallace Stevens – A.S. Byatt also celebrates this quality in the sun and shadows of Van Gogh's painting.

Passions Of The Mind

Selected Writings

Peter Ackroyd

VOL. 3: A MUSE OF FIRE. 
Successful Playwright and Businessman. 
(c. 1595 - Opening of The Globe) 
Peter Ackroyd's insightful new biography positions Shakespeare in the close context of his world. In this way, Ackroyd not only richly conjures up the texture of Shakespeare's life, but also imparts an amazing amount of vivid, interesting material about place, period and background. Walk with Ackroyd through sixteenth century London and Stratford as he uncovers the intimate circumstances of Shakespeare's life. Discover the theatrical world in which Shakespeare had his being - not just Shakespeare the actor but the other actors, playwrights, and managers that surrounded him. And journey to Stratford to meet Shakespeare the family man, whose private life had such an impact on his work that the strongest bond in his plays is always between father and daughter.

Shakespeare - The Biography: Vol III

A Muse of Fire

Michael Rips

A refreshing antidote to the saccharine charms of Peter Mayle's A Year in Provence and Frances Mayes' Under the Tuscan Sun, this is the quirky and hilarious memoir of a criminal lawyer who gives up his New York practise to spend a year in the Etruscan town of Sutri, near Rome, where he moves - reluctantly - with his artist wife and baby.  Himself something of an eccentric from a bizarre Nebraskan family, he has spent his adult life living in hotels; and in Sutri, he heads straight for the caf- in the main square.  From there he observes the baroque events of small-town life, conjures up a cast of Italian eccentrics (including Pasquale and his hypersensitive organ of smell), and relishes the weirdness and the wonder of Sutri's history, folklore, architecture and above all its food - particularly the notorious 'fagioli regina' (beans in a tomato and pig skin sauce) and the annual Bean Festival.   Part of the delight of reading this memoir is that it not only evokes the sights and smells of an ancient and little-known town in Southern Italy, and brings its people to extraordinary life, but it also reveals the irresistible foibles and philosophy of a talented and unusual mind. Funny, philosophical and surprisingly moving, this is the story of how a rootless American finds home in the most unexpected places and how Pasquale and his compatriots put life into perspective in the strangest way.

Pasquale's Nose

Irvine Welsh

In 'A Fault on the Line', a Hearts-Hibernian football match is on television, and a Sunday afternoon trip to a beer garden with the family is an unwelcome distraction for former trackman Malky. The day ends badly when he decides to hurry them home in time for kick-off. 
 
In 'Elspeth's Boyfriend', it's Christmas day in Leith, and Frank is suffering from the previous evening's excesses. He doesn't take kindly to his sister's fancy new boyfriend. Frank's grumblings about the choice of television programmes develop into a more serious confrontation when a spot of unwanted physical contact causes tempers to flare. 
 
In 'Kissing and Making Up', a drunk seeking an outlet for his frustrations heads to a strip club in the early afternoon. There, however, he only manages to make things worse. 
 
Part of the Storycuts series, these three stories were previously published in the collection Reheated Cabbage.

A Fault on the Line / Elspeth’s Boyfriend / Kissing and Making Up (Storycuts)

Iris Murdoch

'I feel there are demons around.' 
 
Everyone is thinking about Julius King. For comfortable, long-married Hilda and Rupert, he is a mystery. For Morgan, Hilda's tormented sister, he is an obsession. For Morgan's abandoned husband, Tallis, he is the source of ruin. For Simon and Axel, deeply in love, he stirs up jealousy and unease. What is Julius thinking about? He's thinking about Hilda, Rupert, Morgan, Tallis, Simon and Axel, and they will not all survive his malevolent attention. 
 
 WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY GARTH GREENWELL 
 
 VINTAGE CLASSICS MURDOCH: Funny, subversive, fearless and fiercely intelligent, Iris Murdoch was one of the great writers of the twentieth century. To celebrate her centenary Vintage Classics presents special editions of her greatest and most timeless novels.

A Fairly Honourable Defeat (Vintage Classics Murdoch Series)

Lauren Redniss

'21st-century genius' Elle 
 
A howling wind, a thunderstorm, the beating sun – it’s with the elements that nature shows its true force and wonder. 
 
In Thunder and Lightning, Guggenheim fellow and Pulitzer nominee Lauren Redniss draws a new account of the weather. She has travelled from the frozen archipelagos of the Arctic Ocean to the ‘absolute desert’ of Atacoma, Chile, to show us the elements at their most extreme. Along the way, through interviews and research, she has unearthed curious stories of exploration, savagery and coincidence – stories which show us how weather has shaped humanity, intervened in the course of history, and how mankind, in turn, has tried to bend the weather to its ends. 
 
A book of exquisite beauty, with each illustration etched and coloured by hand, Thunder and Lightning informs, charms and transports. A combination of art and cultural history, from an uncategorisable and unique creative spirit, it will leave readers looking at the wind, the sun and the rain with new eyes.

Thunder and Lightning

Weather Past, Present and Future

George Eliot

George Eliot's final novel is an extraordinary, keen and yet tender examination of two very different lives. 
 
A beautiful young woman stands poised over the gambling tables in an expensive hotel. She is aware of, and resents, the gaze of an unusual young man, a stranger, who seems to judge her, and find her wanting. The encounter will change her life. 
 
The strange young man is Daniel Deronda, brought up with his own origins shrouded in mystery, searching for a compelling outlet for his singular talents and remarkable capacity for empathy. Deronda's destiny will change the lives of many. 
 
 ‘There is not a page of Daniel Deronda that is not marked with intelligence, and a few are as queer and perceptive as any I've read’ Sunday Times

Daniel Deronda

Atiq Rahimi

For every crime, there must be a punishment… 
 
Rassoul’s world consists of little more than a squalid rented room – strewn with books by Dostoevsky, relics from his days as a student of Russian Literature at Leningrad – and his beloved fiancée Sophia, for whom he would do anything. 
 
So when he finds himself committing a murder, axe in hand, as if re-enacting the opening of Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment, his identification with the novel’s anti-hero is complete: Rassoul is Raskolnikov, transplanted to late twentieth-century Kabul. Amid the war-torn streets, Rassoul searches for the meaning of his crime. Instead he is pulled into a feverish plot thick with murder, guilt, morality and Sharia law, where the lines between fact and fiction, dream and reality, become dangerously blurred. 
 
Blackly comic, with flashes of poetry as well as brilliant irony, Atiq Rahimi's latest novel is an ingenious recasting of Dostoevsky’s masterpiece and a transgressive satire with a frightening resonance all its own.

A Curse on Dostoevsky

John Broadley

Since 1996, John Broadley has been making, chiefly for his own pleasure, a series of remarkable little books. Each one has a tiny print run, sometimes as few as ten copies, which means that apart from a very few cognoscenti, no one has seen his extraordinary work. Until now. 
 
John Broadley's Books will reveal to the world an artist of astonishing imagination and skill, and one with the playfulness of the great English print-makers of the thirties and forties like Edward Bawden and Eric Ravilious. 
 
In this book you will find collected a complete visual record of Broadley's books - covers, end papers, sketches, notes, lines, captions and errata. Comprising work in a multitude of mediums, this is a treasure trove of visual delights. Here are scenes from much loved classics, mysteries and obscure science-fiction adventures, from The Legend of Sleepy Hollow to The Hawkline Sisters' Father: turned into an umbrella stand by his own evil creation - The Chemicals. 
 
We travel on a journey through the bookshelves of a remarkable artist, through 
Broadley's New Book of Mysterious and Melancholy Scenes in Black and Blue to the celebrated Wild for Adventure Stories - vignettes and fables in miniature - including Old Bill President Temperance League, Macabros the Monster-Maker and Frank and the Farmer, each image offering a peek at a world beyond. 
 
Eclectic, unique, fantastical - John Broadley's Books is the most extraordinary book of books you will ever read and a brilliant new addition to the Cape Graphic novel list.

John Broadley's Books

Gemma Weekes

A first love shouldn't bloom so fierce, you know? It shouldn't be like a fist forever clutched around the heart muscle... I didn't realise how bad I had it until he reappeared... 
 
Singer-poet Gemma Weekes turns to prose with this dazzling first novel about love, set between London and New York one hot, sticky summer. Eden is locked in a state of mid-twenties adolescence - directionless, insecure and hopelessly obsessed with her first love. When Zed, the object of her affection, swoops into town, 'flash in every line of his body', spitting gangster rap and the most beautiful boy she's ever seen, she knows she must have him back. Paralysed by lust, Eden hangs out at Zed's gigs, squeezes into mini dresses and drops as many hints as a girl can without losing her dignity, but with no result. Zed's more interested in Max - a blonde with perfect bone structure and as white as toothpaste. But is Max the real reason these two can't get it together? As the story unfolds, glimpses of their St Lucian relatives and parents reveal that Eden and Zed have some serious history they need to face if they're ever to understand what real love is. 
 
Gemma Weekes has a way with language that puts all the music, sweat, colour and raw emotion of a city night directly on to the page. Her dialogue fizzes with the spoken word, her character are intensely real. From Eden's Bible-bashing father to her mystical Aunt K and her rocker boyfriend Spanish, who smoulders with Black Pride, from Hackney to Brooklyn, Weekes brings to life a world of cross-cultural relationships, passion and pain that zings with life and reveals her to be a major new talent.

Love Me

Rudyard Kipling

'Hear and attend and listen; for this befell and behappened and became and was' 
 
Have you ever enquired why the elephant has such an enormously elongated nose? Are you confused by a cat's contrary nature? Have you ruminated on the wrinkles of a rhinocerous? Or speculated on a leopard's spots? Rudyard Kipling wondered about all these things too, and in this marvellous collection of stories he imagines how the animals became 'just so'. 
 
Includes exclusive material: In the Backstory you can find out why Just So Stories is one of Philip Pullman’s favourite books and discover wacky facts about wild animals! 
 
Vintage Children’s Classics is a twenty-first century classics list aimed at 8-12 year olds and the adults in their lives. Discover timeless favourites from The Jungle Book and Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland to modern classics such as The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas and The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time.

Just So Stories

Stan Hey

Ever wondered what it might be like to own a horse, not just back it with a pony on the nose - own it? Stan Hey did.  A veteran of the windswept racecourses of National Hunt he finally decided to stop betting on other people's horses and join the inner circle.  With the growth of partnerships and syndicates this has become increasingly possible so four horses, two trainers, and a few thousand pounds later Stan Hey had this story to tell.  An Arm and Four Legs is his honest account of the pitfalls of racehorse ownership. Its fierce disappointments, escalating costs, skulduggery and deceit are set alongside the intense pleasure offered by an afternoon spent at the track, drinking, betting and chatting to your trainer while the rest of the world has its feet tucked under a desk.

An Arm And Four Legs

A Journey into Racehorse Ownership

Ross King

Responding to a cryptic summons to a remote country house, London bookseller Isaac Inchbold finds himself responsible for restoring a magnificent library pillaged during the English Civil War, and in the process slipping from the surface of 1660s London into an underworld of spies and smugglers, ciphers and forgeries. As he assembles the fragments of a complex historical mystery, Inchbold learns how Sir Ambrose Plessington, founder of the library, escaped from Bohemia on the eve of the Thirty Years War with plunder from the Imperial Library.  Inchbold's hunt for one of these stolen volumes - a lost Hermetic text - soon casts him into an elaborate intrigue; his fortunes hang on the discovery of the missing manuscript but his search reveals that the elusive volume is not what it seems and that he has been made an unwitting player in a treacherous game.

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