Vintage books Stick Out Your Tongue Ma Jian

In Falling Out of Time, David Grossman has created a genre-defying drama - part play, part prose, pure poetry - to tell the story of bereaved parents setting out to reach their lost children. It begins in a small village, in a kitchen, where a man announces to his wife that he is leaving, embarking on a journey in search of their dead son.The man - called simply the 'Walking Man' - paces in ever-widening circles around the town. One after another, all manner of townsfolk fall into step with him (the Net Mender, the Midwife, the Elderly Maths Teacher, even the Duke), each enduring his or her own loss. The walkers raise questions of grief and bereavement: Can death be overcome by an intensity of speech or memory? Is it possible, even for a fleeting moment, to call to the dead and free them from their death? Grossman's answer to such questions is a hymn to these characters, who ultimately find solace and hope in their communal act of breaching death’s hermetic separateness

Your body is teeming with tens of trillions of microbes. It's an entire world, a colony full of life • In other words, you contain multitudes • They sculpt our organs, protect us from diseases, guide our behaviour, and bombard us with their genes. They also hold the key to understanding all life on earth • In I Contain Multitudes, Ed Yong opens our eyes and invites us to marvel at ourselves and other animals in a new light, less as individuals and more as thriving ecosystems • You'll never think about your mind, body or preferences in the same way again

Your favourite fantastic Grimm fairy tales and bedtime stories in the only complete edition of this classic collection • Wolves and grandmothers, ugly sisters, a house made of bread, a goose made of gold...the folk tales collected by the Grimm brothers created an astonishingly influential imaginative world. However, this is also a world where a woman serves her stepson up in a stew, a man marries a snake, a princess sleeps with a frog, and an evil queen dances to death in a pair of burning shoes. Violent, funny, disturbing, wise and sometimes beautiful, these stories have intrigued children, adults, scholars, psychologists and artists for centuries • The only complete edition available of the most famous collection of fairy tales ever published, this collection features the 279 stories in an acclaimed, modern, unexpurgated translation

Blending fact with fiction, China Dream is an unflinching satire of totalitarianism. After decades of loyal service, Ma Daode, a corrupt and lecherous party official, has been appointed director of the China Dream Bureau, charged with promoting President Xi Jinping’s China Dream of national rejuvenation. But just as he is about to present his plan for a microchip that will be implanted into the brain of every citizen to replace all painful recollections with a collective dream of national supremacy, his sanity begins to unravel. Plagued by flashbacks of the Cultural Revolution, his nightmare visions from the past threaten to destroy his dream of a glorious future • This darkly comic fable is a dystopian vision of repression and state-enforced amnesia set not in the future, but in China today

What do you and an ancient philosopher have in common? It turns out much more than you might think… • Aristotle was an extraordinary thinker yet he was preoccupied by an ordinary question: how to be happy. In this handbook to his timeless teachings, Professor Edith Hall shows how ancient thinking is precisely what we need today, even if you don’t know your Odyssey from your Iliad. In ten practical lessons you can learn how to make good decisions, how to ace an interview, how to choose a partner and how to face death. This is advice that won’t go out of fashion

Now We Have Your Attention makes sense of what is happening in British politics by taking a radically different perspective: the people's • From a warehouse in Manchester to a pub in Essex, from the outskirts of Glasgow to a racecourse in Durham, Jack Shenker uncovers the root causes of our current crisis and the future direction of British politics through the lives of ordinary individuals. Taking us deep into communities hollowed out by austerity and decades of economic disadvantage, among a generation crippled by precarious work and unaffordable housing, he shows where the chaos at Westminster ultimately springs from - and how disillusionment with it is fuelling a passionate engagement with politics of a completely different kind: local, personal, effective and utterly fearless

As well as her eight novels, Angela Carter published four wonderful collections of short stories during her lifetime, and contributed stories to several anthologies. The stories were scattered amongst different publishers, and a couple of the volumes are now out of print. In Burning your Boats they are gathered for the first time; this is a key collection and a major event for Angela Carter aficionados

How does Italy really work? • When Valeria travels from hot, dusty Basilicata to begin her studies in a northern university town, she has little idea of the kind of education she will find there. Italian Life is her story, and that of the students and professors around her: a story of power and corruption, influence and exclusion, and the workings of a society where your connections are everything • Written with flair and insight, Italian Life joins Tim Parks' bestselling books about his beloved and paradoxical adopted country. It is a gripping, entertaining, behind-the-scenes account of how Italy actually happens, and the ways it can surprise those who know it inside out

Is my experience real? • Or just a movie in my head? • Am I no more than a super computer? • You are your brain, neuroscientists tell us. Everything happens in there. Yet even the most sophisticated brain scan cannot tell us who we are. Nothing in our neurons remotely suggests the rich nature of our experience, the colours, sounds and smells that make up our lives • When Tim Parks came across a radical new theory of consciousness, he set on a quest that moves through one sparkling encounter after another to arrive at the deepest of questions: what stuff exactly is consciousness made of? And where is it? Inside or out?

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

'Like to spend a night in the Goblin?’ • The Swallows are staying on the Suffolk coast while they wait for their father to return home from China. But although the harbour is bursting with bobbing yachts, barges and steamers, this year there's no chance of any sailing for the landlocked Swallows. That is until they rescue young Jim Brading and his boat the Goblin from a sticky situation and to their delight are recruited as crew members. Mother agrees they can go, on one condition – they absolutely must not sail out past Beach End Buoy and into the open sea… • Includes exclusive content: In the 'Backstory' you can test your knowledge of the book, and learn all about the art of sailing! • Vintage Children’s Classics is a twenty-first century classics list aimed at 8-12 year olds and the adults in their lives

In the Caribbean, at the beginning of the last century, a poor rice-growing family struggle to exist. Four siblings pass their days in the ricefield, as does Ma. But Pa is an angry man ready to vent. It is the August rainy season and above their heads the black sky crackles with lightning • On the day that Pa nearly drowns Ma in a tub of washing water, the children and their mother escape into the cane fields to wait out Pa's rage. But eight-year-old Rama, catches a chill in the rain and falls ill. What follows is a tale of the inheritance of loss. It contains a heart-stopping intensity that places it as one of the greatest Caribbean novels ever written