Vintage books The Cello Suites. In Search of a Baroque Masterpiece Siblin Eric

In 1845, a Reading bookseller named John Snare came across the dirt-blackened portrait of a prince at a country house auction. Suspecting that it might be a long-lost Velazquez, he bought the picture and set out to discover its strange history - a quest that led from fame to ruin and exile • Fusing detection and biography, this book shows how and why great works of art can affect us, even to the point of mania. And on the trail of John Snare, Cumming makes a surprising discovery of her own. But most movingly, The Vanishing Man is an eloquent and passionate homage to the Spanish master Velazquez, bringing us closer to the creation and appreciation of his works than ever before

A mysterious and rarely seen beast, the Scottish Wildcat is Britain's rarest mammal, and one of the most endangered carnivores in the world • Over the centuries, one by one, Britain's most formidable wild animals have fallen to the thoughtless march of humankind. A war on predators put paid to our lynxes, wolves and bears, each hunted relentlessly until the last of them was killed. Only our wildcats lived on • The Scottish wildcat's guile and ferocity are the stuff of legend. No docile pet cat, this, but a cunning and shadowy animal, elusive to the point of invisibility, but utterly fearless when forced to fight for its life. Those who saw one would always remember its beauty – the cloak of dense fur marked with bold tiger stripes, the green-eyed stare and haughty sneer, and the broad, banded tail whisking away into the forest's gloom

In 1992, in peaceful Southern Sweden, Louise Akerblom, an estate agent, pillar of the Methodist church, wife and mother, disappears. There is no explanation and no motive. Inspector Wallander and his team are called in to investigate • As Inspector Wallander is introduced to this missing person's case he has a gut feeling that the victim will never be found alive, but he has no idea how far he will have to go in search of the killer. In South Africa, Nelson Mandela has made his long walk to freedom, setting in train the country's painful journey towards the end of the apartheid. Wallander and his colleagues find themselves caught up in a complex web involving renegade members of South Africa's secret service and a former KGB agent, all of whom are set upon halting Mandela's rise to power

In search of the unpublished manuscript of a martyred Yiddish writer, American novelist Nathan Zuckerman travels to Soviet-occupied Prague in the mid-1970s. There, in a nation straightjacketed by totalitarian Communism, he discovers a literary predicament marked by an institutionalised oppression that is rather different from his own. He also discovers, among the subjugated writers with whom he quickly becomes embroiled in a series of bizarre and poignant adventures, an appealingly perverse kind of heroism • The Prague Orgy, consisting of entries from Zuckerman's notebooks recording his sojourn among these outcast artists, completes the trilogy and epilogue Zuckerman Bound. It provides a startling ending to Roth's intricately designed magnum opus on the unforeseen consequences of art

Now reissued with a stunning new jacket look, The Colour is a gripping drama of sacrifice and greed set during the mid-nineteenth-century gold rush in New Zealand • Joseph and Harriet Blackstone emigrate from Norfolk to New Zealand in search of new beginnings and prosperity. But the harsh land near Christchurch threatens to destroy them almost before they begin. When Joseph finds gold in the creek he is seized by a rapturous obsession with the voluptuous riches awaiting him deep in the earth. Abandoning his farm and family, he sets off alone for the new gold-fields over the Southern Alps, a moral wilderness where many others, under the seductive dreams of 'the colour', are violently rushing to their destinies • By turns both moving and terrifying, The Colour is about a quest for the impossible, an attempt to mine the complexities of love and explore the sacrifices to be made in the pursuit of happiness

From the Sunday Times bestselling author of Free Love and Late in the Day, discover a story of two lives stretched between two cities, two stories bound by the London train • Paul sets out in search of his eldest daughter Pia, who has gone missing somewhere in London. At first he thinks he wants to rescue her, but as time passes he is drawn deeper into the excitements of the capital, and a life lived in jeopardy, he forgets his own way home • In the opposite direction, Cora is moving back to Cardiff, to the house she inherited from her parents. She is escaping her marriage and the disappointments of her London life. And then she receives a telephone call to say that her husband has disappeared • 'She has such great psychological insights into human beings, which is rare

A flooded world • A floating circus • Two women in search of a home • North lives on a circus boat with her beloved bear, keeping a secret that could capsize her life • Callanish lives alone in her house in the middle of the ocean, tending the graves of those who die at sea. As penance for a terrible mistake, she has become a gracekeeper • A chance meeting between the two draws them magnetically to one another - and to the promise of a new life • But the waters are treacherous, and the tide is against them

From the acclaimed author of The Sandpit, an exhilarating literary thriller about the hunt for a missing terrorist in South America • Out of a job but in search of one last scoop from South America, journalist John Dyer strikes gold when he chances upon Agustin Rejas, a former police colonel whose dogged pursuit - and eventual capture - of murderous guerrilla leader Ezequiel made him a national hero • Over many nights, Rejas recounts his story of the years-long manhunt. So too emerges the tale of his own poor upbringing, his turbulent marriage and the passion he once felt for Yolanda, his daughter's ballet teacher - an all-consuming obsession that would ultimately lead him straight to the elusive Ezequiel

It lies somewhere beneath the snow, high in the Dolomites: Nazi gold, tainted with the blood of murdered men. Only a few know its secrets, and one by one they come in search of it – a hot-tempered Italian Comtessa, a racketeering pimp, a Greek criminal, a film-maker and a hapless writer. A tense battle of wits leads to an explosive finale in Innes’ classic tale of revenge and deadly greed

Eleven-year-old Ludo is in search of a father. Raised singlehandedly by his mother Sibylla, Ludo’s been reading Greek, Arabic, Japanese and a little Hebrew since the age of four; but reading Homer in the original whilst riding the Circle Line on the London Underground isn’t enough to satisfy the boy’s boundless curiosity. Is he a genius? A real-life child prodigy? He’s grown up watching Seven Samurai on a hypnotising loop – his mother’s strategy to give him not one but seven male role models. And yet Ludo remains obsessed with the one thing his mother refuses to tell him: his real father’s name. Let loose on London, Ludo sets out on a secret quest to find the last samurai – the father he never knew

John Turner, a young man with a chequered past, has been told he has just one year to live. He decides to use his time in search of three very different men he met briefly during the war: an snobbish British pilot, a young corporal accused of murder, and a black G.I. accused of attempted rape. Along the way, Turner learns about forgiveness, tolerance and second chances, and overcomes his fear of death