VINTAGE BOOKS

Mark Haddon reads from and talks about his debut story collection, The Pier Falls. Why has it taken him so long to want to write in the short form and what were the stories that helped him to change his mind? https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/1109789/the-pier-falls/

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Mark Haddon - The Pier Falls

A Spectator Book of the Year

An expedition to Mars goes terribly wrong.

A seaside pier collapses.

A thirty-stone man is confined to his living room.

One woman is abandoned on a tiny island in the middle of the ocean.

Another woman is saved from drowning.

Two boys discover a gun in a shoebox.

A group of explorers find a cave of unimaginable size deep in the Amazon jungle.

A man shoots a stranger in the chest on Christmas Eve.

In this first collection of stories by the author of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time Mark Haddon demonstrates two things: first that he is a master of the short form (several of the stories have been longlisted for prizes), second that his imagination is even darker than we had thought.

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Alex Andreou, winner of the inaugural Jane Grigson Trust Award, chats to Alex Clark and Will Rycroft about the food of his childhood, his mother's struggle with dementia and the culture of Greece that informs everything from the current financial crisis to the food on our plates. A truly immersive podcast that reveals the hidden art of real Greek food.

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In this special podcast Alex Clark is given a unique tour of Sissinghurst Castle by Juliet Nicholson, whose new book, A House Full of Daughters, details her childhood growing up there as the grand-daughter of Vita Sackville-West and Harold Nicolson. https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/1099352/a-house-full-of-daughters/

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Juliet Nicholcon - A House Full of Daughters

All families have their myths and Juliet Nicolson’s was no different: her flamenco dancing great-great-grandmother Pepita, the flirty manipulation of her great-grandmother Victoria, the infamous eccentricity of her grandmother Vita, her mother’s Tory-conventional background.

A House Full of Daughters takes us through seven generations of women. In the nineteenth-century slums of Malaga, the salons of fin-de-siècle Washington DC, an English boarding school during the Second World War, Chelsea in the 1960s, these women emerge for Juliet as people in their own right, but also as part of who she is and where she has come from.

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1930's Paris, post-war London and the '60s in Sissinghurst; we've slipped the shackles of the studio for this month's podcast and gone on location for a special featuring apricot cocktails, top London trivia and a unique insight into one of the most famous gardens in the Garden of England. Will Rycroft talks to Sarah Bakewell about Jean Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir and modern existentialism whilst sipping apricot cocktails at Le Beaujolais. Alex Clark walks through London with Anthony Quinn as they discuss the landscape of his latest novel, Freya. She then gets an exclusive tour of Sissinghurst Castle from Juliet Nicolson, who grew up there during the 1960s. There's a time and a place for everything and this month the Vintage podcast takes you to three very specific times and places. An immersive listen for every type of reader.

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Anthony Quinn - Freya

Freya Wyley meets Nancy Holdaway amid the wild celebrations of VE Day, the prelude to a devoted and competitive friendship…

Freya, ambitious and outspoken, pursues a career on Fleet Street while Nancy, less self-confident, struggles to get her first novel published. Both friends become entangled with Robert Cosway, a charismatic young man whose own ambition will have a momentous bearing on their lives.

Flitting from war-haunted Oxford to the bright new shallows of the 1960s, Freya plots the unpredictable course of a woman’s life and loves in extraordinary times.

https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/1089993/at-the-existentialist-cafe/9780701186586/ https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/1110797/freya/9781910702505/ https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/1099352/a-house-full-of-daughters/

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No flowers, no chocolates, but all the right words. This is what we talk about when we talk about love - on the Vintage podcast. This month Alex Clark and Will Rycroft talk to Anna Jean Hughes from digital publisher The Pigeonhole about the many different types of love and which books played an important role in shaping their perception of love and lust. Louis de Bernières comes in to talk about his latest collection of poetry and how love has influenced both that and his current fiction. And finally, in an extraordinary interview about her late husband Paul, Lucy Kalanithi talks about his memoir, When Breath Becomes Air, which has been sweeping up everyone who reads it. A profound and uplifting book about how to live a good life gives us a chance to talk about a very special kind of love. https://thepigeonhole.com/ https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/1099471/of-love-and-desire/ https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/1109814/when-breath-becomes-air/

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Paul Kalanithi - When Breath Becomes Air

At the age of thirty-six, on the verge of completing a decade’s training as a neurosurgeon, Paul Kalanithi was diagnosed with inoperable lung cancer. One day he was a doctor treating the dying, the next he was a patient struggling to live.

When Breath Becomes Air chronicles Kalanithi’s transformation from a medical student asking what makes a virtuous and meaningful life into a neurosurgeon working in the core of human identity – the brain – and finally into a patient and a new father.

What makes life worth living in the face of death? What do you do when when life is catastrophically interrupted? What does it mean to have a child as your own life fades away?

Paul Kalanithi died while working on this profoundly moving book, yet his words live on as a guide to us all. When Breath Becomes Air is a life-affirming reflection on facing our mortality and on the relationship between doctor and patient, from a gifted writer who became both.

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Author Julian Barnes and Vintage Creative Director Suzanne Dean have been working together for 20 years. To mark the publication of their latest collaboration, the new novel The Noise of Time, Alex Clark spoke to them both in the Vintage Podcast studio about how a book design comes together, what makes a cover iconic and why neither will let the other retire. See some of the covers in this feature article: https://www.penguin.co.uk/articles/in-conversation/interviews/2016/jan/26/julian-barnes-and-suzanne-dean/

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Julian Barnes - The Noise of Time

In May 1937 a man in his early thirties waits by the lift of a Leningrad apartment block. He waits all through the night, expecting to be taken away to the Big House. Any celebrity he has known in the previous decade is no use to him now. And few who are taken to the Big House ever return.

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Everyone's a critic in this month's podcast. Alex Clark and Will Rycroft get tips from London's booksellers on the hot titles to look out for this year as well as mentioning a few themselves including the new novel from Julian Barnes, The Noise of Time. Sarah Howe gives fascinating insight into her poetry collection, A Loop of Jade, fresh from winning the TS Eliot Prize. And D J Taylor discusses the literary landscape from Grub Street to Bloggers with plenty of opinion along the way. Download and immerse yourself in the world of books.

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Julian Barnes - The Noise of Time

In May 1937 a man in his early thirties waits by the lift of a Leningrad apartment block. He waits all through the night, expecting to be taken away to the Big House. Any celebrity he has known in the previous decade is no use to him now. And few who are taken to the Big House ever return.

Sarah Howe - Loop of Jade

There is a Chinese proverb that says: ‘It is more profitable to raise geese than daughters.’ But geese, like daughters, know the obligation to return home. In her exquisite first collection, Sarah Howe explores a dual heritage, journeying back to Hong Kong in search of her roots.

With extraordinary range and power, the poems build into a meditation on hybridity, intermarriage and love – what meaning we find in the world, in art, and in each other. Crossing the bounds of time, race and language, this is an enthralling exploration of self and place, of migration and inheritance, and introduces an unmistakable new voice in British poetry.

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The Vintage Podcast is ringing the changes; new music, new format - same great authors and books. Join Alex Clark and Will Rycroft as they look back at 2015 and discuss big books, little books and everything in between. What were their favourites, their podcast highlights and what do they have planned for the future? We'd love to know what you think so do please leave a comment and don't forget to follow us so you're the first to catch our next podcast in the new year.

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To celebrate the launch of the Hogarth Shakespeare project, in which today's best-loved authors create new novels based on the plays of Shakespeare, we have a podcast special with Jeanette Winterson and Howard Jacobson in conversation with Alex Clark. What drew them to the project, what made them choose the play they did, and what were the challenges of adapting the Bard? Jeanette Winterson's The Gap of Time is published on October 1st Howard Jacobson's Shylock Is My Name will be published in February next year. http://www.vintage-books.co.uk/HogarthShakespeare/

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Jeanette Winterson - The Gap in Time

A baby girl is abandoned, banished from London to the storm-ravaged American city of New Bohemia. Her father has been driven mad by jealousy, her mother to exile by grief.

Seventeen years later, Perdita doesn't know a lot about who she is or where she's come from - but she's about to find out.

Jeanette Winterson’s cover version of The Winter’s Tale vibrates with echoes of Shakespeare's original and tells a story of hearts broken and hearts healed, a story of revenge and forgiveness, a story that shows that whatever is lost shall be found.

Howard Jacobson - Shylock Is My Name

A re-envisaging of Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice, from the Man Booker Prize-winner and our great chronicler of Jewish life.

‘Who is this guy, Dad? What is he doing here?’

With an absent wife and a daughter going off the rails, wealthy art collector and philanthropist Simon Strulovitch is in need of someone to talk to. So when he meets Shylock at a cemetery in Cheshire’s Golden Triangle, he invites him back to his house. It’s the beginning of a remarkable friendship ...

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