Vintage books Stories from Other Places Shakespeare Nicholas

Ngugi wa Thiong'o is renowned for his political novels and plays, yet he honed his craft as a short story writer. First published in 1975, Secret Lives and Other Stories brings together a range of Ngugi's political short stories • From tales of the meeting between magic and superstition, to stories about the modernising forces of colonialism, and the pervasive threat of nature, this collection celebrates the storytelling might of one of Africa's best-loved writers

From her experience as a survivor of the 900-day siege of Leningrad, Lidiya Ginzburg has created a remarkable hero in whom she distills the experience of life under siege. Though she depicts the harrowing conditions, the reader takes away an impression of the dignity, vitality, and intellectual resilience of the thinking mind as it makes sense of extreme experience. This classic work of documentary fiction, reminiscent of Primo Levi and Albert Camus, will be the first introduction of a major 20th-century Russian writer to many English-language readers

Everyday life crackles with the electricity sparking between men and women, between parents and children, between friends. A son confesses to his mother that he is cheating on his girlfriend; a student falls in love with her lecturer and embarks on an affair with a man in the pub who looks just like him. Young mothers pent-up in childcare dream treacherously of other possibilities; a boy becomes aware of the woman, a guest at his parents' holiday home, who is pressing up too close against him on the beach • Hidden away inside the present, the past is explosive; the future can open unexpectedly out of any chance encounter; ordinary moments are illuminated with lightning flashes of dread or pleasure. These stories about family life are somehow undomesticated and dangerous

Discover a classic adventure from the author of A Town Like Alice and On the Beach • Keith Stewart is an ordinary man. However, one day he is called upon to undertake an extraordinary task. When his sister's boat is wrecked in the Pacific, he becomes trustee for his little niece. In order to save her from destitution he has to embark on a 2,000 mile voyage in a small yacht in inhospitable waters. His adventures and the colourful characters he meets on his journey make this book a marvellous tale of courage and friendship

Scenes from Provincial Life brings together, in one volume, J.M. Coetzee’s majestic trilogy of fictionalised memoir, Boyhood, Youth and Summertime • It opens in a small town in the South Africa of the 1940s. We meet a young boy who, at home, is ill at ease with his father and stifled by his mother’s unconditional love. At school he passes every test that is set for him, but he remains wary of his fellow pupils. Later, as a student of mathematics in Cape Town he prepares to escape to Europe and turn himself into an artist. Once in London, however, the reality is dispiriting. Decades on, an English biographer researches a book about the late writer, John Coetzee. As he interviews important figures in Coetzee’s life, a portrait emerges of an awkward outsider who – even after death – remains dogged by rumours

'A very funny, bitterly intelligent novel...do read it' Malcolm Bradbury • Sefton Goldberg: mid-thirties, English teacher at Wrottesley Poly in the West Midlands; small, sweaty, lustful, defiantly unappreciative of beer, nature and organised games; gnawingly aware of being an urban Jew islanded in a sea of country-loving Anglo-Saxons. Obsessed by failure - morbidly, in his own case, gloatingly, in that of his contemporaries - so much so that he plans to write a bestseller on the subject • In the meantime he is uncomfortably aware of advancing years and atrophying achievement, and no amount of lofty rationalisation can disguise the triumph of friends and colleagues, not only from Cambridge days but even within the despised walls of the Poly itself, or sweeten the bitter pill of another's success

Fidel and Raul Castro are in the hills, descending only to burn sugarcane plantations and recruit rebels • Rachel K is in Havana's Cabaret Tokio, entangled with a French agitator trying to escape his shameful past • Everly and K.C. are growing up in the dying days of a crumbling US colony, about to discover the cruelty and violence that have created their childhood idyll

A teenage son shoots himself under his parents' bed. They sleep that night unaware he is lying dead beneath them • A stranger turns up at a man's door to persude him that they must get rid of his ageing mother in order to sell the house • An old man grumbles to his daughter about the unexplained digging and banging he hears under the house at night • As each story unfolds, Amos Oz, builds a portrait of a village in Israel. It is a surreal and unsettling place. Each villager is searching for something, and behind each episode is another, hidden story. In this powerful, hynotic work Amos Oz peers into the darkness of our lives and gives us a glimpse of what goes on beneath the surface of everyday existence • By the winner of the 2013 Franz Kafka Prize, previous winners of which include Philip Roth, Ivan Klima, Elfriede Jelinek, Harold Pinter and John Banville

В "Моде" Ричард Уэйт рассказывает историю крупнейшего и наиболее влиятельного молодежного культа Британии. Мода начинала свою жизнь как квинтэссенция движения рабочего класса новой богатой нации - уникальная британская смесь американской музыки и европейской моды, которая смешивала современный джаз с модернистским дизайном в попытке избежать унылого конформизма, снобизма и ханжества жизни в Британии 1950–х годов. Но то, что начиналось как популярный культ, стало мейнстримом культуры, а стиль превратился в революцию • "Мод! От Бибопа до Брит-попа, крупнейшего молодежного движения Великобритании" - это история крупнейшего и самого дерзкого молодежного движения Великобритании – и его наследия. Музыка, кино, мода, искусство, архитектура и дизайн – ничто не осталось нетронутым эклектичной, неистовой, непреодолимой энергией моды

This deeply personal work, follows the changing fortunes of the Mau-Tempo family – poor, landless peasants not unlike the author’s own grandparents. Saramago charts the lives of the family in Alentjo, southern Portugal, as national and international events rumble on in the background – the coming of the republic in Portugal, the First and Second World Wars, and an attempt on the dictator Salazar's life. Yet, nothing seriously impinges on the farm labourers' lives until the first stirrings of communism

Do you believe in ghosts? • Ghosts, spirits, spectres or spooks, we have always felt the presence of someone - or something - hovering in the darkest corners of our imaginations • The great writers of the nineteenth and early twentieth century, from Elizabeth Gaskell to Rudyard Kipling, also produced some of the most influential ghost stories ever written, defining the genre for generations of writers to follow • Gathered in this thrilling collection are some of the most iconic Victorian ghost stories, from Charles Dickens's 'The Signalman' to M.R. James's 'A Warning to the Curious', alongside more unexpected contributions from masters of the form such as J.S. Le Fanu and H.G. Wells • You may think you don't believe in ghosts, but these stories will haunt you nonetheless

Covering the first half of Nobel Prize winner Alice Munro's career, these are some of the best, most touching and powerful short stories ever written • This first-ever selection of Alice Munro's stories sums up her genius. Her territory is the secrets that cackle beneath the facade of everyday lives, the pain and promises, loves and fears of apparently ordinary men and women whom she renders extraordinary and unforgettable • This volume brings together the best of Munro's stories, from 1968 through to 1994. The second selected volume of her stories, 1995-2009 is also published by Vintage Classics