Vintage Books

An entirely new kind of biography, "Oscar's Books" explores the personality of Oscar Wilde through his reading. For Wilde, as for many people, reading could be as powerful and transformative an experience as falling in love. He referred to the volumes that radically altered his vision of the world as his 'golden books'; he gave books as gifts -...

A young woman is brutally murdered on a remote mountain road. A young construction worker, Yuichi, is on the run - but is he guilty? This is the dark heart of Japan; a world of seedy sex hotels and decaying seaside towns; a world of loneliness, violence and desperation. As the police close in on Yuichi and his new lover, the stories of the victim,...

Lydia Millet's novel tells an extraordinary story of the three scientists who formed the core of the team that developed the atomic bomb. With the exploding of the first bomb in Nevada, Robert Oppenheimer, Leo Szilard and Enrico Fermi are transported to today's America. As they gradually realise what has happened to them, all three are consumed by...

Plan Aurora, hatched in a remote dacha in the forest outside Moscow and initiated with relentless brilliance and skill, is a plan that is a plan that in its spine-chilling ingenuity breaches the ultra-secret Fourth Protocol and turns the fears that shaped it into a living nightmare. A crack Soviet agent, placed under cover in a quiet English...

A Dance to the Music of Time chronicles the lives of over three hundred characters, and is a unique evocation of life in twentieth-century England. It is unrivalled for its scope, its humour and the enormous pleasure it has given to generations. A Buyer's Market follows Nicholas Jenkins, Kenneth Widmerpool and others, as they negotiate the...

News of the untimely death of Charles Dickens reaches James R. Osgood at his American publisher. Expecting the arrival of the latest instalment of The Mystery of Edwin Drood and suspicious of unscrupulous New York publishers keen to get their hands on the novel, Osgood sends his clerk, Daniel Sands, to await its arrival. When Daniel's body is found...