Vintage books Cold Water Riley Gwendoline

'You’ll start with a blank map, that doesn’t do more than show roughly what’s water and what isn’t’ • When the Walker family’s holiday plans are ruined by Daddy having to work, the whole summer seems lost at sea. But a dull holiday for the children is too miserable to bear so their parents hatch a plan. The Swallows are to be marooned on an island with only a blank map and a little sailing dinghy. Their task? To explore and chart the area, avoid the endless mud and survive. And what do they discover? Well, they might not be as alone as they first thought… • Includes exclusive content: In the 'Backstory' you can find out about some real life explorers! • Vintage Children’s Classics is a twenty-first century classics list aimed at 8-12 year olds and the adults in their lives

Selected as a Book of the Year by The Times and The Economist • China's history is an epic tapestry of courtly philosophies, warring factions and imperial intrigue. Yet, over five thousand years, one ancient element has so dramatically shaped the country's fate that it remains the key to unlocking China's story. That element is water • In The Water Kingdom Philip Ball takes us on a grand tour of China's defining element, from the rice terraces and towering karts of its battle-worn waterways, to the vast engineering projects that have struggled to contain water's wrath. What surfaces is the secret history of a people and a nation, drawn from its deep reverence for nature's most dynamic force

Evan Shepard is a young man with a chequered past when he first meets the Drakes, after his car breaks down outside their house. Behind him, he has a troubled adolescence, a failed marriage and a little daughter, but his meeting with the quiet and beautiful Rachel heralds a new start. However, after their swift marriage, things don't work out quite as planned and the stresses of living with Rachel's family, in their shared house in Cold Spring Harbor, begin to take their toll on the new couple

'Cracking prose - highly inventive, inimitably stylish and funny' The Times • In Martin Amis's short stories whole worlds are created - or inverted. In 'Straight Fiction', everyone is gay, apart from the beleaguered 'straight' community; in 'Career Move', screenplay writers submit their works to little magazines, while poets are flown first-class to Los Angeles; in 'The Janitor of Mars', a sardonic robot gives us some strange news about life in the solar system. In 'Let Me Count the Times' a man has a mad affair with himself. 'Heavy Water', portrays the exhaustion of working-class culture, and 'State of England' its weird resuscitation. And in 'The Coincidence of the Arts' an English baronet becomes entangled with an African-American chess hustler

Eva is walking by the river with her seven-year-old daughter when they catch sight of a man’s body in the water. Eva tells her daughter to wait while she calls the police, but when she reaches the phone box she doesn’t call them. Instead she phones her father, and makes no mention of her discovery • When the body is eventually found, it soon becomes clear to Inspector Sejer and his team that this was no accidental drowning – the man was the victim of a very violent killer. But the trail has gone cold. Until, one night, Eva receives a phone call

Heavy rain falls on Lafferton. As the rain water slowly drains away, a shallow grave - and a skeleton - are revealed • It doesn't take long to identify the remains as those of missing teenager, Harriet Lowther, who was last seen sixteen years ago • But a cold case isn't a priority: if Detective Inspector Simon Serrailler is to solve the case, he will have to do it alone

The Quick • A woman swims in a remote, milky-blue lagoon. Steam rises from the water and as it clears, a body is revealed in the ghostly light • The Dead • Miles away, a vast aircraft hangar rises behind the perimeter fence of the US military base. A sickening thud is heard as a man's body falls from a high platform • The Forgotten • Many years before, a schoolgirl went missing. The world has forgotten her. But Erlendur has not • The Searcher • Erlendur Sveinsson is a newly promoted detective with a battered body, a rogue CIA operative and America's troublesome presence in Iceland to contend with. In his spare time he investigates a cold case. He is only starting out but he is already up to his neck

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

Robert Poste's child is back at Cold Comfort Farm. But all is not well. Flora finds the farm transformed into a twee haven filled with Toby jugs and peasant pottery, and rooms labelled 'Quiete Retreate' and 'Greate laundrie'. It is, Flora winces, 'exactly like being locked in the Victoria and Albert Museum after closing time' • Worse, the farm is hosting a conference of the pretentious International Thinkers Group - a group made up of the 'sadistic owl' Mr Peccavi, loathsome Mr Mybug and the overpowering Mrs Ernestine Thump • And worst of all, there are no Starkadders at Cold Comfort Farm. All the he-cousins have gone abroad to make their fortunes and the female cousins are having a pretty thin time of it. Once again the sensible Flora decides to take the situation in hand

London, 1985. Joe, father to eleven-year-old Matty, has disappeared, and nobody will explain where he's gone, or why • In the long, hot summer that follows, Matty's hunt for Joe leads to the ponds at Hampstead Heath. Beneath the water, there is a new kind of freedom. Above the water, a welcoming community of men offer refuge from an increasingly rocky home life • Fourteen years later, a new revelation sees Matty set off alone in a campervan, driving westwards through Ireland, swimming its wild loughs and following the scant clues left behind about Joe. The trip takes a dangerous turn, and Matty is forced to rely on the kindness of strangers. But safety comes at a price, and with desire and fear running high, the journey turns into an explosive, heart-rending reckoning with the past

'A simply wonderful book...the perfect union of writer and subject...a delightfully eccentric masterpiece; no poolside or riverbank should be without it' Craig Brown, Mail on Sunday • 'Roger Deakin is the perfect companion for an invigorating armchair swim. Engaging, thoughtful and candid' Telegraph • Waterlog celebrates the magic of water and the beauty and eccentricity of Britain • In 1996 Roger Deakin, the late, great nature writer, set out to swim through the British Isles. From the sea, from rock pools, from rivers and streams, tarns, lakes, lochs, ponds, lidos, swimming pools and spas, from fens, dykes, moats, aqueducts, waterfalls, flooded quarries, even canals, Deakin gains a fascinating perspective on modern Britain • Detained by water bailiffs in Winchester, intercepted in the Fowey estuary by coastguards, mistaken for a suicide on Camber sands, confronting the Corryvreckan whirlpool in the Hebrides, he discovers just how much of an outsider the native swimmer is to his landlocked, fully-dressed fellow citizens

Haroun: What's the use of stories that aren't even true? • I asked that question and the Unthinkable Thing happened: my father can't tell stories anymore. That means no more laughter in the city of Alifbay and now the place stinks of sadness. So it's up to me to put things right. If the water genie Iff can take me on the Hoopoe bird Butt all the way to Gup City then maybe, just maybe, I'll be able to persuade the Grand Comptroller to give my father his Story Water supply back. Trouble is, that is strictly forbidden, one hundred percent banned, no way Jose territory • Luka: What do sea monsters eat? • The Old Man of the River of Time: Fish and Ships. Why was six afraid of seven? • Luka: Because seven eight nine • Luckily, my father is the Riddle King and taught me everything I know