Vintage Quarterbound Classics
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Introduction
Vintage Classics is releasing a new range of hardbound gift books called the ‘Vintage Quarterbound’ series with the first books hitting the shelves in October 2023. The books are quarter-bound with different rich colors of cloth, the covers feature contemporary illustrations, and the books include a red silk ribbon bookmark, and other special finishes throughout.
It’s a more eclectic selection of titles than many choose to start with, making it of broader interest to those who want to build up their classics selections without duplicating titles they already have.
The series is being launched with nine titles in 2023, and eight more are anticipated for April 2024.
Shelf Appeal
Each of the volumes features a clothbound spine, in a palette of bright colours that is sure to stand out on the shelf. Cover designs are by a wide range of contemporary artists and illustrators and most feature interesting but often abstract designs that are intended to encourage the casual reader to pick it up in curiosity.
List of Titles
2024
The Talented Mr Ripley - Patricia Highsmith
Vintage Classics, 9781529940428, May 16, 2024. (Originally published 1955).
“Struggling to stay one step ahead of his creditors, and the law, Ripley leaps at the chance to start afresh on a free trip to Europe. But when his new-found happiness is threatened, his response is as swift as it is shocking.“
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The House of the Spirits - Isabel Allende
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Vintage Classics, 9781784879709, Apr 4, 2024. (Originally published 1982).
“As a girl, Clara del Valle can read fortunes, make objects move as if they had lives of their own, and predict the future. Following the mysterious death of her sister, Rosa the Beautiful, Clara is mute for nine years. When she breaks her silence, it is to announce that she will be married soon to the stern and volatile landowner Esteban Trueba. Set in an unnamed Latin American country over three generations, The House of the Spirits is a magnificent epic of a proud and passionate family, secret loves and violent revolution.”
The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood
Vintage Classics, 9781784879679, Apr 4, 2024. (Originally published 1932).
“Offred is a Handmaid in The Republic of Gilead, a religious totalitarian state in what was formerly known as the United States. She is placed in the household of The Commander, Fred Waterford – her assigned name, Offred, means ‘of Fred’. She has only one function: to breed. If Offred refuses to enter into sexual servitude to repopulate a devastated world, she will be hanged. Yet even a repressive state cannot eradicate hope and desire.“
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The Leopard - Giuseppe Tomasi Di Lampedusa
Vintage Classics, 9781784879648, Apr 4, 2024. (Originally published 1958). Translated by Archibald Colquhoun.
“In the spring of 1860, Fabrizio, the charismatic Prince of Salina, still rules over thousands of acres and hundreds of people, including his own numerous family, in mingled splendour and squalor. Then comes Garibaldi’s landing in Sicily and the Prince must decide whether to resist the forces of change or come to terms with them.”
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Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
Vintage Classics, 9781784879686, Apr 4, 2024. (Originally published 1932).
“Welcome to New London. Everybody is happy here. Our perfect society achieves peace and stability by dispensing with monogamy, privacy, money, family and history itself. Now everyone belongs. You can be happy too. All you need to do is take your Soma pills. This is the brave new world of Aldous Huxley’s deeply sinister and prophetic novel, a society based on maximum pleasure and complete surveillance – no matter the cost.“
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The Sailor who Fell from Grace with the Sea - Yukio Mishima
Vintage Classics, 9781784879723, Apr 4, 2024. (Originally published 1963).
“A band of savage thirteen-year-old boys reject the adult world as illusory, hypocritical, and sentimental, and train themselves in a brutal callousness they call ‘objectivity’. When the mother of one of them begins an affair with a ship’s officer, he and his friends idealise the man at first; but it is not long before they conclude that he is in fact soft and romantic. They regard this disillusionment as an act of betrayal on his part – and the retribution is deliberate and horrifying. A great Japanese classic, beautiful, lyrical and deeply ominous.“
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The Night Circus - Erin Morgenstern
Vintage Classics, 9781784879662, Apr 4, 2024. (Originally published 2011).
“Full of breath-taking amazements and open only at night, Le Cirque des Rêves seems to cast a spell over all who wander its circular paths. But behind the glittering acrobats, fortune-tellers and contortionists a fierce competition is underway. Celia and Marco are two young magicians who have been trained since childhood for a deadly duel. With the lives of everyone at the Circus of Dreams at stake, they must test the very limits of the imagination, and of their love.“
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All Quiet on the Western Front - Erich Maria Remarque
Vintage Classics, 9781784879716, Apr 4, 2024. (Originally published 1928). Translated by Brian Murdoch.
“In 1914 a room full of German schoolboys, fresh-faced and idealistic, are goaded by their schoolmaster to troop off to the ‘glorious war’. With the fire and patriotism of youth they sign up. What follows is the moving story of a young ‘unknown soldier’ experiencing the horror and disillusionment of life in the trenches.”
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Slaughterhouse 5 - Kurt Vonnegut
Vintage Classics, 9781784879693, Apr 4, 2024. (Originally published 1969).
“Billy Pilgrim – hapless barber’s assistant, successful optometrist, alien abductee, senile widower and soldier – has become unstuck in time. Hiding in the basement of a slaughterhouse in Dresden, with the city and its inhabitants burning above him, he finds himself a survivor of one of the most deadly and destructive battles of the Second World War. But when, exactly? How did he get here? And how does he get out? Travel through time and space on the shoulders of Vonnegut himself. This is a book about war. Listen to what he has to say: it is of the utmost urgency.“
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2023
The Bloody Chamber - Angela Carter
Vintage Classics, 9781784878689, Oct 5, 2023. (Originally published 1979). Cover art by Daria Filippova.
“Angela Carter was a storytelling sorceress, the literary godmother of Neil Gaiman, David Mitchell, Audrey Niffenegger, J. K. Rowling, Kelly Link, and other contemporary masters of supernatural fiction. In her must-read masterpiece, The Bloody Chamber she spins subversively dark and sensual versions of familiar fairy tales and legends giving them exhilarating new life in a style steeped in the romantic trappings of the gothic tradition.“
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If On A Winter's Night A Traveller - Italo Calvino
Vintage Classics, 9781784878665, Oct 5, 2023. (Originally published 1979).
“You go into a bookshop and buy If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller by Italo Calvino. You like it. But alas there is a printer’s error in your copy. You take it back to the shop and get a replacement. But the replacement seems to be a totally different story. You try to track down the original book you were reading but end up with a different narrative again. This remarkable novel leads you through many different books including a detective adventure, a romance, a satire, an erotic story, a diary and a quest. But the real hero is you, the reader.“
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Catch-22 - Joseph Heller
Vintage Classics, 9781784878696, Oct 5, 2023. (Originally published 1961).
“Set in the closing months of World War II, this is the story of a bombardier named Yossarian who is frantic and furious because thousands of people he has never met are trying to kill him. His real problem is not the enemy – it is his own army — if Yossarian makes any attempts to excuse himself from the perilous missions then he is caught in Catch-22. When a book title becomes a phrase in everyday life, it’s a good sign you should read that book. Darkly hilarious and absurdly enjoyable, Catch-22 is a rite of passage to be read by all.“
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The Woman in Black - Susan Hill
Vintage Classics, 9781784878368, Oct 5, 2023. (Originally published 1983).
“Arthur Kipps, a junior solicitor, is summoned to attend a funeral of the sole inhabitant of Eel Marsh House. The house stands wreathed in fog and mystery, but it is not until he glimpses a wasted young woman, dressed all in black, at the funeral, that a creeping sense of unease begins to take hold. The Woman in Black is gothic horror at its finest, a truly terrifying classic English ghost story that will give you goosebumps.“
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Beloved - Toni Morrison
Vintage Classics, 9781784878672, Oct 5, 2023. (Originally published 1987). Cover art by Sophy Hollington.
“Sethe was born a slave and escaped to Ohio, but eighteen years later she is still not free. She is haunted by the past, and the ghost of her baby, who died nameless and whose tombstone is engraved with a single word: Beloved. Winner of the Pulitzer Prize, Toni Morrison’s Beloved is a spellbinding and dazzlingly innovative portrait of a woman haunted by the past.”
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Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie
Vintage Classics, 9781784878658, Oct 5, 2023. (Originally published 1981).
“Born at the stroke of midnight, at the precise moment of India’s independence, Saleem Sinai is destined from birth to be special. For he is one of 1,001 children born in the midnight hour, children who all have special gifts, children with whom Saleem is telepathically linked. But there has been a terrible mix up at birth, and Saleem’s life takes some unexpected twists and turns. At once a fascinating family saga and an astonishing evocation of a vast land and its people.“
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I Capture the Castle - Dodie Smith
Vintage Classics, 9781784878702, Oct 5, 2023. (Originally published 1948).
“Tells the story of seventeen-year-old Cassandra Mortmain, who lives with her bohemian family in a crumbling castle in the middle of nowhere. All their lives will soon be transformed by the arrival of new neighbours from America, and Cassandra finds herself falling in love. Funny as hell, charismatic, deliciously eccentric, Austenesque and utterly charming: an enchanting novel about growing up.“
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Trainspotting - Irvine Welsh
Vintage Classics, 9781784878894, Oct 5, 2023. (Originally published 1993).
“Trainspotting defined a generation and changed the face of British fiction. Published in 1993, Irvine Welsh’s debut novel burst on to the literary scene in all its dark, raw and exhilarating glory. Its cast of characters, including Renton, Spud, Sick Boy and Begbie, grapple with the meaning of life and heroin addiction in Edinburgh at the end of the 1980s – all told in a dazzling, funny and inventive vernacular style.“
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Stoner - John Williams
Vintage Classics, 9781784879143, Oct 5, 2023. (Originally published 1965).
“The eponymous William Stoner is born at the end of the 19th century, and although initially sent to the university to study agronomy he instead falls in love with English literature and embraces a scholar’s life. John Williams’s luminous and deeply moving novel is a work of quiet perfection. William Stoner emerges from it not only as an archetypal American, but as an unlikely existential hero.”
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