Vintage books Clear Light of Day Desai Anita

In his dynamic tour through 40,000 years of music, from prehistoric instruments to modern-day pop, Howard Goodall leads us through the story of music as it happened, idea by idea, so that each musical innovation – harmony, notation, sung theatre, the orchestra, dance music, recording, broadcasting – strikes us with its original force. He focuses on what changed when and why, picking out the discoveries that revolutionised man-made sound and bringing to life musical visionaries from the little-known Perotin to the colossus of Wagner. Along the way, he also gives refreshingly clear descriptions of what music is and how it works: what scales are all about, why some chords sound discordant and what all post-war pop songs have in common

Encountering an eccentric cast of characters along the way, Sebald confronts the frailty of human existence as he voyages along the Suffolk coast on foot • What begins as the record of a journey on foot through coastal East Anglia becomes the great, constellated story of people and cultures past and present: of Chateaubriand, Thomas Browne, Swinburne and Conrad, of fishing fleets, skulls and silkworms. A rich meditation on the past via a melancholy trip along the Suffolk coast, The Rings of Saturn is an intricately patterned and haunting book on the transience of all things human • Vintage Voyages: A world of journeys, from the tallest mountains to the depths of the mind

An outrageously funny spoof about the ascent of a 40,000-and-a-half-foot peak, discover this laugh-out-loud cult favourite • Led by the reliably under-insightful Binder, a team of seven British men including Dr Prone (constantly ill); Jungle the route finder (constantly lost), Constant the diplomat (constantly arguing) and 3,000 Yogistani porters, set out to conquer the highest peak in the Himalayas • Vintage Voyages: A world of journeys, from the tallest mountains to the depths of the mind

After a lifetime of ups and downs, Horatio Clare was committed to hospital under Section 2 of the Mental Health Act. From hypomania in the Alps, to a complete breakdown and a locked ward in Wakefield, this is a gripping account of how the mind loses touch with reality, how we fall apart and how we may heal • 'One of the most brilliant travel writers of our day takes us now to that most challenging country, severe mental illness; and does so with such wit, warmth and humanity' Reverend Richard Coles

Discover this beautiful special edition of Charles Darwin's groundbreaking theory on human evolution • When the eminent naturalist Charles Darwin returned from South America on board the HMS Beagle in 1836, he brought with him the notes and evidence that would form the basis of a world-changing theory: the evolution of species by a process of natural selection • This theory, published as On the Origin of Species in 1859, is the basis of modern biology and the concept of biodiversity. Its publication sparked a fierce scientific, religious and philosophical debate, which continues to this day • Patterns of Life: Special Editions of Groundbreaking Science Books

A retired widow in rural Connecticut wakes to an unexpected visit from her childhood best friend whom she hasn't seen in forty-nine years • A man arrives at a Bethlehem, Pennsylvania hotel to introduce his estranged father to his newborn daughter and finds him collapsed on the floor of the lobby • A sixty-seven-year-old taxi driver in Kauai receives a phone call from the mainland that jars her back to a traumatic past • These seemingly disconnected lives come together as half-century-old secrets begin to surface over the course of one fateful day

Eleven years old and on the cusp of puberty, Aron Kleinfeld is precocious, imaginative - the leader of his gang of friends. But his bar mitzvah is looming, his friends are all hitting puberty and Aron, terrified and revolted by what he sees around him, enters a state of arrested development. He stops growing, retreats from the world, and is imprisoned in the body of a child for three long years. While Israel inches towards the Six-Day War, and his friends cross the boundary between childhood and adolescence, Aron remains in his child's body, spying on the changes that adulthood wreaks as, like his hero Houdini, he struggles to escape the trap of growing up

Perfect for fans of This Is Going to Hurt • Grief. Anger. Joy. Fear. Distraction. Disgust. Hope • All emotions we expect to encounter over our lifetime. But what if this was every day? And what if your ability to manage them was the difference between life and death? • For Aoife Abbey, a doctor in intensive care, these experiences are part of the job - from grief when you make a potentially fatal mistake to joy when the ward unexpectedly breaks into song. Seven Signs of Life is Abbey's extraordinary account of what it means to be alive and how it feels to care for a living • An insightful, tender and inspiring memoir that explores the reality of life on the NHS front line. 'Brilliant, compelling... A hugely life-affirming book' Mail on Sunday

In a snow-covered village in Chechnya, eight-year-old Havaa watches from the woods as her father is abducted in the middle of the night by Russian soldiers. Their life-long friend and neighbour, Akhmed, has also been watching, and when he finds Havaa he knows of only one person who might be able to help • For tough-minded doctor Sonja Rabina, it's just another day of trying to keep her bombed-out, abandoned hospital going. When Akhmed arrives with Havaa, asking Sonja for shelter, she has no idea who the pair are. But over the course of five extraordinary days, Sonja's world will shift on its axis, revealing the intricate pattern of connections that binds these three unlikely companions together and unexpectedly decides their fate

Chester Royde, an American millionaire, travels to Scotland with his new bride Carrie and sister Myrtle, to find out more about Carrie's Scottish ancestry. Their new 'relatives' turn out to be a little more authentically Scottish than they bargained for. Ben Nevis, Laird of Glenbogle Castle, is fiercely protective of his lands and the Macdonald clan spirit, but being cash-strapped he's not above attempts to marry heiress Myrtle to one of his many brawny sons. But then a group of hikers stumble onto his moor and spoil a day's hunting, sparking all-out war between gentry and commoners

One day, out of the blue, Henry Nagel inherits a sumptuous apartment in St John's Wood. Divine intervention? Or his late father's love nest? Henry doesn't know, but he is glad to escape the North. After nearly sixty years of angry disappointment, Henry's life is about to change • Not that the ghosts of Henry's past are prepared to disappear without a struggle - his old school-friend and rival Osmond 'Hovis' Belkin, currently enjoying success in Hollywood; his tragic great aunt Marghanita for whom Henry once entertained a dangerous passion; and his father Izzi, upholsterer turned illusionist, fire-eater and origamist, whose shade Henry interrogates relentlessly. But the present clamours as loudly as the past. His dyspeptic neighbour Lachlan wants his sympathy; Lachlan's sloppy red setter, Angus, wants a walk; and Moira, the waitress with the crooked smile and custard hair, seems to want him

'Barrow explains nothing with great clarity, a lovely lightness of touch and enormous erudition' Spectator • How do you begin to understand the concept of nothing? • Where does it begin and where does it end? • From the zeros of the mathematician to the void of the philosophers, from Shakespeare to the empty set, from the ether to the quantum vacuum, from being and nothingness to creatio ex nihilo, there is much ado about nothing at the heart of things • Recent exciting discoveries in astronomy are shown to shed new light on the nature of the vacuum and its dramatic effect upon the explanation of the Universe. This remarkable book ranges over every nook and cranny of nothingness to reveal how the human mind has had to make something of nothing in every field of human enquiry