Vintage Publishing

Why have all human cultures - today and throughout history - made music? Why does music excite such rich emotion? And how do we make sense of musical sound? This title explores how the research in music psychology and brain science is piecing together the puzzle of how our minds understand and respond to music.

The updated edition of Julian Barnes' best-loved writing on art, with seven new exquisite illustrated essays 'Flaubert believed that it was impossible to explain one art form in terms of another, and that great paintings required no words of explanation.

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.

Now a major film starring Academy Award nominees Jim Broadbent (Iris) and Charlotte Rampling (45 Years)Winner of the Man Booker Prize for Fiction in 2011 Tony Webster and his clique first met Adrian Finn at school. Maybe Adrian was a little more serious than the others, certainly more intelligent, but they all swore to stay friends for life.

***Winner of the Man Booker Prize for Fiction***Tony Webster and his clique first met Adrian Finn at school. Maybe Adrian was a little more serious than the others, certainly more intelligent, but they all swore to stay friends for life.

The stories in Julian Barnes' long-awaited third collection are attuned to rhythms and currents: of the body, of love and sex, illness and death, connections and conversations.

You put together two things that have not been put together before. And the world is changed... In Levels of Life Julian Barnes gives us Nadar, the pioneer balloonist and aerial photographer; he gives us Colonel Fred Burnaby, reluctant adorer of the extravagant Sarah Bernhardt;

Shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize for Fiction As every schoolboy knows, you can fit the whole of England on the Isle of Wight. One of Barnes's finest and funniest novels, England, England calls into question the idea of replicas, truth vs fiction, reality vs art, nationhood, myth-making, and self-exploration.

In between training as flaneurs and the grind of school they cast a cynical eye over their various dislikes: parents with their lives of spotless emptiness, Third Division (North) football teams, God, commuters and girls, and the inhabitants of Metroland, the strip of suburban dormitory Christopher calls home.

Winner of the Man Booker Prize for Fiction 2011Graham Hendrick, an historian, has left his wife Barbara for the vivacious Ann, and is more than pleased with his new life. Soon Graham is pouncing on old clues, examining her books for inscriptions from past lovers, frequenting cinemas and poring over the bad movies she appeared in.

Beginning with an unlikely stowaway's account of life on board Noah's Ark, this book presents a surprising and subversive fictional-history of earth told from several kaleidoscopic perspectives.