Vintage Classics UK

A classic novel about the golden age of film.It is based on Isherwood's experience of co-writing the 1934 Berthold Viertel film Little Friend.With one impatient phone call, a young Christopher Isherwood is drawn into the film industry.On the other end of the line is temperamental Austrian director Friedrich Bergmann. Christopher’s job is to rescue the script of an idiotic love story set in nineteenth-century Vienna, a film called Prater Violet. Meanwhile, in the real Vienna of 1934, the Austrian right crushes a socialist uprising. Bergmann is distraught; his prophecy of a coming war goes unheeded. As tensions on set grow, studio intrigues and competing egos threaten to derail the whole project, and Hitler’s shadow lengthens over Europe.‘A masterly novella’ Guardian‘A deliberate historical parable. Prater Violet resembles episodes in Goodbye to Berlin and keeps up the same high level of excellence’ New Yorker

A Single Man is an exclusive Vintage Classic that has been made into a film starring Julianne Moore and Colin Firth and directed by Tom Ford.George is heartbroken after the death of his lover.An English professor in suburban California, George must now adjust to a tragic new solitude in the sun. Beneath George’s rigid British restraint, waves of sorrow and fury surge. He doggedly persists with the routines of his past life, heading out to work, to the gym, on again to dinner. Yet along the way, George rediscovers the unexpected pleasures of life and the soul's ability to triumph over loneliness and alienation. This short, poignant novel is a tender and wistful love story.WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY TOM FORD‘Lyrical and intensely moving’ Daily Telegraph‘Widely recognised as his supreme achievement . . . a work of compressed brilliance’ Guardian‘A virtuoso piece of work . . . powerful’ Sunday Time

'The best prose writer in English' Gore Vidal1930s Berlin is a realm of glamour and sleaze, excess and repression.Having moved to the city to work on his novel, Christopher finds himself immersed in a world of contradiction. He becomes enamoured with the local denizens and the colourful lives they lead, meeting an English upper-class waif, the delightfully decadent Sally Bowles; a couple – Peter and Otto – who are struggling with their sexual identities; and a distinguished and doomed Jewish family, the Landauers. With the Nazis rising to power, Christopher’s Berlin is a sparkling city perched on the edge of an abyss.‘Isherwood is a master’ Evening Standard‘Brilliant sketches of a society in decay’ George Orwell‘Reading this novel is much like overhearing anecdotes in a crowded bar while history knocks impatiently at the windows’ Guardian

Tells the story of four sisters, and the declining fortunes of a traditional Japanese family. This title presents a loving and nostalgic recreation of the sumptuous, intricate upper-class life of Osak

The marriage of Kaname and Misako is disintegrating. Misako's father believes their relationship has been damaged by the influence of a new and alien culture, and attempts to heal the breach by educat

In rural Illinois two tenant farmers share much, finally too much, jealously leads to murder and suicide. A tenuous friendship between lonely teenagers - the narrator, whose mother has died young, and

New to the Vintage Classics Woolf series, this is Woolf's groundbreaking experimental novel. Jacob's Room is Virginia Woolf's first truly experimental novel. It is a portrait of a young man, tracing his life from childhood, to Cambridge University, and to his early adult life in artistic London.Jacob always yearns for something greater, and embarks on a voyage to the Mediterranean before the war begins and his fate is forever altered. Impressionistic in style, the narrative is as inspired now as it was when it first appeared. 'A remarkable achievement' New Statesman