Vintage books Dear Daughter Little Elizabeth

Elizabeth Bowen's last novel, a character study of startling originality which many consider to be her best work • WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY TESSA HADLEY • Imposing, rich, unloved and with a genius for unreality; Eva Trout has a 'capacity for making trouble, attracting trouble, strewing trouble around her' that is endless. Eva Trout was Elizabeth Bowen's last completed novel, and in it her elegant style, her gift for social comedy and her intense sensibility combine to create one of her most formidable - and moving - heroines

Selected and with a New Introduction by Tessa Hadley • A girl shares her secret den. A couple stroll through a ruined city. A man walks into a ladies' hat shop. A teacher dreams of killing her pupil • Spanning the 1920s to the post-war years, this new selection brings Elizabeth Bowen's finest short stories together for the first time. Elegant and subtle, they showcase Bowen's ability to evoke ineffable emotions - grief, nostalgia, self-consciousness, dread - and combine remarkable psychological insight with vivid settings, from the countryside of Bowen's native Ireland to the streets of her London home after the Blitz • Encompassing characters from many walks of life and a vast array of moods, these are intricate journeys of domesticity and discovery, of the homely and uncanny, of the mind and body

The first novel from one of the twentieth century's most admired and stylish writers • It's the balmy days of the 1920s and where could be more pleasant for a holiday than a hotel on the Italian Riviera? Filled with prosperous English visitors, the Hotel offers a closed world of wealth and comfort. It also provides the stage for the display of social niceties, for passionate but unspoken love affairs and for the comedy of the shared bathroom. With great wit and insight Elizabeth Bowen's first novel lays bare the intricacies and eccentricities of polite society

Celebrated for her much-admired novels, including The Heat of the Day and The Death of the Heart, Bowen established herself in the front rank of the century's writers equally through her short fiction • WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY A. N. WILSON • Throughout these seventy-nine stories - love stories, ghost stories, stories of childhood, of English middle-class life in the twenties and thirties, of London during the Blitz - Elizabeth Bowen combines social comedy and reportage, perception and vision in an oeuvre which reveals, as Angus Wilson affirms in his introduction, that 'the instinctive artist is there at the very heart of her work'

A girl shares her secret den. A couple stroll through a ruined city. A man walks into a ladies' hat shop. A teacher dreams of killing her pupil • Spanning the 1920s to the post-war years, this new selection brings Elizabeth Bowen's finest short stories together for the first time. Elegant and subtle, they showcase Bowen's ability to evoke ineffable emotions - grief, nostalgia, self-consciousness, dread - and combine remarkable psychological insight with vivid settings, from the countryside of Bowen's native Ireland to the streets of her London home after the Blitz • Encompassing characters from many walks of life and a vast array of moods, these are intricate journeys of domesticity and discovery, of the homely and uncanny, of the mind and body

Meet the three women who helped shape the course of modern Chinese history; a gripping story of sisterhood and betrayal from the bestselling author of Wild Swans • They were the most famous sisters in China. As the country battled seismic transformations these three women left an indelible mark on history • Red Sister rose to be Mao's vice-chair • Little Sister became first lady of pre-Communist Nationalist China • Big Sister made herself one of country's richest women • Big Sister, Little Sister, Red Sister takes us on a sweeping journey from exiles' quarters in Japan and Berlin to secret meeting rooms in Moscow, and from the compounds of the Communist elite in Beijing to the corridors of power in democratic Taiwan. By turns intimate and epic, Jung Chang reveals the lives of three extraordinary women who helped shape twentieth-century China

A wickedly observed novel about falling in love at the end of your life, by the Man Booker Prize-winning author of The Finkler Question • At the age of ninety-something, Beryl Dusinbery is forgetting everything – including her own children. She spends her days stitching morbid samplers and tormenting her two carers with tangled tales of her husbands and affairs • Shimi Carmelli can do up his own buttons, walks without a frame and speaks without spitting. Among the widows of North London, he’s whispered about as the last of the eligible bachelors. He forgets nothing –especially not the shame of a childhood incident that has long hung over him. There's very little left remaining for either of them. . . But perhaps just enough to heal some of the hurt inflicted along the way, and find new meaning in what's left

Making peace in Northern Ireland was the greatest success of the Blair government, and one of the greatest achievements in British politics since the Second World War. In Jonathan Powell's masterly account we learn just how close the talks leading to the Good Friday agreement came to collapse and how the parties finally reached a deal • Pithy, outspoken and precise, Powell, Tony Blair's chief of staff and chief negotiator, gives us that rarest of things, a true insider's account of politics at the highest level. He demonstrates how the events in Northern Ireland have valuable lessons for those seeking to end conflict in other parts of the world and shows us how the process of making peace is sometimes messy and often blackly comic

Elizabeth Morison is an ordinary woman • Yet, to eight-year-old Bunny, his mother is the centre of his universe. To Robert, her elder son, she is someone he must protect against the dangers of the outside world. And to her husband, James, she is the foundation on which his family rests and life without her is unimaginable • As the dark winter of 1918 dawns and the shadow of Spanish flu starts to disturb day-to-day life, a moving portrait of Elizabeth takes shape, set against the lives and fate of the Morison family

From the Pulitzer prize-winning Sunday Times bestseller Anne Tyler. A Patchwork Planet is now re-jacketed along with the rest of Tyler's books in striking new backlist style • Barnaby Gailtin has less in life than he once had • His ex-wife Natalie left him and their native Baltimore several years ago, taking their baby daughter Opal with her, and he has acquired an unalterably fixed position as the black sheep of the family in a family where black sheep aren't tolerated. Then the angelic Sophia enters his life and it seems as if all this is set to change. But can he shake off his past? • **ANNE TYLER HAS SOLD OVER 1 MILLION BOOKS WORLDWIDE** • 'One of my favourite authors' Liane Moriarty • 'She spins gold' Elizabeth Buchan • 'Anne Tyler has no peer' Anita Shreve • 'A masterly author' Sebastian Faulks

Here is one of those rare novels, so captivatingly original, so absurdly funny, surprising and moving, that it crosses all boundaries • 1971: Mao's cultural Revolution is at its peak. Two sons of doctors, sent to 're-education' camps, forced to carry buckets of excrement up and down mountain paths, have only their sense of humour to keep them going. Although the attractive daughter of the local tailor also helps to distract them from the task at hand • The boys' true re-education starts, however, when they discover a hidden suitcase packed with the great Western novels of the nineteenth century. Their lives are transformed. And not only their lives: after listening to the stories of Balzac, the little seamstress will never be the same again

The remarkable story of Bess of Hardwick, her ascent through Elizabethan society and the houses she built that shaped British architectural history • Born in 1521, Bess of Hardwick, businesswoman, money-lender and property tycoon, lived an astonishing eighty-seven years. Through canny choices, four husbands and a will of steel she rose from country squire's daughter to Dowager Countess, establishing herself as one of the richest and most powerful women in England, second only to Queen Elizabeth • Bess forged her way not merely by judicious marriage, but by shrewd exploitation of whatever assets each marriage brought. Wealth took concrete form in her passion for building and she oversaw every stage of the construction of her four houses including Hardwick New Hall, her sole surviving building, which stands as a celebration of one woman's triumphant progress through Elizabethan England