Vintage books New Grub Street Gissing George

The bestselling author of Girl with a Pearl Earring and The Last Runaway returns with a tale of jealousy, bullying and revenge • Arriving at his fourth school in six years, diplomat’s son Osei knows he needs an ally if he is to survive his first day – so he’s lucky to hit it off with Dee, the most popular girl in school. But one student can’t stand to witness this budding relationship: Ian decides to destroy the friendship between the black boy and the golden girl. By the end of the day, the school and its key players – teachers and pupils alike – will never be the same again • The tragedy of Othello is transposed to a 1970s suburban Washington schoolyard in Tracy Chevalier's powerful drama of friends torn apart

Acclaimed National Book Award-winning author George Packer diagnoses America's descent into a failed state, and envisions a path toward overcoming injustices, paralyses, and divides • How, in a few decades, did the United States transform from a broadly prosperous middle-class country, with relatively healthy institutions and competent leaders, to a nation defined by discredited elites, hollowed-out institutions, and blatant inequalities-feared and pitied by our friends, mocked and sabotaged by our adversaries, first in the world in Covid cases and deaths, and led in recent years by an incompetent authoritarian bigot? Last Best Hope is a bracing account of our current crisis and of how a new era of civic revitalization may bring it to an end • Combining reportage with historical narrative, autobiography, and political analysis, Packer depicts and assesses the four inadequate narratives that dominate American public life: Libertarian America, which imagines a nation of individuals responsible for their own fate, and serves the interests of corporations and the wealthy; Cosmopolitan America, the ideology of Silicon Valley and the professional elite,which celebrates globalization and leaves many American communities behind; Diverse America, which defines citizens as members of large identity groups that have inflicted or suffered oppression; and White America, a shallow nationalism that fears the contamination of non-whites and treachery of coastal elites, and poses the greatest threat to democracy in our lifetime

‘Superb... These thirty-two stories inhabit the Technicolor vernaculars of taxi drivers, barbers, paper pushers and society matrons... O'Hara was American fiction's greatest eavesdropper, recording the everyday speech and tone of all strata of mid-century society’ Wall Street Journal • John O'Hara remains the great chronicler of American society, and nowhere are his powers more evident than in his portraits of New York's so-called Golden Age. Unsparingly observed, brilliantly cutting and always on the tragic edge of epiphany, the stories collected here are among O’Hara’s finest work, and show why he still stands as the most-published short story writer in the history of the New Yorker

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

Mitchell is the laureate of old New York. The hidden corners of the city and the people who lived there are his subject. He captured the waterfront rooming-houses , nickel-a-drink saloons, all-night restaurants, the 'visionaries, obsessives, imposters, fanatics, lost souls, the end-is-near street preachers, old Gypsy Kings and old Gypsy Queens, and out-and-out freak-show freaks.' Mitchell's trademark curiosity, respect and graveyard humour fuel these magical essays • Written between 1943 and 1965, Up in the Old Hotel is the complete collection of Joseph Mitchell 's New Yorker journalism and includes McSorley's Wonderful Saloon, Old Mr Flood, The Bottom of the Harbour and Joe Gould's Secret

Inishowen is by turns wildly funny and deeply moving, from the author of Star of the Sea • From the bestselling author of Star of the Sea and Shadowplay, 'a powerful, moving adventure of raw fate and betrayed love' (Independent on Sunday) • Inspector Martin Aitken's life is a mess. He's divorced, his career's in chaos, and the last thing he needs this Christmas Even is a strange woman collapsed on a Dublin street. Ellen Donnelly is a woman on a mission, coming to Ireland to find her mother and escape her marriage. Dr Milton Amery, a New York plastic surgeon, is her unfaithful husband. The three are beginning new journeys, each of which lead to Inishowen • 'A page-turner, full of compassion, laughter and zest for the human condition' Irish Times • 'Tremendous

Reissued in new series style to match Faulks's most recent novel Where My Heart Used to Beat, which was a major Sunday Times bestseller in 2016 • A vividly evocative novel set in Cold War and New Frontier era America, from the bestselling author of Birdsong and Charlotte Gray • America, 1959. With two young children she adores, loving parents back in London, and an admired husband, Charlie, working at the British embassy in Washington, the world seems an effervescent place of parties, jazz and family happiness to Mary van der Linden. But the Eisenhower years are ending, and 1960 brings the presidential battle between two ambitious senators: John Kennedy and Richard Nixon. But when Frank, an American newspaper reporter, enters their lives Mary embarks on a passionate affair, all the while knowing that in the end she must confront an impossible decision

The prequel to The Crown: the first truly candid portrait of George V and Mary, the Queen's grandparents and creators of the modern monarchy • The lasting reputation of George V is for dullness. However throughout his reign, the monarch navigated a constitutional crisis, the First World War, the fall of thirteen European monarchies and the rise of Bolshevism. The suffragette Emily Davison threw herself under his horse at the Derby, he refused asylum to his cousin the Tsar Nicholas II and he facilitated the first Labour government • How this supposedly limited man steered the Crown through so many perils is a gripping tale. With unprecedented access to the Royal archives, Jane Ridley has been able to reassess the many myths associated with this dramatic period for the first time

Freya Wyley meets Nancy Holdaway amid the wild celebrations of VE Day, the prelude to a devoted and competitive friendship… • Freya, ambitious and outspoken, pursues a career on Fleet Street while Nancy, less self-confident, struggles to get her first novel published. Both friends become entangled with Robert Cosway, a charismatic young man whose own ambition will have a momentous bearing on their lives • Flitting from war-haunted Oxford to the bright new shallows of the 1960s, Freya plots the unpredictable course of a woman’s life and loves in extraordinary times

Sammy's had a bad week • Most of it's just a blank space in his mind, and the bits that he can remember, he'd rather not. His wallet's gone, along with his new shoes, he's been arrested then beaten up by the police and thrown out on the street - and he's just gone blind. He remembers a row with his girlfriend, but she seems to have disappeared; and he might have been trying to fix a bit of business up with an old mate, he's not too sure • Things aren't looking too good for Sammy and his problems have hardly begun

Glue is the story of four boys growing up in the Edinburgh schemes, and about the loyalties, the experiences and the secrets that hold them together into their thirties • As we follow their lives from the 70s into the new century - from punk to techno, from speed to Es - we can see each of them trying to struggle out from under the weight of the conditioning of class and culture, peer pressure and their parents' hopes that maybe their sons will do better than they did. What binds the four of them is the friendship formed by the scheme, their school, and their ambition to escape from both; their loyalty fused in street morality: back up your mates, don't hit women and, most importantly, never grass - on anyone

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