Vintage books The End Knausgaard Karl Ove

Childhood is exhilarating and terrifying. For the young Karl Ove, new houses, classes and friends are met with manic excitement and creeping dread. Adults occupy godlike positions of power, benevolent in the case of his doting mother, tyrannical in the case of his cruel father • In the now infamously direct style of the My Struggle cycle, Knausgaard describes a time in which victories and defeats are felt keenly and every attempt at self-definition is frustrated. This is a book about family, memory and how we never become quite what we set out to be

Karl Ove Knausgaard writes about his life with painful honesty. He writes about his childhood and teenage years, his infatuation with rock music, his relationship with his loving yet almost invisible mother and his distant and unpredictable father, and his bewilderment and grief on his father's death • When Karl Ove becomes a father himself, he must balance the demands of caring for a young family with his determination to write great literature. Knausgaard has created a universal story of the struggles, great and small, that we all face in our lives. A profound and mesmerizing work, written as if the author's very life were at stake

Fresh out of high school, Karl Ove moves to a remote fishing village to work as a teacher. He has no interest in the job itself - or in any other job for that matter, his sole aim is to save money and start writing • All goes well to begin with but as the nights grow longer, his life takes a darker turn. Drinking causes him blackouts, his repeated attempts at losing his virginity end in humiliation, and to his own great distress he develops romantic feelings towards one of his 13-year-old students. And all the while the shadow of his father looms large

A retired widow in rural Connecticut wakes to an unexpected visit from her childhood best friend whom she hasn't seen in forty-nine years • A man arrives at a Bethlehem, Pennsylvania hotel to introduce his estranged father to his newborn daughter and finds him collapsed on the floor of the lobby • A sixty-seven-year-old taxi driver in Kauai receives a phone call from the mainland that jars her back to a traumatic past • These seemingly disconnected lives come together as half-century-old secrets begin to surface over the course of one fateful day

Karl Ove Knausgaard explores the day to day realities of fatherhood in the ultimate literary gift for dads • How to be a good father? • Children’s birthday parties, unsuccessful family holidays, humiliating antenatal music classes: the trials of parenthood are all found in Knausgaard’s compelling and honest account of family life. Contrasting moments of enormous love and tenderness towards his children with the boring struggles of domesticity, this is one father’s personal experience, and somehow, every father’s too • Selected from the book A Man in Love by Karl Ove Knausgaard

The end of the world • Or the beginning… • On to the shores of Texas a raging sea coughs up two castaways: Jim and Natty, shipwrecked on their way home from Treasure Island • The Nightingale sunk, their silver gone, captured, weak and afraid, the pair steal a treasure they should have left well alone • The adventure of the New World lies in wait…

‘The funniest book in the world’ Evelyn Waugh • Mr Charles Pooter is a respectable man. He has just moved into a very desirable home in Holloway with his dear wife Carrie, from where he commutes to his job of valued clerk at a reputable bank in the City. Unfortunately neither his dear friends Mr Cummings and Mr Gowing, nor the butcher, the greengrocer's boy and the Lord Mayor seem to recognise Mr Pooter's innate gentility, and his disappointing son Lupin has gone and got himself involved with a most unsuitable fiancee • George and Weedon Grossmith's comic novel, perfectly illustrated by Weedon, is a glorious, affectionate caricature of the English middle-class at the end of nineteenth century

Autumn begins with a letter Karl Ove Knausgaard writes to his unborn daughter. He adds one short piece each day, describing the material and natural world - from twilight to the migration of birds, from Van Gogh to forgiveness - with the precision and mesmerising intensity that have become his trademark

As the youngest student to be admitted to Bergen's prestigious Writing Academy, Karl Ove arrives full of excitement and writerly aspirations. Soon though, he is stripped of his youthful illusions. His writing is revealed to be puerile and cliched, and his social efforts are a dismal failure. He drowns his shame in drink and rock music • Then, little by little, things begin to change. He falls in love, gives up writing and the beginnings of an adult life take shape. That is, until his self-destructive binges and the irresistible lure of the writer's struggle pull him back

'A long-time confidante of the rain and snow, I am ninety years old. The rain and snow have weathered me, and I too have weathered them' • At the end of the twentieth century an old woman sits among the birch trees and reflects on the joys and tragedies that have befallen her people. A member of the Evenki tribe who wander the forests of north-eastern China, hers was a life lived in close sympathy with nature at its most beautiful and cruel • Then, in the 1930s, the intimate, secluded world of the tribe is shattered when the Japanese army invades China. The Evenki cannot avoid being pulled into the brutal conflict that marks the beginning of the end of life as they know it

Bright, photographic, evocative new covers for Greene's backlist, to celebrate one of the keystone writers of the Vintage Classics list • ‘Graham Greene's beautiful and disturbing novel is filled with tenderness, humour, excitement and doubt’ The Times • A leak is traced to a small sub-section of the secret service, sparking off the inevitable security checks, tensions and suspicions. The sort of atmosphere, perhaps, where mistakes could be made? For Maurice Castle, it is the end of the line anyway, and time for him to retire to live peacefully with his wife and child. But no-one escapes so easily from the lonely, isolated, neurotic world of the SIS

This is the archetypal story of the American West. Whether it is cast as a tale of unmatched bravery in the face of impossible odds or of insane arrogance receiving its rightful comeuppance, Custer's Last Stand continues to captivate the imagination • Nathaniel Philbrick brilliantly reconstructs the build-up to the Battle of the Little Big Horn through to the final eruption of violence. Two legendary figures dominate the events: George Armstrong Custer and Sitting Bull. Those involved are brought vividly to life, as well as the history, geography and haunting beauty of the Great Plains • This book provides a thrilling account of what happened there - and why - at the end of June 1876