Spring Catalogue

January-June 2015

I'll Have What She’s Having My Adventures in Celebrity Dieting Rebecca Harrington

Rebecca Harrington leaves no cabbage soup unstirred in I’ll Have What She's Having, her wickedly funny, wildly absurd quest to diet like the stars. Elizabeth Taylor mixed cottage cheese and sour cream; Madonna subsisted on ‘sea vegetables’ and Marilyn Monroe drank raw eggs whipped with warm milk. Where there is a Hollywood starlet offering nutritional advice, there is a diet Rebecca Harrington is willing to try. Facing a harrowing mix of fainting spells, pimples and salmonella, Harrington tracks down illegal haggis to imitate Pippa Middleton, paces her apartment until the wee hours drinking ten Diet Cokes à la Karl Lagerfeld, and attempts something forbiddingly known as the ‘Salt Water Flush’ to channel her inner Beyoncé. Rebecca Harrington risks kitchen fires and mysterious face rashes, all in the name of diet journalism. Taking cues from noted beauty icons like Posh Spice (alkaline!), Sophia Loren (pasta!) and Cameron Diaz (savory oatmeal!), I'll Have What She’s Having is completely surprising, occasionally unappetising, and always outrageously funny.

About the author Rebecca Harrington read English at Harvard, Journalism at Columbia and now works as a staff writer for the Huffington Post. An anglophile, she regularly visits the UK but is currently based in New York.

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January 9780349006031

Humour Collections & Anthologies

Paperback Original £8.99 160pp

A hilarious look at the eating habits of the skinny and famous - from Gwyneth's goji berry and quail egg concoctions to Jackie Kennedy’s baked potato and Beluga caviar regimen.

On the Wilder Shores of Love Sketches from a Bohemian Life Lesley Blanch, edited by Georgia de Chamberet

‘Lesley Blanch was not a school, a trend, or a fashion, but a true original’ Philip Mansel Most famous for The Wilder Shores of Love, her book about women travellers, Lesley Blanch was a scholarly romantic, an intrepid traveller and a fabulous character. Born in 1904, she died aged 103, having gone from being a household name to a mysterious and neglected living legend. She was writing her memoirs at her death, beginning with her very odd Edwardian childhood. Her goddaughter, who was working with her at the time, has now collected that piece and many others, some never published, some published only in French; some letters, some Vogue articles to create On the Wilder Shores of Love: Sketches from a Bohemian Life which captures the essence of a rich and rewarding life spanning the twentieth century. Lesley Blanch chose to ‘escape the boredom of convention’ and having first worked as a theatre designer, she became Vogue’s features editor during World War II. In 1946 she left England, never to return, with her diplomat-novelist husband, Romain Gary. By the time they reached Hollywood they were literary celebrities. Gary left her for the young actress, Jean Seberg. Blanch headed East and travelled across Siberia, Outer Mongolia, Turkey, Iran, Samarkand, Afghanistan, Egypt, the Sahara.

About the author Lesley Blanch, MBE, FRSL was born a writer, traveller and historian. She was born in London on 6th June 1904 and died on 7th May 2007 in France.

• On The Wilder Shores of Love, first published in 1957 is still in print and a much-loved book.

• Readers will love the eccentric, clever, dashing woman who was Lesley Blanch.

• The perfect book for fans of the Mitfords.

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January 9780349005447

Biography & Autobiography: Literary

Hardback £20.00 320pp

There are two sorts of romantic: those who love, and those who love the adventure of loving - Lesley Blanch

Laughing All the Way to the Mosque The Misadventures of a Muslim Woman Zarqa Nawaz

Zarqa Nawaz has always straddled two cultures. She’s just as likely to be agonising over which sparkly earrings will pimp out her hijab as to be flirting with the Walmart meat manager in a futile attempt to secure halal chicken the day before Eid. In Laughing All the Way to the Mosque she tells the sometimes absurd, sometimes challenging and always wickedly funny stories of being Zarqa in a western society. From explaining to the plumber why the toilet must be within sitting arm’s reach of the water tap (hint: it involves a watering can and a Muslim obsession with cleanliness) to urging the electrician to place an eye-height electrical socket for her father-in-law’s epilepsy-inducing light-up picture of the Kaaba, Zarqa paints a hilarious portrait of growing up in a household where, according to her father, the Quran says it’s okay to eat at McDonald’s - but only if you order the McFish.

About the author Zarqa Nawaz created Little Mosque on the Prairie for Canadian television, and has spent much of the past six years writing comedy pilots for ABC, CBS, NBC and FOX, and touring the world as a sought-after public speaker. She has been interviewed or profiled by CNN, the BBC, the New York Times and Aljazeera. She lives in Regina with her family.

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February 9780349005935

Biography & Autobiography Trade Paperback

£12.99 208pp

A brilliantly funny collection of stories about what it’s really like to be Muslim in western society.

Rumer Godden – her novels reissued as Virago Modern Classics

With a new introduction by Anita Desai

About the author Rumer Godden (1907-98) was the acclaimed author of over sixty works of fiction and non-fiction for adults and

children. Born in England, she and her siblings grew up in Narayanganj, India, and she later spent many years living in Calcutta and Kashmir. Several of her novels were made into films, including Black Narcissus, The Greengage Summer

and The River, which was filmed by Jean Renoir. She was appointed OBE in 1993.

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February

9781844088416 General & Literary Fiction

VMC £9.99 224pp

February

9781844088461 General & Literary Fiction

VMC £9.99 304pp

February

9781844088478 Modern Fiction

VMC £9.99 224pp

The Battle of Fiorita The River The Lady and the Unicorn

One of Us

Åsne Seierstad

‘Two hours after the blast in downtown Oslo, a tall, blond man dressed in a police uniform boarded the little shuttle ferry to the island of Utøya, where the youth wing of the Labour Party held their yearly summer camp. He told the crew he had been sent to inform the youths of the attack on the government headquarters. Less than a minute after setting foot on the island, he killed his first victim, one of the island’s two guards. Over the next hour he would shoot a victim every minute, most of them kids aged between 14 and 18. When the police finally arrived on the island, the assassin had been killing teenagers for an hour and a half. The police ordered him to stop shooting; he put down his weapon, lifted his arms, surrendered and smiled.’ On 22nd July 2011 Anders Behring Breivik killed 77 of his fellow Norwegians in a terrorist atrocity that shocked the world. Åsne Seierstad had spent years visiting war-torn countries such as Afghanistan, Iraq and Chechnya as a foreign correspondent and writer. Now, for the first time, she was being asked to write about her home country - quiet, peaceful Norway, with one of the lowest murder rates in the world. Told through numerous angles and sources, Seierstad recounts the events of that terrible day and explores Breivik's background and personality. It also tells the story of the aftermath – the response to the attacks and how the survivors fought to rebuild their lives.

About the author Åsne Seierstad is the author of four previous books: The Bookseller of Kabul; The Angel of Grozny; With their Backs to the World and 101 Days - about Afghanistan, Chechnya, Serbia and Iran respectively.

• Åsne Seierstad is uniquely placed to write the definitive account of this shocking but important story.

• 780,000 copies of The Bookseller of Kabul sold in the UK and it was a best-seller around the world.

• The author is a highly distinguished and experienced foreign correspondent.

• A European best-seller.

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March 9781844089192

History Hardback

£16.99 352pp

The definitive account of Anders Breivik’s terrorist atrocity and its aftermath by Norwegian writer and foreign correspondent Åsne Seierstad, author of The Bookseller of Kabul

Saving Safa Rescuing a Little Girl from FGM Waris Dirie

Waris Dirie, the Somalia nomad who became a supermodel, and an anti-FGM activist, first came to the world’s attention with the publication of her autobiography, Desert Flower. The book was subsequently made into a film and little Safa Nour, from one of the slums of Djibouti, was chosen to play the young Waris. The book and the film record many extraordinary things - from facing down a tiger, to being discovered by a famous photographer in London - but it also tells the grim story of female circumcision, an ordeal that the young Waris had to endure. Saving Safa opens with a letter from Safa, now aged seven, who explains that she is worried that she will undergo FGM in spite of the contract her parents have signed with Dirie’s Desert Flower Foundation stating that they will never have their daughter cut. Waris drops everything and flies to Djibouti where she meets Safa’s father and mother who thinks her daughter should be cut to stop the community ostracising them. Waris brings them to Paris and to Vienna, they learn about the foundation and Safa’s father finally comes round to the idea of working for the foundation as well. As Safa was saved from FGM through a contract with her parents, the Foundation believes a thousand other girls can be saved through providing their families with aid in return for a promise not to mutilate their daughters

About the author Waris Dirie is an internationally renowned model and was the face of Revlon skin-care products. In 1997 she was appointed by the UN as special ambassador against FGM. She lives in Vienna with her son.

• The UK campaign against FGM has never been stronger.

• Waris Dirie is a much loved activist.

• The Desert Flower Foundation is opening offices around the world

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March 9780349005966

Biography & Autobiography Trade Paperback

£13.99 224pp

From the best-selling author of Desert Flower: the true story of saving a young girl from FGM

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Mary Renault – her novels reissued as Virago Modern Classics

About the author Mary Renault (1905-1983) was born in London and educated at St Hughs, Oxford. She trained as a nurse at Oxford’s

Radcliffe Infirmary, where she met her lifelong partner, Julie Mullard. Her first novel, Purposes of Love, was published in 1937. In 1948, after North Face won a MGM prize worth $150,000, she and Mullard emigrated to South Africa. There,

Renault was able to write forthrightly about homosexual relationships for the first time - in her masterpiece, The Charioteer (1953), and then in her first historical novel, The Last of the Wine (1956). Renault’s vivid novels set in the ancient world brought her worldwide fame. In 2010 Fire From Heaven was shortlisted for the Lost Booker of 1970.

March 9781844089635

Classic Fiction,General & Literary Fiction VMC £8.99 320pp

March 9781844089628

Classic Fiction,General & Literary Fiction VMC £8.99 320pp

The King Must Die The Bull from the Sea

I Go by Sea, I Go by Land

P. L. Travers

‘James and I stayed on at home and everything was quiet and sunny and we got to thinking the war would never come after all... Just when we were so sure nothing would happen, the German plane came over. It came over one night at one o’clock in the morning and the sound was quite different from an English plane and we all woke up. You could hear it drumming and drumming like a big bee in a flower, buroom, buroom, buroom, round and round in the air above the house. Then suddenly there were five loud explosions. After that there was a terrible silence and I knew that Father and Mother were looking at each other in the darkness and I felt myself getting small and tight inside. Then Father said quietly, ‘Meg, they must go!’’ Now I am going to write a Diary because we are going to America because of the War. It has just been decided. I will write down everything about it because we shall be so much older when we come back that I will never remember it if I do not. So this is the beginning. Oh, please let us come back soon, please.’ This is the fictional diary of Sabrina Lind, an eleven-year-old English girl who, with her little brother James, is sent on the long voyage across the sea to her aunt in America.

About the author P. L. Travers (1899-1996) was born in Queensland, Australia. She worked as a secretary, a dancer and an actress, but writing was P. L. Travers’s real love, and for many years she was a journalist. It was while recuperating from a serious illness that she wrote Mary Poppins - ‘to while away the days, but also to put down something that had been in my mind for a long time’, she said. She recieved an OBE in 1977.

• A classic children’s book by the author of Mary Poppins. Much revived interest in P. L. Travers following the film, Saving Mr Banks.

• With beautiful illustrations by artist and sculptor Gertrude Hermes OBE.

• For readers approx. 10+.

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March 9780349005744

Classic Fiction VMC £6.99 128pp

First published in 1941, this children’s classic, by the author of Mary Poppins, has been unavailable for many years. A moving story of a little girl and her brother, who must leave their parents and home in the Sussex countryside for safety in America.

Image taken from inside book

Adeline

Norah Vincent

Adeline is a gorgeous reimagining of the historical events that brought Virginia Woolf to the riverbank, with a stunning dénouement worthy of its protagonist. An ambitious work in the tradition of Woolf herself, Adeline audaciously explores the interior consciousness of the most interior of authors from the summer she began working on To The Lighthouse through to the winter she finished Between the Acts.

About the author Norah Vincent’s first book, Self-made Man (2006) was an international media sensation and a New York Times best-seller. Previously, Vincent wrote a column for the Los Angeles Times. Her work has also appeared in the New York Times, New Republic, Village Voice and the Washington Post. She lives in New York.

• In 2015 BBC2 will broadcast Life In Squares, a three-part mini-series set around the perennially popular Bloomsbury Group.

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April 9780349005645

General & Literary Fiction Hardback

£14.99 224pp

A captivating novel of Virginia Woolf and the Bloomsbury group.

Novel On Yellow Paper

Stevie Smith

Stevie’s alter ego Pompey is young, in love and working as a secretary for the magnificent Sir Phoebus Ullwater. In between making coffee and typing letters for Sir Phoebus, Pompey scribbles down - on yellow office paper - her quirky thoughts. Her flights of imagination take in Euripedes, sex education, Nazi Germany and the Catholic Church, shattering conventions in their wake.

About the author Stevie Smith (1902-71) was born Florence Margaret in 1902. She lived in Palmers Green, London, and for much of her life worked, until retirement, as a secretary for the magazine publishers Sir George Newnes and Sir Neville Pearson. When she tried to publish a volume of poems, she was told to ‘go away and write a novel’. Novel on Yellow Paper was the result, and it turned her into an instant celebrity. Two further novels – The Holiday and Over the Frontier – followed, but it is her poetry that has secured her legacy. In 1966 she received a Cholmondeley Award and in 1969 was awarded the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry.

• Smith's novels The Holiday and Over the Frontier will be published in ebook for the first time, to coincide with this reissue.

• One of Britain’s driest, quirkiest writers, the author of the famous poem Not Waving But Drowning.

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April 9780860681465

Classic Fiction Paperback

£8.99 240pp

The first novel from Stevie Smith, one of the country’s favourite poets, was a runaway best-seller on first publication in 1936. It is as original now as it was then.

Mossy Trotter

Elizabeth Taylor

‘We - that is, Herbert and I - want you, Mossy, to be our page-boy,’ Miss Silkin said, staring hard at Mossy again, as if she were trying to imagine him dressed up, and with his hair combed. Mossy went very red, and nearly choked on a piece of cake, and Selwyn laughed, and went on laughing, as if he had just heard the funniest joke of all his life. They both knew what being a page-boy meant. One of the boys at school - one of the very youngest ones - had had to be one, wearing velvet trousers and a frilled blouse.’ When Mossy moves to the country, life is full of delights - trees to climb, woods to explore and, best of all, the marvellous dump to rummage through. But every now and then his happiness is disturbed - chiefly by his mother's meddling friend, Miss Silkin. And a dreaded event casts a shadow over even the sunniest of days - being a page-boy at her wedding. In her only children’s book, Elizabeth Taylor perfectly captures the temptations, confusion and terrors of a mischievous boy, and just how illogical, frustrating and inconsistent adults are!

About the author Elizabeth Taylor (1912-75) is increasingly being recognised as one of the best writers of the twentieth century. She wrote her first book, At Mrs Lippincote's, during the war, and this was followed by eleven further novels and a children's book, Mossy Trotter. Her short stories appeared in Vogue, the New Yorker and Harper’s Bazaar. Rosamond Lehmann considered her writing ‘sophisticated, sensitive and brilliantly amusing, with a kind of stripped, piercing feminine wit’, and Kingsley Amis regarded her as ‘one of the best English novelists born in this century’.

• Approximate age guide: 8+ • Elizabeth Taylor is one of the

most popular and successful authors on the VMC list. She is a favourite of literary reviewers and Mossy Trotter, her only children’s book, is sure to attract a lot of attention.

• With drawings by Tony Ross, one of the most popular illustrators, best known for The Little Princess series and the Horrid Henry books.

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April 9780349005577

Fiction, Classic Fiction VMC £7.99 160pp

Elizabeth Taylor is a major author on the VMC list. Mossy Trotter, which has been out of print since its first publication in 1967, is her only book for children.

Naked at the Albert Hall The Inside Story of Singing Tracey Thorn

In her best-selling autobiography Bedsit Disco Queen, Tracey Thorn recalled the highs and lows of a thirty-year career in pop music. But with the touring, recording and extraordinary anecdotes, there wasn't time for an in-depth look at what she actually did for all those years: sing. She sang with warmth and emotional honesty, sometimes while battling acute stage-fright. Part memoir, part wide-ranging exploration of the art, mechanics and spellbinding power of singing, Naked at the Albert Hall takes in Dusty Springfield, Dennis Potter and George Eliot; Auto-tune, the microphone and stage presence; The Streets and The X Factor. Including interviews with fellow artists such as Alison Moyet, Romy Madley-Croft and Green Gartside of Scritti Politti, and portraits of singers in fiction as well as Tracey’s real-life experiences, it offers a unique, witty and sharply observed insider’s perspective on the exhilarating joy and occasional heartache of singing.

About the author Tracey Thorn was singer and songwriter with Everything But the Girl from 1982-2000. At that point she semi-retired from the music business to bring up her children. She has since recorded three solo albums, Out of the Woods, Love and Its Opposite, and Tinsel and Lights, and published her autobiography, Bedsit Disco Queen. She lives in London with her husband Ben Watt and their three children.

• Bedsit Disco Queen was a Sunday Times Top Ten hardback best-seller and has sold over 33,000 copies across all editions.

• A unique insider perspective on singing and pop music, written by an internationally acclaimed singer and lyricist with an established fan base.

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May 9780349005263

Music Hardback

£14.99 352pp

Tracey Thorn, musician and author of the best-selling autobiography Bedsit Disco Queen, offers a unique insider’s take on the art of singing: why and how we sing, and the voice’s power to captivate

West With The Night

Beryl Markham

West With The Night appeared on 13 best-seller lists on first publication in 1942. It tells the spellbinding story of Beryl Markham -- aviator, racehorse trainer, fascinating beauty – and her life in the Kenya of the 1920s and 30s. Markham was taken to Kenya at the age of four. As an adult she was befriended by Denys Finch-Hatton, the big-game hunter of Out Of Africa fame, who took her flying in his airplane. Thrilled by the experience, Markham went on to become the first woman in Kenya to receive a commercial pilot’s license. In 1936 she determined to fly solo across the Atlantic -- without stopping. When Charles Lindbergh did the same, he had the wind behind him. Markham, by contrast, had a strong headwind against her and a plane that only flew up to 163 mph. On 4 September, she took off ... Several days later, she crash-landed in Nova Scotia and became an instant celebrity.

About the author Born in England in 1902, Markham grew up in East Africa. She apprenticed as a trainer and breeder of racehorses and in the 1930s became an African bush pilot. In 1936 she became the first person to fly solo across the Atlantic from east to west. Markham died suddenly in 1986.

• Deserves to be ranked alongside Out Of Africa.

• Time Out was an international best-seller on first publication with life sales of over 38,000 copies.

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June 9780860685418

Biography & Autobiography: General

VMC £8.99 320pp

Ernest Hemingway wrote to a friend: 'She can write rings around all of us . . . I wish you would get it and read it because it is really a bloody wonderful book' Introduction by Martha Gellhorn

Patricia Highsmith – her novels reissued as Virago Modern Classics

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Little Tales of Misogyny Patricia Highsmith January 9780349004938 Classic Fiction VMC £4.99 144pp

People who knock at the door Patricia Highsmith June 9780349004976 Classic Fiction VMC £7.99 336pp

Little Tales of Misogyny is Highsmith's legendary, cultish short-story collection. With an eerie simplicity of style, Highsmith turns our next-door neighbours into sadistic psychopaths, lying in wait among white picket fences and manicured lawns. In these darkly satirical, often hilarious, sketches you'll meet seemingly familiar women with the power to destroy both themselves and the men around them.

In a pitiless story of prying suburban self-righteousness, Patricia Highsmith introduces the Alderman family as they descend into moral crisis. When small-town insurance salesman Richard Alderman becomes a born-again Christian, his once tight-knit family quickly begins to rip apart at the seams. He and his youngest son, Robbie, embrace their newfound faith, while his elder son Arthur rejects it. Caught in the middle of the ensuing web of lies, his wife, Lois, tries to keep the family together, but when the church elders start to interfere in Arthur's love life, events spiral toward violence. In this masterful late work, Highsmith weaves a powerful tale about blind faith and the peculiar ideas of justice that lie underneath the veneer of respectability.

About the author Patricia Highsmith (1921-1995) was born in Fort Worth, Texas. Her first novel, Strangers on a Train, was made into a classic film by Alfred

Hitchcock in 1951. The Talented Mr Ripley, published in 1955, introduced the fascinating anti-hero Tom Ripley, and was made into an Oscar-winning film in 1999 by Anthony Minghella. Graham Greene called Patricia Highsmith 'the poet of apprehension', saying that she 'created a

world of her own - a world claustrophobic and irrational which we enter each time with a sense of personal danger'. Patricia Highsmith died in Locarno, Switzerland, in February 1995. Her last novel, Small g: A Summer Idyll, was published posthumously, the same year.