Is there anything quite so exhilarating as swimming in wild water? This is a joyful swimming tour of Britain, a frog's-eye view of the country's best bathing holes - the rivers, rock pools, lakes, ponds, lochs and sea that define a watery island.

VINTAGE MINIS: GREAT MINDS. BIG IDEAS. LITTLE BOOKS. Also in the Vintage Minis series: Language by Xiaolu Guo Death by Julian Barnes Love by Jeanette Winterson Home by Salman Rushdie

Bob Slocum is anxious, bored and fearful of his job. So why is it he wants nothing more than the chance to speak at the next company convention? In this book, the author takes us for a turn on the maddening hamster wheel of work.

Selected from the book Cider with Rosie by Laurie Lee VINTAGE MINIS: GREAT MINDS. BIG IDEAS. LITTLE BOOKS. Also in the Vintage Minis series: Liberty by Virginia Woolf Eating by Nigella Lawson Swimming by Roger Deakin Drinking by John Cheever

A story featuring the foul-mouthed Kinky Friedman, ace private eye. Little old ladies are dropping dead at an alarming rate in the vicinity of the family's ranch/summer camp in Texas, and Kinky is asked to investigate. A faded photograph of ten pretty girls is just the clue he needs.

In the iron-hulled trawlers which plough the ocean off New England, James Pfeiffer gains insights into the truths behind stories he heard as a child - rumours of killer whales and sharks, and ghost ships in the fog. He also learns the truth about his father's terrible fear of the sea.

The second of the mysteries featuring the foul-mouthed Kinky Friedman, ace private eye. It is Thanksgiving at the legendary Lone Star Cafe, a raucus little corner of Texas right in the middle of Manhattan. Larry Barkins is found dead in his dressing room, his head bashed in with his own guitar.

Focuses on the ties that bind people, the good and bad things they do to each other, the happiness, embarrassment and the pain that they cause their friends, their partners, and their children.

D, a courier carrying cocaine from Jamaica to London, decides to go it alone and disappears into the mean streets of Hackney carrying a kilo of white powder that his erstwhile friends are anxious to recover. But D's treachery will never be forgotten - or forgiven.

Madeline Wolfe has given up her home and her hemisphere to come to London to live with the British man in her life. She soon discovers that being an Australian is currently passe, and suntans now have the social cachet of a heavy drinker. And then she discovers that she is pregnant.

When Michael Herr went to Vietnam in 1967 he was virtually unknown as a writer. But with "Dispatches" he brought us a terrifying account of what it was like to fight in, and survive, the war in Vietnam. These are his journals, describing the waste and the human lives involved.

Franz Kafka is a challenging chronicler of a nightmarish world. This book introduces the reader to Kafka's dark and often unsettling mid-European imagination. This book sets Kafka in centext and explores his relevance to our modern world. It provides a balance of biography, influences and critical appraisal.

The Lazy Tour of Two Idle Apprentices is a charming evocation of the adventures Charles Dickens and Wilkie Collins experienced on a walking tour of the north-west of England.

Famed for having killed his cousin Alessandro, the Duke of Florence, in 1537, Lorenzino de' Medici remains one of the most enigmatic figures of Italian literature. In his masterpiece, Apology for a Murder, he reveals the inner motives behind his act.

Written in Machiavelli's characteristically lucid and terse style, Life of Castruccio Castracani is a revealing account of the political ferment and fractious factionalism of fourteenth-century Italy.

This unique edition, translated by critically-acclaimed translator Andrew Brown, is one of the earliest examples of the classic murder mystery and it has been an inspiration for a host of thriller and crime writers.

This 1882 novella, a key work in Huysmans' literary development - prefiguring in its protagonist the figure of Jean des Esseintes, the hero of A rebours, written two years later - is accompanied here by another masterly study of human despair, 'M. Bougran's Retirement'.

Part of Alma Classics new series: 101 Pages, The Duel is an autobiographical novel which describes Casanova's extraordinary battle to the death with a Polish Count

Part of Alma Classics new series: 101 Pages, The Frozen Deep is an action-packed tale of vengeance and sacrifice based on an actual doomed mission to the Arctic captained by Sir John Franklin.

Part of Balzac's La Comedie humaine cycle, Colonel Chabert is a poignant tale about the pursuit of justice, as well as a portrait of France's transition from the Napoleonic Empire to the Restoration.

Published posthumously and intended mainly as a satire of its age, this imaginative and entertaining tale - here presented in a lively translation by Andrew Brown - is now considered one of the pioneering works of science fiction."

A unique collection of short stories by the master of Italian modernism.

The first of Edith Wharton's works depicting life in "old New York", The Touchstone is an acutely observed novella , and an exploration of the tension between self-serving opportunism and the desire to live a moral life."