Vintage International

In the summer of 1956, Stevens, the ageing butler of Darlington Hall, embarks on a leisurely holiday that will take him deep into the countryside and into his past . . .A contemporary classic, The Remains of the Day is Kazuo Ishiguro's beautiful and haunting evocation of life between the wars in a Great English House, of lost causes and lost love.

......contains poems written over the course of seven years by VS, the author of the bestselling novel in verse, The Golden Gate. The unusual feature of this collection is its variety: the poems range from love poems to those dealing wth nature or travel, from a section of epigrammatical four-liners to longer narratives in the voices of those caught up in war and public crisis. As in The Golden Gate, Seth conveys his feelings with directness and clarity, and with the memorable use of rhyme and metre.

An intricate and delightful novel' Graham GreeneFlaubert's Parrot deals with Flaubert, parrots, bears and railways; with our sense of the past and our sense of abroad; with France and England, life and art, sex and death, George Sand and Louise Colet, aesthetics and redcurrant jam; and with its enigmatic narrator, a retired English doctor, whose life and secrets are slowly revealed.A compelling weave of fiction and imaginatively ordered fact, Flaubert's Parrot is by turns moving and entertaining, witty and scholarly, and a tour de force of seductive originality

Sardonic story of a man who undertakes the perfect crime - his own murder.

In his highly acclaimed debut, A Pale View of Hills, Kazuo Ishiguro tells the story of Etsuko, a Japanese woman now living alone in England, dwelling on the recent suicide of her daughter. Retreating into the past, she finds herself reliving one particular hot summer in Nagasaki, when she and her friends struggled to rebuild their lives after the war. But then as she recalls her strange friendship with Sachiko - a wealthy woman reduced to vagrancy - the memories take on a disturbing cast.

First published in 1989, London Fields is set ten years into a dark future, against a backdrop of environmental and social decay and the looming threat of global cataclysm. As the dreaded Y2K approaches, Nicola Six, a “black hole” of sex and self-loathing, has chosen her thirty-fifth birthday, November 5, 1999, as the date of her own murder. Whom to manipulate into killing her is the question; her choice wavers between violent lowlife Keith Talent, who is obsessed with winning a darts tournament, and a dimly romantic banker named Guy Clinch. When Samson Young—a writer suffering from a long bout of writer’s block—stumbles upon these three, he believes he has found a story that will write itself.

The Stonemason is a profoundly moving drama set in Louisville, Kentucky in the 1970s, concerning several generations of a black family. McCarthy's narrator, Ben, reveals a painful episode in his family's history, grounding us at the same time in the beautiful dynamic between him and his grandfather, Papaw. Ben, Ben's father, and Papaw are all stonemasons, but in descriptions of "the trade" we learn as much about this family's capacity for love as we do about constructing sound foundations for houses, barns and bridges. Papaw's knowledge about stonemasonry is analogous to his deep spiritual wisdom, and Ben recognizes both as he looks back on his apprenticeship in the "trade at which I thought myself a master and of which I stood in darkest ignorance. And as I came to know him ... As I came to know him ... Oh I could hardly believe my good fortune. I swore then I'd cleave to that old man like a bride. I swore he'd take nothing to his grave." Papaw's son Big Ben and great-grandson Soldier do not respond as whole-heartedly to the old man's wealth of knowledge and patient guidance and the tragedy of the story is largely rooted in this fact. Both of these characters have lost connection with the work of their hands and by association with the earth, their family, and themselves. They are profoundly dissatisfied. Of his father, Ben later wonders, "Why could he not see the worth of that which he had laid aside and the poverty of all he hungered for? Why could he not see that he too was blest?" The Stonemason reveals afresh the mastery of character, plot, pathos, and the poetic facility for language that distinguishes Cormac McCarthy's fiction, and which recently earned him the National Book Award for his bestselling novel, All The Pretty Horses.

As Japan rebuilds her cities after the calamity of World War II, the celebrated painter Masuji Ono should be enjoying a tranquil retirement. But as his memories continually return to a life and career deeply touched by the rise of Japanese militarism, a dark shadow begins to grow over his serenity.

Nabokov described this novella, written in Paris in 1939 but only published twenty years later, as 'the first little throb of Lolita'. The plot is similar: a middle-aged man wedding an unattractive widow in order to indulge his paedophilic obsession with her daughter. However, The Enchanter has an utterly different atmosphere, as time, place and even names remain a mystery. Nabokov transforms his protagonist's attempts to lull his twelve-year-old step-daughter into a state of 'enchantment' into a graceful, chilling fairytale.

A literary sensation and bestseller in both England and America, The Swimming-Pool Library is an enthralling, darkly erotic novel of gay life before the scourge of AIDS; an elegy, possessed of chilling clarity, for ways of life that can no longer be lived with total impunity. “Impeccably composed and meticulously particular in its observation of everything” (Harpers & Queen), it focuses on the friendship of two men: William Beckwith, a young gay aristocrat who leads a life of privilege and promiscuity, and the elderly Lord Nantwich, an old Africa hand, searching for someone to write his biography and inherit his traditions.

A self-satisfied couple intent on raising a happy family is shocked by the birth of an abnormal and brutal fifth child.

Die Blechtrommel ist ein Roman von Günter Grass. Er erschien 1959 als Auftakt der Danziger Trilogie und gehört zu den meistgelesenen Romanen der deutschen Nachkriegsliteratur. Der Roman lässt sich als historischer Roman, Zeitroman, Schelmenroman und Entwicklungsroman charakterisieren.

Mexico, 1991: Black acid rain falls on "Makesicko City", the most polluted, most populated city in the world. Amid this apocalyptic landscape a prize is being offered to the first child born on the 500th anniversary of Columbus' discovery of America. That child is the narrator of this passionate, savage novel by one of the world's preeminent writers. Notes: Translation of: Cristóbal Nonato. Description: xi, 531 p. ; 24 cm. Other Titles: Cristóbal Nonato. Responsibility: Carlos Fuentes ; translated from the Spanish by Alfred Mac Adam and the author. More information: Publisher description Contributor biographical information

Edmund White is a patriarch of gay American literature. A Boy's Own Story is the first of his trio of autobiographical novels (followed by The Beautiful Room Is Empty and The Farewell Symphony). It begins with experiments and realizations of adolescence and proceeds through his firsthand account of the Stonewall uprising.

A funny and heartbreaking new book from one of Britain's favourite and bestselling writers.A Frenchman once pointed out to Louis de Bernieres that Britain was the most exotic country in Europe, adding that it was 'an immense lunatic asylum'. Casting his mind back to the village in southern Surrey where he grew up in the sixties and seventies, but plagued by a novelist's inability to stick to the truth, Louis de Bernieres brings us in Notwithstanding stories of a vanished England which will delight readers of his much-loved novels. The English village was a place where a lady might dress as a man in plus fours and spend her time shooting squirrels with a twelve bore, or keep a vast menagerie in her house. A retired general might give up wearing clothes, a spiritualist might live in a cottage with her sister and the ghost of her husband, and people might think it quite natural to confide in a spider that lives in a potting shed. De Bernieres' characters roam through the book, appearing in each other's stories and painting a picture of an entire community. Here we find the atmosphere of those times as it was in the countryside. Notwithstanding is not about an imagined idyll; it is about people who are worth remembering, whose lives are worth celebrating, and who would otherwise have been forgotten.

Five stories trace the sentimental education of a restless, complex, and contradictory man from youth to late middle age. In “Skushno,” the adolescent Gregor is disgraced and exacts revenge on the Jewish boy who is a rival for his aunt’s affection. “Youth” finds him on the run from his aristocratic family, supporting himself as a window dresser, and enmeshed in an unhappy affair with a Jewish woman he calls the “black widow.” Vienna in the years leading up to the Anschluss is the setting for the tale of betrayal, “Troth.” And in “Pravda,” the final story, an older man wanders the streets of Rome and reckons with a life held in thrall by passion and prejudice.

Een vrouw en jongen in het 17e eeuwse Engeland blijken zich in bizarre 20e eeuwse fantasieën te bevinden.

"Because Auden is an important poet, this is an important book, and one which will help more toward clarifying Auden's later verse than any criticism that has yet been written about him. Because Auden is the most intelligent of living poets, and the wittiest, the clarification is more pleasurable than critical clarification ususally is." [Cover].

Mole has converted a huge underground quarry into an "ark" capable of surviving the coming nuclear holocaust and is now in search of his crew. He falls victim, however, to the wiles of a con-man-cum-insect-dealer. In the surreal drama that ensues, the ark is invaded by a gang of youths and a sinister group of elderly people called the Broom Brigade, lead by Mole's odious father, while Mole becomes trapped in the ark's central piece of equipment, a giant toilet powerful enough to flush almost anything, including chopped-up humans, out to sea--Publisher's description.

In this collection of interviews, articles, and editorials, Nabokov ranges over his life, art, education, politics, literature, movies, and modern times, among other subjects. Strong Opinions offers his trenchant, witty, and always engaging views on everything from the Russian Revolution to the correct pronunciation of Lolita.

A novel about the survivors of an atomic war, who face an inevitable end as radiation poisoning moves toward Australia from the North.

Funny, ironic, erudite, surprising, and not afraid to take a dive overboard into the depths of sorrow and loss. My novel of the year' Nadime GordimerBeginning with an unlikely stowaway's account of life on board Noah's Ark, A History of the World in 10½ Chapters presents a surprising, subversive, fictional history of earth told from several kaleidoscopic perspectives. Noah disembarks from his ark but he and his Voyage are not forgotten: they are revisited in on other centuries and other climes - by a Victorian spinster mourning her father, by an American astronaut on an obsessive personal mission. We journey to the Titanic, to the Amazon, to the raft of the Medusa, and to an ecclesiastical court in medieval France where a bizarre case is about to begin...This is no ordinary history, but something stranger, a challenge and a delight for the reader's imagination. Ambitious yet accessible, witty and playfully serious, this is the work of a brilliant novelist.