Vintage Desire

'This book will haunt you, and stay with you, and won’t ever let go, just like the memory of a love that never happened but should have happened’ André Aciman, author of Call Me by Your Name

With the shadow of the Second World War now far behind, Tom is quietly living out the final years of his life. Then a letter arrives from an old friend and Tom is hurtled back to his days as a prisoner of war: the hunger, the horror, the longing for closeness and the young man with the black eyes, whom he never forgot.

First drafted by the author during his own time as a prisoner of war, Bitter Eden is a staggeringly beautiful elegy to lost love.

Vintage Desire: classic stories of lust and longing.

'Fleshy, beautiful and obscene' Evening Standard

As she whiles away her summer days in a dull seaside town, a young woman finds herself strangely and increasingly drawn to the looming figure of her boss, the butcher.

A controversial bestseller when first published 1988, Alina Reyes novella pairs here with her stories 'Lucie's Long Voyage' and 'The Fatal Bodice' to form a vision of female sensuality that is by turns dreamlike and nightmarish.

‘Her depiction of sex has sparked a resurgence of erotica as a lost literary tradition.... The language is as rich as calves' liver.’ The Times

Vintage Desire: classic stories of lust and longing.

‘Ogawa is original, elegant, very disturbing.’ Hilary Mantel

Mari works the front desk at her mother’s crumbling, seaside hotel on the coast of Japan. One night, a strange encounter with an older guest ignites a disturbing erotic affair, marking Mari’s initiation into a dark realm of both pleasure and pain.

Bold and surprising to the very last, Hotel Iris is a stirring novel that travels to the violent edge of love and intimacy, from the author of cult classic The Memory Police.

‘[Ogawa] creates moments of breathtaking ugliness. . . but also sometimes a longing that is touching and tender.’ Independent

Vintage Desire: classic stories of lust and longing.

With an introduction by Lena Dunham.

“That’s right. That’s a good girl”

An independent single mother in her thirties, Rachel has long lived a life of no-nonsense self-control. Then, one night she encounters the cold-eyed Joshua at a dinner party, and it seems as though all her darkest fantasies might be becoming very real.

Jenny Diski’s controversial first novel is a startling psycho-sexual spiral into oblivion, following one complicated woman’s hunt for true pleasure.

‘An honest and startling look at the angry face of sex’ Cosmopolitan


Vintage Desire: classic stories of lust and longing.

With an introduction by André Aciman, author of Call Me by Your Name.

At the age of sixteen, Olivia is sent to a Parisian finishing school to broaden her education. Soon after her arrival, she finds herself falling under the spell of her beautiful, sharp-witted teacher, Madamoiselle Julie.

Inspired by the author’s own youth, banned by the Catholic Church, Olivia is a groundbreaking, passionate, and subtle story of first – and forbidden – love.

'Perfectly captures the breathless excitement of adolescent passion' Sarah Waters

Vintage Desire: classic stories of lust and longing.

‘A lost world of louche living and erotic late-night liaisons...that still carries an illicit thrill’ Vogue

Will spends his days, and his trust fund, idly cruising 1980s London for erotic encounters – until a chance meeting with an older man draws him to unravel a tragic tale of repression that leads far too close to home.

A literary mystery, an erotic tour de force, The Swimming-Pool Library recalls a lost queer London with vivid clarity and masterfully uncovers its secrets.

‘A work of revolutionary candor that laid bare, in exquisite prose, the cut and thrust of queer existence.’ New Yorker

Vintage Desire: classic stories of lust and longing.

‘It takes one to the sheer edge of human relationships’ Vogue

Into a white millionaire's Caribbean mansion comes Jadine, a sophisticated black graduate of the Sorbonne. Then there’s Son, a criminal on the run, violent, uneductaed, a man who embodies all she loathes – and all she most desires.

A ravishingly beautiful, incendiary reinvention of the love story by the legendary winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature.

‘She told incredible, passionate, resonant stories.’ Roxane Gay

Vintage Desire: classic stories of lust and longing.

‘A gateway into a world of forbidden pain and pleasure’ Financial Times

Severin, a gentle Galician nobleman, desires nothing more than to be enslaved by a beautiful woman. When he comes across the striking widow Wanda at an Italian resort, it seems he has met his match.

Both a groundbreaking fable and an erotic nightmare, Leopold von Sacher-Masoch's novel inspired the term ‘masochism’ and remains an iconic vision of sexual submission and control.

‘Short, intense, erotic’ Hilton Als

Vintage Desire: classic stories of lust and longing.