Search results for ""Granta Books""

A ground-breaking look at gender and sex from the world's leading primatologist and New York Times bestselling author of Are We Smart Enough To Know How Smart Animals Are? 'Brilliant and fascinating... brings a scientific, compassionate and balanced approach to some of the hottest controversies about sex and gender' Yuval Noah Harari, author of Sapiens, Homo Deus and 21 Lessons for the 21st Century How different are the sexes? Is gender uniquely human? Where does gender identity originate? Drawing on decades of observing our closest living relatives, chimpanzees and bonobos, world-renowned primatologist Frans de Waal explores what we know of biological sex differences and of the role of culture and socialization. From maternal and paternal behaviour to sexual orientation, gender identity, and the limitations of the gender binary, de Waal analyses our shared evolutionary history with the apes, considering what is similar and what sets us apart. Male and female networking groups, sexual signals, the existence of gender non-conforming individuals, and maternal bonds are observed in primate societies, but humans stand apart in the development of nuclear families, the prevalence of sexual violence, and joint parental care. With expert insight and engaging storytelling, de Waal not only sets right gendered biases in the scientific community, but delivers a fresh and thought-provoking understanding of the behavioural norms and the many remarkable potentials of the human species. 'A breath of fresh air...Fascinating, nuanced and very timely' Rutger Bregman, author of Humankind and Utopia for Realists

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A vivid journey around England's great seaside resorts, exploring their history and current struggle, and what they reveal about England, from the award-winning author of Love of Country.

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A compendium of sounds from this world and beyond, from the author of A New Map of Wonders and The Book of Barely Imagined Beings Sound shapes our world in invisible but profound ways, and here Caspar Henderson brings his characteristic curiosity, knowledge and sense of wonder to the subject to take us on an exhilarating journey through the heard universe. A Book of Noises gathers together sounds from the cosmos, the natural world, the human world, and the invented world, and contains quiet pockets of silence. From the vast sound of sand in the desert to the tuneful warble of a songbird, to the meditative resonance of a temple bell and the improvisational melodies of jazz, this is a celebration of all things auricular.

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Even if we don't believe that Jesus was the son of God, we tend to think he was a great moral teacher. But was he? And how closely do idealised values such as our love of the family, helping the needy, and the importance of kindness, match Jesus's original tenets? Julian Baggini challenges our assumptions about Christian values - and about Jesus - by focusing on Jesus's teachings in the Gospels, stripping away the religious elements such as the accounts of miracles or the resurrection of Christ. Reading closely this new 'godless' Gospel, included as an appendix, Baggini asks how we should understand Jesus's attitude to the renunciation of the self, to politics, or to sexuality, as expressed in Jesus's often elusive words. An atheist from a Catholic background, Baggini introduces us to a more radical Jesus than popular culture depicts. And as he journeys deeper into Jesus's worldview, and grapples with Jesus's sometimes contradictory messages, against his scepticism he finds that Jesus's words amount to a purposeful and powerful philosophy, which has much to teach us today.

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You might have heard the saying 'you're in a pickle' meaning you're in a difficult situation. This is just one example of Rotwelsch, an ancient language of the road influenced by Yiddish and written in rudimentary signs, and spoken by vagrants and refugees, merchants and thieves since the European Middle Ages. Martin Puchner grew up knowing that Rotwelsch was of unusual interest to his family. When he inherited a family achive, it led him on a journey not only into the history of this extraordinary language but also into his family's connections to the Nazi Party, for whom Rotwelsch held a particular significance. The Language of Thieves is a compelling story of the mindset and milieu of Central Europe and of the way language can be used to evade oppression. It is also a deeply moving reckoning with a family's buried past.

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A darkly wild novel from the multi-million-copy bestselling author of Convenience Store Woman How far would you go just to be yourself? As a child, Natsuki believed she was an alien, a different species to her earthling family and classmates. She hoped a spaceship would come down and take her home. Now, she lives quietly in an asexual marriage, pretending to be normal. But the buried horrors of Natsuki's past are pursuing her. As she flees the suburbs for the Nagano mountains and a reunion with her beloved cousin Yuu, she wonders, what will it take to escape the earthlings? 'Intimate, deadpan, and unflinchingly unhinged' Wired

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What if meeting new people were a gift, not a burden? How might we transform our lives if we set aside our fear of outsiders? When Will Buckingham's partner died, the shock of his grief told him to withdraw. Instead, he sought solace in throwing open the door to new people; travelling the world - from Birmingham to Myanmar - seeking out stories of loneliness, exile and friendship, from classical times to the modern day. Drawing from his travels, as well as insights from philosophy, anthropology, history and literature, Hello, Stranger is a powerful antidote to loneliness and xenophobia, and a heart-warming story of the power of kindness and compassion.

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A young mother speaks to her second born child. Since the drama of childbirth, all feels calm. The world is new and full of surprises, even though dangers lurk behind every corner; a car out of control, disease ever-present in the air, the unforgiving speed of time. She tells of the times before the child was born, when the world felt unsure and enveloped in darkness, of long nights with an older lover, of her writing career and the precariousness of beginning a relationship and then a family with her husband, Bo. A portrait of modern motherhood, THE CHILD is a love story about what it means to be alive and stay alive, no matter how hard the journey.

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Pakistan's largest city is a sprawling metropolis of 20 million people. A place of political turbulence, where lavish wealth and absolute poverty sit side by side, and where the lines between idealism and corruption can quickly blur. Through the stories of those who know the city best - including a journalist, an activist, and an ambulance driver - Samira Shackle paints a vivid, vibrant and often violent portrait of Karachi over the past decade: a period during which the Taliban arrived in Pakistan, adding to the daily perils of its residents and pushing their city into the international spotlight. Nuanced and fast-paced, Karachi Vice is an immersive, electrifying journey around one of the most compelling cities in the world.

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Howard Hinton and his family are living in Japan, escaping from a scandal. Hinton's obsessions are his work - speculative voyages into the fourth dimension of space - and his wife and sons, each of whom yearns to find escape from entanglement in the strange and unknown landscapes of Hinton's science fictions. A ravishing period piece of late-Victorian social, scientific and domestic life, Hinton is about extraordinary discoveries, and terrible choices. It is about those who discover and map other realms, and the implications for those of us left behind.

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One spring, many years ago, Esther Woolfson's daughter rescued a fledgling rook. That rook, named Chicken, quickly established herself as part of the family, and other birds, including an irascible cockatiel and a depressive parrot, soon followed. But it was the corvids - members of the crow family - who amazed Woolfson with their personality and their capacity for affection. This classic blend of memoir and natural history combines the author's fascination with all things avian, from the mechanics of flight to the science of birdsong, with her funny, tender stories of life among the birds.

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'CENSUS is a vital testament to selfless love; a psalm to commonplace miracles; and a mysterious evolving metaphor. So kind, it aches.' David Mitchell, author of Cloud Atlas A father and son who are census takers journey across a nameless country from the town of A to the town of Z in the wake of the father's fatal diagnosis. Knowing that his time is menacingly short, the father takes his son, who requires close and constant adult guidance, on this trip of indefinite length. Their feelings for each other are challenged and bolstered as they move in and out of a variety of homes, meeting a variety of different people. Census is about the ways in which people react to the son's condition, to the son as a person in the world. It is about discrimination and acceptance, kindness and art, education and love. It is a profoundly moving novel, glowing with wisdom and grace, roaring with a desire to change the world.

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If a standard guidebook has never revealed the Italy you seek, let City Secrets show you the way. See the glorious art and architecture of Italy's villages and cities through the eyes of the people who know them best: an architect leads you through a hidden Florence passageway built for the Medici; a novelist points out the panoramic vistas that inspired St Francis; the most renowned of Italian cooks divulges her favourite Venetian eateries; and an artist directs you to the courtyard of a Renaissance convent, where you will ring for access to the frescoes - and a miraculous handprint - that lie within. Clothbound, elegant, and pocket-sized, this book features a subtle non-guidebook design and detailed maps. It is the ideal supplement to a more basic travel guide, or a perfect gift for the sophisticated traveller who is tired of the picture postcard recommendations and wants to try something unique.

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This book brings together for the first time Ben Lerner's three acclaimed volumes of poetry, along with a handful of newer poems, to present a decade-long exploration of the relationship between form and meaning, between private experience and public expression. No Art is an exhilarating argument both with America and with poetry itself, in which online slang is juxtaposed with academic idiom, philosophy collides with advertising, and the language of medicine and the military is overlaid with echoes of Whitman and Keats. Here, clichés are cracked open and made new, made strange, and formal experiments disclose new possibilities of thought and feeling. No Art confirms Ben Lerner as one of the most searching and ambitious poets working today.

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On the night of April 15, 1990, Jill Bialosky's twenty-one-year-old sister Kim came home from a bar in downtown Cleveland. She argued with her boyfriend on the phone. Then she took her mother's car keys, went into the garage, and closed the garage door. Her body was found the next morning. Those are the simple facts, but the act of suicide is far from simple. For twenty years, Bialosky has lived with the grief, guilt, questions, and confusion unleashed by Kim's suicide. Now, in a remarkable work of literary non-fiction, she recreates with unsparing honesty her sister's inner life, and the events and emotions that led her to take her life on this particular night. In doing so, she opens a window on the nature of suicide itself, our own reactions and responses to it - especially the impact a suicide has on those who remain behind. Drawing on the works of doctors and psychologists as well as a range of writers from Herman Melville and Emily Dickinson to Sylvia Plath and Wallace Stevens, Bialosky gives us a haunting exploration of human fragility and strength. She juxtaposes the story of Kim's death with the challenge of becoming a mother and her own experience of raising a son. This is a book that explores the families we are born into, the families circumstances give us, and the tender and enduring bonds that keep us connected to the people we love, even after they have left us.

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Adrift in lives of possibility and limitation, the flawed, struggling and sympathetic characters of these desperate, eerie stories seek refuge from meaninglessness and boredom in love, art, friendship, drugs, and sex. A journalist is either the guest or captive of a reclusive former tennis star at his mansion in the French hills; a terrible storm forces a man and a woman, who may be his therapist, to flee New York together; the artistic ambitions of a banker are laid bare when he comes under the influence of two strange sisters. Unflinching, funny and profound, Prodigals maps the degradations of contemporary life - from the deification of celebrity, to the impotence of violence, to the psychological debts of privilege, to the loss of grand narratives - with unusual insight, sincerity, and passion. It is a fiercely honest and heartfelt look at what we have become, the comedy of our foibles, and our longing for home.

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'A sweeping, colourful read' Mail on Sunday Lose yourself in the irresistable story of one woman's journey through 20th-century Russia. Growing up in 1930s Brooklyn, Florence Fein will do anything to escape the confining values of her family and her city, and create a life of meaning and consequence. When a new job and a love affair lead her to Moscow, she doesn't think twice about abandoning America - only to discover, years later, that America has abandoned her. Now, as her son Julian travels back to Moscow - entrusted to stitch together a murky transcontinental oil deal - he must dig into Florence's past to discover who his mother really was and what she became. He must also persuade his own son, Lenny, to abandon his risky quest for prosperity in the cut-throat Russian marketplace. As he traces a thread from Depression-era America, through the collective housing and work camps of Stalin's USSR, to the glittering, oil-rich world of New Russia, Julian finally begins to understand the role he has played - as a father, and as a son. Epic in sweep and intimate in detail, The Patriots is both a compelling portrait of the entangled relationship between America and Russia, and a beautifully crafted story of three generations of one family caught between the forces of history and the consequences of past choices.

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Addiction is seemingly inexplicable. From the outside, it can look like wilful, arrogant self-destruction; from the inside, it can feel as inevitable and insistent as a heartbeat. It is possible to describe, but hard to explore. Yet in The Recovering, Leslie Jamison draws on her own life and the lives of addicts of extraordinary talent - John Cheever, John Berryman, Jean Rhys and Amy Winehouse among them - to take us inside the experience of addiction, exposing the contours, edges and wholes of an intoxicated life. Part memoir, part group biography, part literary history and part definitive analysis of cultural and social considerations of addiction, The Recovering is a significant moment in the history of post-war narrative non-fiction.

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Throughout the 19th and 20th centuries séances and spiritualist meetings grew in popularity. One 'ghost' appeared more than any other: the Katie King spirit. A Ghost's Story presents the mysterious spirit writings and biographical outpourings of Katie King, this famous and enigmatic spirit celebrity. Is she a profound and curious consciousness guided into this realm by the faith of true believers, or the cheap trickery of parlour cheats and exploitative swindlers? Katie King is both, and more. This is the tale of a ghost's quest to understand human faith, loss and passion. It is also the tale of a contemporary scholar desperate to understand the allure of the spirit world, journeying with Katie from the candle-lit drawing rooms of Victorian London to the Imperial Palaces of Tsars; from the shadiest of gimmicks and tricks, to the most poignant sincerity of the death-bed wish. A Ghost's Story announces a narrator like no other, moving in and out of time and space, obstreperous, witty and profoundly honest. Above all, it is an examination of belief and a spectacular insight into what lies on the other side.

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As with the first two Young British Novelists issues, Granta's 2003 list was compelling and prescient. The issue introduced readers to fiction by Zadie Smith, David Mitchell and Monica Ali. From Ben Rice's story of marital crises among Koi fanciers to Hari Kunzru's account of the development of a Bollywood-inspired computer virus, the issue showcases the multifacetedness and vibrancy of contemporary British literature.

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The discovery of a baby's skeleton on a remote Scottish island unearths long-buried secrets in this darkly comic, atmospheric new novel from the author of the acclaimed COLD EARTH.

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What does it mean to leave your country? Is it possible, by travelling to a New World, to become a new person? A year ago, Jonathan Raban crossed the Atlantic by ship and, like the immigrants before him, made for America. The first of four installments, 'New World' is the story of his journey, a journey in search of a new language, a new name, a new identity. A life.

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A richly layered, nuanced and deeply moving memoir about how butterflies become the vital connection between a son and his dying father.

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In 1964 Ryszard Kapuscinski was appointed by the Polish Press Agency as its only foreign correspondent, and for the next ten years he was 'responsible' for fifty countries. He befriended Che Guevara in Bolivia, Salvador Allende in Chile and Patrice Lumumba in the Congo. He reported on the fighting that broke out between Honduras and El Salvador in 1969 around their matches to determine which one of them would qualify for the 1970 World Cup. By the time he returned to Poland he had witnessed twenty-seven revolutions and coups. The Soccer War is Kapuscinski's eyewitness account of some of the most defining moments in twentieth-century history.

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Set in 1795, "Water Music" is the rambunctious account of two men's wild adventures through the gutters of London and the Scottish Highlands to their unlikely meeting in darkest Africa.

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Martha Gellhorn's peacetime dispatches bear witness to six decades of change: America in the Great Depression, the betrayal of Czechoslovakia, young Poles undaunted by their Communist government, the trial of Adolf Eichmann, Spain in the days after Franco's death, Cuba revisited after forty-one years. Here is history as it looked and felt to the people who lived through it. Intense, courageous and vividly readable, The View from the Ground is a remarkable act of testimony.

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This is an account of how an angry young man can cross the line that divides theoretical support for violence from a state of 'killing rage', in which the murder of neighbour becomes thinkable. Over 3000 people have died in Northern Ireland since 1969, and most of them have died at the hands of their neighbours. The intimacy of the Ulster conflict, what it means to carry out a political murder when in all probability the victim is personally known, or lives in a nearby street, is described accurately by an honest participant. The book does not attempt to soften the impact of the events it describes through euphemism or rhetoric. It is a truthful picture of the brutality and waste caused by the IRA's unwinnable campaign, and of its human consequences. It is also a self-portrait of the despair and disintegration, the hardening to conscience and grief, that accompany political violence.

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Here are some of Sciascia's greatest stories - brief and haunting, the realist tradition at its best. In one tale a couple of men talk, cynically yet earnestly, about the etymology of the word 'mafia' - who they are, and why their interest is so piqued by the word, becomes apparent with frightening clarity. In another story a group of peasants are taken on board ship and promised that they will be put ashore illegally at Trenton, New Jersey; after a long time at sea, their landfall is far from what they expected. And Mussolini himself takes an interest in the case of Aleister Crowley, whose presence in Sicily has become an embarrassment.

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Shortlisted for the Folio Prize Internationally celebrated by critics and readers alike A dazzling and utterly original novel about making art, love, and children during the twilight of an empire In the past year, the narrator of 10:04 has enjoyed unexpected literary success, been diagnosed with a potentially fatal heart condition, and been asked by his best friend to help her conceive a child. Now, in a New York of increasingly frequent superstorms and political unrest, he must reckon with his biological mortality, the possibility of a literary afterlife, and the prospect of (unconventional) fatherhood in a city that might soon be under water. In prose that Jonathan Franzen has called 'hilarious... cracklingly intelligent... and original in every sentence', Lerner's new novel charts an exhilarating course through the contemporary landscape of sex, friendship, memory, art and politics, and captures what it is like to be alive right now. 'Brilliant... Contemplative and tender... I doubt I'll read a finer novel this year' - Sunday Telegraph 'Reading Ben Lerner gives me the tingle at the base of my spine that happens whenever I encounter a writer of true originality. He is a courageous, immensely intelligent artist who panders to no one and yet is a delight to read. Anyone interested in serious contemporary literature should read Ben Lerner, and 10:04 is the perfect place to start' - Jeffrey Eugenides, author of The Marriage Plot

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Lucien (Lucy) Minor is the resident odd duck in the bucolic hamlet of Bury. Friendless and loveless, young and aimless, he is a compulsive liar and a melancholy weakling. When Lucy accepts employment assisting the majordomo of the remote, forbidding castle of the Baron Von Aux he meets thieves, madmen, aristocrats, and a puppy. He also meets Klara, a delicate beauty who is, unfortunately, already involved with an exceptionally handsome partisan soldier. Thus begins a tale of polite theft, bitter heartbreak, domestic mystery and cold-blooded murder in which every aspect of human behaviour is laid bare for our hero to observe. Lucy must stay safe, and protect his puppy, because someone or something is roaming the corridors of the castle late at night. Undermajordomo Minor is a triumphant ink-black comedy of manners by the Man Booker shortlisted author of The Sisters Brothers. It is an adventure story, and a mystery, and a searing portrayal of rural Alpine bad behaviour with a brandy tart, but above all it is a love story. And Lucy must be careful, for love is a violent thing.

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An American anthropologist is at a loose end in Botswana. She is ferociously intelligent and wonderfully inquisitive. She is also in love with Nelson Denoon, a charismatic intellectual who runs an experimental women-only utopian village in the Kalahari. At times wildly comic but also magnificently cerebral, Mating is a profound exploration of the human condition and a moving love story, circling the question 'what do men and women really want?'

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'Mesmerizing storytelling... Under the Udala Trees is breathtaking, rich with history and heart' Tayari Jones One day in 1968, at the height of the Biafran civil war, Ijeoma's father is killed and her world is transformed forever. Separated from her grief-stricken mother, she meets another young lost girl, Amina, and the two become inseparable. Theirs is a relationship that will shake the foundations of Ijeoma's faith, test her resolve and flood her heart. From Ijeoma's childhood in war-torn Biafra and through the perils and pleasures of her blossoming sexuality, Okparanta takes us on a journey through thwarted hopes and wrong turns and into the everyday joys and sorrows of marriage and motherhood. A triumphant love story, Under the Udala Tree is work of extraordinary beauty that will enrich your heart. 'Under the Udala Trees [recalls] the work of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie in its powerful interweaving of the personal and the political... the dizzying scope of her storytelling keeps you gripped' Financial Times

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Not so long ago, our roads, buildings, gravestones and monuments were built from local rock, our cities were powered by coal from Welsh mines, and our lamps were lit with paraffin from Scottish shale. We live among the remnants of those times but for the most part our mines are gone, our buildings are no longer local, and the flow of stone travels east to west. Spurred on by the erasure of history and industry, Ted Nield journeyed across this buried landscape: from the small Welsh village where his mining ancestors were born and died, to Swansea, Aberdeen, East Lothian, Surrey and Dorset. Nield unearths the veins of coal, stone, oil, rock and clay that make up the country beneath our feet, exploring what the loss of kinship between past and present means for Britain and the rest of the world today.

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A brilliantly evocative, atmospheric novel about the delusion and indecision of a wealthy family in the last days of the Third Reich as the Russians advance from the east In January 1945, the German army is retreating from the Russian advance. Germans are fleeing the occupied territories in their thousands, in cars and carts and on foot. But in a rural East Prussian manor house, the wealthy von Globig family seals itself off from the world. Protected from the deprivation and chaos around them, they make no preparations to leave until a decision to harbour a stranger for the night begins their undoing. Finally joining the great trek west, the remaining members of the family face at last the catastrophic consequences of the war. Profoundly evocative of the period, sympathetic yet painfully honest about the motivations of its characters, All for Nothing is a devastating portrait of the complicities and denials of the German people as the Third Reich comes to an end.

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Collected 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.

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One starless night Janie's childhood was swept away by the terrors of the Khmer Rouge. Exiled from Phnom Penh, Janie and her family were forced to live out in the open: cold, hungry and under constant surveillance. Caught up in a political storm which brought starvation to millions, tore families apart and changed the world forever, Janie lost everyone she loved. Now, three decades later, Janie's life in Montreal is unravelling. Weaving together the threads of Janie's life, Dogs at the Perimeter evokes totalitarianism through the eyes of a little girl, and draws a remarkable map of the mind's battle with memory, loss and the horrors of war.

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In the 1920s, many in the British establishment became convinced that their way of life was being threatened by the new Soviet state. The British government launched vast spying operations in response, carrying out surveillance on not only suspect Russians, but British aristocrats, Bloomsbury artists, ordinary workers and even MPs. What they discovered had profound ramifications for the whole of British society, dividing the nation and laying the foundations for the later Cold War. Drawing on a wealth of recently declassified archives, The Secret Twenties tells the story of the first Soviet spies and the double agents in their midst, all of it set against the sparkling backdrop of cocktail-era London.

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In an Antique Land is a subversive history in the guise of a traveller's tale. When the author stumbles across a slave narrative in the margins of an ancient text, his curiosity is piqued. What follows is a ten year search, which brings author and slave together across 800 hundred years of colonial history. Bursting with anecdote and exuberant detail, it offers a magical, intimate biography of the private life of a country, Egypt, from the Crusades to Operation Desert Storm.

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In the midst of the current financial crisis, John Gray revisits his brilliant polemic against the forces of global capitalism and deregulation. Written over ten years ago, False Dawn is a remarkably prescient book, sharply criticizing the greed and unsustainable economic practices which have proved to be the seeds of a worldwide recession. In a substantial new chapter, Gray considers how the economic landscape has shifted in a decade, and asks the crucial question: where do we go from here?

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In Dancing in the Streets Ehrenreich uncovers the origins of communal celebration in human biology and culture. She discovers that the same elements come up in every human culture throughout history: a love of masking, carnival, music-making and dance. Although sixteenth-century Europeans began to view mass festivities as foreign and 'savage', Ehrenreich shows that they were indigenous to the West, from the ancient Greek's worship of Dionysus to the medieval practices of Christianity as a 'danced religion'. Exhilarating in its scholarly range, humane, witty and impassioned, Dancing in the Streets will generate debate and soul-searching.

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Meet Misha Vainberg, aka Snack Daddy, a 325-pound disaster of a human being, son of the 1,238th-richest man in Russia and proud holder of a degree in multicultural studies from Accidental College, USA. Misha is an American impounded in a Russian's body and the only place he feels at home is New York; he just wants to live in the South Bronx with his Latina girlfriend, but after his gangster father murders an Oklahoma businessman in Russia, all hopes of a US visa are lost. Salvation lies in the tiny oil-rich nation of Absurdistan (a fictional former Soviet republic), where a crooked consular officer will sell Misha a Belgian passport. But after a civil war breaks out between two competing ethnic groups and a local warlord installs hapless Misha as minister of multicultural affairs, our hero soon finds himself covered in oil, fighting for his life, falling in love, and trying to figure out if a normal life is still possible in the twenty-first century.

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Her father died instantly, her mother in the hospital. She has learned to say this flatly and without emotion, the way she says her name (Marina), her doll's name (also Marina) and her age (seven). Her parents were killed in a car crash and now she lives in the orphanage with the other little girls. But Marina is not like the other little girls. In the curious, hyperreal, feverishly serious world of childhood, Marina and the girls play games of desire and warfare. The daily rituals of playtime, lunchtime and bedtime are charged with a horror; horror is licked by the dark flames of love. When Marina introduces the girls to Marina the Doll, she sets in motion a chain of events from which there can be no release. With shades of Daphne du Maurier, Shirley Jackson, Guillermo Del Toro and Mariana Enríquez, Such Small Hands is a beautifully controlled tour-de-force, a bedtime story to keep readers awake.

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1959, Seoul. Divided from his family by the violent tumult of the Korean civil war, Yunho arrives in South Korea's capital searching for his oldest friend. He finds him in the arms of Eve Moon, a dancer with many names who may be a refugee fleeing the communist North, or an American spy. Beguiled, Yunho falls desperately in love. But nothing in Seoul is what it seems. The city is crowded with double agents and soldiers, and wracked by protests and poverty, while across the border, Pyongyang grows more prosperous by the day. When a series of betrayals and a brutal crime drive the three friends into exile, Yunho finds himself caught in the riptide of history. Might a homecoming to North Korea be his only hope for salvation?

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Three bears. The first, a diligent memoirist whose unlikely success forces her to flee Soviet Russia. The second, her daughter, a skilled dancer in an East Berlin circus. The third, Knut, a baby bear born and raised in Berlin Zoo at the beginning of the 21st century. Here, then, is the enchanting story of three extraordinary bears, brought to life by one of Japan's most inventive and dazzling novelists.

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'A Mumbai slum understood and imagined as never before in language of intense beauty' Salman Rushdie 'If Bollywood ever decides to do its own version of The Wire, this would be it' Barbara Ehrenreich Annawadi is a slum at the edge of Mumbai Airport, in the shadow of shining new luxury hotels. Its residents are garbage recyclers and construction workers, economic migrants, all of them living in the hope that a small part of India's booming future will eventually be theirs. But when a crime rocks the slum community and global recession and terrorism shocks the city, tensions over religion, caste, sex, power, and economic envy begin to turn brutal. As Boo gets to know those who dwell in Mumbai's margins, she evokes an extraordinarily vivid group of individuals flourishing against the odds amid the complications, corruptions and gross inequalities of the new India. 'A triumph of a book. A beautiful account of the sorrows and joys, anxieties and stamina, in the lives of the precarious and powerless in urban India' Amartya Sen, winner of the Nobel Prize for Economics 'Magnificent...a masterpiece... Quite simply, one of the finest works on contemporary India yet written' Sunday Telegraph

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*From the author of The Last Children of Tokyo* A mind-expanding, cheerfully dystopian novel about friendship, difference and what it means to belong, by a National Book Award-winning novelist. Welcome to the not-too-distant future. Japan, having vanished into the sea, is now remembered as 'the land of sushi'. Hiruko, a former citizen and a climate refugee herself, has a job teaching immigrant children in Denmark with her invented language Panska (Pan-Scandinavian): 'homemade language. no country to stay in. three countries I experienced. no time to learn three different languages. might mix up. insufficient space in brain. so made new language. homemade language most Scandinavian people understand'. Hiruko soon makes new friends to join her in her travels searching for anyone who can still speak her mother tongue: Knut, a graduate student in linguistics, who is fascinated by her Panska; Akash, an Indian man who lives as a woman, wearing a red sari; Nanook, an Eskimo from Greenland, first mistaken as another refugee from the land of sushi; and Nora, who works at the Karl Marx House in Trier. All these characters take turns narrating chapters, which feature an umami cooking competition; a dead whale; an ultra- nationalist named Breivik; Kakuzo robots; uranium; and an Andalusian bull fight. Episodic, vividly imagined and mesmerising, Scattered All Over the Earth is another sui generis masterwork by Yoko Tawada.

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A fascinating and revelatory cultural history of hypochondria, from Hippocrates to wellness influencers - for fans of Andrew Solomon and Siddhartha Mukherjee

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