Vintage books Foreign Affairs Lurie Alison

'Marvellous entertainment' Sunday Times • Just married and newly arrived in Los Angeles are Paul and Katherine Cattleman. Paul responds immediately to the sunny, sprawling cosmopolitan city but to Katherine the main impression is of dirt and smog. Paul explores his surroundings and discovers Ceci, a girl who could be the incarnation of the city's uninhibited ways, while Katherine meets Iz a psychiatrist who recognises her unhappiness and sets out to help her. Under the bright west coast sun, the city begins to affect the couple in separate, subtle but significant ways, shining new light on their marriage with moving, funny and unexpected consequences

'Delightful... Her characters are, as always, wonderfully imperfect' New York Review of Books • Alan has changed because he's injured his back. Pain has altered his appearance and made him glum, demanding and resentful. His wife Jane has to do everything for him - fetching, carrying, shopping, cooking, even dressing and undressing him. Sometimes she longs for escape • Delia is a writer and researcher specialising in fairy tales - she is, in her own estimation, a 'Great Artist'. Her husband, Henry, manages her every need making certain Delia gets everything she desires including spectacular doses of adulation • Can Delia coax Alan out of his grumpiness? Can Henry stop Jane feeling guilty? Can the two couples break out of their fixed roles?

Gabe Wallach, freshly discharged from the Korean War army, reeling from his mother's recent death, and thus freed from old attachments, is hungrily seeking new ones. He's drawn to Paul Herz, a fellow graduate in literature, and to Libby - Paul's moody, Catholic-turned-Jewish wife. Gabe wonders: how to reconcile the ordered 'world of feeling' found in books with the anarchy of life, responsible adulthood, and his own love affairs? When Gabe meets Martha Reganhart, a spirited, outspoken, divorced mother of two, she poses the greatest challenge that he, and his moral enthusiasm, will face

"Эмма" Джейн Остин - ее шедевр, сочетающий в себе блеск ее ранних книг с глубокой чувствительностью наблюдателя • Эмма молода, богата и независима. Она решила не выходить замуж и вместо этого тратит свое время на организацию любовных похождений своих знакомых. Однако ее планы относительно матримониального успеха ее новой подруги Харриет приводят ее к осложнениям, которые в конечном счете проверяют ее собственную отстраненность от мира романтики • Книга на английском языке • Jane Austen's Emma is her masterpiece, mixing the sparkle of her early books with a deep sensibility' Observer • Emma is young, rich and independent. She has decided not to get married and instead spends her time organising her acquaintances' love affairs. Her plans for the matrimonial success of her new friend Harriet, however, lead her into complications that ultimately test her own detachment from the world of romance

"Эмма" Джейн Остин - ее шедевр, сочетающий в себе блеск ее ранних книг с глубокой чувственностью" • Эмма молода, богата и независима. Она решила не выходить замуж и вместо этого тратит свое время на организацию любовных похождений своих знакомых. Однако ее планы относительно матримониального успеха ее новой подруги Харриет приводят ее к осложнениям, которые в конечном счете проверяют ее собственную отстраненность от мира романтики • Книга на английском языке • Discover the classic story behind the major new film • 'Jane Austen's Emma is her masterpiece, mixing the sparkle of her early books with a deep sensibility' Observer • Emma is young, rich and independent. She has decided not to get married and instead spends her time organising her acquaintances' love affairs

The brilliant new novel from the winner of the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize • On the eve of Angolan independence, Ludo bricks herself into her apartment, where she will remain for the next thirty years. She lives off vegetables and pigeons, burns her furniture and books to stay alive and keeps herself busy by writing her story on the walls of her home • The outside world slowly seeps into Ludo’s life through snippets on the radio, voices from next door, glimpses of a man fleeing his pursuers and a note attached to a bird’s foot. Until one day she meets Sabalu, a young boy from the street who climbs up to her terrace

В этой замечательной составной биографии Элисон Вейр живо оживляет шестерых жен Генри, раскрывая каждую как самостоятельную и неотразимую личность. Опираясь на богатый документальный материал периода Тюдоров, "Шесть жен Генриха VIII" показывает нам двор, где личные потребности часто влияли на общественные мероприятия и где жизнь, полная пышных ритуализированных удовольствий, была пронизана амбициями, изменой и насилием • Книга на английском языке • One of the most powerful monarchs in British history, Henry VIII ruled England in unprecedented splendour • In this remarkable composite biography, Alison Weir brings Henry's six wives vividly to life, revealing each as a distinct and compelling personality in her own right. Drawing upon the rich fund of documentary material from the Tudor period, The Six Wives of Henry VIII shows us a court where personal needs frequently influenced public events and where a life of gorgeously ritualised pleasure was shot through with ambition, treason and violence

These three brilliant novels span Henry Green's career as a novelist and display his unique talents as a writer. Nothing is a tale of the merry-go-round of love, marriage and infidelity, and the ceaseless tussle of innocence versus experience. Doting sets the middle-aged male infatuation for pretty girls against the comfortable affection of wives and old friends, delving into the complications of burgeoning affairs and boring marriages. In Blindness, Green's first novel, a young man is blinded in a senseless accident but thereafter discovers new imaginative powers

A complicated and comic story of dangerous love affairs • Martin believes he can possess both a beautiful wife and a delightful lover. But when his wife, Antonia, suddenly leaves him for her psychoanalyst, Martin is plunged into an intensive emotional re-education. He attempts to behave beautifully and sensibly. Then he meets a woman whose demonic splendour at first repels him and later arouses a consuming and monstrous passion. How will he survive it?

A witty, elegant comedy of errors to rival any of Shakespeare's • Edmund has escaped from his family into a lonely life. Returning for his mother's funeral he finds himself involved in the old, awful problems, together with some new ones. One by one his relatives reveal their secrets to a reluctant Edmund: illicit affairs, hidden passions, shameful scandals. And the heart of all, there is, as always, the family's loyal servant, the Italian girl

‘A masterly work of profound research and reflection, objective and humane’ Hugh Trevor-Roper, Sunday Telegraph • What would have happened if the Nazis had invaded Britain? How would the British people have responded – with resistance or collaboration? In Madeleine Bunting’s pioneering study, we begin to find the answers to this age-old question • Though rarely remembered today, the Nazis occupied the British Channel Islands for much of the Second World War. In piecing together the fragments left behind – from the love affairs between island women and German soldiers, the betrayals and black marketeering, to the individual acts of resistance – Madeleine Bunting has brought this uncomfortable episode of British history into full view with spellbinding clarity

A tangled tale of falling in love - with three very different men • Flora Trevelyan is a ten-year-old misfit, despised by her selfish and indolent parents, and left to wander the streets of a small French town whilst her parents prepare to depart for life in colonial India. There she befriends the locals, acquires an extensive vocabulary of French foul language and encounters the privileged lifestyle of the elegant, middle-class British families holidaying in 1920s France • Introduced for the first time to kindly, civilised and, above all, caring people Flora falls helplessly and hopelessly in love with not one but three young men • Over the next forty years Flora will grow from an awkward schoolgirl into a stunning beauty and explore, consummate and finally resolve each of these affairs