Vintage books Epitaphs for Underdogs Szepessy Andrew

The end of the world • Or the beginning… • On to the shores of Texas a raging sea coughs up two castaways: Jim and Natty, shipwrecked on their way home from Treasure Island • The Nightingale sunk, their silver gone, captured, weak and afraid, the pair steal a treasure they should have left well alone • The adventure of the New World lies in wait…

Too often we take for granted and neglect our libraries, parks, markets, schools, playgrounds, gardens and communal spaces, but decades of research now shows that these places can have an extraordinary effect on our personal and collective wellbeing. Why? Because wherever people cross paths and linger, wherever we gather informally, strike up a conversation and get to know one another, relationships blossom and communities emerge – and where communities are strong, people are safer and healthier, crime drops and commerce thrives, and peace, tolerance and stability take root • Through uplifting human stories and an illuminating tour through the science of social connection, Palaces for the People shows that properly designing and maintaining this ‘social infrastructure’ might be our single best strategy for a more equal and united society

Enter Alms for Oblivion, Simon Raven's dazzling cycle of ten novels, all telling separate stories but at the same time linked together by the characters they have in common: schoolboys and businessmen, writers and soldiers, prostitutes and patient wives, actresses and models. In the first four novels Raven's wayward band of upper-class anti-heroes lurch from debauched parties to rehearsals for nuclear war; from blackmail to murder; from marriage to adultery and back again • Volume 1: The Rich Pay Late, Friends in Low Places, The Sabre Squadron and Fielding Gray

The next round in the beloved Two Pints series from the ever-brilliant, always hilarious imagination of bestselling author of The Commitments and Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha • Two men meet for a pint - or three - in a Dublin pub. They chew the fat, set the world to rights and mourn friends gone: David Bowie, Prince, Princess Leia and Young Frankenstein. Around them the world of Brexit, Trump, and referendums storm, but some things - good things - never change • Inspired by the last five years of news, Roddy Doyle's Two for the Road offers a strong brew of Roddy Doyle's comic genius - to be downed in one riotous sitting, or savoured over, laugh after laugh

Discover Pulitzer Prize-winning, Sunday Times bestselling author Anne Tyler's deeply personal American historical epic • Duncan Peck is a restless man, always on the move. His wife, Justine, is a fortune teller who can't remember the past. Her grandfather, Daniel, longs to find the brother who walked out of his life in 1912 never to be seen again. All three are taking journeys that lead back to the family's deepest roots, to a place where rebellion and acceptance have the haunting power to merge into one

After the early death of her philandering husband, Etsuko moves into her father-in-law's house, where she numbly submits to the old man's advances. But soon she finds herself in love with the young servant Saburo. Tormented by his indifference, yet invigorated by her desire, she makes her move, with catastrophic consequences

Simon Raven's sequence of colourful and funny novels about the English upper-class misbehaving continues against a backdrop of intrigue in Athens, radicalism in Cambridge, turmoil in India and movie-making in Corfu. Dazzlingly witty and thoroughly depraved, Raven's world is also a dark mirror to our times - one that is sure to make you blush, shriek, laugh out loud and always read on • Volume 2: The Judas Boy, Places Where they Sing, Sound the Retreat and Come Like Shadows

The mysterious death of a young woman on an Australian farm reveals a bittersweet story of doomed wartime romance amidst a family crisis • Alan Duncan returns to his family home in Australia after the war and several years of study in England. But his homecoming is marred by the mysterious suicide of his parents' quiet and reliable parlour-maid. A search through her belongings in search of clues leads to heartbreaking revelations about the woman's identity, the death of Alan's brother Bill and, above all, the disappearance of his brother's fiancee, Janet

‘A fine and powerful piece of work… Dark, at times cryptic, and hugely energetic’ Irish Times • “No!" is the first word of this haunting novel. It is how a middle-aged Hungarian-Jewish writer answers an acquaintance who asks him if he has a child, and it is how he answered his wife years earlier when she told him that she wanted one. The loss, longing and regret that haunt the years between these two 'No!'s give rise to one of the most eloquent meditations ever written on the Holocaust. As Kertesz's narrator addresses the child he couldn't bear to bring into the world, he takes readers on a mesmerising, lyrical journey through his life, from his childhood to Auschwitz to his failed marriage

Agatha Christie called her ‘a shining light’. Have you discovered Margery Allingham, the 'true queen' of the classic murder mystery? • Scandal, secrets and suspicions abound when one of the directors at the prestigious publishing house of Barnabas is found dead, locked in the company’s strongroom • All eyes are on the other partners at the firm – cousins of the dead man with much to gain from his demise – and all rumours hint at a connection to the disappearance of another director decades earlier • Desperate to salvage their reputation, the cousins turn to Albert Campion – but will his investigations clear the Barnabas family name, or besmirch it forever? • As urbane as Lord Wimsey…as ingenious as Poirot… Meet one of crime fiction’s Great Detectives, Mr Albert Campion

For Mallory, as for all of his generation, death was but ‘a frail barrier that men crossed, smiling and gallant, every day’. As climbers they accepted a degree of risk unimaginable before the war. What mattered now was how one lived, and the moments of being alive • While the quest for Mount Everest may have begun as a grand imperial gesture, it ended as a mission of revival for a country and a lost generation bled white by war. In a monumental work of history and adventure, Davis asks not whether George Mallory was the first to reach the summit of Everest, but rather why he kept climbing on that fateful day

For two years Solomon the elephant has lived in Lisbon. Now King Dom Joao III wishes to make him a wedding gift for a Hapsburg archduke in Vienna. The only way for Solomon to get to his new home is to walk. So begins a journey that will take the stalwart elephant across the dusty plains of Castile, over the sea to Genoa and up to northern Italy where, like Hannibal's elephants before him, he must cross the snowy Alps. Based on a true story, Saramago’s tale is an enchanting mix of fact, fable and fantasy