Vintage books The Ghost Writer Рот Филип

'The Anatomy Lesson is a ferocious, heartfelt book - lavish with laughs and flamboyant inventions' John Updike • With his fortieth birthday receding into the distance, along with his hairline and his most successful novel, the writer Nathan Zuckerman comes down with a mysterious affliction – pure pain, beginning in his neck and shoulders, invading his torso, and taking possession of his spirit. Zuckerman, whose work was his life, finds himself physically unable to write a line • He treks from one doctor to another, but none can find a cause for the pain and nobody can assuage it. Could it be, he wonders to himself, that the cause of the pain is nothing less than the books he has written? • As he grapples with this possibility, he tries an onslaught of painkillers, then vodka, and finally marijuana

In search of the unpublished manuscript of a martyred Yiddish writer, American novelist Nathan Zuckerman travels to Soviet-occupied Prague in the mid-1970s.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

‘People will die,’ says the panic-stricken woman outside police headquarters • She refuses to speak to anyone besides Commissaire Adamsberg. Her daughter has seen a vision: ghostly horsemen who target the most nefarious characters in Normandy. Since the middle ages there have been stories of murderers, rapists, those with serious crimes on their conscience, meeting a grisly end following a visitation by the riders • Soon after the young woman’s vision a notoriously vicious and cruel man disappears. Although the case is far outside his jurisdiction, Adamsberg agrees to investigate the strange happenings in a village terrorised by wild rumours and ancient feuds

The Ruppert Mundys, once the greatest baseball team in America, are now in a terminal decline, their line-up filled with a disreputable assortment of old men, drunks and even amputees. Around them baseball itself seems to be collapsing, brought down by a bizarre mixture of criminality, stupidity, and The Great Communist Conspiracy, aimed at the very heart of the American way of life • In this hilarious and wonderfully eccentric novel Philip Roth turns his attention to one of the most beloved of all American rituals: baseball. Players, tycoons and the paying public are all targets as Roth satirises the dense tapestry of myths and legends that have grown up around The Great American Pastime

The breathtaking short story collection from the Costa-shortlisted Irish writer • Three gunshots on the Irish border define the course of a young man's life; a writer clings fast to a star-crossed affair with a woman who has never been fully in his reach; a fisherman accustomed to hard labour rolls up his sleeves to dig a grave for his child; a pair of newly-weds embark on their first adventure, living wild on the deserted Beginish Island • Spanning a century and two continents - from the muddy fields of Ireland to a hotel room in Paris, a dingy bar in Segovia to an aeroplane bound for Taipei - these densely layered tales reveal the quiet heroism and gentle dignity of ordinary life. Ranging from the elegiac to the brutally confrontational, Billy O'Callaghan's stories explore the resilience of the human heart and its ability to keep beating even in the wake of grief, trauma and lost love

The Leopard is a modern classic which tells the spellbinding story of a decadent, dying Sicilian aristocracy threatened by the approaching forces of democracy and revolution • 'There is a great feeling of opulence, decay, love and death about it' Rick Stein • In the spring of 1860, Fabrizio, the charismatic Prince of Salina, still rules over thousands of acres and hundreds of people, including his own numerous family, in mingled splendour and squalor. Then comes Garibaldi's landing in Sicily and the Prince must decide whether to resist the forces of change or come to terms with them • 'Every once in a while, like certain golden moments of happiness, infinitely memorable, one stumbles on a book or a writer, and the impact is like an indelible mark

The world's finest living short story writer turns to her family for inspiration; and what follows is a fictionalised, brilliantly imagined version of the past. From her ancestors' view from Edinburgh's Castle Rock in the eighteenth century to her parents' thwarted ambitions in Ontario, and her own awakening in 1950s Canada, Munro effortlessly weaves fact and myth to create an epic story of past and present, proving that fiction has much to tell us about life

The Ds can't wait to go and stay with Nancy and Peggy in the Lake District during the summer holidays. But when the Amazons’ dreadful Great Aunt invites herself to stay too, the summer is threatened with dullness. Staying indoors and reading poetry is not what anyone had in mind. To save the Ds from total boredom, the Amazons arrange for their friends to stay in a tumble-down hut in the woods. And as long as no one discovers they're there they can sail all summer long • In the Backstory you can learn how to make a campfire! • Vintage Children’s Classics is a twenty-first century classics list aimed at 8-12 year olds and the adults in their lives

The Vintage Classics Europeans series - with covers provided by textile design firm Wallace Sewell, these are must-have editions of European masterpieces, celebrating the warp and weft of a shared literary treasury • It is the spring of 1869 and there is talk of revolution in Sicily, by day the rattle of firing squads and by night the flickering lights of bonfires lit by rebel bands. Prince Fabrizio knows that beneath these outward signs of transformation, the sensuality, languor and corruption of his native land will never change. But can his family’s ancient power endure? Lampedusa’s macabre myth remains astounding relevant, reflecting any modern edifice of power and money just as surely as it shows us a corner of Italy long ago

The Northmen’s Fury tells the Viking story, from the first pinprick raids of the eighth century to the great armies that left their Scandinavian homelands to conquer larger parts of France, Britain and Ireland. It recounts the epic voyages that took them across the Atlantic to the icy fjords of Greenland and to North America over four centuries before Columbus and east to the great rivers of Russia and the riches of the Byzantine empire • One summer’s day in 793, death arrived from the sea. The raiders who sacked the island monastery of Lindisfarne were the first Vikings, sea-borne attackers who brought two centuries of terror to northern Europe. Before long the sight of their dragon-prowed longships and the very name of Viking gave rise to fear and dread, so much so that monks were reputed to pray each night for delivery from ‘the Northmen’s Fury’

The Italian Renaissance shaped Western culture - but it was far stranger and darker than many of us realise. We know the Mona Lisa for her smile, but not that she was married to a slave-trader. We revere Leonardo da Vinci for his art, but few now appreciate his ingenious designs for weaponry. We visit Florence to see Michelangelo's David, but hear nothing of the massacre that forced the republic's surrender. In fact, many of the Renaissance's most celebrated artists and thinkers emerged not during the celebrated 'rebirth' of the fifteenth century but amidst the death and destruction of the sixteenth century • The Beauty and the Terror is an enrapturing narrative which includes the forgotten women writers, Jewish merchants, mercenaries, prostitutes, farmers and citizens who lived the Renaissance every day

The Bass Rock has for centuries watched over the lives that pass under its shadow on the Scottish mainland. And across the centuries the fates of three women are linked: to this place, to each other • In the early 1700s, Sarah, accused of being a witch, flees for her life • In the aftermath of the Second World War, Ruth navigates a new house, a new husband and the strange waters of the local community • Six decades later, the house stands empty. Viv, mourning the death of her father, catalogues Ruth's belongings and discovers her place in the past - and perhaps a way forward • Each woman's choices are circumscribed by the men in their lives. But in sisterhood there is the hope of survival and new life