Stunningly-designed new editions of Toni Morrison''s best-known novels, published by Vintage Classics in celebration of her life and work. WITH A NEW INTRODUCTION BY BOOKER PRIZE WINNING AUTHOR BERNARDINE EVARISTO Sethe is now miles away from Sweet Home - the farm where she was kept as a slave for many years. Unable to forget the unspeakable horrors that took place there, Sethe is haunted by the violent spectre of her dead child, the daughter who died nameless and whose tombstone is etched with a single word, ''Beloved''. A tale of brutality, horror and, above all, love at any cost, Beloved is Toni Morrison''s enduring masterpiece and best-known work.
When Ishmael sets sail on the whaling ship Pequod one cold Christmas Day, he has no idea of the horrors awaiting him out on the vast and merciless ocean. The ship's strange captain, Ahab, is in the grip of an obsession to hunt down the famous white whale, Moby Dick, and will stop at nothing on his quest to annihilate his nemesis.
Eureka Street is a story of Belfast in the 1990s, six months before and after another ceasefire. It is the story of Chuckie Lurgan, fat, Protestant and poor, who suddenly becomes wealthy by various legal but immoral means; Meanwhile the strange letters 'OTG' start appearing on walls and paving stones throughout the city.
Two men have been enlisted to kill the head of the Gestapo. This is Operation Anthropoid, Prague, 1942: two Czechoslovakian parachutists sent on a daring mission by London to assassinate Reinhard Heydrich - chief of the Nazi secret services, 'the hangman of Prague', 'the blond beast', 'the most dangerous man in the Third Reich'.
''She wanted to die, and she wanted to live in Paris.'' This is the story of Emma, trapped in a disappointing marriage with a dull country doctor, she dreams for a life more like the sentimental novels she reads. In an attempt to break from the drab reality of her provincial life in Normandy, Emma takes a lover, and disaster soon follows. Greedy, delusional and selfish, the character of Emma Bovary scandalised readers from the novel''s first publication in 1857, yet her magnetism is undeniable. A landmark work in modern realism, Madame Bovary vibrates with the inner life of a woman hungry for more. Meet ten of literature''s most iconic heroines, jacketed in bold portraits by female photographers from around the world.
Modern fictionA major publishing event; the first paperback publication of a lost masterpiece written in France in 1941, telling the story of a group of characters living under the Nazi occupation. The author died in Auschwitz in 1942, and was awarded the prestigious Prix Renaudot in 2005 - the first time that the prize has been awarded posthumously. 'A book of exceptional literary quality, it has the kind of intimacy found in the diary of Anne Frank' TLS. 'One of those rare books that demands to be read' Helen Dunmore Guardian. An audio edition is also published this month.
The great modernist writer's biography of Flush, the cocker spaniel of nineteenth century poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning, is available here as part of the }Vintage Lives{series, providing an insight into Woolf at her most playful and accessible.
WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY BENJAMIN MARKOVITS In 1845 Thoreau, a Harvard-educated 28-year-old, went to live by himself in the woods in Massachusetts. He stayed for over two years, living self-sufficiently in a small cabin built with his own hands. Walden is his personal account of the experience, in which he documents the beauty and fulfilment to be found in the wilderness, and his philosophical and political motivations for rejecting the materialism which continues to define our modern world.
In this vivid portrait of one day in a woman's life, Clarissa Dalloway is preoccupied with the last-minute details of a party she is to give that evening. As she readies her house she is flooded with memories and re-examines the choices she has made over the course of her life.
Mysterious disappearances, domestic cases, noiseless, bloodless snuffings-out... the law can look as deep as it likes, but when the crime itself goes unsuspected... oh yes, there's many a murderer basking in the sun...
When Therese Raquin is forced to marry the sickly Camille, she sees a bare life stretching out before her, leading every evening to the same cold bed and every morning to the same empty day. Escape comes in the form of her husband's friend, Laurent, and Therese throws herself headlong into an affair. There seems only one obstacle to their happiness; Camille. They plot to be rid of him. But in destroying Camille they kill the very desire that connects them...
First published in 1867, Therese Raquin has lost none of its power to enthral. Adam Thorpe's unflinching translation brings Zola's dark and shocking masterwork to life.
A NEW TRANSLATION BY ADAM THORPE 'Adam Thorpe's version deserves to become the standard English text' Daily Telegraph
A deluxe gift edition of Charlotte Bronte's masterpiece WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY MAGGIE O'FARRELL As an orphan, Jane's childhood is full of trouble, but her stubborn independence and sense of self help her to steer through the miseries inflicted by cruel relatives and a brutal school. A position as governess at the Thornfield Hall promises a kind of freedom. But Thornfield is a house full of secrets, its master a passionate, tormented man, and before long Jane faces her greatest struggle in a choice between love and self-respect.
VINTAGE CLASSICS BRONTE SERIES - beautiful editions, three iconic stories, three extraordinary women.
Dorothea is beautiful and rebellious and has married the wrong man. Lydgate is an ambitious doctor and has married the wrong woman. They long to make a positive difference in the world. But they and other inhabitants of Middlemarch, must struggle to reconcile themselves to their fates and find their places in the world.
A reissue of Wright's 1945 autobiography about growing up in the Jim Crow South only one step away from slavery. Gradually he learned how to survive in a world of white hostility, secretly satisfying his craving for books. He also wrote "Native Son", "Uncle Tom's Children" and "The Outsider".
Virginia Woolf's most unusual and fantastic creation, a funny, exuberant tale that examines the very nature of sexuality.
WITH INTRODUCTIONS BY PETER ACKROYD AND MARGARET REYNOLDS As his tale begins, Orlando is a passionate young nobleman whose days are spent in rowdy revelry, filled with the colourful delights of Queen Elizabeth's court. By the close, he will have transformed into a modern, thirty-six-year-old woman and three centuries will have passed. Orlando will not only witness the making of history from its edge, but will find that his unique position as a woman who knows what it is to be a man will give him insight into matters of the heart.
The Vintage Classics Virginia Woolf series has been curated by Jeanette Winterson and Margaret Reynolds, and the texts used are based on the original Hogarth Press editions published by Leonard and Virginia Woolf.
**One of the BBC's 100 Novels That Shaped Our World**
Focusing on Cantor's dilemmas as polio begins to ravage his playground - and on the everyday realities he faces - this title leads us through various emotions such a pestilence can breed: the fear, the panic, the anger, the bewilderment, the suffering, and the pain.
Nobody knows yet that she is a murderer... Abandoned at the gates of a London park one winter''s night in 1850, baby Lily Mortimer is saved by a young police constable and taken to the London Foundling Hospital. Lily is fostered by an affectionate farming family in rural Suffolk, enjoying a brief childhood idyll before she is returned to the Hospital, where she is punished for her rebellious spirit. Released into the harsh world of Victorian London, Lily becomes a favoured employee at Belle Prettywood''s Wig Emporium, but all the while she is hiding a dreadful secret... Across the years, policeman Sam Trench keeps watch over the young woman he once saved. When Sam meets Lily again, there is an instant attraction between them and Lily is convinced that Sam holds the key to her happiness - but might he also be the one to uncover her crime and so condemn her to death? Praise for Rose Tremain: ''One of the very finest British novelists'' Salman Rushdie ''One of my favourite writers'' Nina Stibbe ''There are few writers out there with the dexterity or emotional intelligence to rival that of the great Rose Tremain'' John Boyne
Oliver is an orphan living on the dangerous London streets with no one but himself to rely on. Fleeing from poverty and hardship, he falls in with a criminal street gang who will not let him go, however hard he tries to escape. This work conjures up the capital's underworld, full of prostitutes, thieves and lost and homeless children.
May, Christine, Heed, Junior, Vida - even L - all are women obsessed by Bill Cosey. More than the wealthy owner of the famous Cosey Hotel and Resort, he shapes their yearnings for a father, husband, lover, guardian, and friend, yearnings that dominate the lives of these women long after his death.
Every weekend, in basements and parking lots across the country, young men with good white-collar jobs and absent fathers take off their shoes and shirts and fight each other barehanded for as long as they have to. Then they go back to those jobs with blackened eyes and loosened teeth and the sense that they can handle anything.
Victor Frankenstein's story is one of ambition, murder and revenge. As a young scientist he pushed moral boundaries in order to cross the final scientific frontier and create life. But his creation is a monster stitched together from grave-robbed body parts who has no place in the world, and his life can only lead to tragedy.
