Pick & Mix Deal - Vintage Red Spines Collection

This is a volcanic journey into the soul of a winged red monster named Geryon. It is queer coming-of-age love story, a Greek myth retold, and a modern classic.

Tormented as a boy by his brother, Geryon escapes to a parallel world of photography. He falls deeply in love with Herakles, a golden young man, who deserts him at the peak of infatuation. So Geryon retreats ever further into the world created by his camera, fascinated by his wings, his redness and the fantastic accident of who he is. But all is suddenly and irrevocably shattered by Herakles’ return.

Autobiography of Red is a deceptively simple narrative filled with currents of meaning, emotion, and the truth about what it’s like to be red. An extraordinary, modern epic poem - moving, disturbing and delightful.

'Totally engrossing' Ocean Vuong

'This book is amazing - I haven't discovered any writing in years that's so marvellously disturbing' Alice Munro

‘A profound love story...sensuous and funny, poignant, musical and tender’ Ruth Padel, New York Times Book Review

Sethe is now miles away from Sweet Home, the farm where she was kept as a slave.

Unable to forget the unspeakable horrors that took place there, she is haunted by the violent spectre of her dead child, the daughter who died nameless and whose tombstone is etched with a single word, ‘Beloved’. A tale of brutality, horror and, above all, love at any cost, Beloved is Toni Morrison’s enduring masterpiece and best-known work.

‘Dazzling. . . Magical. . . An extraordinary work’ New York Times

‘Toni Morrison was a giant of her times and ours… Beloved is a heartbreaking testimony to the ongoing ravages of slavery, and should be read by all’ Margaret Atwood

‘An American masterpiece’ A. S. Byatt

WINNER OF THE PULITZER PRIZE

**One of the BBC’s 100 Novels That Shaped Our World**

Welcome to New London. Everybody is happy here.

Our perfect society achieves peace and stability by dispensing with monogamy, privacy, money, family and history itself. Now everyone belongs. You can be happy too. All you need to do is take your Soma pills.This is the brave new world of Aldous Huxley’s deeply sinister and prophetic novel, a society based on maximum pleasure and complete surveillance – no matter the cost.

'A masterpiece of speculation... As vibrant, fresh, and somehow shocking as it was when I first read it' Margaret Atwood, bestselling author of The Handmaid's Tale

'A grave warning... Provoking, stimulating, shocking and dazzling' Observer

**One of the BBC's 100 Novels That Shaped Our World**

INTRODUCED BY MARGARET ATWOOD AND DAVID BRADSHAW

Discover Joseph Heller's hilarious and tragic satire on military madness, and the tale of one man's efforts to survive it.

It's the closing months of World War II and Yossarian has never been closer to death. Stationed in an American bomber squadron off the coast of Italy, each flight mission introduces him to thousands of people determined to kill him.

But the enemy above is not Yossarian's problem - it is his own army intent on keeping him airborne, and the maddening 'Catch-22' that allows for no possibility of escape.

'The greatest satirical work in the English language' Observer

'The most devastating satire ever written about the lunacy of war and military bureaucracy' Antony Beevor

INTRODUCED BY HOWARD JACOBSON

All that stands between one man and murder by the mafia is a penguin.

Viktor is an aspiring writer with only Misha, his pet penguin, for company. Although Viktor would prefer to write short stories, he earns a living composing obituaries for a newspaper. He longs to see his work published, yet the subjects of his obituaries continue to cling to life. But when he opens the newspaper to see his work in print for the first time, his pride swiftly turns to terror. He and Misha have been drawn into a trap from which there appears to be no escape.

‘A tragicomic masterpiece’ Daily Telegraph

‘A black comedy of rare distinction and the penguin is an invention of genius’ Spectator

WITH A FOREWORD BY THE AUTHOR

After years teaching Romantic poetry in Cape Town, David Lurie has an impulsive affair with a student.

The affair sours; he is denounced and summoned before a committee of inquiry. Willing to admit his guilt, but refusing to yield to pressure to repent publicly, he resigns and retreats to his daughter Lucy’s isolated smallholding. For a time, his daughter’s influence and the natural rhythms of the farm promise to harmonise his discordant life. But the balance of power in the country is shifting. He and Lucy become victims of a savage and disturbing attack which brings into relief all the faultlines in their relationship.

'A great novel by one of the finest authors writing in the English language today' The Times

'At the frontier of world literature' Sunday Telegraph

**One of the BBC's 100 Novels That Shaped Our World**

Discover the haunting, heartbreaking post-apocalyptic tale of female friendship and intimacy set in a deserted world.

Deep underground, thirty-nine women live imprisoned in a cage. Watched over by guards, these women have no memory of how they got there, no notion of time, and only vague recollections of their lives before. As the burn of electric light merges day into night and numberless years pass, a young girl – the fortieth prisoner – sits alone and outcast in the corner. But soon she will show herself to be the key to the others’ escape and survival in the strange world that awaits them above.

‘A haunting post-apocalyptic tale’ Guardian

'An intriguingly dark thought experiment told by a compellingly alien voice...strangely fascinating' The Times

WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY SOPHIE MACKINTOSH

My Left Foot is Christy Brown's inspirational story of his early life, his battle against the restraints of cerebral palsy and his determination to learn to read, write, and paint, all with the aid of his left foot.

This autobiography, published in 1954 when he was twenty-two, recounts his early life in Dublin – the poverty of his childhood, the support of his mother and his hope for a better life. Above all it describes his struggle to learn to read, write, paint and finally type, all with the toe of his left foot. Warm, honest and inspiring, this is a unique and captivating story of disability told by an extraordinary man.

'Riveting, funny and inspiring' Irish Times

'His book, over and above the extraordinary achievement it reveals, is a testament to one man’s courage, a hope for others' Kirkus Reviews

Bigger Thomas has grown up in Chicago’s slums, reckless, angry and adrift.

A respectable job with the affluent Dalton family provides hope but sets him on course for a catastrophic collision between his world and theirs. Hunted by citizen and police alike, and baited by prejudiced officials, Bigger finds himself the cause célèbre in an ever-narrowing endgame.

First published in 1940, Native Son shocked readers with its candid depiction of violence and confrontation of racial stereotypes. It went on to make Richard Wright the first bestselling black writer in America.

‘In addition to being a masterpiece, a Great American Novel' Guardian

'The most important and celebrated novel of Negro life to have appeared in America' James Baldwin

WITH AN AFTERWORD BY GARY YOUNGE

Jeanette Winterson's explosive first novel, a gripping coming-of-age story, a queer romance, a modern classic.

‘I love her.’
‘Then you do not love the Lord.’
‘Yes, I love both of them.’
‘You cannot.’
'I do.''

This is the story of Jeanette, born to be one of God's elect: adopted by a fanatical Pentecostal family and ablaze with her own zeal for the scriptures, she seems perfectly suited for the life of a missionary. But then she converts Melanie, and realises she loves this woman almost as much as she loves the Lord. How on Earth could her Church called that passion Unnatural?

Both a groundbreaking coming-of-age novel and a pioneering work of autofiction, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit goes beyond facts into the deepest truths. Searing and tender, playful and provocative, it is a portrait of the artist as a young evangelist, re-writing her own Bible.

'Witty... extraordinary and exhilarating' The Times

'She is a master of her material, a writer in whom great talent abides' Vanity Fair

'Many consider her to be the best living writer in this language... In her hands, words are fluid, radiant, humming' Evening Standard

'A novel that deserves revisiting' Observer

'A wonderful rites-of-passage novel' Mariella Frostrup

The brilliant graphic memoir of growing up in Iran during and after the Islamic revolution.

Marjane Satrapi lived through the Iranian Revolution as a little girl. This is her classic memoir-in-comic-strips, the story of a child entangled in the history and politics of her country. It paints an unforgettable portrait of growing up in revolutionary and war-torn Iran, in a family that was both outrageous and ordinary, beset by tragedy and yet buffered by love. Funny, wise, ultimately heartbreaking and told with unforgettable pictures.

‘A revelation...you will remember it for a very long time’ Mark Haddon

‘The magic of Marjane Satrapi’s work is that it can condense a whole country’s tragedy into one poignant, funny scene after another’ Independent on Sunday

THE COMPLETE PERSEPOLIS VOLUMES I & II: Includes The Story of a Childhood and The Story of a Return

TRANSLATED BY ANJALI SINGH

**ONE OF THE GUARDIAN'S 100 BEST BOOKS OF THE 21st CENTURY**

This is the story of a quiet man, destined to be a farmer but who becomes an academic. It is book in which nothing and everything happens and is possibly the greatest novel you've never read.

'It's simply a novel about a guy who goes to college and becomes a teacher. But its one of the most fascinating things that you've ever come across' Tom Hanks, Time

William Stoner enters the University of Missouri at nineteen to study agriculture. A seminar on English literature changes his life, and he never returns to work on his father's farm. Stoner becomes a teacher. He marries the wrong woman. His life is quiet, and after his death, his colleagues remember him rarely.

Yet with truthfulness, compassion and intense power, this novel uncovers a story of universal value - of the conflicts, defeats and victories of the human race that pass unrecorded by history - and in doing so reclaims the significance of an individual life.

'A beautiful, sad, utterly convincing account of an entire life' Ian McEwan

'A brilliant, beautiful, inexorably sad, wise and elegant novel' Nick Hornby

INTRODUCED BY JOHN McGAHERN

Sugar is young, confident and hoping to start over.

'Poignant and bittersweet, this novel is a joy' Richard & Judy

When she arrives in the southern town of Bigelow, it isn’t long before the neighbourhood is alight with gossip and suspicion. Sugar fears her past is catching up with her. Then she meets Pearl, a woman trying to forget her own trauma. As these next-door neighbours become unlikely friends, they wonder if their lives could finally be changing for the better. But small towns have long memories.

Perfect for fans of Demon Copperhead and The Bluest Eye, Sugar is a classic waiting to be rediscovered.

'Riveting... Searing and expertly imagined' TONI MORRISON on The Warmest December by Bernice L. McFadden

'A page-turning novel guaranteed to be looked back on as a timeless classic' INDEPENDENT

'This book is so engaging and beautiful and intriguing and satisfying that I could not put it down' ELLE

Solzhenitsyn spent eleven years in labour camps and in exile.

This book is his masterwork, based on his own experiences as well as the testimony of some 200 survivors. A vast canvas of camps, prisons, transit centres and secret police, of informers and spies and interrogators but also of everyday heroism, it chronicles the story of those who dared to oppose Stalin, and for whom the key to survival lay not in hope but in despair. A thoroughly researched document and a feat of literary and imaginative power, this edition of The Gulag Archipelago was abridged into one volume at the request of the author.

'Helped to bring down an empire. Its importance can hardly be exaggerated' Doris Lessing, Sunday Telegraph

'Solzhenitsyn’s masterpiece...helped create the world we live in today' Anne Applebaum

WITH AN AFTERWORD BY JORDAN B. PETERSON

THE OFFICIALLY APPROVED ABRIDGEMENT OF THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO VOLUMES I, II & III

** THE SUNDAY TIMES NO. 1 BESTSELLER **

Discover the dystopian novel that started a phenomenon.

Offred is a Handmaid in The Republic of Gilead. She is placed in the household of The Commander, Fred Waterford – her assigned name, Offred, means ‘of Fred’. She has only one function: to breed. If Offred refuses to enter into sexual servitude to repopulate a devastated world, she will be hanged. Yet even a repressive state cannot eradicate hope and desire. As she recalls her pre-revolution life in flashbacks, Offred must navigate through the terrifying landscape of torture and persecution in the present day, and between two men upon which her future hangs.

'A fantastic, chilling story. And so powerfully feminist' Bernadine Evaristo

‘As relevant today as it was when Atwood wrote it’ Guardian

Four Chinese women, four America daughters - can they learn to understand each other?

In 1949 a group of Chinese women, recent immigrants to San Francisco, meet weekly to play mahjong and tell stories of what they left behind in China. United in loss and new hope for their daughters’ futures, they call themselves the Joy Luck Club. Their daughters, who have never heard these stories, think their mothers’ advice is irrelevant to their modern American lives – until their own inner crises reveal how much they’ve inherited of their mothers’ pasts.

'Pure enchantment' Mail on Sunday

‘Honest, moving and beautifully courageous’ Alice Walker

'An ambitious saga that's impossible to read without wanting to call your Mum' Stylist

In Bulgakov's allegorical masterpiece of Stalin’s regime the devil is making a personal appearance in Moscow.

He is accompanied by various demons, including a naked girl and a huge black cat. When he leaves, the asylums are full and the forces of law and order are in disarray. Only the Master, a writer and a man devoted to truth, and Margarita, the woman he loves, can resist the devil’s onslaught.

‘Stunning, superb...Bulgakov is one of the greatest Russian writers, perhaps the greatest’ Independent

‘A masterpiece – a classic of twentieth-century fiction’ New York Times

TRANSLATED BY MICHAEL GLENNY, INTRODUCED BY WILL SELF

TRANSLATED BY JOHN NATHAN

A tale of youth and warped masculinity, this is the suspenseful, lyrical and page-turning Japanese classic.

A band of thirteen-year-old boys reject the stupidity of the adult world. They decide it is illusory, hypocritical and sentimental, and train themselves in a brutal callousness they call ‘objectivity’. When the mother of one of them begins an affair with a ship’s officer, he and his friends idealise the man at first, but it is not long before they conclude that he is, in fact, soft and romantic. They regard this disillusionment as an act of betrayal on his part – and the retribution is deliberate and horrifying.

‘A page turning novel… A timeless classic’ Independent

‘Mishima’s greatest novel, and one of the greatest of the past century’ The Times

TRANSLATED BY JOHN NATHAN

New Year’s Eve, 1975. Two hunted men leave Mexico City in a borrowed white Impala.

Their quest: to track down the mythical, vanished poet Cesárea Tinajero. But, twenty years later, they are still on the run. The Savage Detectives is their remarkable journey through our darkening universe. Told, shared and mythologised by a generation of lovers, rebels and readers, their testimonies are woven together into one of the most dazzling Latin American novels of all time.

TRANSLATED BY NATASHA WIMMER

‘Roberto Bolaño was a game changer: his field was politics, poetry and melancholia. He could be funny, he could be literate, he could be devastating. And his writing was always unparalleled’ Mariana Enríquez, author of Our Share of Night

‘Bolaño makes you feel changed for having read him; he adjusts your angle of view on the world’ Guardian

'Shoot all the Bluejays you want, if you can hit 'em, but remember it's a sin to kill a Mockingbird.'

Atticus Finch gives this advice to his children as he defends the real mockingbird of this classic novel - a black man charged with attacking a white girl. Through the eyes of Scout and Jem Finch, Lee explores the issues of race and class in the Deep South of the 1930s with compassion and humour. She also creates one of the great heroes of literature in their father, whose lone struggle for justice pricks the conscience of a town steeped in prejudice and hypocrisy.

This edition of one of the world’s best-loved books features the original text.

**One of the BBC’s 100 Novels That Shaped Our World**

Geoffrey Braithwaite is a retired doctor haunted by an obsession with the French literary genius, Gustave Flaubert.

As Geoffrey investigates the mystery of the stuffed parrot Flaubert borrowed from the Museum of Rouen to help research one of his novels, we learn an enormous amount about the writer’s work, family, lovers, thought processes, health and obsessions. But we also gradually come to learn some important and shocking details about Geoffrey himself.

A compelling weave of fiction and imaginatively ordered fact, Flaubert's Parrot is by turns moving and entertaining, witty and scholarly, and a tour-de-force of seductive originality.

‘Unputdownable... A mesmeric original’ Philip Larkin

‘Delightful and enriching...a book to revel in!’ Joseph Heller

‘A wry and graceful book... Unfailingly sharp and often very funny’ Sunday Times

WITH A NEW INTRODUCTION BY THE AUTHOR TO MARK THE 40TH ANNIVERSARY OF FIRST PUBLICATION

'Witty and unusual' George Orwell
'Magnificent' W H Auden

A lyrical tour of life as a young working-class man born into the first days of the 20th century, Caliban Shrieks is a lost masterpiece of 1930s British literature.

WITH NEW INTRODUCTIONS BY ANDREW McMILLAN AND JACK CHADWICK

Caliban Shrieks’ narrator went from a childhood of poverty, yet joy and freedom, to the punishing grind of factory life and the idiocy of being sent blindly into war. He was turned out of the army a vagrant - seeing England from city to city, county to county - before being thrust back into an uncertain cycle of working life as it unfolded in the post-war years.

A story of men and women lost, wandering – and angrily dreaming of a better, fairer England, Hilton’s autobiographical novel is a bold modernist retelling of the myth of how we find ourselves disenfranchised from the world and sold into a slavery of our making.

Lost to time, only to be rediscovered again in the Salford's Working Class Movement Library in 2022, Caliban Shrieks is a working-class masterpiece of British literature, and continues to speak as brash and impassioned as it did on its first rave publication in 1935.

'Astonishingly beautiful... The best gay novel written by anyone of our generation' Harpers

'A life changing read for me. Describes a New York that has completely disappeared and for which I longed - stuck in closed-on-Sunday's London' Rupert Everett

Young, divinely beautiful and tired of living a lie, Anthony Malone trades life as a seemingly straight, small town lawyer for the disco-lit decadence of New York's 1970's gay scene. Joining an unbridled world of dance parties, saunas, deserted parks and orgies - at its centre Malone befriends the flamboyant queen, Sutherland, who takes this new arrival under his preened wing.

But for Malone, the endless city nights and Fire Island days, are close to burning out. It is love that Malone is longing for, and soon he will have to set himself free.

First published in 1978, Dancer from the Dance is widely considered the greatest, most exciting novel of the post-Stonewall generation. Told with wit, eroticism and unashamed lyricism, it remains a heart-breaking love letter to New York's hedonistic past, and a testament to the brilliance of our passions as they burn brightest.

WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY ALAN HOLLINGHURST

This is dub poetry: bold and musical, funny and furious.

This collection brings together the work of nine inventive and brilliant poets who defined and drove the dub poetry genre. From the Caribbean, Canada and the UK, the poetry in this collection spans forty years, as dub became a powerful cultural and creative force.

With roots in the reggae culture of 1970s Kingston, dub poetry uses the vivid expressions of everyday spoken language to describe and challenge the experience of life on the margins. Early dub poetry took on police violence, slums and poverty. Later, as Caribbean migrants arrived in countries like Britain and Canada, dub poets faced new issues: racism, discrimination and hostility. Over four difficult decades, dub gave marginalised people a voice for their anger, defiance and creativity. It was the soundtrack to post-Windrush culture.

Serious and humorous, alive and urgent, here is the very best of dub poetry.

The poets included in this collection are: Oku Onuora, Mikey Smith, Mutabaruka, Jean 'Binta' Breeze, James Berry, Benjamin Zephaniah, Ahdri Zhina Mandiela, Lillian Allen and Afua Cooper.

Discover this extraordinary and beautiful novel from one of America's greatest novelists.

In rural Illinois two tenant farmers share much, finally too much, until jealously leads to murder and suicide. A tenuous friendship between lonely teenagers - the narrator, whose mother has died young, and Cletus Smith, the troubled witness to his parent's misery - is shattered. After the murder and upheavals that follow, the boys never speak again. Fifty years on, the narrator attempts a reconstruction of those devastating events and the atonement of a lifetime's regret.

**One of the BBC’s 100 Novels That Shaped Our World**

**AS SEEN ON WRITE AROUND THE WORLD WITH RICHARD E GRANT**

'The No.1 Greatest Crime Writer' The Times

'Ripley, amoral, hedonistic and charming, is a genuinely original creation' Daily Telegraph

'He is using you for what you are worth'

Tom Ripley wants money, success, and the good life - and he's willing to kill for it. Struggling to stay one step ahead of his creditors, and the law, Ripley leaps at the chance to start afresh on a free trip to Europe. But when his new-found happiness is threatened, his response is as swift as it is shocking.

This is the first in Highsmith's classic series featuring the character of Tom Ripley. The Talented Mr Ripley also inspired the Academy Award-winning film starring Matt Damon, Gwyneth Paltrow and Jude Law.

One of the BBC's 100 Novels That Shaped Our World.

Love, money, revenge and betrayal - this is the Jazz Age novel that became the great American classic.

The world and his mistress are at Jay Gatsby’s party. But Gatsby stands apart from the crowd, isolated by a secret longing. In between sips of champagne his guests speculate about their mysterious host. Some say he’s a bootlegger. Others swear he was a German spy during the war. They lean in and whisper ‘he killed a man once’. Just where is Gatsby from and what is the obsession that drives him?

‘Shimmers with a magic that readers have long recognised…Fitzgerald was so far ahead of his time that we are only just catching up with him’ Sarah Churchwell, Guardian

‘Not just one of the greatest works of American literature, but a timeless evocation of the allure, corruption and carelessness of wealth’ The Times

As Seen on BBC Between the Covers

A brief visit to a Swiss sanatorium becomes a life-altering seven-year odyssey.

Hans Castorp arrives at a sanatorium in the Swiss Alps to visit his cousin, intending to stay for just three weeks. But when he falls ill, he remains and is drawn in by the introspection and erudition that define life in the mountains. As his stay extends to seven transformative years, Hans falls in love and becomes intoxicated with the ideas he hears at the clinic - ideas which will strain and crack apart in a world on the verge of the First World War.

'Magnificent... a beautiful, feverish account of obsessive love' Jonathan Coe, Guardian

'The greatest German novelist of the 20th century' Spectator

‘Before we face experience, that miserable enemy, let us have some more innocence, just for a while....'

INTRODUCED BY ZADIE SMITH

In this masterwork of literary memoir, Martin Amis tells the stories of his life, both the ordinary and the outlandish — from his bohemian childhood, through fame, fatherhood and divorce, to the news of a cousin brutally murdered, the agonising removal of all his teeth, the discovery of a long-lost daughter and, most poignantly, the death of his father, and fellow novelist Kingsley Amis.


**ONE OF THE GUARDIAN'S 100 BEST BOOKS OF THE 21st CENTURY**

'Martin Amis is a seriously good writer, and never on better form than now. Experience, the book of his life, may be the book of his life' Daily Telegraph

'All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others'

Mr Jones, the owner of Manor Farm, is a lazy drunk. The animals decide to overthrow him in a revolution that will allow them to run the farm, liberating themselves and creating a new life of equality and freedom. But they have underestimated the pigs. Napoleon and Snowball form an elite and take control for themselves, and the tyranny of the farmer is replaced with another kind of control leaving the animals again subject to a ruthless and cruel authority.

Imagined only as Orwell could, this powerful fable is instilled with humour and an underlying urgency that makes this one of the most prescient warnings ever written.

'Surely one of the greatest works of literature of the 20th century, delivering truths about politics that remain, to this hour, horribly disturbing' The Times

WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS

Read the searing first novel from the celebrated author of Beloved, which immerses us in the tragic, torn lives of a poor black family in post-Depression 1940s Ohio.

Unloved, unseen, Pecola prays each night for blue eyes. In this way she dreams of becoming beautiful, of becoming someone – like her white schoolfellows – worthy of care and attention. Immersing us in the tragic, torn lives of a poor black family in post-Depression Ohio, Toni Morrison’s indelible debut reveals the nightmare at the heart of Pecola’s yearning, and the tragedy of its fulfilment.

**AS FEATURED IN OPRAH’S BOOK CLUB**

'She revealed the sins of her nation, while profoundly elevating its canon. She suffused the telling of blackness with beauty, whilst steering us away from the perils of the white gaze. That's why she told her stories. And why we will never, ever stop reading them' Afua Hirsch

'Discovering a writer like Toni Morrison is rarest of pleasures' Washington Post

'When she arrived, with her first novel, The Bluest Eye, she immediately re-ordered the American literary landscape' Ben Okri

Winner of the PEN/Saul Bellow award for achievement in American fiction