Category Archives: Travel Guides
Petals of Blood
After decades of British rule Kenya has declared its independence, but drought and poor harvests still govern the village of Ilmorog. Undeterred, Munira, Karega, Wanja and Abdulla each move to Ilmorog in search of a more provincial life, only to find themselves suspects in a crime that signals a dark turning of the times. A
Roots
WITH A NEW INTRODUCTION BY DAVID OLUSOGA Winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book AwardTracing his ancestry through six generations of architects, lawyers, blacksmiths, farmers, freedmen and slaves, Alex Haley`s research took him back to Africa and a sixteen-year-old youth named Kunta Kinte. Torn from his homeland and brought to the slave markets
The New York Stories
`Superb… These thirty-two stories inhabit the Technicolor vernaculars of taxi drivers, barbers, paper pushers and society matrons… O`Hara was American fiction`s greatest eavesdropper, recording the everyday speech and tone of all strata of mid-century society` Wall Street JournalJohn O`Hara remains the great chronicler of American society, and nowhere are his powers more evident than in
Nothing but the Night
Description: Arthur Maxley is a tense and listless young man. One day he receives a letter from his long-estranged father. Arthur`s fear and aversion to the man is powerful, yet his compulsion to see his father is irresistible. After their meeting, Arthur is propelled into a night of drinking and spontaneous intimacy with a beautiful
Love: Vintage Minis
How do we love? With romance. With work. Through heartbreak. Throughout a lifetime. As a means, but not an end. Love in all its forms has been an abiding theme of Jeanette Winterson`s writing. Here are selections from her books about that impossible, essential force, stories and truths that search for the mythical creature we
Friendship: Vintage Minis
What is the secret to true friendship? Is it really love`s quieter relation or something stronger and more profound? And where does the line between the two lie? Rose Tremain looks at two unlikely lifelong friendships, which – though tested – prove unbreakable. Thought-provoking and life-affirming, this is at once an examination and a celebration
Fateless
Gyuri, a fourteen-year-old Hungarian Jew, gets the day off school to witness his father signing over the family timber business to the firm`s bookkeeper – his final business transaction before being sent to a labour camp. Two months after saying goodbye to his father, Gyuri finds himself assigned to a `permanent workplace`, but within a
Liquidation
Kingbitter, an editor at a publishing house on the verge of closure, believes himself to have been the closest friend of a celebrated writer and Auschwitz survivor, B, who recently committed suicide.Amongst the papers B has left him, Kingbitter finds a play entitled Liquidation that uncannily predicts the behaviour of B`s ex-wife, his mistress and
Kaddish For An Unborn Child
“No!” is the first word of Imre Kertesz`s haunting novel, Kaddish for an Unborn Child. It is how the novel`s narrator, a middle-aged Hungarian-Jewish writer, answers an acquaintance who asks him if he has a child, and it is how he answered his wife years earlier when she told him that she wanted one. The
Detective Story
Antonio Martens was an interrogator for the secret police of a recently fallen dictatorship.Now imprisoned, he begins to recount his involvement in the assassination of the high-profile Federigo Salinas and his son, Enrique. Preying upon the aimless Enrique, the secret police began by positioning the son as a subversive element, before they turned their attentions
To Have and Have Not
Harry Morgan is a tough guy making his living during the Depression from his motor boat in Key West, Florida. Although he normally takes out fishing parties, sometimes his boat can be put to other uses. If the money offered is worth his while, Harry will run guns, rum and men to and from Cuba.
The Years (Vintage Classics Woolf Series)
WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY SUSAN HILL The Years follows the lives of the Pargiters, a large middle-class London family, from an uncertain spring in 1880 to a party on a summer evening in the 1930s. We see them each endure and remember heart-break, loss, radical change and stifling conformity, marriage and regret. Written in 1937,
Vera
Lucy Entwhistle and Everard Wemyss are both reeling from recent unhappiness when they meet and swiftly fall in love. Lucy is Wemyss` `sweet girl`, and to Lucy, Everard is the whole world. The only blot on Lucy`s happiness is the shadowy figure of Wemyss` first wife, Vera, who died in mysterious circumstances. But it is
Fraulein Schmidt and Mr Anstruther
What on earth could have induced Mr Anstruther to fall in love with Fraulein Schmidt? He is an eligible English bachelor from a good family with great expectations; she is the plain, poor, `spinster` daughter of a German scholar. But Rose-Marie Schmidt is also funny, intelligent, brave and gifted with an irrepressible talent for happiness.
The Door
Emerence is a domestic servant – strong, fierce, eccentric, and with a reputation for being a first-rate housekeeper. When Magda, a young Hungarian writer, takes her on she never imagines how important this woman will become to her. It takes twenty years for a complex trust between them to be slowly, carefully built. But Emerence
Desire: Vintage Minis
You`ve just passed someone on the street who could be the love of your life, the person you`re destined for – what do you do? In Murakami`s world, you tell them a story. The five weird and wonderful tales collected here each unlock the many-tongued language of desire, whether it takes the form of hunger,
Drinking: Vintage Minis
What`s the worst another drink could do? John Cheever pours out our most sociable of vices, and hands it to us in a highball. From the calculating teenager who raids her parents` liquor cabinet, only to drown her sorrows in it, to the suburban swimmer withering away with every plunge he takes, these are stories
Eating: Vintage Minis
In this inspiring, witty and eminently sensible book, Nigella Lawson sets out a manifesto for how to cook (and eat) good food every day with a minimum of fuss. From basic roast chicken and pea risotto to white truffles and Turkish Delight figs, Nigella brings the joy back into the kitchen. Selected from the books
Home: Vintage Minis
Salman Rushdie, a self-described `emigrant from one place and a newcomer in two`, explores the true meaning of home. Writing with insight, passion and humour, he looks at what it means to belong, whether roots are real and homelands imaginary, what it is like to reconfigure your past from fragments of memory and what happens
Jealousy: Vintage Minis
Can we truly know the one we love? In this painfully candid book Marcel Proust looks straight into the green eye of every lover`s jealous struggle. He broods on why we are driven to try possess one another, how jealousy can outlive death, and whether we can ever reclaim those careless days of first love.
