Vintage books Highway Blue McFarlane Ailsa

A serial killer is terrorising the people of Bologna and rookie Detective Inspector Grazia Negro is determined to solve the case. She only has one witness who can identify the killer - and he is blind. Simone spends his nights listening to Chet Baker and scanning the radio waves of the city, eavesdropping on other people's lives. He imagines what people are like - based on the 'colour' of their voice - and his acute hearing sets alarm bells ringing when he tunes in to the killer. Together Simone and Negro are the only people able to stop the killer, before he closes in on Simone • From the diverse perspectives of the detective, the blind Simone and the killer, Lucarelli, master of Italian noir, weaves a gripping thriller

Lost, found, stolen, strayed, sold, fought over... This engrossing, beautifully crafted novel follows the fictional adventures, over a hundred years, of an early 20th-century painting and the women whose lives it touches • It opens with bold, passionate Gwen, struggling to be an artist, leaving for Paris where she becomes Rodin's lover and paints a small, intimate picture of a quiet corner of her attic room • Then there's Charlotte, a dreamy intellectual Edwardian girl, and Stella, Lucasta, Ailsa and finally young Gillian, who share an unspoken desire to have for themselves a tranquil golden place like that in the painting • Quintessential Forster, this is a novel about women's lives, about what it means and what it costs to be both a woman and an artist, and an unusual, compelling look at a beautiful painting and its imagined afterlife

'In his blue gardens men and girls came and went like moths among the whisperings and the champagne and the stars' • The world and his mistress are at Jay Gatsby's party. But Gatsby stands apart from the crowd, isolated by a secret longing. In between sips of champagne his guests speculate about their mysterious host. Some say he's a bootlegger. Others swear he was a German spy during the war. They lean in and whisper 'he killed a man once'. Just where is Gatsby from and what is the obsession that drives him? • Vintage Deco: Nine blazing, daring novels to celebrate the 1920s - 100 years on

As relevant today as when it was first published, We is the first modern dystopian novel which inspired both Nineteen Eighty-Four and Brave New World • The citizens of the One State live in a condition of 'mathematically infallible happiness'. D-503 decides to keep a diary of his days working for the collective good in this clean, blue city state where nature, privacy and individual liberty have been eradicated. But over the course of his journal D-503 suddenly finds himself caught up in unthinkable and illegal activities - love and rebellion • Banned on its publication in Russia in 1921, We is the first modern dystopian novel and a satire on state control that has once again become chillingly relevant

A bittersweet novel of family and self-discovery from the bestselling, award-winning author of A Spool of Blue Thread • Willa Drake can count on one hand the defining moments of her life: her mother’s disappearance when she was just a child, being proposed to at an airport at the age of twenty-one, the accident that would leave her a widow in her forties. Each time, Willa ended up on a path laid out for her by others • So when she receives a phone call from a stranger informing her that her son’s ex-girlfriend has been shot, she drops everything and flies across the country. The spur-of-the moment decision to look after this woman and her nine-year-old daughter leads Willa into uncharted territory and the eventual realisation that it’s never too late to choose your own path

Her fresh start is about to turn into a nightmare… • Audra has finally left her abusive husband. She’s taken the family car and her young children, Sean and Louise, are buckled up in the back. This is their chance for a fresh start • Audra keeps to the country roads to avoid attention. Then she spots something in her rear-view mirror. A police car is following her and the lights are flickering. Blue and red • As Audra pulls over she is intensely aware of how isolated they are. Her perfect escape is about to turn into a nightmare beyond her imagining…

One day, out of the blue, Henry Nagel inherits a sumptuous apartment in St John's Wood. Divine intervention? Or his late father's love nest? Henry doesn't know, but he is glad to escape the North. After nearly sixty years of angry disappointment, Henry's life is about to change • Not that the ghosts of Henry's past are prepared to disappear without a struggle - his old school-friend and rival Osmond 'Hovis' Belkin, currently enjoying success in Hollywood; his tragic great aunt Marghanita for whom Henry once entertained a dangerous passion; and his father Izzi, upholsterer turned illusionist, fire-eater and origamist, whose shade Henry interrogates relentlessly. But the present clamours as loudly as the past. His dyspeptic neighbour Lachlan wants his sympathy; Lachlan's sloppy red setter, Angus, wants a walk; and Moira, the waitress with the crooked smile and custard hair, seems to want him

For thousands of years the human heart remained the deepest of mysteries; both home to the soul and an organ too complex to touch, let alone operate on. Then, in the late nineteenth century, medics began going where no one had dared go before • In eleven landmark operations, Thomas Morris tells us stories of triumph, reckless bravery, swaggering arrogance, jealousy and rivalry, and incredible ingenuity, from the trail-blazing ‘blue baby’ procedure to the first human heart transplant. The Matter of the Heart gives us a view over the surgeon’s shoulder, showing us the heart’s inner workings and failings. It describes both a human story and a history of risk-taking that has ultimately saved millions of lives

Jean-Baptiste Adamsberg is not like other policemen. His methods appear unorthodox in the extreme: he doesn't search for clues; he ignores obvious suspects and arrests people with cast-iron alibis; he appears permanently distracted. In spite of all this his colleagues are forced to admit that he is a born cop • When strange blue chalk circles start appearing overnight on the pavements of Paris, only Adamsberg takes them - and the increasingly bizarre objects found within them - seriously. And when the body of a woman with her throat savagely cut is found in one, only Adamsberg realises that other murders will soon follow…

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

Philip Roth's entire oeuvre - 31 books - to be reissued in electric new Vintage jackets for October 2016 • As a student in college, David Kepesh styles himself as 'a rake among scholars, a scholar among rakes' - an identity that will cling to him for a lifetime. As Philip Roth follows Kapesh from the domesticity of childhood out into the vast wilderness of erotic possibility, from a menage a trois in London to the depths of loneliness in New York, Kapesh confronts the central dilemma of pleasure: how to make a truce between dignity and desire; and how to survive the ordeal of an unhallowed existence

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