Fiction in translation

Book SynopsisIn Northern Sámi, the word Ædnan means the land, the ground, the earth. In this majestic verse novel, Linnea Axelsson chronicles the fates of two Indigenous Sámi families, telling of their struggle and persistence over a century of colonial displacement, loss and resistance. It begins with Ristin and Ber-Joná, who are trying to care for their troubled young sons while migrating their reindeer herd in northernmost Scandinavia during the 1910s. The coming of the Swedes brings new borders that lay waste to Sámi customs and migration paths - and mean devastating separation for this family. In the 1970s, Lise grapples with how she was forced to adapt to Swedish society, haunted by her time in a 'nomad school' where she was deprived of her ancestors' language and history. Lise's daughter, Sandra, seeks to reclaim that heritage, becoming an activist struggling for reparations from the Swedish state. As one generation succeeds another, their voices interweave and form a spellbinding hymn to lands and traditions lost and reclaimed. Written in sparse, glittering verse that flows like a current,?Ædnan is a profound and moving epic of Sámi life.Trade Review'Crystalline... reads like poetry and myth at once. There are intricate layers of beauty and meaning here in sparse clusters across a vast new landscape as I've never read before. The music of this book is old, and it is new, and it is old' - Tommy Orange, author of 'There, There''Mesmerising. A beautiful, poetic weaving of language, character and place... Evocative and heart-breaking' - Audrey Magee, author of 'The Colony''A soul-gripping and enthralling journey into what it feels like to be othered in your own land... Axelsson offers us a profound invitation into understanding what it means to be deeply intertwined with nature' - Lola Akinmade Akerstrom, author of 'In Every Mirror She's Black''A sharp-edged tale in verse of colonial suppression, resistance, and survival' - Kirkus Reviews, starred review'Incredibly beautiful and magnificent... With AEdnan, Swedish literature has been enriched' - Dagens Nyheter

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Book SynopsisStudded with five gouache drawings by Louise Bourgeois, this erudite, witty fable by the acclaimed author of Now, Now, Louison (2018) considers the ambiguous figure of the baby Jesus and its representation in the artistic canon.' 'One day in 2007,' recalls Jean Fremon about a visit to artist Louise Bourgeois's studio, 'I discovered an entirely new series of drawings.... silhouettes of women with embryos in their wombs, drawn with a brush full of water and red gouache. These drawings were, for me, the most poignant of her long career.'Trade Review'How should one paint the baby Jesus? This deceptively innocent question runs the length of Jean Fremon's Nativity, a fictional work that takes as its subject the first painter to represent the saviour of humankind without his swaddling clothes. The book is a miniature portrait in itself, running for fewer than 50 pages and punctuated by a series of evocative drawings by the artist Louise Bourgeois. With the bells of Christmas ringing faintly in the distance, Nativity offers a stylish, expressive new study into artistic representations of Christianity's founding story.' - The Arts Desk; 'Fremon's decision to focus on a painter and his mission brings something very personal to the history encompassed within this short essay (...) [t]he five paintings by Bourgeois are made up of red brushstrokes, and depict the more human side of the Christmas story: a child swelling in the womb, a birth, a hungry newborn (...) The reflections are compelling and lucidly composed; in contrast the representations offered by Bourgeois are carnal, showing that for all the divine wonder of the Nativity, it is also the story of a first-time mother giving birth in extraordinary - and probably terrifying - circumstances.' - Helen Vassalo, Translating Women; 'A perfectly pitched medley of fact and fiction' - Times Literary Supplement; 'The nativity that Fremon's work is deeply indebted to and preoccupied with is that of artistic ideas - the naissance of a way of thinking, of seeing, of representing - and the cultural precedent they subsequently set in motion. (...) Fremon's inclusion of Bourgeois' drawings not only speaks directly into art history's marked exclusion and omission of women from this tradition, but also rights it by having Bourgeois have her say on birth and motherhood.' - Hannah Hutchings-Georgiou, Lucy Writers; Praise for Jean Fremon: 'Jean Fremon is a wholly singular artist, a writer who lives in the radiant zone where poetry, philosophy and storytelling meet.' (Paul Auster); 'Like all the most urgent poetry, it is "fragile and momentary, but momentarily invincible.' (John Ashberry); Praise for Now, Now, Louison (Les Fugitives, 2018): 'A truly wonderful book... The spider woman, the intellectual, the rebel, the sly enchantress, and the good girl sing together in this exuberant, lithe text beautifully translated by Cole Swensen. There is something uncanny at play in this small book, something I don't fully grasp, but I suspect that elusive, haunted excess may be exactly why I love it.' (Siri Hustvedt); 'A sensitive portrait of a woman whose struggle for self- definition came to drive her artistic practice.' (Financial Times (Best Books of 2018, Translated Fiction)); 'A perfectly pitched medley of fact and fiction.' (Times Literary Supplement); 'Perhaps life, this life, any life, is best preserved in its many bits, just as it was lived.' (Frieze); 'This enchanting short book (...) is simultaneously a love letter, an elegy, a poem, a novel, a fictionalised biography.' (Michele Roberts, for The Tablet's Best Books of 2018); 'A compulsive, daringly perceptive, sometimes astringent exploration of the role, power and symbolism of maternity, fertility, sublimation and reality, ecstasy and happiness, silence and the overcrowding bustle of belonging; of hysteria and emotionality, of how to give material substance to presence, to nothingness and the void.' (Bookanista); 'Cole Swensen's greatest accomplishments in Now, Now, Louison stem from her complex engagement with the relationship between fidelity and translation.' (Asymptote); French reviews: 'Jean Fremon brings Louise Bourgeois close up into a fascinating and moving proximity.' (ArtPress); 'The life of Louise Bourgeois is rendered in ellipsis, quick brush strokes, and a mix of associations of ideas and of sensations waltzing with chronology. A highly original, sensitive text.' (Liberation).

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Book SynopsisI was trying not to think about looking for work, which is immoral, I wasn't hoping to earn a living, which is pretty unusual, I couldn't have cared less about the cash, which is reckless in these times of very grave threats, but I was scraping a living already, which was repugnant, on the miniscule royalties from a thickwit novel, which is scandalous, which I'd created from the stories of a brilliant and brittle grand dame of theatre, survivor of a romance full of stereotypes, which makes you think though I don't know what about.' Sparring with the spectre of an over-bearing father, torn between the push to find a job and the pull to write, the narrator wanders into a larger debate, one in which the troubling lights of Kafka, Kraus, and Klemperer shine bright. Set against the backdrop of police brutality and rising nationalism that marked the state of emergency following the 2015 terrorist attacks in Paris, Poetics of Work takes a jab at the values of late capitalism. Hence these ten 'lessons to today's young poets' - a blistering treatise of survival skills for the wilfully idleTrade Review‘Poetics of Work by Noemi Lefebvre, translated by Sophie Lewis, is set against the backdrop of terrorist attacks and rising nationalism in France. It takes the form of exploratory reflections on philosophy, poetry, language and work, interspersed with conversations with the narrator’s Socratic “superego” father. The narrator finds relevant insights in Kafka, Kraus and Klemperer, only to slam against the brick wall of her father’s gruff, everyman logic. It’s a neatly-made point: perhaps civilisation, with all its nuance and complexity, is too easily out-muscled by simpler arguments, even wrong ones. The book’s propositions are refreshingly low-tech. We are spared facile arguments about the role of the internet in all this, in favour of considering the deeper roots of societal darkness and its palpability in real life.’ - Ronan Hession, Irish Times; 'A smart, timely, and novel manifesto for poetics in the age of personal and political patriarchy.' -Joanna Walsh, author of Break.up; 'This experimental novel is partly a tongue-in-cheek manifesto for poets and partly a Socratic dialogue with a superego called Papa, who thinks poetry is pointless. An unnamed, genderless narrator wanders around Lyon, smoking joints and questioning society's ideas of usefulness. ... They read obsessively about the Third Reich and see echoes in the xenophobic tenor of contemporary France, hinting that capitalism and fascism share a disregard for anything considered unproductive.' - New Yorker; 'Lefebvre's shiftless narrator searches for the place of poetry in a world gone mad, where the "culture sector is a graveyard for the soul's repose." ... an interior monologue filled with sharp observations, hysterical asides, and a sincere search for personal truth. Lefebvre succeeds in mapping out an unquiet mind in the midst of crisis.' - Publishers Weekly; 'Noemi Lefebvre refines a form of vital poetic resistance that ultimately liberates a strange and subversive political animal, half orang and half utan. At once lyrical and feverish, Poetics of Work will do you a power of good.' -Le Monde des livres; 'Lefebvre writes like a hiker who enjoys nothing more than staying where they are, following dead ends or winding, risky paths.' - Les Inrockuptibles; 'Lefebvre stands up to the language of capitalism. She invents her own to elude the law of market forces, which exists in the name of the father. In doing so, she insinuates herself between the lines of the dominant discourse, swimming against the tide of prevailing neoliberalism and its categorical imperatives.' - L'Humanite

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Book Synopsis

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Book Synopsis

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Book SynopsisIn an anonymous French village a child loves to wander a forest where his mother may have disappeared. His father is speechless with anger; his grandmother is concealing her own story.Trade Review'The Child Who beautifully explores the power and powerlessness of language, but I was struck most of all by its haunting depiction of intergenerational silence, and the way we have to live with those silences.' - Tash Aw, author of Strangers on a Pier; 'Aching, tender and luminous, The Child Who explores the splitting of the self that can occur in response to grief. Finding beauty even in the most painful dynamics, this is a humane and moving story touched by a transcendent lyricism.' - Jessica Traynor, author of The Quick; 'Mystical. A slow hand walking you into a forest. I come to it to think about loss, absence and longing, what can never be ours.' - Tice Cin, author of Keeping the House; 'A poetic exploration of the presence of absence in a family's life, tracking grief in all its melancholy intangibility. Jeanne Benameur writes with uncommon beauty, perceptiveness and subtlety.' - Ronan Hession, author of Leonard and Hungry Paul; 'For those with the sensibility to respond to its poetic voice, Jeanne Benameur's L'enfant qui and the excellent English translation by Bill Johnston have the power to change lives. Existential beyond any philosophical system, the book carefully, lyrically explores the phenomenon of being as it occurs in each of three unnamed family members in an unnamed French village at an unnamed time.' - Lynn Hoggard; '[The Child Who] is driven by reflections on the love between parent and child and between husband and wife. And then there's a first-person narrator who talks to the child directly: "I'd like to say to you that the world is immense and lovely, that there's a path for you too."' - John Self, Guardian Best Recent Translated Fiction; 'Prose that approximates the condition of poetry... Benameur's particular strength lies in her ability to give a distinctive voice to the voiceless.' - Michael Cronin, Irish Times; 'Jeanne Benameur's work is carved out of silences. Her characters use few words, while she chooses her own with a parsimony that increases their impact tenfold. Suffused in mystery, this novel-about what makes a family, how a personality emerges, how one learns to inhabit the world-is fashioned from a poetry as startling as its title.' - Raphaelle Leyris, Le Monde; 'It's a brief story, but a prodigiously compact one-the hallmark of all Jeanne Benameur's books. It's impossible to say enough good things about her, for the loveliest assessments will never adequately convey her talent.' - Mohammed Aissaoui, Le Figaro; 'A work of startling beauty.' - Xavier Houssin, ELLE; 'A marvel.' -Claire Conruyt, Le Figaro Litteraire

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Book SynopsisOver the course of a night in police custody, a young woman tries to understand the rage that led her to assault a refugee on the Paris metro. She too is a foreigner, now earning a living as an interpreter for asylum seekers in the outskirts of the city. Translating the stories of men and women who come from her country of birth, into the language of her country of citizenship, Sinha's narrator finds herself caught up in a tangle of lies and truths. Armed with an acerbic sense of humour she exposes prejudices on all sides.Trade Review'A *provocative and visceral* book about class, caste, fear and self-loathing, exposing the real generational damage Imperialism wreaks on brown minds. Shumona Sinha gets inside the skin of an everyday woman turned monster by the system: *her voice grips the imagination and does not let go.*' - *Preti Taneja*, author of Aftermath; 'A novel *as singular in its subject matter as in its language and unbridled energy*. Through the poetic force of her writing, Sinha brings a broken world to burning point.' - *Le Monde*; 'Sinha lays bare so much of the nuance and violence imposed on individuals by the systems in the world meant to keep certain people down.' - Emma Ramadan, translator of Me & Other Writing by Marguerite Duras; 'Shumona Sinha's singular voice takes us into the nauseating world of bureaucracy, without heroes or pure-hearted victims. She does not condemn anyone, or perhaps she condemns everyone. Welcome to the real world.' - Grazia; 'Indian poet Shumona Sinha has transformed Baudelaire's poetic provocation into a strange and blazing reflection on violence.' - Marianne; 'The accuracy and power of her innovations in vocabulary and metaphor are striking. There is Kafka and Duras in these pages. But also Pascal Quignard whose reflection on the Greeks' belief in the fundamental freedom to go wherever one wants is emphasised at the start of this beautiful novel. Sinha has taken it as the alpha and omega of her writing, enriched with a dazzling and original poetic vitality.' - Tirthankar Chanda, Radio France Internationale; 'A harsh lucidity, often misunderstood by those who, like Sinha, come from far away, looking for a better world. She is similar yet different. And that is the heart of the question - the knot, which she is trying to untangle, of her belonging and her rejection. It is both fascinating and gratifying.' - Quinzaine litteraire; 'A striking book, infinitely harsh on exile, on society and its mirrors, its wounded memory. The author describes the nightmare of aimless wandering and the pain of being reduced to a bureaucratic checklist.' - Telerama; Further praise for Shumona Sinha; 'A seasoned novelist, Shumona Sinha travels between past and present, public unrest and private histories' - L'Express, for Calcutta; 'Longstanding tensions and bewildering modernity: the narrator sifts through the ashes before roaming through "the clutter of dreams". She succeeds in creating an intimate, nostalgic and serious book; a journey to her birthplace, her family and her abandoned language which is also the story of her country's political history.' -Telerama, for Calcutta

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Book SynopsisRural Iraq, during the war against the so-called Islamic State. A pregnancy out of wedlock. The young woman knows her fate is sealed. In crystalline prose May the Tigris Grieve for You enters the minds of all protagonists, before and after death; fragments of the legend of Gilgamesh, the Mesopotamian hero who carries along the memory of the country and its people, punctuate the family members' short monologues, spaced with the mythical voice of the Tigris River, who has seen it all.; Inspired by her experience of Iraq's complex reality and brutal wars, Malfatto delivers an uncompromising yet compassionate insight into a rigid society ruled by fathers and sons, a world in which life matters less than honour. Winner of the Prix Goncourt du Premier Roman 2021.Trade Review'A chorus of a novel with a rare intensity... here honour rhymes with horror. Each page is dazzling.' - Le Figaro Litteraire;'With masterful lyricism and elegant language, Emilienne Malfatto gives an account of one of the intimate tragedies that so often pass unnoticed between falling bombs' - Liberation; 'Approaching the tragedy of femicide from the inside, Emilienne Malfatto brings a stripped back lyricism to these destinies of submission.' - Livres Hebdo; 'The writing is simple, the sentences often short and arresting. The story comes swift and powerful, a true literary achievement.' - France Info Culture; 'A long poem in prose, like a fable, or Greek tragedy. A beautiful book, and beautiful first novel.' - France bleue radio; 'A hard-hitting tale of many voices, that is strong, moving and painful in equal measure.' - Femmes ici et ailleurs; 'A first novel that reads raw, laid bare, short and hard-hitting. A taut tragedy, like a rope that we know is fragile, threatened by obscurantim, the weight of tradition and taboo. A deep dive into present day Iraq.' - Bernard Magnier, Le francais dans le monde

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Book SynopsisIF YOU SEE HIS REFLECTIONIT'S ALREADY TOO LATE . . .Five years ago, Jenny Lind was abducted on her way home from school.Now her lifeless body is found hanging in a playground. But there is no evidence and only one witness - a man who cannot remember what he saw. With Detective Joona Linna and the police scrambling to find a lead, another girl goes missing. And as they close in on the killer, they discover that the Mirror Man's crimes are more shocking than they ever could have imagined . . .From the 17 million copy global bestseller Lars Kepler comes the darkest, most chilling crime thriller of 2022 - perfect for fans of Jo Nesbo, Ragnar Jonasson, and Alex North's The Whisper Man. Praise for The Mirror Man:'Chilling, nerve-shredding, clever, and impossibly dark' - CHRIS WHITAKER, bestselling author of We Begin at the End'As dark and chilling as a Swedish winter' - GREGG HURWITZ'Picture Hannibal Lecter sitting down to channel Stieg Larsson' - BRAD THORTrade ReviewChilling, nerve-shredding, clever, and impossibly dark. Lars Kepler has that rare ability to take you to the very edge, and hold you there until the final page * CHRIS WHITAKER, bestselling author of WE BEGIN AT THE END *As dark and chilling as a Swedish winter, Lars Kepler's The Mirror Man is a riveting read. Those who love their Scandinavian crime fiction intense, twisty, and psychologically terrifying will be unable to put this one down * GREGG HURWITZ, bestselling author of Orphan X *

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Book SynopsisWINNER OF THE AKUTAGAWA PRIZE'Usami so successfully depicts the consequences of pure obsession' Guardian'Essential reading for anyone who wants to understand what it is like to be a teenage girl' Catherine PrasifkaHigh-school student Akari has only one passion in her life: her oshi, her idol. His name is Masaki Ueno, best known as one-fifth of Japanese pop group Maza Maza. Akari's dedication to her oshi consumes her days completely - until he disgraces himself and Akari's world goes into a tailspin.Trade ReviewUsami so successfully depicts the consequences of pure obsession * * Guardian * *[Idol, Burning] cracked a door open into an intense world of obsession . . . essential reading for anyone who wants to understand what it is like to be a teenage girl, where priorities are skewed, emotions are high, and everything feels like it's life or death -- CATHERINE PRASIFKAA vivid depiction of the joys and despairs of teenage fan culture, Idol, Burning is urgent and all-consuming . . . In this passionate and compassionate novel, the voice of teenage desperation sings out -- KATIE HALEA short but mighty novel that sheds a light on the world of superfans, obsession and the dangers of building your identity around a phenomenon that can disappear in a second . . . Usami's novel lifts the lid on the unique world of fandom and 'stan' culture in Japan * * The Skinny * *Compelling and unsettling in equal measure, Idol, Burning is a pitch-perfect insight into how confusing and exhausting modern life can feel to young women today. * * Buzz Magazine * *Idol, Burning is a window into the world of teenage obsession and the dark places it can venture to . . . This is like nothing else I've read * * Red * *Praise for Rin Usami: Pure brilliance -- TOSHIYUKI HORIE, author of THE BEAR AND THE PAVING STONEPoignant -- YOKO OGAWA, author of THE MEMORY POLICE[Usami's] writing is extremely fresh and she has high literary ability -- Akutagawa Prize Judges

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Book SynopsisWhat good is a town without people? Wu Township is hollowing out. Our most capable sons and daughters have long since uprooted from their birthplace on the central plains to fuel China's economic miracle. The ancient trees now sit in the shade of a modern aqueduct, funnelling even our precious water to the metropolises beyond. From the marketplace where gossip is traded to the long-abandoned execution grounds, ordinary life carries on. For we who remain, feuds between neighbours compound the burdens shared by increasingly ageing shoulders. But If you know where to look, you'll find the town still clings to its customs and dreams. Let me show you around. If we're lucky, we'll run into the benevolent doctor or beauty store owner, and if we're not, the corrupt local official, perhaps even the souls of executed ancestors. Why do you want to visit? To see it before it's all gone... of course.Trade ReviewPraise for the author;"Speaks to universal challenges, problems facing not just Chinese villages but also alienated communities around the world." - Ian Johnson, New York Times;"It is in these stories that the universality of people's hopes, fears and frustrations really shines through." - Jo Lateu, New Internationalist; "Stunningly insightful... What makes Liang's study so compelling is the way in which it offers a glimpse of a world in which personal problems ... exist on the same level as broader social and political problems." Mark Rappolt, ArtReviewTable of Contents1. A Shining Cloud Moving Over the Skies of Wu Town 2. Drifting 3. The Holy Man, Dequan 4. Xu Jialiang Builds a House 5. Swimming in the Second River 6. The Beauty, Caihong 7. Meatheads 8. That Bright, Snowy Afternoon 9. The Exercise Ground 10. The Good Man, Lan Wei About the Author About the Translator About Sinoist Books

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Book SynopsisWithout Blood begins with a shocking, visceral act of violence - the assassination of a man and his family. Only the daughter, Nina, survives, thanks to an extraordinary act of mercy by one of the attackers. Nina is just four years old.Decades later Nina hunts down the last of her family's murderers, the man who was her saviour. Their reunion brings about a profound reappraisal of their lives and what took place on that fateful night over half a century earlier.Highly visual and unforgettably sad, Without Blood is a haunting book about damage, longing, memory and forgiveness. Ann Goldstein's superb translation captures Baricco's effortless prose style and gives readers in Britain the opportunity to experience this gem of a novel that has already delighted hundreds of thousands across Europe.Trade ReviewContained in these few pages is a complete portrait of what it means to be human, at our most elemental, and the effect is awesome * * Observer * *Baricco's writing shows an author in unquestioned control of his vocabulary, his phrases brief but beautifully cadenced. * * Independent * *With its tenderness, eroticism and simplicity, it is one of the most astonishing and moving novels I have ever read. * * Daily Telegraph * *Baricco's delicate, minimalist prose style, full of wistful refrains and subtle rondos, is closer to a haiku than anything in the European literary tradition. * * Independent on Sunday * *Short and sharp, the novel's conclusion is as moving a piece of writing as one might hope to read. -- Chris Power

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Book SynopsisA funny and uplifting fable about the journey to learn who we are, from the bestselling author of The Yellow WorldDani has devoted his life to finding missing children. One day, as his girlfriend starts packing her bags to leave him, he gets a phone call from a distraught father asking for help. It's a strange case, one that Dani wouldn't usually take on. But, when he hears his girlfriend slam the front door, and his apartment falls into silence, he realizes it's one he can't turn down.His journey to find the lost boy takes Dani over the seas to the sleepy Italian island of Capri - a place infused with a kind of hazy magic, which begins to conjure up in Dani's mind long-forgotten memories of his own childhood. And, as he starts to unravel the story of his own life, he realises that he is not just on a quest to save the missing child - he is also on a quest to save himself. Quirky, warm-hearted, and honest, this is an uplifting parable of memory and forgiveness, as a man makes a life-changing journey across an island and into his own heart. Told in simple, emotionally-honest prose, it reveals how, by revisiting the past , we can change the shape of the future.

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Book SynopsisRomania, the last months of the dictator's regime. Adina is a young schoolteacher. Paul is a musician. Clara, Adina's friend, works in a wire factory. Pavel is Clara's lover. But one of them works for the secret police and is reporting on the group. One day Adina returns home to discover that her fox fur rug has had its tail cut off. On another day, a hindleg. Then a foreleg. The mutilation is a sign that she is being tracked - the fox was ever the hunter. Images of photographic precision combine to form a kaleidoscope of reflections, deflections and deceit. Adina and her friends struggle to keep living in a world permeated with fear, where even the eyes of a cat seem complicit with the watchful eye of the state, and where it's hard to tell the victim apart from the perpetrator.Trade ReviewExtraordinary... Muller lays bare the totalitarian attack on the individual and the everyday horror of life under a repressive regime. There is a cinematic intensity to the narrative... This ethereal, other-worldly atmosphere gradually gives way to the horrors of a more defined reality... The mounting tension made tangible by such scenes is felt most intensely in Muller's language. Short, clipped sentences accumulate, overlapping and building into a noisy, symphonic whole... A profoundly unsettling novel, which renders palpable the cruelty of life under the regime, as well as the brittle exhilarations of its overthrow -- Charlotte Ryland * TLS *Her prose - as poetic as it is blunt -works like a prism, shattering and illuminating a world that is always watching, waiting. [A] dark collage, which glints with fear - and with beauty * The Atlantic *Poetic [and] haunting... deftly rendered by Philip Boehm... In her writing, Müller inches closer to narrowing the gap between people and things, between life and language * Washington Post *When the collage is completed, the reader understands that each and every one of Müller's stories, every flight of luscious language and every brutal fact, has been necessary in depicting a society torn to pieces and tasked, with the curtains finally open and the light streaming in, with putting those pieces back together to make sense of it all * New York Times *Herta Muller fled Romania for Germany, and the lingering memories of her ex-state's oppressiveness saturate this novel. Set in the final months of Ceausescu's rule... [It's] effective at evoking a monotonous, joyless existence defined by hunters preying on hunted -- Lesley McDonald * Sunday Herald *

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Book SynopsisBy an author described by critics as 'the most accomplished Malaysian writer, full stop'. Lake Like a Mirror is a scintillating exploration of the lives of women buffeted by powers beyond their control. Squeezing themselves between the gaps of rabid urbanisation, patriarchal structures and a theocratic government, these women find their lives twisted in disturbing ways. In precise and disquieting prose, Ho Sok Fong draws her readers into a richly atmospheric world of naked sleepwalkers in a rehabilitation centre for wayward Muslims, mysterious wooden boxes, gossip in unlicensed hairdressers, hotels with amnesiac guests, and poetry classes with accidentally charged politics - a world that is peopled with the ghosts of unsaid words, unmanaged desires and uncertain statuses, surreal and utterly true.

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Book Synopsis'Luminous' Ian McEwan 'Astonishing' Economist 'Mesmerising and prophetic' Arifa Akbar, Independent It's 1948 and the villagers of Khirbet Khizeh are about to be violently expelled from their homes. A young Israeli soldier who is on duty that day finds himself battling on two fronts: with the villagers and, ultimately, with his own conscience. Haunting and heartbreaking, Khirbet Khizeh, now considered a modern Hebrew masterpiece, offers a wrenchingly honest view of one of Israel's defining moments. 'So incendiary and eloquent that one has to put it down every few pages... How often can you say of a harrowing, unquiet book that it makes you wrestle with your soul?' The TimesTrade ReviewExtraordinary ... Khirbet Khizeh is a tribute to the power of critical thought to register the injustices of history ... Khirbet Khizeh is the story which, with the least ambivalence, offers to official Zionist history its strongest, unanswerable, counterpoint. The translation is long overdue. In lyrical, haunting prose - evocatively rendered into English by Nicholas de Lange and Yaacob Dweck - the narrator describes what was done to the Palestinians in 1948 -- Jacqueline Rose * Guardian *It's subject is so painful, its execution so charged, so wildly beautiful, its moral ambivalence so incendiary and eloquent that one has to put it down every few pages ... the mighty rush of its prose, with its creative syntax, its long, fibrous sentences, its combination of impassioned, unbridled lyricism and colloquial speech, is exhilarating ... How often can you say of a harrowing, unquiet book that it makes you wrestle with your soul -- Neel Mukherjee * The Times *S. Yizar's classic Khirbet Khizeh is available in a fine miniature new edition ... its original publication in 1949 was a landmark, both historically and linguistically * Jewish Chronicle *The luminous account of the clearing of an Arab village during the'48 war -- and of a protest that never quite leaves the throat of its narrator as the houses are demolished and the villagers driven from their land. It is a tribute to an open society that this novella was for many years required reading for Israeli schoolchildren. Khirbet Khizet remains painfully relevant, and the moral questioning lives on. -- Ian McEwan * Jerusalem Prize Acceptance Speech *Yizhar's extraordinary tale narrates the need, and the price, of remembering * Jacqueline Rose *Years after the tragic events it describes, Khirbet Khizeh retains its disturbing relevance ... Conveying in vivid microcosm the moral ambiguities attending Israel's establishment in 1948, [it] resonates as both historical experience and art * TLS *The entire novella, canonical in Hebrew literature, has the effect of pointing up how brutally unjust visitations of war inevitably are upon civilian populations, and how brutally coarsened soldiers must become to carry out the "operational orders" that steer, in the sanitized language of the generals and politicians who decide such things from a distance, the broad and heartless missions of armies -- Mark Kamine * The Believer *There's no false note, no generic anti-war rhetoric in Khirbet, and as long as we continue to kill one another, in the Middle East or elsewhere, Khirbet will retain its poetic relevance * Words Without Borders *Astonishing * The Economist *Sixty years on S. Yizhar's Khirbet Khizeh retains its extraordinary power ... No outline can do justice to a narrative that touches the very heart of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. For anyone familiar with the 1948 war but reading Khirbet Khizeh for the first time, the story is both startling and uncanny in its predictive clarity -- Ian Black * Jewish Quarterly *Written by an Israeli soldier on a sortie to forcibly expel the Palestinian villagers of Khirbet Khizeh during the 1948 war, this mesmerising and prophetic testimony is just as potent today against the backdrop of continuing conflict ...The account unfolds with a magnificent, biblical simplicity, and none of its terrible beauty is lost in this shimmering translation by Nicholas De Lange and Yaacob Dweck -- Arifa Akbar * Independent *[This] poetic, anguished and uncompromising portrayal of the eviction of an Arab village was based on experience ... the lyricism of the writing has been beautifully captured by Nicolas de Lange and Yaacob Dweck -- Toby Lichtig * Times Literary Supplement *

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Book SynopsisCollected here are Gogol's finest tales - from the demon-haunted 'St John's Eve' to the strange surrealism of 'The Nose', from the heart-rending trials of the copyist in 'The Overcoat' to those of the delusional clerk in 'The Diary of a Madman' - allowing readers to experience anew the unmistakable genius of a writer who paved the way for Dostoevsky and Kafka. To this superb new translation - the first in twenty-five years and destined to become the definitive edition of Gogol's short fiction - Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky bring the same clarity and fidelity to the original that they brought to their brilliant translation of Dostoevsky's works and to War and Peace.Trade ReviewGogol's occasional weirdness is just as weird today, of such a strange order of invention, that even a word like "exuberant" doesn't begin to cover it ... Gogol is strangely timeless -- Nicholas Lezard * Guardian *This was, for me, an electric introduction to Russian literature. -- AD Miller * The Independent *Nabokov was right about Gogol's greatness, and right to point out that he was a creator of a new reality -- A.S. ByattGogol's narratives take on a compelling logic of their own and the details are by turn comic, sinister, and even touching ... Gogol doesn't ignore the conventions of realism, but, rather, jumbles them up, as in a dream. His stories build their hilarious fantasies on solid observational foundations -- Edmund Gordon * Observer *One of the most unfathomable minds and most spellbinding narrators in literary history. Shrewd observer, Romantic dreamer, idiot savant, parodist, or a comic Dante, Gogol still eludes all categories -- Donald Rayfield * Literary Review *The "father of Russian Modernism" came to fame very early which possibly burned him out, as he wrote little in the last 10 years of his life. His tales might have been written weeks ago though, so fresh and vibrant are they, a testament to the youth of their author when he wrote them -- Lesley McDowell * Sunday Herald *Such is Gogol's all-pervasive influence on European writing that both of these new editions are great value -- Eileen Battersby, Books of the Year * Irish Times *

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In a series of nine letters, the narrator tells his friend how he introduced Vera Nikolayevna, a married woman who had been forbidden as a child to read fiction and poetry, to the intellectual pleasures of Goethe's masterpiece. Opening up in front of Vera's eyes is not only the realm of imagination, but also a world of unbridled feelings and tempestuous passions, which can only shatter the comfort and safety of her existence and force her to set off on a journey of spiritual awakening.

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Book SynopsisThis evocative account of the life of the Renaissance’s greatest figure traces Leonardo’s early development as an artist and court figure to his final years in exile, portraying his loves and sufferings, as well as his intellectual curiosity and tireless loyalty to his ideals. But it is the background to his famous painting La Gioconda and his relationship with the mysterious Florentine woman who modelled for it that are at the heart of the novel – here presented for the first time in an unabridged translation. The result is an engrossing and unforgettable read. An unjustly forgotten masterpiece of Russian literature that inspired one of Freud’s most important essays, Leonardo da Vinci also offers an illuminating snapshot of the society of the period – beset with intrigue and religious and social tension – and a host of memorable historical figures such as Michelangelo, Raphael, Machiavelli, Savonarola and the infamous Borgias.Trade ReviewWe are given a rare insight into what is probably the nearest anyone has come to Leonardo's character. * Yorkshire Gazette *

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Book Synopsis"Finding the young Angélique on their doorstep one Christmas Eve, the pious Hubert couple decide to bring her up as their own. As the girl grows up in the vicinity of the town’s towering cathedral and learns her parents’ trade of embroidery, she becomes increasingly fascinated by the lives of the saints, a passion fuelled by her reading of the Golden Legend and other mystical Christian writings. One day love, in the shape of Felicien Hautecoeur, enters the dream world she has constructed around herself, bringing about upheaval and distress. Although it provides a detailed portrait of provincial nineteenth-century life and adheres to a naturalist approach, The Dream eschews many of the characteristics of Zola’s other novels of the Rougon-Macquart cycle – such as a pronounced polemical agenda or a gritty subject matter – offering instead a timeless, lyrical tale of love and innocence."Trade ReviewI consider Zola’s books among the very best of the present time. -- Vincent Van Gogh

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Book SynopsisEncapsulating in luxurious detail the phenomenon of consumer society - obsessed with image, fashion and instant gratification - Ladies' Delight vividly depicts the workings of a new commercial entity, the department store. The novel centres around the story of Denise, a young shopgirl from the provinces, and Octave Mouret, the dashing young director of a shopping emporium, who find themselves torn between the conflicting forces of love, loyalty and ambition. Set in the heart of the city, Zola's novel - the eleventh in his Rougon-Macquart series - evokes the giddy pace of Paris's transition into a modern city and the changes in sexual attitudes and class relations taking place during the second half of the nineteenth century.Trade ReviewIt's sex and shopping for 400 pulsating pages in Zola's gripping 1883 novel (recently adapted for television by the BBC). From the opening image of the great Parisian dress emporium, all gilded cherubs and lavish window displays of satins and silks, you are hooked. (...) Fireworks, passion, lust, heartbreak, class-conflict... all the crucial elements are in this rip-roaring classic. * The Daily Mail * Zola overwhelms us with an abundance of description that oscillates between fantastical lyricism and meticulous realism, with plenty of rather wry psychological analysis to hold the two poles together. -- Tim Parks I consider Zola's books among the very best of the present time. -- Vincent Van Gogh To enjoy Zola at his best, you have to read one of the great novels, in which a whole panorama emerges, as in the work of one of those highly realistic nineteenth-century painters. -- A.N. Wilson Perhaps the most famous novel about shopping is Emile Zola's The Ladies' Paradise... For Zola, the department store was a metaphor for the triumph of capitalism... but he also saw it as the place where women were duped and enslaved into the new habit of consumerism. * The Guardian * It's an excellent edition! -- P.D. Smith Nothing gets a crowd going like sex and shopping. Emile Zola was one of the first to describe this new consumerist link... * The Times *

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Book SynopsisMusil's limpid, psychological evocation of adolescent sexuality and its often sadistic eroticism which anticipates the carnage of both World Wars. As the nineteenth century draws to an end, young Törless is sent to a military boarding school for the sons of the nobility on the eastern outreaches of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Far from his comfortable, free-thinking bourgeois home and left to his own devices, he experiences the joy, pain and self-doubt of adolescence. He is confronted with desire and love, but also his own cruelty, as he finds himself participating in his fellow pupils’ bullying campaigns. A dark Bildungsroman which shocked its readership at the time, Robert Musil’s first novel is a fresco of psychoanalysis, philosophy, eroticism, snobbery, sado-masochism and schoolboy humour, a hothouse of alternately repressed and unchained desires that prefigure the carnage of both World Wars.

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Book SynopsisBegun in 1920 while Bulgakov was employed in a hospital in the remote Caucasian outpost of Vladikavkaz, and continued when he started working for a government literary department in Moscow, Notes on a Cuff is a series of journalistic sketches which show the young doctor trying to embark on a literary career among the chaos of war, disease, politics and bureaucracy. Stylistically brilliant and brimming with humour and literary allusion, Notes on a Cuff is presented here in a new translation, along with a collection of other short pieces by Bulgakov, many of them - such as 'The Cockroach' and 'A Dissolute Man' - published for the first time in the English language.Trade ReviewThis is a very good place to start on Bulgakov if you haven't read any of his work before. All his manic energy is here; and so, largely, is his talent. (...) In Notes on a Cuff you can see one of the most original voices of the 20th century starting to find itself. Congratulations to the publisher for making it available to us. * The Guardian * Loyal fans will enjoy spotting the great writer's early seeds of talent. * The Times * Roger Cockrell's unstrained and highly readable translations capture with admirable versatility the whole gamut of situations, characters and voices encompassed in this absorbing collection of stories. * East-West Review * Vigorous, unevenly brilliant and deeply felt, (these stories) amply justify Bulgakov's attraction to the darker aspects of his times... they sparkle with herlter-skelter Gogolian verve. * TLS *Table of ContentsContains: Notes on a Cuff, The Fire of the Khans, The Crimson Island, A Week of Enlightenment, The Unusual Adventureof a Doctor, Psalm, Moonshine Lake, Makar Devushkin's Story, A Scurvy Character, The Murderer, The Cockroach, A Dissolute Man

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Book SynopsisOn a train journey, Pozdnyshev tells his story to a stranger: how his relationship with his wife gradually deteriorated from one of love and passion to jealousy and resentfulness, culminating in a mad act of desperation while she practised Beethoven’s Kreutzer Sonata with her violin teacher. An uncompromising examination of lust, suspicion and infidelity which was once forbidden by censors in Russia and banned in the US due to its shocking content, Tolstoy’s controversial novella – here presented in a new translation, along with ‘The Prisoner of the Caucasus’, ‘Master and Man’ and ‘After the Ball’ – is now considered one of the masterpieces of Tolstoy’s late period.Trade ReviewTolstoy is the greatest Russian writer of prose fiction. -- Vladimir NabokovIt showcases the questioning, unsettling and perfectly crafted prose of the author of Anna Karenina and War and Peace. * The Good Book Guide *In Roger Cockrell's fluid rendering in English, the story shines and glimmers beautifully. * RTÉ *Table of ContentsContains: The Kreutzer Sonata, After the Ball, Master and Man, The Prisoner of the Caucasus.

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Book SynopsisMost famous for his twenty-volume dissection of nineteenth-century French mores and society, the Rougon-Macquart novels, Zola was also an extremely accomplished short-story writer, as exemplified by the tales included in this volume. Concerned with the manifold aspects of everyday life and varying in their settings – from aristocratic drawing rooms to poverty-stricken garrets, from the hustle and bustle of Paris to the Provençal countryside of the author’s childhood – these stories will keep the reader riveted from the beginning to the end and surprise for their modernity. Contains: The Attack on the Mill The Girl Who Loves Me Rentafoil Death by Advertising Story of a Madman Big Michu The Way People Die A Flash in the Pan Absence Makes the Heart Grow Fonder Priests and Sinners Fair Exchange The Haunted HouseTable of ContentsContains: The Attack on the Mill, The Girl Who Loves Me, Rentafoil, Death by Advertising, Story of a Madman, Big Michu, The Way People Die, A Flash in the Pan, Absence Makes the Heart Grow Fonder, Priests and Sinners, Fair Exchange The Haunted House

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Book SynopsisWhen shop-owner Julia Segovia decides that she’s going to marry the handsome if exceedingly young and naive soldier Valentin Brû, he willingly goes along with her scheme. Little does he know that he will have to contend with disgruntled in-laws, eccentric locals, a cunning wife, a shifty career in fortune-telling, the approaching threat of war with Germany and the mysteries of Parisian public transport. With a cast of eccentric characters, amusing incidents and an uplifting tone, The Sunday of Life – its title playfully alluding to Hegel’s theory of history – is a scintillating novel which showcases Queneau’s trademark punning, sly wit and delight in the absurdity of people and situations.Trade ReviewA very funny book with great charm. * The Times *

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Book SynopsisPublished originally as the purported French translation of a novel by fictional Irish writer Sally Mara, We Always Treat Women Too Well is set in Dublin during the 1916 Easter Rising and tells the story of the siege of a small post office by a group of rebels, who discover to their embarrassment that a female postal clerk, Gertie Girdle, is still in the lavatory some time after they have shot or expelled the rest of the staff. The events that follow are not for prudish readers, forming a scintillating, linguistically delightful and hilarious narrative. By far Queneau’s bawdiest work, We Always Treat Women Too Well contains all of its author’s hallmarks: wit, stylistic innovation and formal playfulness – expertly rendered into English by Barbara Wright’s classic translation.Trade ReviewEndowed with Queneau’s cerebral prankishness, electric pace and cut-on-the-bias poetry. -- John Updike

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Book SynopsisTravelling salesman Enrico Gaia decides to play a trick on the conceited ageing littérateur Mario Samigli: he dupes him into thinking that a representative of a prestigious Viennese publishing house wants to commission a German translation of a long-forgotten novel Samigli had written and published at his own expense forty years ago. This leads the old man to reach new heights of self-delusion, spurred on by Gaia’s succession of ruses. In this tragicomic study of deception and disappointment, Italo Svevo – who himself was an undiscovered writer until his old age – parodies elements of his own life and offers an insightful psychological portrait of a person who has lost touch with reality.Trade Review…a wonderful comedy where the resourcefulness of the vain and creative mind is aided by a variety of unlikely circumstances in its desperate effort to reconstruct self-esteem and serenity -- Tim Parks

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Book SynopsisThe lowly, downtrodden Paris civil servant Jean Folantin seeks respite from the boredom and isolation of his life in the small joys of food and the occasional embraces of a prostitute. But whatever he does, wherever he turns in his quest for some pleasure, his dissatisfaction only increases, until he is forced to realize that he has to abandon all hope and just “go with the flow”. This 1882 novella, a key work in Huysmans’ literary development – prefiguring in its protagonist the figure of Jean des Esseintes, the hero of À rebours, written two years later – is accompanied here by another masterly study of human despair, ‘M. Bougran’s Retirement’.Trade ReviewWith the Flow is the most complete expression of that pessimism which, even at the start of the twenty-first century, remains central to our self-perception. -- Simon Callow

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Book SynopsisA respectable young widow and mother of two children, the Marquise of O- finds herself inexplicably pregnant after being rescued by a Russian officer from the attentions of his soldiers during the storming of her town's citadel. Convinced of her own innocence and wishing to vindicate her own integrity, the Marquise places an advert in the newspapers, appealing for the father to come forward and promising to marry him. But will this be enough to quench her family's doubts and the derision of the society around her? Will this help her solve the mystery and urge the perpetrator to acknowledge paternity of the child? One of the great classics of German literature, Heinrich von Kleist's sexually charged novella is as edgy today as it was when it was first published in 1808, and is accompanied here by two other celebrated stories, 'The Earthquake in Chile' and 'The Foundling', showcasing the range of their author's narrative abilities and his taste for the ambiguous and the paradoxical.Trade ReviewOne of the most radical writers who ever lived - Times Literary Supplement

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Book SynopsisSimplicius Simplicissimus - the towering achievement of H.J.C. von Grimmelshausen, one of the earliest novelists in the German language - charts the adventures of its hero, Simplicius, through the horrors of battle, murder, fire and famine, offering an invaluable eyewitness account of the Thirty Years' War and showing how humanity can, in the end, triumph over brutality A work of great poetical beauty and satirical strength, and a lasting historical document of timeless value, Simplicius Simplicissimus is one of the greatest picaresque novels in the Western canon.

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When the immoral libertine Monsieur de Franval marries and fathers a daughter, he decides to inculcate in her a sense of absolute freedom, an unconventional education that involves the two becoming secret lovers. But Franval's virtuous, God-fearing wife becomes suspicious and confronts him, setting off a tragic chain of events. Part of Sade's The Crimes of Love cycle, this shocking tale - which was among the writings banned for publication until the twentieth century - tests the limits of morality and portrays the disastrous consequences of freedom and pleasure.

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Book SynopsisCristiano is thirteen. Home life is far from perfect. When his father and two friends come up with a plan to rob a bank, Cristiano sees the chance of a better life. As a tremendous storm brews that night, Cristiano will have to put childhood behind him once and for all, and the perfect crime will have shocking consequences.Trade ReviewAmmaniti has cranked up the volume for his blistering new novel. * * Independent * *Every scene contains a twist. * * Guardian * *Brutal but effective. * * The Times * *Energy and danger spray off it like water from a choppy sea . . . Very hard to put down. * * Daily Mail * *One of Italy's brightest literary stars . . . Combines tense horror with the blackest comedy. * * Observer * *Ammaniti fills his scenes with such rich detail, humour and surprise that it is impossible not to be drawn in . . . A forceful portrait of contemporary Italy, providing a long overdue counterbalance to the romantic, tourism-drive portraits of the country. And yet, for all the harshness of his world, warmth bubbles up between the cracks. * * Financial Times * *Offers an artful interstiching of plots and cinematic, horror-dazed images, and Jonathan Hunt's translation is exemplary. * * Observer * *Undeniably gripping . . . Indeed, this is in a surprising way a love story. * * Scotsman * *A compulsively readable tragedy with a bleakly comic underbelly, as if the Kray twins' gang had been infiltrated by a couple of Marx brothers. * * Sunday Herald * *The Crossroads is a rollicking dark horror-comic, a gruelling piece of fun. * * Independent * *

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Book SynopsisThe setting for this magical fable is Eldorado, the Enchanted city that inhabited the fevered dreams of European navigators and conquistadors, but eluded all attempts to find it on the map. Some have linked it to Manaus in the Amazon Basin, and it is here that Arminto Cordovil lives with his father Amando in a white mansion.Theirs is a relationship full of passion and limitless ambition. Separating father and son is a remarkable cast of characters, from Angelina, the dead mother, to Denisio, the infernal boatman, and at the centre, Dinaura, a girl who betwitches Arminto and dreams of Eldorado...Orphans of Eldorado is a rich and magical fable that beautifully captures the atmosphere of the steamy, lush Amazonian world.Trade ReviewThe story is universal, though sensuously anchored in Manaus, gripping in both its particular twists and its tragic inevitability, it is a human story told in a world made real by a very good writer -- A.S. Byatt on Hatoum's THE BROTHERSA profoundly textured work that is sophisticated, elegant, unusually vivid and intriguingly convincing. -- Irish Times on Hatoum's TALE OF A CERTAIN ORIENTClear in each particular but tantalisingly elusive in its overall meaning, Orphans of Eldorado does what every good telling of a myth should. -- Adrian Turpin * * Financial Times * *Delicately crafted and dreamlike. * * Financial Times * *

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Book SynopsisThe day begins like any other Saturday for beautiful Parisian restaurateur Aurélie Bredin, until she wakes up to find her apartment empty - her boyfriend gone off with another woman. Heartbroken, Aurélie walks the streets of Paris in the rain, finally seeking refuge in a little bookshop in the Île Saint-Louis, where she's drawn to a novel titled The Smiles of Women by obscure English author Robert Miller. She buys it and takes it home, but when she begins to read she's astonished: The Smiles of Women can't possibly be about her restaurant, about her. Except, it is. Flattered and curious to know more, Aurélie attempts to get in touch with the reclusive Mr Miller, but it proves to be a daunting task. His French publishers seem determined to keep his identity secret, and while the Editor-in-Chief André Chabanais is happy to give Aurélie his time, he seems mysteriously unwilling to help her find her author. Is Robert Miller really so shy, or is there something that André isn't telling Aurélie?

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Book SynopsisWhen Abwehr Captain Eberhard Mock is called from his New Year's Eve revelries to attend a particularly grisly crime scene, even his notoriously robust stomach is turned. A young girl - and suspected spy - who arrived by train from France just days before, has been found dead in her hotel room, the flesh torn from her cheek by her assailant's teeth. Ill at ease with the increasingly open integration of S.S., Gestapo and police, Mock is partially relieved to be assigned to liaise with officers in Lvov, Poland, where a series of similar crimes - as yet unsolved - cast a long shadow over the town.Trade Review'Another of Krajewski's insightful burlesque thrillers, laden with a sense of time and place. A must for any fan of Philip Kerr's Bernie Gunther' Peter Millar, The Times. * The Times *

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Book SynopsisCatch-22 meets The Brothers Karamazov in the last great satire of the Soviet EraThe Great Patriotic War is stumbling to a close, but a new darkness has fallen over Soviet Russia. And for a disparate, disconnected clutch of wanderers - many thousands of miles apart but linked by a common goal - four parallel journeys are just beginning.Gorych and his driver, rolling through water, sand and snow on an empty petrol tank; the occupant of a black airship, looking down benevolently as he floats above his Fatherland; young Andrey, who leaves his religious community in search of a new life; and Kharitonov, who trudges from the Sea of Japan to Leningrad, carrying a fuse that, when lit, could blow all and sundry to smithereens.Written in the final years of Communism, The Bickford Fuse is a satirical epic of the Soviet soul, exploring the origins and dead-ends of the Russian mentality from the end of World War Two to the Union's collapse. Blending allegory and fable with real events, and as deliriously absurd as anything Kurkov has written, it is both an elegy for lost years and a song of hope for a future not yet set in stone.Translated from the Russian by Boris DralyukTrade ReviewKurkov's style is spare and effective, drawing us with deceptive ease into a dense, complex world full of wonderful characters. -- Michael Palin.Kurkov is the real thing . . . Comparisons with Bulgakov's zany Moscow are not far-fetched. -- Kapka Kassabova * Guardian. *Some people see him as a latter-day Bulgakov; to others he's a Ukrainian Murakami. -- Phoebe Taplin * Guardian. *His bestselling novels are known for their surreal touches, but Andrey Kurkov, the Ukrainian novelist hailed as a post-Soviet Kafka, also has an uncanny ability to predict events in the real world around him. * Daily Telegraph. *Beguiling ... frequently funny ... completely its own thing. it may even be a little bit of a masterpiece -- Sam Leith * Financial Times *A kind of Ukrainian Kurt Vonnegut . . . If you want to read about the Soviet Union but can't face reading, say, Robert Service, and you have a penchant for the strange and surreal, you could do worse than reading Kurkov. -- Ian Samson * Spectator. *A sharp and funny examination of the Russian soul -- Eileen Battersby * Irish Times *

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Book SynopsisRain falls relentlessly on the Po valley in northern Italy, and the river is swollen to its limits. A huge barge leaves its moorings, steering an erratic course downstream and away into the foggy night. When finally it runs aground hours later, the bargeman is nowhere to be found. That same evening, Commissario Soneri is summoned to investigate the apparent suicide of a man in nearby Parma. He and the bargeman were brothers, and when the detective discovers that they served together in the fascist militia fifty years earlier, the incidents seem likely to be linked. Resentments dating from the savage civil strife between Fascists and Partisans in the closing years of the war still weigh heavily, and as the flood waters begin to ebb, the river yields up its secrets: tales of past brutality, bitter rivalry and revenge. Valerio Varesi is a penetrating analyst of his country's dark and undigested history.Trade Review'The real coups of River of Shadows are twofold: the author's trenchant analysis of his country's ignoble past, married to the narrative acumen of a master storyteller' Barry Forshaw, Independent. * Independent *

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Book SynopsisThis is the limit - how far would you go?Helium-3 is a rare element that promises to solve all the world's energy problems - and it's been discovered on the Moon, prompting a breathless race between the Americans and Chinese.In Shanghai, cyber-detective Owen Jericho has been hired to find a missing girl, but what started as a routine investigation soon develops into a nightmarish hunt, where he's the quarry: there's a crazed assassin hot on his heels, all because Yoyo accidentally stumbled onto a secret society called Hydra - and now their lives are at risk. Following the Hydra trail takes Jericho and Yoyo round the world and finally to the Moon, where a billionaire entrepreneur is entertaining some of the world's richest and most influential men and women in the Gaia, the planet's very first hotel.But Hydra has its own plans for the Earth - and the Moon. And nothing and no one will be allowed to stand in its way.Trade Review'Enthralling and visionary' Thomas Reiter, Astronaut. 'Full of excitement and danger. [A] complex and well-woven thriller [that] combines a thoughtful vision of the future with relics of the present and creates an atmosphere both alien and familiar' Library Journal.

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Book SynopsisSet in the cities and islands of the Mediterranean, and linked thematically, the eight stories in The Foxes Come at Night read more like a novel, a meditation on memory, life and death. Their protagonists collect and reconstruct fragments of lives lived intensely, and now lost, crystallized in memory or in the detail of a photograph. And yet the tone of these stories is far from pessimistic: it seems that death is nothing to be afraid of.Trade Review'Both wise and beautiful' John de Falbe, Literary Review. * Literary Review *'Exquisite toys for the broken-hearted' Jonathan Gibbs, Independent. * Independent *'Nooteboom is full of surprises and makes every word, every observation, not only count but also linger' Eileen Battersby, Irish Times. * Irish Times *'I much admired Cees Nooteboom's sharply melancholy stories' Julian Barnes, TLS Books of the Year. * Books of the Year *'One of the most remarkable writers of our time' Alberto Manguel, Guardian. * Guardian *'Poignant, wistful, and sometimes bitingly funny studies of memory, longing, regret, and a wry acceptance that this is what being alive is like' Independent on Sunday. * Independent on Sunday *Table of ContentsGondolas. Thunderstorm. Heinz. Late September. Last Afternoon. Paula. Paula II. The Futhermost Point.

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Book SynopsisThe modern Italian classic discovered and championed by James Joyce, ZENO'S CONSCIENCE is a marvel of psychological insight, published here in a fine new translation by William Weaver - the first in more than seventy years.Italo Svevo's masterpiece tells the story of a hapless, doubting, guilt-ridden man paralyzed by fits of ecstasy and despair and tickled by his own cleverness. His doctor advises him, as a form of therapy, to write his memoirs; in doing so, Zeno reconstructs and ultimately reshapes the events of his life into a palatable reality for himself - a reality, however, founded on compromise, delusion, and rationalization.With cigarette in hand, Zeno sets out in search of health and happiness, hoping along the way to free himself from countless vices, not least of which is his accursed "last cigarette!" (Zeno's famously ineffectual refrain is inevitably followed by a lapse in resolve.) His amorous wanderings win him the shrill affections of an aspiring coloratura, and his confidence in his financial savoir-faire involves him in a hopeless speculative enterprise. Meanwhile, his trusting wife reliably awaits his return at appointed mealtimes. Zeno's adventures rise to antic heights in this pioneering psychoanalytic novel, as his restlessly self-preserving commentary inevitably embroiders the truth. Absorbing and devilishly entertaining, ZENO'S CONSCIENCE is at once a comedy of errors, a sly testimonial to he joys of procrastination, and a surpassingly lucid vision of human nature by one of the most important Italian literary figures of the twentieth century.

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Book SynopsisBorn in Transylvania in the days of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Miklos Banffy lived to witness both the zenith of that Empire and its fall. The short stories in this collection, from the tale of the idle young man dawdling pleasantly in Venice to the Romanian villager meditating revenge on his tormentor, draw on the author's experiences of life, love, sacrifice, betrayal and courage, and reveal, as a recurring leitmotif, an indomitable will to survive. The translator, Thomas Sneddon, lives in Budapest where he teaches translation at the Peter Pazmany University.

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Book SynopsisCommissario Soneri returns home for a hard-earned autumn holiday, hoping to spend a few days mushroom picking on the slopes of Montelupo. This isolated village relies on the salame factory founded in the post-war years by Palmiro Rodolfi, and now run by his son, Paride. On arrival, Soneri is greeted by anxious rumours about the factory's solvency and the younger Rodolfi's whereabouts. Not long afterwards, a decomposing body is found in the woods. In the shadow of Montelupo, carabinieri prepare to apprehend their chief suspect - an ageing woodsman who defended the same mountains from S.S. commandos during the war.Trade Review'A master storyteller' Barry Forshaw, Independent. * Independent *'A rich, rewarding read' Laura Wilson. * Laura Wilson *'A broodingly atmospheric and engaging crime thriller' Mail on Sunday. * Mail on Sunday *'Varesi exposes a dark history that still has the power to unsettle' Joan Smith, Sunday Times. * Sunday Times *

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Book SynopsisParma. A multiple pile-up occurs on the autostrada into the city. A truck transporting cattle skids off the road. Dozens of cows and bulls go on the rampage, injured and crazed. In the chaos, the burned body of a young woman is found at the side of the road. Her death has no apparent link to the carnage. Commissario Soneri is assigned the case. It is a welcome distraction: his mercurial lover Angela has decided to pursue other options, leaving him even more morose than usual. The dead woman is identified as Nina Iliescu, a Romanian immigrant whose beauty had enchanted a string of wealthy lovers. Temptress, muse, angel - she was all things to all men. Her murder conceals a crime and a sacrilege, and even in death she has a surprise waiting for Soneri.

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