Vintage books Another Now. Dispatches from an Alternative Present Варуфакис Янис

From the slums of Cape Town to the palaces of Algiers, through Pygmy villages where pineapples grow wild, to the Gulf of Guinea where the sea blazes with oil flares, across two continents and fourteen countries - this epic journey is nothing to swallows, they do it twice a year. But for Horatio Clare, writer and birdwatcher, it is the expedition of a lifetime • Along the way he discovers old empires and modern tribes, a witch-doctor's recipe for stewed swallow, explains how to travel without money or a passport, and describes a terrifying incident involving three Spanish soldiers and a tiny orange dog. By trains, motorbikes, canoes, one camel and three ships, Clare follows the swallows from reed beds in South Africa, where millions roost in February, to a barn in Wales, where a pair nest in May

When Janie Ryan is born, she is destined to be the latest in a long line of Aberdeen fishwives • Ahead of her lies a life filled with feckless men, filthy council flats and bread & marge sandwiches • But Janie isn’t like the rest of them. She wants a different life • And Janie, born and bred for combat, is ready to fight for it

'After Mark Cocker’s glorious book, you will never look at a blackberry bush the same way again.' • Philip Hoare, New Statesman • In 2001 Mark Cocker moved to Claxton, a small village in Norfolk. In a series of daily writings spanning the course of a year he explores his relationship to the landscape he lives in, to nature and to all the living things around him - the birds, plants, trees, mammals, hoverflies, moths, butterflies, bush crickets, grasshoppers, ants and bumblebees. Passionate, astonishing and inspiring, this book is a celebration of the wonder that lies in our everyday experience • Shortlisted for the Royal Society of Biology Book Award, the Jarrold East Anglian Book Awards, the New Angle Prize and theThwaites Wainwright Prize

1988 saw the birth of the internet. 2008 gave us bitcoin. Today, cybercurrencies are changing the world we live in. What would a world without banks, credit cards or national currencies look like for all of us? • For centuries, the system that governs how money works has stayed the same. Now there's an alternative, and it puts us on the cusp of a revolution that could reshape our world. At the heart of this lie, cryptocurrencies, a technology with the transformative potential of the printing press or the internet. They bypass the elites and cut out the gatekeepers. Unlike traditional money, they don't have a nationality, they're digital and democratic. They are also lawless • From Silicon Valley to the streets of Beijing, this is a story about a revolution in the making, a tale of human invention, and a guide to the future

His name is Lord Doyle • His plan: to gamble away his last days in the dark and decadent casino halls of Macau • His game: baccarat punto blanco -- 'that slutty dirty queen of casino card games.' • Though Doyle is not a Lord at all. He is a fake; a corrupt lawyer who has spent a career siphoning money from rich clients. And now he is on the run, determined to send the money – and himself – up in smoke • So begins a beguiling, elliptical velvet rope of a plot: a sharp suit, yellow kid gloves, another naughty lemonade and an endless loop of small wins and losses. When Lady Luck arrives in the form of Dao-Ming, a beautiful yet enigmatic lost soul, so begins a spectacular and unnatural winning streak in which millions come Doyle’s way. But in these shadowy dens of risk and compulsion, in a land governed by superstition, Doyle knows that when the bets are high, the stakes are even greater

A dark past. An impossible journey. The will to survive • Franny Stone is determined to go to the end of the earth, following the last of the Arctic terns on what may be their final migration to Antarctica • As animal populations plummet, Franny talks her way onto one of the few remaining boats heading south. But as she and the eccentric crew travel further from shore and safety, the dark secrets of Franny's life begin to unspool • Haunted by love and violence, Franny must confront what she is really running towards - and from • From the west coast of Ireland to Australia and remote Greenland, this is an ode to the wild places and creatures now threatened, and an epic, moving story of the possibility of hope against all odds

Eni Aluko: 102 appearances for England women's national football team. First female pundit on Match of the Day. UN Women UK ambassador. Guardian columnist. First class honors law degree. Now an inspirational author • They Don't Teach This steps beyond the realms of memoir to explore themes of dual nationality and identity, race and institutional prejudice, success, failure and faith. It is an inspiring manifesto to change the way readers and the future generation choose to view the challenges that come in their life applying life lessons with raw truths of Eni's own personal experience • 'A fascinating examination of her multiple identities - British and Nigerian, a girl in a boy's world, footballer and academic, a kid from an estate with upper-middle-class parents, a God-fearing rebel

'I'm alive inside. A bird is my heart. Mama and Daddy is not win. I'm winning.' • This is the story of Precious, a sixteen-year-old illiterate Black girl who has never been out of Harlem. Pregnant by her own father for the second time, she is kicked out of school and placed in an alternative teaching programme. Through learning to read and write, Precious begins to find her voice, and fight back • Push is the unflinching diary of a girl whose strength and kindness shines amidst extraordinary adversity • Meet ten of literature's most iconic heroines, featuring bold portraits by female photographers from around the world

Creepy. Peculiar. Fairy. Goblin. Liar. Weirdo. Crank. Genius • No one knows what to make of Juliet Slater, not even her mother. And clothes, boys, school, friends, the changing seasons and what other people think - none of these things seem to matter to Juliet. She spends hours in her room with incomprehensible mathematical text books, her mind voyaging in strange seas of thought, alone. Is she a genius? It might take the rest of her life to find out • While Stella Gibbons was celebrated for her beloved bestseller Cold Comfort Farm, the manuscript for Pure Juliet lay unseen and forgotten until it was brought to light by her family in 2014, and is published here for the first time in Vintage Classics. A tale that travels from an eco-millionaire's British country idyll to an Arabian Nights-style fantasy of the Middle East, this is a treat for fans of this witty, curious and always surprising author

The setting is a comedy club in a small Israeli town. An audience that has come expecting an evening of amusement instead sees a comedian falling apart on stage; an act of disintegration, a man crumbling, as a matter of choice, before their eyes. They could get up and leave, or boo and whistle and drive him from the stage, if they were not so drawn to glimpse his personal hell. Dovaleh G, a veteran stand-up comic – charming, erratic, repellent – exposes a wound he has been living with for years: a fateful and gruesome choice he had to make between the two people who were dearest to him • A Horse Walks into a Bar is a shocking and breathtaking read. Betrayals between lovers, the treachery of friends, guilt demanding redress. Flaying alive both himself and the people watching him, Dovaleh G provokes both revulsion and empathy from an audience that doesn’t know whether to laugh or cry – and all this in the presence of a former childhood friend who is trying to understand why he’s been summoned to this performance

A subtle and insightful story about boredom, passion, curiosity and memory from the Nobel Prize-winner Jose Saramago • A subtle and insightful story about boredom, passion, curiosity and memory from the Nobel Prize-winner Jose Saramago • Senhor Jose is a lonely civil servant who spends his days labouring in the labyrinthine stacks of Lisbon's central registry. Among the file-cards for the living and the dead, one - of an apparently ordinary woman - will transform his life. Breaking away from his strict routine, Jose resolves to track the woman down, obsessively following a thread of clues in a bid to rescue her from an oblivion deeper than the grave • 'When a very good book finds us at just the right moment in life, it can become stitched into our own identity

In 2010, Alan Rusbridger, the editor of the Guardian, set himself an almost impossible task: to learn, in the space of a year, Chopin’s Ballade No. 1 – a piece that inspires dread in many professional pianists • His timing could have been better • The next twelve months were to witness the Arab Spring, the Japanese tsunami, the English riots, and the Guardian’s breaking of both WikiLeaks and the News of the World hacking scandal • In the midst of this he carved out twenty minutes’ practice a day – even if that meant practising in a Libyan hotel in the middle of a revolution as well as gaining insights and advice from an array of legendary pianists, theorists, historians and neuroscientists, and even occasionally from secretaries of state • But was he able to play the piece in time?