198 x 129 mm

Jailbird by Kurt Vonnegut (Vintage) — a darkly comic political novel narrated by minor Watergate figure Walter Starbuck after his prison release. Drawing on American labour history and McCarthyism, it explores political conscience and its costs with Vonnegut’s characteristic blend of tenderness, humour, and anger.

Hocus Pocus by Kurt Vonnegut (Vintage) — narrated by Vietnam veteran and prison warden Eugene Debs Hartke from a prison cell, it is a dark, funny portrait of America in decline. Vonnegut’s compassion, anger, and moral intelligence at full power. Essential late Vonnegut.

Look at the Birdie by Kurt Vonnegut (Vintage) — fourteen previously unpublished stories discovered after his death. These 1950s tales of postwar American life stand fully alongside his published work: warm, funny, and morally intelligent. A genuine posthumous discovery.

Independent People by Halldór Laxness (Vintage) — the Nobel Prize-winning Icelandic masterpiece. The story of the magnificently stubborn crofter Bjartur, who sacrifices everything for independence, is both absurd and devastating: one of world literature’s great portraits of human will. Translated by J.A. Thompson.

The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner (Vintage) — a masterpiece of American modernism. The Compson family’s decline is told through four radically different perspectives, beginning with the fragmented consciousness of Benjy. Technically dazzling, emotionally devastating, and one of the most important American novels ever written.

Spring Snow by Yukio Mishima (Vintage) opens the masterful Sea of Fertility tetralogy. Set in Meiji Japan, it traces the forbidden love between the aristocratic Kiyoaki and the betrothed Satoko in prose of luminous beauty — a meditation on desire, loss, and the desire for transcendence.