Vintage books Paradise Morrison Toni

It is the mid-1800s and as slavery looks to be coming to an end, Sethe is haunted by the violent trauma it wrought on her former enslaved life at Sweet Home, Kentucky. Her dead baby daughter, whose tombstone bears the single word, Beloved, returns as a spectre to punish her mother, but also to elicit her love. Told with heart-stopping clarity, melding horror and beauty, Beloved is Toni Morrison's enduring masterpiece

Bernard Walsh, agnostic theologian, has a professional interest in heaven. But when he travels to Hawaii with his reluctant father Jack, to visit Jack's dying, estranged sister it feels more like purgatory than paradise • Surrounded by quarrelling honeymooners, a freeloading anthropologist and assorted tourists in search of their own personal paradise, and with his father whisked off to hospital after an unfortunate accident, Bernard is beginning to regret ever coming to Haiwaii. Until, that is, he stumbles on something he had given up hope of finding: the astonishing possibility of love

'A magnum opus... Puts the reader at the heart of the horror that came to be called the Atlanta child murders' Toni Morrison • Zala Spencer is barely surviving on the margins of Atlanta's booming economy when she awakens one summer's morning in 1980 to find her teenage son, Sonny, has disappeared. As uneasy hours turn into desperate days, Zala realizes that Sonny is among the many cases of missing children beginning to attract national attention. Growing increasingly disillusioned with the authorities, who respond to Sonny's disappearance with cold indifference, Zala and her estranged husband embark on an epic search. Through the eyes of a family seized by anguish and terror, we watch a city roiling with political, racial, and class tensions • Written over a span of twelve years, and edited by Toni Morrison, who called Those Bones Are Not My Child the author's magnum opus, Toni Cade Bambara's last novel leaves us with an enduring and revelatory chronicle of an American nightmare

A stunning new collection of short stories about motherhood, selected and introduced by Candice Brathwaite • The story of motherhood is an endlessly rich one: it's one of love - and all the highs and lows that come with that world-turning emotion - and, in the purest sense, of life itself. Within these pages, some of the finest writers in the world explore motherhood in wildly varying modes, from single parenthood to sisters coparenting, from the deepest hardships to the biggest celebrations • Selected and introduced by Candice Brathwaite, author of I Am Not Your Baby Mother • Stories by Lydia Davis, Anita Desai, Mary Gaitskill, Tessa Hadley, Jamaica Kincaid, Toni Morrison, Ngugi wa Thiong'o, Irenosen Okojie, Casey Plett, Tabitha Siklos, Helen Simpson, Ali Smith

From 'Best of the Booker' winner Salman Rushdie, an incisive and inspiring collection of non-fiction essays, criticism and speeches that takes readers on a thrilling journey through the evolution of language and culture • Across a wide variety of subjects, Rushdie delves into the nature of storytelling as a deeply human need and what emerges is a love letter to literature itself. Throughout, he shares his personal encounters, on the page and in person, with storytellers from Shakespeare to Toni Morrison and revels in the creative lines that can join art and life. Rushdie considers, too, the nature of truth and looks afresh at migration, multiculturalism and censorship

A Treacherous Paradise sees Henning Mankell turn his talents for writing gripping thrillers to a world where power and powerlessness meet and passion is a dangerous commodity • Hanna Lundmark escapes the brutal poverty of rural Sweden for a job as a cook onboard a steamship headed for Australia. Jumping ship at the African port of Lourenco Marques, Hanna decides to begin her life afresh • Stumbling across what she believes to be a down-at-heel hotel, Hanna becomes embroiled in a sequence of events that lead to her inheriting the most successful brothel in town. Uncomfortable with the attitudes of the white settlers, Hanna is determined to befriend the prostitutes working for her, and change life in the town for the better, but the distrust between blacks and whites, and the shadow of colonialism, lead to tragedy and murder

'There are times, though, that no matter how much food I eat, I find the food does nothing for me, like I am hungry for my country and nothing is going to fix that' • This is the story of Darling, uprooted from her family home by paramilitary police, and living in a Zimbabwean shanty called Paradise. Despite the turmoil, she revels in mischief and adventures with her friends, like stealing guavas from the rich neighbourhood, and singing Lady Gaga at the top of her voice • But when Darling has a chance to forge a different life in America, she realises that this new paradise brings its own set of challenges. In We Need New Names a spirited girl grows into a powerful observer of global identity • Meet ten of literature's most iconic heroines, jacketed in bold portraits by female photographers from around the world

A stirring exploration of war, race and belonging from the Nobel-prize winning author of Beloved • An angry and self-loathing veteran of the Korean War, Frank Money finds himself back in racist America after enduring trauma on the front lines that left him with more than just physical scars. As Frank revisits the memories from childhood and the war that leave him questioning his shattered sense of self, he unearths the courage he thought he'd lost forever. It is with incantatory power that Morrison's language reveals an apparently defeated man finding his manhood - and, finally, his home

The gripping adventure that invented the mystery of Shangri-La • Flying out of India, a light aircraft is hi-jacked and flown into the high Tibetan Himalayas. The few passengers on board anxiously await their fate, among them Conway, a talented British consul. But on landing they are unexpectedly conducted to a remote valley, a legendary paradise of peace and beauty, known as Shangri-La. Have they been kidnapped? Can they escape? And do they even want to? • From the author of Goodbye Mr Chips, this is the epic adventure story of literature's most entrancing utopia and one of our most enduring literary mysteries

Ten-year-old Darling has a choice: it's down, or out • 'To play the country-game, we have to choose a country. Everybody wants to be the USA and Britain and Canada and Australia and Switzerland and them. Nobody wants to be rags of countries like Congo, like Somalia, like Iraq, like Sudan, like Haiti and not even this one we live in - who wants to be a terrible place of hunger and things falling apart?' • Darling and her friends live in a shanty called Paradise, which of course is no such thing. It isn't all bad, though. There's mischief and adventure, games of Find bin Laden, stealing guavas, singing Lady Gaga at the tops of their voices • They dream of the paradises of America, Dubai, Europe, where Madonna and Barack Obama and David Beckham live

A man is discovered adrift in the wreckage of a boat, babbling of horrors scarcely imaginable...this is his story • They say that terror is a disease • A shipwrecked man finds himself, after various twists of Fate, on a lonely tropical island. From a locked enclosure the cries of animals in pain can be heard, and there is a stink of chemicals in the air. Bestial faces stare out of the forests and grotesque, misshaped creatures move in the gloom. In this island paradise, the horrific experiments of the infamous Doctor Moreau will reach their inevitable conclusion

Discover this fresh, pacy, modern translation of an enduring literary classic • Halfway through life, you find yourself lost, unsure of the right path. Greed, deception and pride have led you away from the ideals and dreams you cherished in younger days. How do you go on? • This is the starting point of one of the most extraordinary and important journeys in western literature, a stunningly ambitious flight of imagination and philosophy which has reverberated down the years since Dante Alighieri first wrote it down in the fourteenth century. The Divine Comedy is a vision of the afterlife, the three regions of Hell, Purgatory and Paradise, through which the narrator must journey in order to better understand the workings of the universe, the love of God, and his place in the world