Vintage books Love and Friendship Lurie Alison

'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?

Jenny has devoted her life to her husband, the famous naturalist Wilkie Walker. But this year, as winter comes on, Wilkie seems distant and depressed. In desperation Jenny persuades him to visit Key West, but the sun and tropical scenery do nothing to cheer him up. As he grows even stranger, Jenny becomes involved with some intriguing local characters including Gerry, an ex-beatnik poet, and Lee, the dramatically attractive manager of a women-only guest house • Wife, secretary, confidante, housekeeper - might Jenny at last break free from her role as Wilkie's support act?

These inventive and entertaining pieces display the early sparkles of wit and imagination of Jane Austen’s mature fiction. Written when she was only in her teens, they are by turns amusing, acerbic and occasionally downright silly • ‘Love and Friendship’ and ‘Lesley Castle’ provide parodies of the gentry and the fashionable idea of sensibility of the time. ‘A History of England’ supplies us with a lively chronicle of English monarchic history. Also included in this collection are ‘The Three Sisters’, ‘Catharine’, the series of vignettes known as ‘A Collection of Letters’ and ‘Lady Susan’, an epistolary story which was recently adapted for the cinema. Taken together, these pieces display all the wry humour, shrewd observation and satirical insight of Emma or Pride and Prejudice

This tender story of parents, children and step-children, mistakes and secrets was Elizabeth Gaskell's last novel and is considered her masterpiece • Set in the watchful society of Hollingford, this is a warm tale of love and longing. Molly Gibson is the spirited, loyal daughter of the local doctor. Their peaceful close-knit home is turned upside down when Molly's father decides to remarry. Whilst Molly struggles to adjust to her snobbish stepmother, she forms a close relationship with her glamorous new stepsister Cynthia. The strength of this friendship is soon tested as their lives become entwined with Squire Hamley and his two sons

From the winner of the 2011 Man Booker Prize for Fiction comes the highly entertaining sequel to Talking it Over • In Talking it Over Gillian and Stuart were married until Oliver - witty, feckless Oliver - stole Gillian away. In Love, etc Julian Barnes revisits the three of them, using the same intimate technique of allowing the characters to speak directly to the reader, to whisper their secrets, to argue for their version of the truth. Darker and deeper than its predecessor, Love, etc is a compelling exploration of contemporary love and its betrayals

Я, как и все остальные, желаю быть совершенно счастливой; но, как и у всех остальных, у меня есть свои представления на этот счет.» • Откройте для себя любимую историю сестер, любви и общества, которая положила начало карьере Джейн Остин • Элинор настолько же расчетлива, насколько импульсивна ее сестра Марианна. Им стоит поучиться друг у друга, особенно после того, как смерть их отца вынудила их покинуть родной дом и вступить в конкруентную среду приличного общества. Обаяние неподходящих мужчин и происки соперниц приносят разочарование на пути к заветному счастью, и все же вместе они не отчаиватся и пытаются найти путь к нему • язык издания: Английский • ‘I wish, as well as everybody else, to be perfectly happy; but, like everybody else, it must be in my own way’ • Discover the beloved story of sisters, love and society that launched Jane Austen’s career

Love is Angela Carter's fifth novel and was first published in 1971. With surgical precision it charts the destructive emotional war between a young woman, her husband and his disruptive brother as they move through a labyrinth of betrayal, alienation and lost connections. This revised edition has lost none of Angela Carter's haunting power to evoke the ebb of the 1960s, and includes an afterword which describes the progress of the survivors into the anguish of middle age

It is not love at first sight for Frances and Bernard • She finds him faintly ridiculous while he sees her as aloof. But after that first meeting, Bernard writes Frances a letter which changes everything and soon they are immersed in the kind of fast, deep friendship that can alter the course of lives. They find their way to New York and discover cramped West Village kitchens, rowdy cocktail parties stocked with the sharp-witted and glamorous, taxis that can take you anywhere at all and long talks along the Hudson River as the lights of the Empire State Building blink on above • Irresistibly witty and deeply moving, Frances and Bernard is a story of kindred spirits and the people who help us discover who we are

One summer's evening, two men meet up in a Dublin restaurant. Old friends, now married and with grown-up children, their lives have taken seemingly similar paths. But Joe has a secret he has to tell Davy, and Davy a grief he wants to keep from Joe. Both are not the men they used to be • As two pints turns to three, then five, Davy and Joe set out to revisit the haunts of their youth. With the ghosts of Dublin entwining around them - the pubs, the parties, the broken hearts and bungled affairs - the men find themselves face-to-face with the realities of friendship

'As a novel it stands very high, but it is in its qualities as a "social document" that its great value lies' Times Literary Supplement • In Hanky Park, near Salford, Harry and Sally Hardcastle grow up in a society preoccupied with grinding poverty, exploited by bookies and pawnbrokers, bullied by petty officials and living in constant fear of the dole queue and the Means Test. His love affair with a local girl ends in a shotgun marriage, and, disowned by his family, Harry is tempted by crime. Sally, meanwhile, falls in love with Larry Meath, a self-educated Marxist. But Larry is a sick man and there are other more powerful rivals for her affection

Selected as a Book of the Year 2016 in The Times, Sunday Times and The Economist, and one of the 10 Best Books of 2016 in the New York Times • Shortly before his death, Stefan Hertmans' grandfather Urbain Martien gave his grandson a set of notebooks containing the detailed memories of his life. He grew up in poverty around 1900, the son of a struggling church painter who died young, and went to work in an iron foundry at only 13. Afternoons spent with his father at work on a church fresco were Urbain’s heaven; the iron foundry an inferno • During the First World War, Urbain was on the front line confronting the invading Germans, and ever after he is haunted by events he can never forget. The war ends and he marries his great love, Maria Emelia, but she dies tragically in the 1919 flu epidemic

Set in 1900s, this is a lushly descriptive and highly autobiographical portrayal of a young man growing up in class-divided Nottingham • Paul Morel is the focus of his disappointed and fiercely protective mother's life. Their tender, devoted and intense bond comes under strain when Paul falls in love with Miriam Leivers, a local girl his mother disapproves of. The arrival of the provocatively modern Clara Dawes causes further tension and Paul is torn between his individual desires and family allegiances • Set in a Nottinghamshire mining town at the turn of the twentieth century, this is a powerful portrayal of family and love in all its forms