Vintage books English Monsters Scudamore James

The gripping adventure that invented the mystery of Shangri-La • Flying out of India, a light aircraft is hi-jacked and flown into the high Tibetan Himalayas. The few passengers on board anxiously await their fate, among them Conway, a talented British consul. But on landing they are unexpectedly conducted to a remote valley, a legendary paradise of peace and beauty, known as Shangri-La. Have they been kidnapped? Can they escape? And do they even want to? • From the author of Goodbye Mr Chips, this is the epic adventure story of literature's most entrancing utopia and one of our most enduring literary mysteries

Однажды осенним днем в Мехико 17-летняя Луиза не возвращается домой из школы. Вместо этого она садится в автобус, идущий на Тихоокеанское побережье, с безрассудным, импульсивным Томасом, мальчиком, которого она едва знает. Их цель: разыскать труппу бродячих артистов, которые недавно сбежали из гастролирующего цирка • Вместе они отправляются на Зиполите, «Пляж мертвых», в сообщество, населенное хиппи, любителями пляжного отдыха и эксцентричными рассказчиками историй, и Луиза ищет кого-то, кого угодно, кто «пообещает, несмотря ни на что, оставаться загадкой» • Но по мере того, как Луиза бродит по берегу, она начинает понимать, что поиски легче представить, чем осуществить • "Sea Monsters" — захватывающий роман о приключениях, полный уникальных персонажей и их оригинальных историй

C L R James, one of the foremost thinkers of the twentieth century, was devoted to the game of cricket. In this classic summation of half a lifetime spent playing, watching and writing about the sport, he recounts the story of his overriding passion and tells us of the players whom he knew and loved, exploring the game's psychology and aesthetics, and the issues of class, race and politics that surround it • Part memoir of a West Indian boyhood, part passionate celebration and defence of cricket as an art form, part indictment of colonialism, Beyond a Boundary addresses not just a sport but a whole culture and asks the question, 'What do they know of cricket who only cricket know?

James and Katherine meet at a wedding in London in 2006, towards the end of the money for nothing years. James is a man with a varied past now living alone in a flat in Bloomsbury; Katherine is separated from her husband and working in an interim job in a luxury hotel. They exchange phone numbers at the wedding, but from then on not much goes according to the script

Reissued in electric new backlist style for October 2016, The Counterlife was lauded by the likes of John Updike, Martin Amis, Julian Barnes, John Banville and James Wood, as well as winning the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction • Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction • The Counterlife is about people living their dreams of renewal and escape, some of them going so far as to risk their lives to alter their destinies. Wherever they find themselves, the characters of The Counterlife are tempted by the prospect of an alternative existence • Illuminating these lives in free-fall and transformation is the acrobat mind of novelist Nathan Zuckerman. His is the sceptical, enveloping intelligence that calculates the price that's paid in the struggle to change personal fortune and reshape history, whether in a dentist's office in suburban New Jersey; a tradition-bound English Village in Gloucestershire; a church in London's West End; or in a tiny desert settlement in Israel's occupied West Bank

An ex-circus strongman, veteran of Warsaw, 1939, and Notting Hill rough-justice artist, meets his own personal holocaust and 'Einsteinian' destiny; maximum boredom and minimum love-making are advised in a 2020 epidemic; a virulent new strain of schizophrenia overwhelms the young son of a 'father of the nuclear age'; evolution takes a rebarbative turn in a Kafkaesque love story; and the history of the earth is frankly discussed by one who has witnessed it all • The stories in this collection form a unity and reveal a deep preoccupation: '"Einstein's Monsters" refers to nuclear weapons but also to ourselves,' writes Amis in his enlightening introductory essay, 'We are Einstein's monsters: not fully human, not for now.'

Highly original and magnificent in scope, Albion: The Origins of the English Imagination discovers the roots of English cultural history in the Anglo-Saxon period, and traces it through the centuries • What does it mean to be English? This dazzling book demonstrates that a quintessentially English quality can be discovered in all forms of English culture, not only in literature but also in painting, music, architecture, philosophy and science • Just as London: The Biography guided the reader through the capital city with a mixture of narrative and theme, so Albion, employing the same techniques, engages the reader with stories and surprises - From Beowulf to King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table, via Chaucer and Shakespeare, to the Bronte sisters, Alice through the Looking Glass and Lord of the Rings • Witty, provocative and anecdotal, this is Peter Ackroyd at his most brilliant and exuberant

What does it take to be a family? • Julia has fallen deeply, unexpectedly in love. James is her second chance, and everything she never knew she wanted. It’s perfect but for two things: their children • Julia’s beloved daughter Gwen loathes James and James’s son Nathan takes pleasure in antagonising his new stepsister. Uniting two households is never easy, but the teenagers’ unexpected actions will eventually threaten everyone’s hard-won happiness

A powerful and unique story about connection, showing that miracles can happen – even across a library circulation desk • The year is 1950, and in a small town on Cape Cod twenty-eight year old librarian Peggy Cort feels as if love and life have stood her up. That is, until the day James Carlson Sweatt – the 'over-tall' eleven year old boy who's the talk of the town – walks into her library and changes her life for ever • Two misfits whose lonely paths cross at the circulation desk, Peggy and James are odd candidates for friendship. In James, Peggy discovers the one person who's ever really understood her, and as he grows – six foot five at age twelve, then seven foot, then eight – so does their most singular romance

There's no better time to rediscover James Bond • Who is Auric Goldfinger? • The Bank of England wants to know and they're also curious to find out what he's done with the huge stock of gold he's been collecting since the war. James Bond is put on the trail • This isn't the first time 007 has come across the enigmatic millionaire and he quickly discovers that Goldfinger never forgets and never forgives. Bond is drawn inexorably into the most ambitious heist of the century and finds himself the only defence against Goldfinger's murderous mania for gold

As America recovers from the Second World War, two families' journeys begin • James Vincent, born in 1942 to an Irish-American family, escapes his parents' turbulent marriage and attends law school in New York, where he moves up the social ladder as a prosperous and bright attorney • Meanwhile, Agnes Miller, a beautiful black woman on date with a handsome suitor, is pulled over by the police on a rural road in Georgia. The terrible moments that follow make her question her future and pivot her into a hasty marriage and new life in the Bronx • Illuminating more than six decades of sweeping change - from the struggle for civil rights and the chaos of Vietnam to Obama's first year as President - James and Agnes's families will come together in unexpected, intimate and profoundly human ways

There's no better time to rediscover James Bond • The British Secret Service has many enemies • Whether it's a sniper in East Berlin, a Russian agent secretly bidding for a Faberge egg, or a retired major in Jamaica with a treacherous secret, it is down to James Bond to neutralize the threat • In these stories the dirty world of international espionage tests Bond's skills to the extreme