Is there anything quite so exhilarating as swimming in wild water? This is a joyful swimming tour of Britain, a frog's-eye view of the country's best bathing holes - the rivers, rock pools,...
Bob Slocum is anxious, bored and fearful of his job. So why is it he wants nothing more than the chance to speak at the next company convention? In this darkly satirical book, Joseph Heller...
In this inspiring, witty and eminently sensible book, Nigella Lawson sets out a manifesto for how to cook (and eat) good food every day with a minimum of fuss. From basic roast chicken and...
How does a writer compose a suicide note? This was not a question that the prize-winning novelist William Styron had ever contemplated before. In this true account of his depression, Styron...
How do we find calm in our frantic modern world? Tim Parks - lifelong sceptic of all things spiritual - finds himself on a Buddhist meditation retreat trying to answer this very question....
Vintage Minis bring you the world’s greatest writers on the experiences that make us human – from birth to death and everything in between. Simon Schama on ART joins Ian McEwan on SCIENCE...
What's the worst another drink could do? John Cheever pours out our most sociable of vices, and hands it to us in a highball. From the calculating teenager who raids her parents' liquor...
In 1953, in the presence of an investigator, Aldous Huxley took four-tenths of a gramme of mescalin, sat down and waited to see what would happen. When he opened his eyes everything, from...
Can we ever be wholly free? In this book of breathtaking imaginary leaps that conjure dystopias and magical islands, Margaret Atwood holds a mirror up to our own world. The reflection we are...
VINTAGE MINIS: GREAT MINDS. BIG IDEAS. LITTLE BOOKS. How do we choose between what is fair and just, and what our debtors demand of us? Yanis Varoufakis was put in such a dilemma in 2015...
Selected from the books Sapiensand Homo Deusby Yuval Noah Harari How did money come to be invented? Why does it now have such significance in our lives? Does it make us happier or...
You've just passed someone on the street who could be the love of your life, the person you're destined for - what do you do? In Murakami's world, you tell them a story. The five weird and...
Why should one half be free to live, while the other is doomed to watch silently from the sidelines? In this visionary collection, Virginia Woolf leads us on a transformative journey through...
Babies: our biggest mystery and our most natural consequence, our hardest test and our enduring love. The author describes the intensity, bewilderment and extravagant happiness of her...
Welcome to motherhood - a land of aching fatigue, constant self-sacrifice and thankless servitude, a land of bottomless devotion, small hands and feet like warm pink roses, and velvet...
Meg, Jo, Beth and Amy are four of the most famous sisters in literature. This book features stories of the joys and heartaches they share, which is also a celebration of the special ties of...
In this gripping and disturbing book, Richard Wright weaves his own childhood recollections with those of Bigger Thomas - a young black man trapped in a life of poverty in the slums of...
`Family, that slippery word, a star to every wandering bark and everyone sailing under a different sky'Where do you go if you can't feel at home in your own family?
A self-described 'emigrant from one place and a newcomer in two', the author explores the true meaning of home. He looks at what it means to belong, whether roots are real and homelands...
Irvine Welsh, 'poet laureate of the chemical generation', exposes the seamy underbelly of rave's utopian dream.A series of short books by the world's greatest writers on the experiences that...
The hawk was everything I wanted to be: solitary, self-possessed, free from grief, and numb to the hurts of human life. With breathtaking honesty and insight, she recounts her months spent...
When it comes to death, is there ever a best case scenario? In this book, the author confronts our unending obsession with the end. It reflects on what it means to miss God, whether death...
Have you ever tried to learn another language? When Zhuang first arrives in London from China she feels like she is among an alien species. But with increasing fluency in English surviving...
How to be a good father? From children's birthday parties, unsuccessful family holidays, to humiliating antenatal music classes, this account of family life presents the trials of...
`I want to change, but not if it means changing,' a patient once said to me in complete innocence What do we do when we find ourselves trapped by our own thoughts or behaviour?
Selected from the books The Essentials of Psycho-Analysis and The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of the Sigmund Freud, Volume IV: The Interpretation of Dreams (First...
Jane Austen was fascinated by this question, subjecting it to her forensic eye and wonderfully ironic wit again and again. Selected from the novels Sense and Sensibility, Pride and...
Rose Tremain looks at two unlikely lifelong friendships, which - though tested - prove unbreakable.A series of short books by the world's greatest writers on the experiences that make us...
Selected from the books Birdsong, A Possible Life and A Week in December by Sebastian FaulksVINTAGE MINIS: GREAT MINDS.A series of short books by the world's greatest writers on the...
A high-pitched laugh echoes in an empty church. Selected from the book Ghost Stories by M.R.A series of short books by the world's greatest writers on the experiences that make us humanAlso...
How do we love? With romance. With work. Through heartbreak. Throughout a lifetime. As a means, but not an end. This book focuses on love in all its forms. It includes selections from...
Can we truly know the one we love? The author looks straight into the green eye of every lover's jealous struggle. He broods on why we are driven to try possess one another, how jealousy can...
Is who we are really only skin deep? In this book, the author unravels race through the stories of those debased and dehumanised because of it. It also includes the story of a young black...
