Set against the backdrop of Japanese-occupied Korea, Capitalists Must Starve follows a sharp-tongued, big-hearted heroine who dares to love, rebel, and carve out space for working-class women in a world determined to silence them. Echoing the unflinching narratives of Alias Grace and the sweeping historical vision of Pachinko, this feminist historical novel balances raw grit with unexpected tenderness and a defiant streak of dark humour.
A stirring portrait of resistance from below: fierce, funny, and full of fight.
]]>Anton Hur was born in Stockholm. He is the author of Toward Eternity and has been nominated for the International Booker Prize, the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the Dublin Literary Award for his various translations including Love in the Big City by Sang Young Park and A Magical Girl Retires by Park Seolyeon. He lives in Seoul.
]]>In this mesmerising collection of stories, poems and essays from the award-winning team of Sweatshop Literacy Movement, you are invited to take a journey through dingy streets and pristine sunsets, delve deep into the tormented soul, and attempt to make sense of that big crazy thing called the human heart.
]]>This beautifully illustrated collection brings together 82 cat-themed haiku by Japan's most celebrated poets including Basho, Issa, Shiki, Buson, Soseki and many others translated into English by bestselling author William Scott Wilson with beautiful colour paintings by award-winning French artist Manda.
The passing year!
The cat hunches down
on my lap.
-Natsume Soseki
A night of frost;
opening the window to the cries
of an abandoned cat.
-Issa
The cat scampers into the mulberry field.
A morning
of high wind.
-Hekigodo
The result is a book that will delight all poetry lovers and cat enthusiasts!
Thirty years ago, Manda felt the need to free herself from academic art and decided to travel to Japan. Frequent stays there gave her the opportunity to adopt new practices. She learned from Japanese masters the "art of the line" as well as the mysteries of haiga, compositions where painted elements and poetry emerge from the same brush, forming a single entity. She has published many books, notably the works of Basho and Santoka. Her art appears in The Illustrated Book of Japanese Haiku, a collaboration with William Scott Wilson.
]]>This is the first book of Musashi: The Novel, a sweeping three-book unabridged translation of Eiji Yoshikawa's bestselling masterpiece Japan's most beloved historical novel. Masterfully translated for the first time in its entirety by Alexander Bennett, this vivid and fast-paced story reveals the exploits and inner life of a man who finds not only his true purpose but also his humanity.
Book One opens in the year 1600 at the Battle of Sekigahara, a scene of unimaginable carnage where Musashi lies wounded on the battlefield. After being imprisoned for three years, he wanders the countryside aimlessly as a vagabond, desperate to make a name for himself. He becomes a dueling Ronin a swordfighter without a master. And while his destiny seems clear, to achieve it he must leave his old life behind.
]]>Alexander Bennett is a Professor of Japanese History, Martial Arts, and Budo Theory at Kansai University. He is a Director General of the International Budo University's Budo Sports Research Institute. He co-founded and publishes Kendo World, the first English-language Kendo journal, and holds black belts in several martial arts. His published works include The Complete Musash and Hagakure: The Secret Wisdom of the Samurai.
]]>But just along the shoreline is the beach of La Preneuse, the taker of souls. The island is haunted with tragedy and the remnants of colonial rule.
But it is also home, where Anita Ram longs to be following the collapse of her marriage. After enduring a shocking betrayal and the sexism and racism of a cold Britain in the early twenty-first century, she finds comfort in simple things; her mother's cooking, her childhood bedroom, and a handsome architect.
Will these be enough for Anita to find happiness again, or will the ghosts of her past consume her?
Following the international success of her debut Riambel, Hein's heart-wrenching new novel reveals the violence and beauty inherent in her native Mauritius.
'Set against the lush beauty and brutal history of Mauritius, this novel explores heartbreak, homecoming, and healing with lyrical power.' Brittle Paper
'[a] vivid examination of love, generational trauma and how the impact of slavery still haunts Mauritian lives.' National Geographic Traveller
'A beautiful, melancholy story...A tale of longing and regret, of missed chances, of stillborn dreams.' Ananda Devi, author of Eve Out of Her Ruins
'The narrative of 'some exotic girl from a faraway island' could have easily fallen into cliche in the hands of a lesser writer. But in Tamarin, Priya Hein tells the story with such bravery, candour, and evocative detail that I often mistook it for a true account. Her Mauritius mirrors my Trinidad in ways that felt both familiar and thrilling to explore. Women everywhere will see themselves their deepest loves and betrayals, and their most delicate relationships reflected in these pages.' Celeste Mohammed, author ofEver Since We Small and Pleasantview, winner of the OCM Bocas Prize 2022
'There are books whose characters haunt you long after you've turned the last page. Anita Ram gets under your skin without you even realising it. Tamarin is one of those books where even melancholy knows how to be coquettish. Priya Hein is a grain of sand that the Indian Ocean cannot ignore.' Ari Gautier, author of Lakshmi's Secret Diary
'Tamarin is a lush, gorgeous novel. Priya Hein's prose is transportive. It is impossible not to feel the sand, smell the incense, taste the khir. But beneath the sensory richness lies an achingly melancholic story of loss, betrayal, and the quiet, restorative power of coming back home.' James Roseman, author of Placeholders
]]>In Riambel, Priya Hein invites us to protest, to rail against longstanding structures of class and ethnicity. She shows us a world of natural enchantment contrasted with violence and the abuse of power. This seemingly simple tale of servitude, seduction and abandonment blisters with a fierce sense of injustice.
'Priya Hein has given us a book that should be essential reading for all those who care about our history, in particular the devastating legacy of slavery; but what is extraordinary is that she tells this harrowing story in the most beautiful prose, luminous and musical, drawing in the reader before hitting them hard with the reality of her young narrator's life, and the humiliations and pain she endures because of this very legacy. Today more than ever, this story needs to be told; Priya Hein does so movingly and powerfully.' Ananda Devi, author of Eve Out of Her Ruins
'Riambel bravely grasps the complexity of ethnic relationships in Mauritius . . . displaying great art in the sense of shame blended with indignation and in the gaps in what is not said.' J. M. G. Le Clezio, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature
]]>Priya Hein was born in Mauritius. She has published several children's books and short stories, and has contributed to a number of anthologies. In 2017 she was nominated by the National Library of Mauritius for the Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award. She was selected for the Women's Creative Mentorship Project for the University of Iowa International Writing Program. Her debut manuscript Riambel won the 2021 Jean Fanchette Prize. Priya lives in Munich and Mauritius with her family.
]]>'Through this constellation we see, in silhouette, the historical shape of capitalism and its necessary mutation, imperialism. In a time of "No/politics but the politics of real/estate", the two long poems in this book offer us something rare: political poetry that moves, and demands movement.' Andre Dao
]]>He is a co-editor of the publishing collective Rosa Press and with Astrid Lorange, is one half of the critical art collective Snack Syndicate.
]]>'With her expansive vision, Burton explores Boston, the self, family legacy, intergenerational trauma and poetic confession. With freedoms curtailed, American democracy seems on the brink of collapse. Yet, Burton senses its spirit still stirring in the libraries and archives of her adopted city.' Heather Clark
]]>'A modern-day fairy tale that is both ghastly and beautiful.' Kirkus
Mother and daughter mermaids navigate starting over and finding their place in the world in Lara Ehrlich's debut novel.
The youngest siren sister, Ceto is weary of an existence driven by hunger, no better than a fish. She trades her tail for legs, marries the first man she meets, and bears a daughter only to find domesticity as suffocating as the sea. Craving more, Ceto flees with her daughter Naia back to the ocean, where she reinvents herself as the star of a mermaid burlesque, performing in a lavish tank carved into the limestone cliffs above the waves.
At Sirenland, Ceto's sensual performances and the erotic allure of her trained sirens transform the seaside attraction into a national sensation a glittering empire where spectacle, desire, and female power reign.But as Naia comes of age and begins to question her mother's vision, the boundary between empowerment and exploitation grows dangerously thin. When a shocking death rocks Sirenland, Ceto's rule is threatened, and mother and daughter must reckon with the cost of performance on their already tenuous bond.
Bind Me Tighter Still is a lush, provocative exploration of power, sex, sacrifice, and motherhood a celebration of female strength in a world determined to tame it.
]]>'In villages where women bore most of the weight of a constricted life, witches flew by night on broomsticks,' said Italo Calvino of the way imagination bridges the gap between everyday existence and an idealised alternative.
The fifteen stories of Animal Wife are unified by girls and women who cross this threshold seeking liberation from family responsibilities, from societal expectations, from their own minds. A girl born with feathers undertakes a quest for the mother who abandoned her. An indecisive woman drinks Foresight, only to become stymied by the futures branching before her. A proofreader cultivates a cage-fighting alter ego. A woman becomes psychologically trapped in her car. A girl acts on her desire for a childhood friend as a monster draws closer to the shore. A widow invites a bear to hibernate in her den.
Animal Wife was selected as the winner of the Red Hen Fiction Award by New York Times bestselling author Ann Hood, who says of the collection, 'From the first sentence Animal Wife grabbed me and never let go. Sensual and intelligent, with gorgeous prose, it made me dizzy with its exploration and illumination of the inner and outer lives of girls and women.'
]]>It is brave to write about childhood scars and the heartbreak the dead leave behind. It is brave to reconfigure one's life in the aftermath of a stroke. Richard Siken presents these subjects directly, without ornament, and with nothing to hide behind, confronting the fact that he can no longer manipulate the constructions of form, or speak lies that tell the truth. In spite of these limitations, Siken chooses to write these poems and release them into a dangerous world. Each image, each sentence, is as direct as the American artist Jasper Johns's shooting targets. Each poem is like a small room in a house, a room where you will be punched in the throat. As he claws himself back into a self, into a body, Siken has written a book that is unsettling and autobiographical by necessity, and its seventy-seven prose poems invite the reader to risk a difficult intimacy in search of yet deeper truths.
]]>"Richard Siken writes about love, desire, violence, and eroticism with a cinematic brilliance and urgency."-Huffington Post
In reviewing Richard Siken's first book, Crush, the New York Times-are immediately complicated by concerns of morality, human capacity, and the ways we look to art for meaning and purpose while participating in its-and our own-invention.
"Slippery, magnetic riffs on the arbitrary divisions made by the human mind in light of the mathematical abstractions that delete them; poetry lovers will want to read."-Library Journal, starred review
"[P]oems of passion, examining what it means to love, to be, and to create."-Vanity Fair
"Siken's stark, startling collection focuses tightly on both the futility and the importance of creating art."-Booklist
"Poems primarily about painting and representation give way to images that become central characters in a sequence of fable-like pieces. Animals, landscapes, objects, and an array of characters serve as sites for big, human questions to play out in distilled form. Siken's sense of line has become more uniform, this steadiness punctuated by moments of cinematic urgency."-Publishers Weekly
"War of the Foxes builds upon the lush and frantic magic of Richard Siken's first book, Crush. In this second book, Siken takes breathtaking control of the rich, varied material he has chosen...Siken paints and erases-the metaphor of painting with words allows him to leave those traces that mostly go unseen. He is the Trickster. If paint/then no paint. He does this with astonishing candor and passion."-The Rumpus
The Museum
Two lovers went to the museum and wandered the rooms.
He saw a painting and stood in front of it
for too long. It was a few minutes before she
realized he had gotten stuck. He was stuck looking
at a painting. She stood next to him, looking at his
face and then the face in the painting. What do you
see? she asked. I don't know, he said. He didn't
know. She was disappointed, then bored. He was
looking at a face and she was looking at her watch.
This is where everything changed . . .
Richard Siken is a poet, painter, and filmmaker. His first book, Crush, won the Yale Younger Poets' prize. He lives in Tucson, Arizona.
]]>Melissa Edmundson is a collector, scholar and anthologist specialising in strange and uneasy fiction particularly by women writers of Victorian and Edwardian periods. She has published several collections of classic short stories with Victorian Secrets and Handheld Press including Women's Weird and Women's Weird 2 in 2019 and 2020.
]]>Tales of eternal damnation, love, sexuality, death and supernatural talents form the core of May Sinclair's essential and groundbreaking oeuvre. Literary and still thrilling today, her stories explore the strangeness at the heart of human experience and relationships, where the mundane and the everyday meets lurking, otherworldly weirdness.
Including the contents of the classic collections Uncanny Stories (1923) and The Intercessor and Other Stories (1931), this new volume also features two rare strange tales from a third, lesser-known book which explore further facets of Sinclair's fascination with the uncanny.
]]>The Snowdon family stands as a pinnacle of Black excellence in Washington, D.C.: educated, affluent, and influential. John Christopher, the patriarch, saves lives as a heart surgeon and is revered by his students at Howard University. His wife, Camille, governs an elegant house overlooking Rock Creek Park and devotes herself to reading, gardening, and raising their three daughters Cynthia, Patricia, and Eva to attend the very best schools and roam the world on a whim.
Theirs ought to be a story of success and empowerment, but something is rotten in the house of Snowdon. Years later, when John Christopher's granddaughter Johnnie comes to seek the truth about her own parentage, she unveils a legacy of unspeakable family secrets tangled up in America's original sin. What begins as a quest for identity spirals into an apocalyptic vision of a nation on the brink of ruin.
By turns a poetic epic, a ghost story, a historical saga, and a chilling dystopian fable, Thereafter Johnnie is a unique and uniquely American fusion of myth and hard-bitten reality: an erotic, horrifying, and even hopeful reckoning with centuries of injustice.
]]>Lila Cartwright is thriving after dumping her toxic ex well, mostly. That is, until she bumps into him and his new girlfriend, forcing her to grab the nearest man and introduce him as her boyfriend. Unfortunately, that man is her infuriatingly moody (yet undeniably attractive) colleague, Rhys Aubrey.
Rhys isn't Lila's biggest fan either, but when he needs to convince his family that he's excelling in both work and love, striking a deal with her suddenly makes sense. As their fake relationship unfolds, the lines between pretence and reality blur. Can they keep up the act, or is there something real beneath the rivalry?
Praise for Carbon Dating:
'Nate and Laurel will dig their way into your heart and leave you breathless. A must read!' Ally Wiegand, author of First Base
'A laugh-out-loud, forced proximity romance that also delivers on the swoons and spice.' Georgia Moore, author of Four Night Stand
'I came for the hot British archaeologist, but stayed for the strong female main character. I couldn't put it down.' Leonie Mack, author of In Italy for Love
]]>This is one of the 22 novels written by Muriel Spark in her lifetime.
]]>Alan Taylor has contributed to numerous publications, including the TLS, The New Yorker and The Melbourne Age, and edited four acclaimed anthologies The Assassin's Cloak (2000), The Secret Annexe (2004), The Country Diaries (2009) and most recently, Glasgow: The Autobiography (2016).
]]>The book follows the story of Victor Frankenstein and his monster: the result of his desire to create life. But his botched experiment is so grotesque that the doctor immediately regrets what he has done and abandons the monster, leaving him to fend for himself. The creature finds and confronts his maker pleading for a companion his human right to happiness. Fearing what this may lead to, Victor refuses, causing the monster to vow to ruin any happiness in Victor's life.
A tragedy and a cautionary tale about the pitfalls of ambition and creation, Mary Shelley's masterpiece is more relevant now than ever.
]]>Dr Jenni Fagan is an award-winning poet, novelist and screenwriter. She is the author of the bestselling Hex, and A Swan's Neck on the Butcher's Block, her seventh collection of poetry.
]]>This new edition ofStevenson's renowned gothicmasterpiece has a specially writtenintroduction by Denise Mina.
In The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, London lawyer Gabriel John Utterson investigates a series of sinister events involving his seemingly respectable friend Dr Henry Jekyll and the dangerous and violent criminal known as Edward Hyde. The shocking revelation about their hidden connection has enthralled generations of readers since the book's first publication in 1886; it is still regarded as one of the most important and influential stories ever written.
A morality tale of good and evil, the book explores the multi-faceted complexities of human nature, duality and class themes that continue to fascinate and intrigue us today.
'An important book...written with great economy, tension and wit' Ian Rankin
'An exciting and unexpected read, even for those who think they know the story already' Louise Welsh
]]>Denise Minahas won the CWA Dagger for Best First Crime Novel, the Theakstons Old Peculier Crime Novel of the Year twice, and the MacIlvanney Prize twice. She is the author of the first Darkland Tale, Rizzio (Polygon).
]]>'All animals are equal. But some animals are more equal than others.'
Mr Jones of Manor Farm is so lazy and drunken that one day he forgets to feed his livestock. The ensuing rebellion under the leadership of the pigs Napoleon and Snowball leads to the animals taking over the farm. Vowing to eliminate the terrible inequities of the farmyard, the renamed Animal Farm is organised to benefit all who walk on four legs. But as time passes, the ideals of the rebellion are corrupted, then forgotten. And something new and unexpected emerges...
]]>Alan Johnson was General Secretary of the Communication Workers Union before entering Parliament as Labour MP for Hull West and Hessle in 1997. He served as Home Secretary from June 2009 to May 2010. Before that, he filled a wide variety of cabinet positions in both the Blair and Brown governments. His childhood memoir This Boy (Bantam Press, 2013) won the Royal Society of Literature Ondaatje Prize, and the Orwell Prize. His second memoirPlease Mr Postman(2014) won the National Book Club award for Best Biography. The Long and winding Road,the final book in his memoir trilogy, won the Parliamentary Book Award for Best Memoir.
]]>It is here that he meets and falls in love with Julia. They start a secret, forbidden affair - but nothing can be kept secret, and they are forced to face consequences more terrifying than either of them could have ever imagined.
]]>Our narrator is held in complete darkness and isolation. His endless thoughts are turned into the book we are reading Schattenfroh directed by none other than the narrator's mysterious jailer by the same name. Undulating through explorations of Renaissance art, the German reformation, time-defying esoterica, the printing process in the 16th century, Kabbalistic mysticism, and beyond, Schattenfroh is a remarkable book that, in turn, asks the remarkable of its readers.
Interruptions, breaks, and annotations both buoy and deceive, and endless historical references, literary allusions, and wordplay construct a baroque, encyclopedic quest. Schattenfroh's publication in English marks a seminal moment in the history of the literary form.
]]>Max Lawton is a translator, novelist, and musician. He has translated many books by Vladimir Sorokin, including Blue Lard (NYRB Classics), Their Four Hearts, and Dispatches from the District Committee (both from Dalkey Archive Press).
]]>Lina has dreamt for years of leaving her tiny village in the drought-stricken region. Her son left long ago to find work and a better fortune. Relicario, her husband, is content to stay put in the land of his ancestors, tending to their graves. Ignoring Relicario's pleas, a desperate Lina decides to abandon their home in search of her son, work, and water. She starts her journey on foot, and Relicario eventually follows behind, bringing a donkey and a sack with his ancestors' bones. Both witness unspeakable violence, cruelty, and folly, but the hope of reuniting their family keeps them alive. Poetically charged, restrained, and delicately condensed, this is a suspenseful ancestral tale rooted in a long Latin American history of rural displacement and perpetual inequality.
'Hypnotic, almost ancestral voices echo throughthis novellike whispers in the wilderness, like orphan cries and wounds of light accompanying us on a powerful journey from which none of us will emerge unscathed.' Agustina Bazterrica,bestselling author of Tender is the Flesh
]]>Samantha Schnee is the founding editor of Words Without Borders, which has published 4,400 writers from 139 countries since the online magazine launched in 2003. As a translator from Spanish, she is the recipient of a 2023 National Endowment of the Arts Literature Fellowship to translate eminent Mexican author Carmen Boullosa's novel El complot de los romnticos as well as a 2024 Berlin Prize from the American Academy in Berlin to translate Irati Elorrieta's award-winning debut novel, Luces de invierno.
Will Morningstar is a book editor and translator whose work is featured in Deep Vellum's Best Literary Translations 2025 anthology and has appeared in journals such as the New England Review, ANMLY, Two Lines, Latin American Literature Today, Strange Horizons, and the Massachusetts Review, as well as in museums and cultural institutions throughout Spain. He is the publisher of Boston-based Diptych Press, a new initiative to foster dialogue about literature from around the world.
]]>After returning to his hometown, Paul, the beleaguered host of a small-time podcast, discovers a longtime friend committed suicide in the dilapidated ruins of Paul's childhood home. Desperate to find answers, Paul interviews friends and locals hoping to find closure. He finds himself in a chilling downward spiral of his memories and the land he grew up on. Has his past caught up with him or is there something far more sinister at play?
Joshua Hull, screenwriter of Glorious, brings an edge of horror film expertise to this story of small-town haunting, trauma, and grief that just won't let go. 8114 roots out the rot of a small town's past and unravels the memories we must face to survive the present.
]]>The Sugar Kremlin is the follow-up to Vladimir Sorokin's Day of the Oprichnik, taking place in the same New Medieval universe over the course of fifteen chapters that all return to the object of the title: replicas of the Moscow Kremlin made of sugar. Thousands of these creations are given away to children during the holidays, then make their way through each stratum of Russian society. We follow the trajectories of these candied gifts from the hands of harried paupers to secret political dissidents, from torture-obsessed civil servants to sex workers in a nearby bordello...
As Sorokin shifts from story to story and style to style, he draws the reader through grotesquely Russian scenes, creating an aberrantly metaphysical encyclopedia of the New Medieval 'Russian soul'. The candy's sweetness is deceptive underneath it, you may detect notes of blood.
]]>Max Lawton is a translator, novelist, and musician. He has translated many books by Vladimir Sorokin, including Blue Lard (NYRB Classics), Their Four Hearts, and Dispatches from the District Committee (both from Dalkey Archive Press).
Joshua Cohen was born in 1980 in Atlantic City.Called 'a major American writer' by the New York Times, and 'an extraordinary prose stylist, surely one of the most prodigious at work in American fiction today' by the New Yorker). He was named one of Granta's Best Young American Novelists, and his awards include the Matanel Prize, the National Jewish Book Award, and the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.
]]>Tombstone, Texas, has never seen anything like the barefoot travelers who barrel in one afternoon, looking like they just stepped out of the seventies. They appear right in the middle of Pinky Elizabeth Swear's eulogy for her beloved rescue cat, Sweet Potato Grace (may she rest in eternal peace and abundance of goat cheese). To be honest, Pinky is relieved at the interruption. She'd planned to use the second half of her eulogy to come out of the closet. Now, she doesn't have to.
Are the newcomers a circus troupe? Revolutionaries? A sinister cult? While the town grows suspicious and rumor mills churn, Pinky finds herself drawn to the charisma of the barefoot strangers. Perhaps, she starts to think, the wrath of Tombstone is a thing worth risking in order to be true to oneself.
]]>After being met with suspicion from most of the locals, the family are thrilled when they're taken under the wing of their well-respected neighbours, Bill and Betty Nevan, who offer them work, companionship and an opportunity to fit in.
But for one of the O'Learys, this new friendship sparks an intense attachment that makes the dynamic dangerous for all. It's difficult to bury secrets, but almost impossible to bury feelings...
Like Howarth's acclaimed debut, Heap Earth Upon It explores rural Irish life at a specific moment in time and delves into claustrophobic relationships and tangled identities, leaving you wondering who to trust until the very last page.
'Heap Earth Upon It is a tense and claustrophobic novel with gothic atmosphere which seeps into your bones like fog. It's a fascinating look at mid-century rural Irish life, and a brutal exploration of the corrosive impact of shame and secrecy. Chloe Michelle Howarth knows her sapphic yearning!' Rachel Dawson, author of Neon Roses
'Dark, passionate and poised. A remarkable story of the way rural Ireland haunts and is haunted. Intense and thrilling.' Soula Emmanuel, author of Wild Geese
'It's a clever and mysterious book that never collapses into ordinariness, and possesses an eerie, liminal, orphaned quality that lingers in the mind.' Cameron Woodhead, The Sydney Morning Herald
]]>Like the jazz rhythms that inspired and punctuated her practice, Jayne Cortez improvised her way through and across disciplines, bridging poetry and performance with music and the visual arts to create a unique body of work. Consciously rupturing the boundaries between art and politics, Cortez's practice uneasily fits within literary movements of the 20th century, residing everywhere and nowhere between the Black Arts Movement, Surrealism, feminism, and early performance art. As intersectional as it is interdisciplinary, her work is consistently visceral and fearless, acting as a powerful expression of collective rage on behalf of the disenfranchised and dispossessed. In the words of historian Robin D.G. Kelley, 'her poetry was never "protest" but a complete revolt, a clarion call for a new way of life.'
]]>In 1919, Milena Jesensk, a clever and spirited twenty-three-year-old, is trapped in an unhappy marriage to literary critic Ernst Pollak. Since Pollak is unable to support the pair in Vienna's post-war economy, Jesensk must supplement their income by working as a translator. Having previously met her compatriot Franz Kafka in the literary salons of Prague, she writes to him to ask for permission to translate his story 'The Stoker' from German to Czech, becoming Kafka's first translator. The letter launches an intense and increasingly passionate correspondence. Jesensk is captivated by Kafka's energy, intensity, and burning ambition to write. Kafka is fascinated by Jesensk's wit, rebellious spirit, and intelligence.
Jesensk and Kafka meet twice for lovers' trysts, but can such an intense connection endure beyond a fleeting affair? In her remarkable debut novel, Christine Estima weaves little-known facts and fiction into a rich tapestry, powerfully portraying the struggles of a woman forced to choose between the roles of wife, lover, and intellectual.
]]>**Winner, WA Premier's Book Awards 2025, Poetry Book of the Year**
**Highly Commended, Victorian Premier's Literary Awards 2025, Poetry**
G-d, Sleep, and Chaos is a prayer of thanks for a broken world.
Alan Fyfe's debut collection employs a core of Jewish philosophy to explore themes of love, metaphysics, the self-destructive impulse, trauma, and the transcendent. With a boisterous affection for all things absurd and liminal and a bristling loyalty to working class aesthetics, G-d, Sleep, and Chaos includes poems that swing from visceral to hilarious across seven sections, and a range of forms, to ask how we might come by gratitude, and the peace of silence, in our bleakest moments. G-d, Sleep, and Chaos is a collection for the questing mind and the wanting spirit.
]]>He is a winner of the Karl Popper Philosophy Award. His first novel, T, was shortlisted for the T.A.G Hungerford Prize (Australia), the Chaffinch Press Aware Prize (Ireland), and the West Australian Premier's Book Award. G-d, Sleep, and Chaos is Alan's debut poetry collection and was awarded silver for the Flying Islands unpublished manuscript prize.
He is currently teaching poetry and creative writing.
]]>Newly returned from university, Tom isolates himself in his childhood bedroom, guarding the truth of his burgeoning identity.
When animal rights activists break into the cowshed one morning, Tom appears to side with the protesters. As the Calverts begin to unravel, a decades-old secret surfaces one that might rip them apart completely, or finally unite them.
A deeply moving debut about one family's struggle to find connection in a rapidly changing world, Human, Animal is an ode to the wild, a journey of self-discovery and a hopeful path to common ground.
'Beautifully, skilfully told with real tension and gorgeous characters, Human, Animal moved me to tears. Insua writes with so much kindness, empathy and wisdom...Remarkable.' Russell T Davies
'Insua probes the spaces between black-and-white-thinking with immeasurable sensitivity...Human, Animal explores the anxious convergence of the past, present and future with staggering clarity. A truly impressive debut.' Joshua Jones, author of Local Fires
'A rich and compelling debut from a writer with a striking talent for weaving together complex narrative strands in order to create a sophisticated, symphonic whole. Insua is one to watch.' Barney Norris, author of The Vanishing Hours
'A searingly powerful novel, Human, Animal grapples with questions of identity, change and family, delivering a nuanced and moving story about the desire for connection and acceptance.' Lucy Ashe, author of Clara & Olivia
'A beautiful, clever debut...Insua balances polarised worlds the young and old, the urban and rural, the expected and forbidden to create a novel so full of generosity and insight.' Abigail Dean, author of Girl A
'Blisteringly emotional, exploring the complex folds of family bonds. The last page left me haunted. Completely unmissable.' Lucy Rose, author of The Lamb
'Compelling, conflicting and heartbreaking, Human, Animal had my heart pounding in my throat until I'd devoured every last page. A bold and unforgettable novel.' Awais Khan, author of No Honour
]]>Set between the Blue Mountains and a Sydney hospital, Lisa Kenway's All You Took From Me is a thriller brimming with great characters and nail-biting tension.
Anaesthetist Clare Carpenter has just lost her husband and her memory in a single-vehicle accident. So why is a stranger following her? After questioning patients about their dreams, she becomes convinced that an anaesthetic drug might help her access missing memories. But there's no way to be certain without jeopardising her career or her life.
As unexplained threats escalate, Clare realises she must take matters into her own hands to learn the uncomfortable truth about her secretive husband, his connection to a mysterious club and what she did to trigger a stranger's crusade for vengeance. But how far will she go?
'Truly exciting. It's a rare treat to read a book that I am still thinking about long after the last page - the surprising reveals are both earned and satisfying. Readers are destined to fall in love with the ways Kenway brings such expertise and a unique perspective to the psychological thriller genre.' - Shelley Burr, author of Wake and Ripper
'A taut psychological thriller with a driving plot, All You Took From Me interrogates the limits of memory, both lost and recovered. From its compelling opening mystery, every page bristles with threat and intrigue.' - Ashley Kalagian Blunt, bestselling author of Dark Mode
'Kenway brings an exciting level of insider authenticity to this simmering drama about an anaesthetist struggling to make sense of a life unspooling in the aftermath of a tragic accident. Tense, twisty and unique, this is an unforgettable debut.' - Anna Downes, author of The Safe Place and Red River Road
'I found myself first pulled in by the prose - Kenway writes like a dream - but soon I was consumed by the mystery at the heart of the story the question of where we go and what happens to us under the narcotic oblivion of anaesthesia. Charged with menace and paranoia, this is a masterfully plotted psychological thriller.' - J. P. Pomare, author of In The Clearing and 17 Years Later
]]>Meanwhile, she begins an unexpected romance and friendship, and these relationships help her to understand the stories of extraordinary survival she hears about during the trial. When she is called back to Australia to reckon with her own childhood, she finds she can't quite leave everything she's heard behind. Out of the Woods asks what it means to bear witness to the suffering of people who have experienced real tragedy and whether it is possible, afterwards, to resume a normal life.
'A triumph. Out of the Woods traces the complex lines of complicity and grief a deeply compelling and humane story about what it means to bear witness. This is a book that looks into your soul.' Stephanie Bishop
'This searchingly original novel counters the historical weight of human cruelty with small acts of attention and persistence. Shirm's empathy and intelligent precision exert a quiet moral authority on every page.' Delia Falconer
]]>Moving nimbly between the granular and the broad view, The Oblong Plot, Chris Andrews' third collection, takes in paint splotches on a sawhorse and a star named Fang, life-wasting systems and means of escape. These faceted, echoing poems observe the world's shifting arrangements while rearranging their own letters, sounds, syllables, words and lines. The Oblong Plot invites the reader to join in its serious play.
'I loved this exhilarating, brilliant book. The poems in The Oblong Plot have style and wit to burn, and strike like a tuning fork, reverberating and reshaping the air around us. They are sharply attuned to the ironies and absurdities of contemporary life, finding linguistic torque and wry humour in cityscapes and their inhabitants' waking lives, dreams and aspirations. In seemingly effortless but technically dazzling syllabics, time and again Andrews punctures through the surface of things to find something much stranger and more surreal sitting under the day's skin. He is a relentlessly surprising and inventive poet whose vast linguistic gifts - including an electrifying skill at toggling between the vernacular and the poetically charged, "between / the dreamwarp and the cybercapsule" - remind us that language can both unmake and remake the world around us. The Oblong Plot is a gift to all who turn to poetry seeking to find our language recharged and refreshed.' - Sarah Holland-Batt
]]>The poems in Tintinnabulum focus on animals, people, and places, though you could say that the real subject matter is the power of poetry, since the book explores how metaphor, simile, imagery and sound can reveal connections that are imaginative, revelatory and sometimes threatening. Beveridge's creative use of language is most evident in the section of the book titled 'Bizarre Bazaar' - where she plays on lines and titles by Wallace Stevens (a fitting companion), and offers linguistic elaborations on familiar objects, and strange beliefs and customs. Each detail leads to others through association, there is multiplicity everywhere, and movement and energy, and this is as true of the poems which capture the particular features of animals, the transient effects of landscape, or the memories of people and places, as it is of the language-oriented poems.
There is a range of styles, lyrical, dramatic and narrative, which build on the achievements of poems in Beveridge's previous collections. There is also an emotional range to the poems: some poems are joyous, celebratory, ecstatic - others humorous, elegiac, nostalgic - but the overall feeling is of the joy and richness of language.
]]>'Mixed Business offers a broad sweep across Melbourne's past century. It is sharply observed, written as a fine verse novel, poet Alan Wearne exhibiting a rare historical and sociological imagination. Wearne brilliantly succeeds in his aim of "trying to capture how Australians yap/ with use of rhyme to give that extra snap."' Jim Davidson
'Alan Wearne's Mixed Business is an epic adventure, its energies tied poetically to the everyday. Wearne introduces a cast of characters whose voices, and those of their descendants, speak to each other across the manuscript's over-a-100-year span. Each narrative, whether a domestic or political saga, has its own social and cultural imprint a reader is guided down streams of consciousness where Wearne's subtlety with the natural rhythms of vernacular registers plays into and against the intellectual toughness of his satire. With discursive shifts between the charming and the garrulous Wearne's lens is, as always, on the social contract between individuals, its harmonies and disruptions.' Michelle Borzi
'Of Australia's poets Wearne may be most like Banjo Paterson, without regional pretensions and with fewer animals. Or he may be a late last flowering of social realism, albeit in a liberal-democratic key. Whatever Wearne is and to whom, this is an odd book, in the best sense, that is sure to startle the younger generations. And you're probably in it.' A J Carruthers
]]>In this novel, Charmian Clift broke the rules of the romance genre by her representation of a relationship between a middle class Australian woman and a Greek sponge diver who is an outcast even within his own society. Both are 'desperate' trapped in loveless marriages and overcome by a sense of nameless dread. But when these twin souls fall in love in the ruins of an ancient citadel above the port-town of a remote and poverty-stricken Greek island, 'honour' becomes 'mimic' a false imitation of itself and is cast aside, together with unhappiness and fear.
Honour's Mimic combines the authentic Greek setting of Charmian Clift's travel memoirs with the fine writing that has caused her to be described as Australia's greatest essayist.
'Charmian Clift broke the rules of the romance genre with this representation of a relationship between a middle-class Australian woman and a Greek sponge diver who is an outcast even within his own society.' Readings Monthly
'The [writing] is but it is distinctive in its potency, and for the way the love story is interwoven with the brutal realities of class, immigration, and mid-century morality. We devoured it.' The Paris End
'Honour's Mimic is a superbly realised portrait of the links between true love and mortality. It is about how being in another country can unmoor and perhaps free you to find "a passionate affirmation of that old lost desire to face challenge and danger, to be brave, to dare for the truth".' Declan Fry
'At the heart of Honour's Mimic is a transgressive, all-consuming love story that also offers an incisive, often chilling, indictment of the measures and strictures of class and society.' Heidi Maier, INDaily
'With the compelling flavour of a grotesque and shimmering fairytale that carries no consoling ending, Honour's Mimic casts a potent spell.' Carmel Bird, The Saturday Paper
]]>Nadia Wheatley is the editor of Sneaky Little Revolutions: Selected essays of Charmian Clift and The End of the Morning: The never-before-published novel by Charmian Clift. She is also the author of The Life and Myth of Charmian Clift. Described by critic Peter Craven as 'one of the greatest Australian biographies', this was the Age Non-Fiction Book of the Year, 2001, and won the NSW Premier's Australian History Prize (2002). After twenty years it remains the classic account of the life and work of this transformational Australian writer. Nadia Wheatley's other works include the award-winning memoir Her Mother's Daughter and Radicals Remembering the Sixties, written in partnership with Meredith Burgmann.
]]>'In those days the end of the morning was always marked by the quarry whistle blowing the noon knock-off.
Since everybody was out of bed very early, morning then was a long time, or even, if you came to think about it, a round time - symmetrical anyway, and contained under a thin, radiant, dome shaped cover...'
During the years of the Great Depression, Cressida Morley and her eccentric family live in a weatherboard cottage on the edge of a wild beach. Outsiders in their small working-class community, they rant and argue and read books and play music and never feel themselves to be poor. Yet as Cressida moves beyond childhood, she starts to outgrow the place that once seemed the centre of the world. As she plans her escape, the only question is: who will she become?
The End of the Morning is the final and unfinished autobiographical novel by Charmian Clift. Published here for the first time, it is the book that Clift herself regarded as her most significant work. Although the author did not live to complete it, the typescript left among her papers was fully revised and stands alone as a novella. It is published here alongside a new selection of Clift's essays and an afterword from her biographer Nadia Wheatley.
'The End of the Morning is full of feeling, animated by that formless, aching questioning of childhood, and a fascinating glimpse of the forces that shaped Clift as a person and a writer.' - Fiona Wright
'Reading her, even a glimpsed paragraph of her, is like quaffing the finest champagne on earth.' - Peter Craven, Sydney Morning Herald
'Forthright, funny and with an indefinable flair, Charmian Clift's writing plays second fiddle to nobody.' - Richard Cotter, Sydney Arts Guide
]]>After serving as a lieutenant in the Australian Army, in 1946 Clift joined the staff of Melbourne's Argus newspaper, where she met fellow journalist George Johnston. Over the next twenty-three years, the couple raised three children, produced thirty books, and created a legend.
While living in Greece, Clift wrote the travel memoirs Mermaid Singing and Peel Me a Lotus, and the novels Walk to the Paradise Gardens and Honour's Mimic. She also began the autobiographical novel titled The End of the Morning, which she regarded as her major work.
Returning to Australia in 1964, Charmian Clift set her novel aside so that she could devote her time to her weekly newspaper column and to her family commitments. Although she resumed work on The End of the Morning in 1968, she died a year later, before the book was completed.
For more information, see: www.charmianclift.com.au
Nadia Wheatley is the editor of Sneaky Little Revolutions: Selected Essays of Charmian Clift and the author of The Life and Myth of Charmian Clift. Described by critic Peter Craven as 'one of the greatest Australian biographies', this was acclaimed as the Age Non-Fiction Book of the Year, 2001, and was awarded the NSW Premier's Australian History Prize in 2002. It remains the classic account of the life and work of this transformational Australian writer.
For more information, see: www.nadiawheatley.com
]]>An exhilarating and unforgettable love song for our world. Heartbroken and in fear for his life, corporate whistle blower, Jagger Eckerman, escapes to hide out in a remote cave, but kick-arse radical, Nia Moretti, is furious a 'capitalist suit' has taken over her cave. It is hatred at first sight.
Yet Nia is hiding for reasons of her own, ones that drag Jagger closer to death as they are forced on the run together and he is unwittingly pulled deeper into Nia's reckless mission to help save the planet. But who can save Jagger from the relentless pursuit of the man who wants him dead?
Both an electrifying cat-and-mouse-chase and an odd couple love story, The Rewilding captures the essence of what it means to be alive today in this cusp of change pulsing with possibilities.
It is a passionate intimation of hope.
'A breathless chase thriller with a warm ecological heart.' - Inga Simpson, author of The Last Woman in the World
'Fiction at its rebellious, fast-paced best with hope as its touchstone, making The Rewilding an urgent novel for our times.' - Sally Piper, author of Bone Memories
'A genre-bending page-turner from an author of the highest calibre: Cameron's writing is rich, evocative and comes straight from the heart.' Anna Downes, author of The Safe Place
]]>After living in a Singapore dog shelter for five years, Gucci a vaguely Dalmatian-like crossbred is losing hope of ever being rescued. One day to his surprise he is adopted by her, a writer, and moves to inner city Sydney. On arrival, however, an anti-dog war breaks out in their apartment block; Gucci's owner receives a letter threatening the possibility of 'euthanasia'. The incident triggers nightmares in her and brings back distressing childhood memories.
My Name Is Gucci is a charming novel about the relationships between pets and their owners and about how the past shapes the present. This bold ex-shelter dog narrated fable beautifully unravels Gucci's and his adopter /guardian's secrets, which have been intertwined for decades through their recurring reincarnations.
Sun Jung understands the deep connections that exist between animals and humans. You won't need to be a dog lover to be entranced by this story; it is brimming with warmth, wit and wisdom.
'A comic and moving Homeric odyssey about Gucci the dog, who must deal with, and outwit, the most problematic species of all humans.' Louis Nowra, author of Sydney: A Biography
'A magical novel that will capture your heart.' Andrea Carter, author of A Body Falls
]]>Launched in 2020, the British Library Women Writers series is a curated collection of novels and anthologies by female authors who enjoyed broad, popular appeal in their day. In a century during which the role of women in society changed radically, their fictional heroines highlight women's experience of life inside and outside the home through the decades in these rich, insightful and evocative stories.
]]>Setting out on a mission to re-weird this lost stretch of the ritual year, Johnny Mains returns with a collection of tales of the bizarre, the beastly and the brutal to welcome the summer and raise the cry: Wyrd is Icumen in!
]]>Fourteen-year-old Billie rarely crosses the boundaries of her high-rise housing estate. By the end of the month their money just about stretches to pasta with ketchup, but her mother, Marika, lights up Billie's world with her imagination and big heart.
One day they receive an unwelcome visit from her Hungarian grandmother, and Billie loses much more than the colourful everyday life she shared with her mother. No longer able to ask Marika questions, Billie sets off alone in their old Nissan determined to meet the father she never knew and find out why she keeps dreaming about the sea, even though she's never been there.
Longlisted for the German Book Prize 2023, Paradise Garden is a spellbinding journey and a deeply affecting story of class, resilience and belonging.
'Elena Fischer writes so lovingly about sadness that it is comforting.' Alina Bronsky
'An accomplished debut about the courage to get to know one's own origins and to accept them as they are.' Ursula Nowak for Deutschlandfunk, Cologne
'This novel is a small miracle and a big surprise.' Claudio Armbuster / ZDF, Mainz
]]>Elena Fischer has been nominated for the German Book Prize and for the Harbour Front Literary Festival's Debut Prize 2023.
]]>The Japanese novel comes of age in this gripping story of love, art and life as a group of architects competes to design the new National Library of Modern Literature in Tokyo.
In 1980s Japan, newly-graduated Toru Sakanishi joins a small, prestigious architecture firm founded by a former student of Frank Lloyd Wright. As the sweltering summer months approach, the team migrates from the bustling centre of Tokyo to the beautiful rural surroundings of Mount Asama, where several love stories are woven together and Sakanishi encounters four remarkable women who change the course of his life.
From honouring ancestors to illustrating the complexities of the living, Summer at Mount Asama is a prize-winning novel beautifully translated by National Book Award winner Margaret Mitsutani, offering a moving and elegant portrait of the clash of modernity and tradition.
'Packed with ideas about art, life, and love.' Kirkus Reviews
'The more I read, the more I fell in love with this beautiful novel.' Hiromi Kawakami
'Expertly-crafted.' Mariko Ozaki
]]>His debut novel, Summer at Mount Asama, received the Yomiuri Prize for Literature.
Margaret Mitsutani is a translator of Yoko Tawada and Japan's 1994 Nobel Prize laureate Kenzabur e. She was a finalist for the National Book Award and winner of the National Book Award for her translation of Yoko Tawada's The Emissary.
]]>Jeanne learns from an early age to dodge her father's abuse, but her mother and sister resign themselves to his brutality. One day when she is eight he attacks her viciously, angered by her self-assurance. Convinced that the village doctor will put an end to their nightmare, she is shocked by his silence.
From then on, Jeanne's hatred of her father and her disgust at the doctor's cowardice drive her on. At boarding school she experiences five years of respite, but is then triggered by an unbearable replica of the violence that started it all. Moving to Lausanne, unable to come to terms with her past and to engage fully with life, she nevertheless finds solace in the arms of lovers and in the waters of Lake Geneva, while further tragedy fuels her rage.
My Favourite is a powerful novel about departure and return, of love, guilt and shame, and the paralysing effects of trauma. Sarah Jollien-Fardel forcefully describes the price to be paid for Jeanne's hard-won emancipation, as history inexorably repeats itself.
'This book is a remarkable debut.' LE MONDE DES LIVRES
'My Favourite is exceptional, moving and fierce, proud of its often elliptical style, reflecting its title.' LIBRATION
'Sarah Jollien-Fardel demonstrates her mastery and composure during the implacable outcome of events and human behaviour.' L'EXPRESS
'A poignant story, narrated with finesse and boldness.' Nataliya Deleva, author of Arrival and Four Minutes
]]>Holly James is a British literary translator based in Paris.
]]>Our narrator is a gifted photographer, an uncertain wife, an infertile mother, a biracial woman in an America that's coming undone. As she grapples with a lifetime of ambivalence about motherhood, yet another act of police brutality makes headlines, and this time the victim is Noah, a boy in her photography class.
Unmoored by the grief of a recent, devastating miscarriage and Noah's fight for his life, she worries she can no longer chase the hope of having a child, no longer wants to bring a Black body into the world. Yet her husband Asher contributing white Jewish genes alongside her Black-Japanese ones to any potential child - is just as desperate to keep trying.
Throwing herself into a new documentary on motherhood and making secret visits to Noah in the hospital, this is when she learns she is, impossibly, pregnant. As life shifts once more, she must decide what she dares hope for the shape of her future to be.
]]>Isaac is immediately infatuated by the handsome, charismatic artist, but while they grow closer, his sense of self becomes increasingly hazy. Harrison's demands shift constantly, and after Isaac tries everything to prove his worthiness, he must take a hard look at his ideas about love, sex and men, and his relationship with himself.
'So vivid and real, it brought a thousand memories rushing back' - Russell T Davies
'Truly impressive: funny, melancholic and acutely real. Isaac takes me back to my own adolescence in London, to being on the precipice of adult life... bracing and uncensorious' - James Cahill, author of Tiepolo Blue
'Carefully written, sexually candid but full of warmth and longing, Isaac is deeply satisfying in its elegance and tenderness' - Niamh Campbell, author of This Happy
'A luminous and beautiful debut about coming-of-age in London today. An instant queer classic' - Jon Ransom, author of The Gallopers
'Garner writes like a queer, twenty-first century Richard Yates: honest, uncompromising, fearless, and completely engrossing' - Alex Pheby, author of Playthings
]]>Julia Walden a Synth was designed for one reason: to compete on The Proposal and claim the heart of bachelor Josh LaSala. Her casting is controversial, but Julia seems to get her fairy-tale ending when Josh gets down on one knee.
Fast-forward fifteen months, and Julia and Josh are married and raising their baby in small-town Indiana. But with haters around every corner, Julia's life is a far cry from the domestic bliss she imagined. Then her splintering world shatters: Josh goes missing, and she becomes the prime suspect in his murder.
With no one left she can trust, Julia takes the investigation into her own hands. But the explosive truths she uncovers will drive her to her breaking point and isn't that where a person's true nature is revealed? That is...if Julia truly is a person.
'The Bachelor meets Black Mirror (with a splash of Barbie gone dark) in this captivating, empowering, and wildly original thriller... A spectacular debut.' Megan Collins, author of Thicker Than Water
'A deftly crafted, stunningly original debut. I loved it from the clever first pages all the way to the jaw-dropping conclusion.' Andrea Bartz, author of The Spare Room
'Made for You is a thrill ride that never stops twisting and turning. With its smart fusion of reality TV, murder mystery, and social commentary, this story promises an addictive and thought-provoking reading experience, while feeling unlike any other book you've ever read.' Laurie Elizabeth Flynn, author of The Girls Are All So Nice Here
'It's Mary Shelley in the Bachelor era, as unpredictable as it is inevitable, and feminist as hell.' Katie Gutierrez, author of More Than You'll Ever Know
'A genre-blending romp that kept me riveted. Satterthwaite has established herself as a force in the mystery universe, and I can't wait to see what she does next.' Kristen Bird, author of Watch It Burn
'A Black Mirror-esque story combining AI, reality TV drama and a murder mystery...' Soaliha Iqbal, Missing Perspectives
]]>After facilitating a handful of successful romances, Katie Donald is eager to continue helping the lovelorn find connection. Word of her expertise spreads quickly, and more people than ever are flocking to the Perfect Passion Company seeking Katie's advice. With each client's distinctive quirks and unique personalities, Katie finds herself seeking new and creative solutions to locate their perfect match.
With the tenderness of which only McCall Smith is capable,The Perfect Passion Company charmingly illuminates the fascinating psychology of matchmaking, the universal search for love and compassion, and the mysterious spark of attraction that can, at times, catch hold of us all.
]]>For fans of Alexander McCall Smith's many beloved series and romantic standalone novels, The Perfect Passion Company shows him at his most perceptive, playful, and generous. In the way that only McCall Smith can, this novel offers a glimpse inside the psychology of matchmaking, the search for love and companionship, and the mysterious spark of attraction that can, at times, catch hold of us all.
]]>A thousand years ago in an ancient Scottish landscape, a woman is on the run with her three companions a healer, a weaver and a seer. The men hunting her will kill her because she is the only one who stands between them and their violent ambition. She is no lady: she is the first queen of Scotland, married to a king called Macbeth.
As the net closes in, we discover a tale of passion, forced marriage, bloody massacre and the harsh realities of medieval Scotland. At the heart of it is one strong, charismatic woman, who survived loss and jeopardy to outwit the endless plotting of a string of ruthless and power-hungry men. Her struggle won her a country. But now it could cost her life.
Part of Polygon's DARKLAND TALES series.
]]>Bedi and Sushma's marriage is arranged. When they first meet, they stumble through a faltering conversation about happiness and hope and agree to go in search of these things together. But even after their children Selena, Tara and Rohan are grown up and have their own families, Bedi and Sushma are still searching.
Years later, the siblings attempt to navigate life without their parents. As they travel to the Ganges to unite their father's ashes with the opaque water, it becomes clear that each of them has inherited the same desire to understand what makes a life happy, the same confusion about this question and the same enduring hope.
A Person is a Prayer plumbs the depths of the spaces between family members and the silence that rushes in like a flood when communication deteriorates. It is about how short a life is and how the choices we make can ripple down generations.
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