Vintage books Spider Woman. A Life Lady Hale

This book is about learning to live • Echoing Socrates’ statement that the unexamined life not worth living, psychoanalyst Stephen Grosz draws on his twenty-five years of work and more than 50,000 hours of conversations to form a collection of beautifully rendered tales that illuminate the human experience • These are stories about everyday lives: from a woman who finds herself daydreaming as she returns home from a business trip to a young man loses his wallet, to the more extreme examples: the patient who points an unloaded gun at a police officer and the compulsive liar who convinces his wife he's dying of cancer. The resulting journey will spark new ideas about who we are and why we do what we do

'Extraordinarily mature - technically as well as emotionally' Sunday Times • Arthur Machin's life changes when he is picked for the Rugby league team in his local town. Once a struggling coal miner's son, now he can buy what he likes - a car, a fur coat for his widowed landlady, Mrs Hammond, who is becoming something more. But fame makes a mess of things. Machin is troubled by advances from the boss's wife, he challenges the sensibilities of the comfortable classes and struggles to understand why his success fails to impress Mrs Hammond • Gritty, full of ambition and anger, This Sporting Life is an unflinching and surgical dissection of one man's life and a rare foray onto the sports field in British fiction

From the Booker Prize winning author of Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha and The Commitments: the story of an ordinary woman whose extraordinary character will stay with you long after reading • ‘He loved me and he beat me. I loved him and I took it. It’s as simple as that’ • Paula Spencer is thirty-nine, the mother of four and learning to live without Charlo, her violent, abusive husband • Paula’s started drinking more and dreaming more, taking herself back to her contented childhood and audacious teenage years. Everything was better then, not least the music, the soundtrack to her romance with Charlo. As the past floats by and mingles with the present Paula Spencer finds herself coming alive, in all her vulnerability and her strength

SHORTLISTED FOR THE WHITBREAD BIOGRAPHY AWARD • 'Definitive' Daily Telegraph • Orwell has become one of the most potent and symbolic figures in western political thought. Even the adjective 'Orwellian' is now a byword for a particular way of thinking about life, literature and language yet, despite this iconic status, the man who was born Eric Blair in 1903 remains an enigma • Drawing on a mass of previously unseen material, D J Taylor offers a strikingly human portrait of the writer too often embalmed as a secular saint. Here is a man who, for all his outward unworldliness, effectively stage-managed his own life; who combined chilling detachment with warmth and gentleness, disillusionment with hope; who battled through illness to produce two of the greatest masterpieces of the twentieth century

A revelatory portrait of Napoleon written for our own time, exploring his love of nature and the gardens that gave his revolutionary life its light and shade • Napoleon's gardens range from his childhood olive groves in Corsica, to Josephine's menageries in Paris, to the walled garden of Hougoumont at the battle of Waterloo, and ultimately to St Helena, where he could sit and scan the sea in his final months • In this innovative biography, Ruth Scurr follows the dramatic trajectory of Napoleon's life through the land he cultivated and that offered him retreat from the manifold frustrations of war and politics. Seen through the eyes of those who knew him in the shade of his gardens, Napoleon emerges a giant figure made human - both as the Emperor hunting for glory and the man in an old straw hat, leaning on his spade

A tangled tale of falling in love - with three very different men • Flora Trevelyan is a ten-year-old misfit, despised by her selfish and indolent parents, and left to wander the streets of a small French town whilst her parents prepare to depart for life in colonial India. There she befriends the locals, acquires an extensive vocabulary of French foul language and encounters the privileged lifestyle of the elegant, middle-class British families holidaying in 1920s France • Introduced for the first time to kindly, civilised and, above all, caring people Flora falls helplessly and hopelessly in love with not one but three young men • Over the next forty years Flora will grow from an awkward schoolgirl into a stunning beauty and explore, consummate and finally resolve each of these affairs

A heartbreaking story of love, loss and survival from the multi-million copy bestselling author of Captain Corelli’s Mandolin • Returning from life as a fighter pilot in the First World War, Daniel is struggling to put the trauma of the Western Front behind him • As the 1920s dawn, he and his wife Rosie move to a tea plantation in Ceylon with their small daughter to make a fresh start. Yet navigating their new world could test their marriage to its limits • Back in England, Rosie's sisters are dealing with impossible challenges in their searches for family, purpose and happiness. These are precarious times, and taking unconventional means may be the only way to get what they want. Around them the world changes, and events in Germany take a dark and forbidding turn

Могут ли лошади испытывать стыд? Горюют ли олени? Почему петухи обманывают кур? • Мы склонны считать, что мы единственные живые существа, способные испытывать чувства, но задумывались ли вы когда-нибудь, что происходит в голове животного? От покрытой листвой лесной подстилки до внутренностей пчелиного улья - внутренняя жизнь животных открывает царство животных так, как никогда раньше. Мы слышим истории о благодарном горбатом ките, о ежике, которому снятся кошмары, и о сороке, которая совершает прелюбодеяние; мы встречаем пчел, которые строят планы на будущее, свиней, которые учат свои собственные имена, и ворон, которые катаются на санках ради забавы. И наконец-то мы узнаем, почему существуют осы • Книга на английском языке • Can horses feel shame? Do deer grieve? Why do roosters deceive hens? • We tend to assume that we are the only living things able to experience feelings but have you ever wondered what's going on in an animal's head? From the leafy forest floor to the inside of a bee hive, The Inner Life of Animals opens up the animal kingdom like never before

Terrified, a young prisoner in the Second World War closes his eyes and pictures himself going out to bat on a sunlit cricket ground in Hampshire • Across the courtyard in a Victorian workhouse, a father too ashamed to acknowledge his son • A skinny girl steps out of a Chevy with a guitar; her voice sends shivers through the skull • Soldiers and lovers, parents and children, scientists and musicians risk their bodies and hearts in search of connection - some key to understanding what makes us the people we become • Provocative and profound, Sebastian Faulks's novel journeys across continents and time to explore the chaos created by love, separation and missed opportunities. From the pain and drama of these highly particular lives emerges a mysterious consolation: the chance to feel your heart beat in someone else's life

Finding himself the victim of a botched kidnapping attempt, Val Gyrth suspects that he might be in a spot of trouble. Unexpected news to him – but not to the mysterious Mr Campion, who reveals that the ancient Chalice entrusted to Val’s family is being targeted by a ruthless ring of thieves • Fleeing London for the supposed safety of Suffolk, Val and Campion come face to face with events of a perilous and puzzling nature – Campion might be accustomed to outwitting criminal minds, but can he foil supernatural forces?

A funny, sharp, delicately woven story of female friendship • Read this funny, sharp, delicately woven story of two women's complicated relationship set in post-apartheid South Africa • Hortensia and Marion are next door neighbours in a charming, bougainvillea-laden Cape Town suburb. One is black, one white. Both are successful women with impressive careers behind them. Both have recently been widowed. Both are in their eighties. And both are sworn enemies, sharing hedge and hostility pruned with zeal • But one day an unforeseen event forces the women together. Could long-held mutual loathing transform into friendship? • Love thy neighbour? Easier said than done

A passenger is missing...but was she ever on board at all? • This was meant to be the perfect trip. The Northern Lights. A luxury press launch on a boutique cruise ship • A chance for travel journalist Lo Blacklock to recover from a traumatic break-in that has left her on the verge of collapse • Except things don't go as planned • Woken in the night by screams, Lo rushes to her window to see a body thrown overboard from the next door cabin. But the records show that no-one ever checked into that cabin, and no passengers are missing from the boat • Exhausted and emotional, Lo has to face the fact that she may have made a mistake - either that, or she is now trapped on a boat with a murderer