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
]]>It's the early 1990s, and in the Irish village of Crossmore, Lucy feels out of place. Despite her fierce friendships, she's always felt this way, and the conventional path of marriage and motherhood doesn't appeal to her at all. Not even with handsome and doting Martin, her closest childhood friend.
Lucy begins to make sense of herself during a long hot summer, when a spark with her school friend Susannah escalates to an all-consuming infatuation, and, very quickly, to a desperate and devastating love.
Fearful of rejection from her small and conservative community, Lucy begins living a double life, hiding the most honest parts of herself in stolen moments with Susannah.
But with the end of school and the opportunity to leave Crossmore looming, Lucy must choose between two places, two people and two futures, each as terrifying as the other. But only one can offer her real happiness.
Sunburn is an astute and tender portrayal of first love, adolescent anxiety and the realities of growing up in a small town where tradition holds people tightly in its grasp.
]]>A small Australian town. The story of an extraordinary family.
Locals see George Maskey as a hollow braggard who is at least partly responsible for the crime and drug related death Naples has seen over the years. His wife blames him for the death of their teenage twins. His gay stepson regards him as a racist homophobe. And Serenade Theadora the town's famed mystic sees him in equal parts as good and bad. But George, the family patriarch, is not the star of this story.
When Rodney, the loyal Maskey right-hand man, is kidnapped by service-station proprietor Gayle Reynolds in a bungled revenge against his boss events are set in train that will see the Maskey family changed forever. Love-starved reader of romance novels, physical runt, dreamer; Rodney has lived in a forest on the Knuckle, tending the Maskey's marijuana plantation since the death of his mother. Gayle regards his capture as an opportunity to learn the whereabouts of her missing son, Duncan: Rodney's childhood best friend. For Rodney, captivity turns his life upside down. He meets Leanne. She is the girl who brings him his meals. And in her the unattractive young man, who has despaired of ever finding love, sees a person he could risk everything for.
The Maskeys is a thrilling and groundbreaking portrayal of the overlooked, both tender and incisive. From the author of the critically acclaimed Low Expectations.
]]>As an adult, Hilary becomes a successful novelist. In her fifties, she comes upon a stack of her old diaries, which document the trauma she's endured. She decides she is ready to face the hidden backstory of her life.
She embarks on writing a memoir, Hilary's Story, which will take her through her worst years and her best years, through courage and endurance, through friendship and great love.
The One Remaining is a captivating story of overcoming loss, finding the courage to trust those who believe in us, and the self-healing power of writing our stories.
'The One Remaining is a wise, beautiful and moving novel about the whole of a woman's life. I lived with the main character Hilary through her griefs, suffering and great joys. I cried as I read, then I wiped my eyes and smiled. McLean shows us how surviving loss and trauma is not linear or clear, but gives a depth and richness to life nonetheless.' Sophie Gee, The Secret Life of Books podcast
]]>During the police investigation that follows, Eleanor is traumatised to learn, that in 1975, Ida (her stepmother), worked as an Indonesian spy. She was supposedly responsible for the imprisonment and torture of hundreds of East Timorese resistance fighters and was also suspected of betraying the journalists known as the Balibo Five.
All Eleanor wants is to be left alone, but the past won't disappear. Wracked with guilt, and with the threat of a murder charge hanging over her head, she travels to East Timor seeking to discover the extent of Ida's involvement in these atrocities. Here, however, she must confront her own feelings of betrayal and the treacherous role played by both the Australian and Indonesian governments in their obsession with Timorese oil and gas.
'Rich with vivid detail and evocatively drawn, Revelation Beach is a compelling reckoning with a dark chapter in our past.' Mark Brandi, award-winning crime writer
'A literary page-turner for thriller lovers and everyone with an interest in Timor-Leste and Australia.' Tony Park, best-selling author of adventure thrillers
'Susan Francis has taken the tragic story of the Balibo Five as a starting point to create a psychologically intricate cross-cultural thriller with the superbly rendered Eleanor as its complex and unwilling protagonist. Reminiscent of Christopher Koch at his best.' Ed Wright, editor and critic
]]>He has plenty to work with. Pardoned convict Thomas Gunson knows the way through the wilderness and agrees to guide the faithful on a circuit of their struggling chapels, though he fears the company of people now that he's out of his shackles. Irish emigre Oona Farry, recruited as a candlemaker, resents the devotion of the women during their ecstatic praising, convinced that God has abandoned her for her lustful secrets. Even righteous hosts Jacob and Anne Temple harbour transgressions they dare not voice.
But when Californian preacher Charisma Groom stirs up unbridled repentance during a watchnight mass on the edge of wild country, illicit sex and sudden death come to light. The congregation is ordered to hunt the devil through the ancient Fish River Caves, a dangerous underworld where raptures more powerful than faith are awakened.
With nothing but his fledgling moral compass, Muncey must see through blind faith to uncover which member of the flock is a callous killer.
This is a bold reimagining of the untold story of the Methodist settlers who colonised Australia's renowned Jenolan Caves during the Frontier Wars.
]]>Michael's great-grandparents represent a broad cultural spectrum in Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand, including English, Scottish, and Irish migrants, as well as Mori heritage. He enjoys researching the diverse cultures that shaped the colonial landscape of the region. The thousands of steps he took through Jenolan Caves as a tour guide from 2008 to 2012 inspired him to create The Watchnight.
His complete works can be found at www.burgewords.com.
]]>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.
]]>KONTRA enacts a poetics of clashing decadences, testing the tightrope between 'feminine' goodness and deviance, desire and refusal, reverence and repulsion. It casts a female gaze on the kontrabida a Filipina soap opera villain stuck in a rise-and-fall cycle. The poet reimagines the kontrabida as a figure driven not by revenge, but by wild desire. Oscillating in and out of character, Andrada navigates the tension between poet and persona. Alongside the shapeshifting, spectral force of the kontrabida, the poet invokes a chorus of voices to trace a lineage of opposition and the alternate futures it holds.
The collection is in the form of a narrative triptych. The opening section 'KONTRA' explores the power and fate of the oppositional figure. In 'OPER', two characters speak alongside each other to excise painful histories of domination and sexual assault; which moves us forward to the final section 'BIDA', to a more genuine, queer persona that is free from domination.
Praise for Eunice Andrada:
'Brilliant and devastating, TAKE CARE is no doubt one of the most important poetry releases in years, weaving complex themes with intelligence and innovation of form...A poet whose courage is necessary and whose words we all need.' Ellen van Neerven
'TAKE CARE is the live wire of poetry that does not spare us...each poem both a surrender and a severing, each page an urgent demand we do not look away from violence, from its banal to its most grotesque, and each word filled with as much purpose and energy as it is with tenderness and care.' Sara Saleh
]]>Austen fans will now be able to own her iconic novel as it was originally published by T. Egerton in London in 1813, in three gorgeous volumes, presented in an ornate clamshell case. This edition will also include reproductions of Austen letters from the Library's collection of her personal effects, as well as introductory notes by a lead curator.
]]>First published in 1886 and reprinted here with a bewitching introduction by Kirsty Logan, the spooky tales in this little book are guaranteed to send a tingle down your spine. Whatever you do, don't read them after midnight!
]]>Beautifully produced, carefully curated and timeless, this book is the perfect gift for anyone who likes to be haunted by ghost stories. Read it if you dare.
]]>This edition, beautifully illustrated by Arthur Rackham and introduced by Jonathan Kruk, The Legend storyteller, reproduces Irving's original tale. First published in 1820, it became the inspiration for many adaptations ranging from silent film, animation and blockbuster movies to musicals and graphic novels. It is now inextricably associated with Halloween.
]]>ARTHUR RACKHAM (18671939) was a leading book illustrator of his generation.
JONATHAN KRUK is a storyteller based in New York State and the author of The Legends and Law of Sleepy Hollow and the Hudson Valley (2011).
]]>Rottgor is worn out. Literally. Barely held together by dark magic, he has protected the Necropolis for centuries. When he's forced into retirement, he's faced with a new challenge: to forge a future guided not by obligation, but by passion.
Following his heart (and stomach), he decides to open a restaurant where the city's undead and living residents can share food and community. He's helped in his quest by an unlikely assortment of neighbors, including elves, skeletons, vampires and a young orphan girl named Astra, whose ancestry, if discovered, could put her and the entire Necropolis in danger. To protect Astra and the life he's building, Rottgor must face his past and form new alliances built on friendship, loyalty, and love. As comforting as warm pumpkin bread, this gentle fantasy traces how even a dark history can rise into a bright future.
]]>It is said that when one person in a family is unstable, the whole family is destabilised. Meet the Shreds. Ollie is the sister in the spotlight until her stunning confidence becomes erratic and unpredictable, a hurricane leaving people wrecked in her wake. Younger sister Amy, cautious and studious to the core, believes in facts, proof and the empirical world. None of that explains what's happening to Ollie, whose physical beauty and charisma mask the mental illness that will shatter Amy's carefully constructed life.
As Amy comes of age and seeks to find her place first in academia, then New York publishing, and through a series of troubled relationships every step brings collisions with Ollie, who slips in and out of the Shred family without warning. Yet for all that threatens their sibling bond, Amy and Ollie cannot escape or deny the inextricable sister knot that binds them.
Spanning two decades, Shred Sisters is an intimate and bittersweet story exploring the fierce complexities of sisterhood, mental health, loss and love.
]]>In this world, half-remembered traditions mix with decadence and an awful lot of small dead animals. And sometimes, not just animals. When Tommo's friend Johnnie's brother is found dead, a shotgun at his feet, he realises there are secrets that everyone knows, but no one speaks about, or even acknowledges. And those secrets can no longer be hidden.
'Keeps the outrageous laughs and twists comingin equal measure' Alexander Larman,The Observer
'Darkly funny as Saltburn, but with kilts' Val McDermid
'Rabbits is an instantly compelling novel; it is simultaneously poignant, peculiar, tragic, and very, very funny. Highly recommended' Sathnam Sanghera
]]>And thus, Ines Camargo the youngest daughter of an Italian nobleman and a Colombian poet begins to speak in a bitter, sweet voice.
Against the backdrop of early twentieth-century Colombia, where the Catholic Church exercises total control over women, Orange Wine weaves an unforgettable story of sisterhood, love, passion, and betrayal. Isolated in a society that opposes her desires, Ines struggles with her identity as a mother, artist, sister, lover, and woman. Her choices are stark: accept her duty to her family or embark on a sensuous journey of self-discovery. Each path will cost her or those she loves something dear.
Mirroring the alchemical process of turning oranges into wine, Ines must create a new life from a bitter pith, pressing sweetness from life's agonies as she struggles toward artistic freedom and feminine awakening.
]]>Reeling from her father's death, Zara Pines accepts a ghostwriting gig for celebrity chef Jane Bailey. Jane, star of the wildly popular cooking show 30 Bucks Tops, insists that Zara spend the summer with her in her East Hampton home.
As the two women create Jane's book, their attachment grows stronger. Zara, who's lost and searching for an identity, finds one in the shadow of Jane. She starts wearing Jane's clothes, speaking like her, and adopting her mannerisms. Eventually, the line between the ghostwriter and the subject blurs, and Zara starts to see the side Jane keeps hidden from the cameras.
This dark and twisty novel about fame, lies, and obsession will make even the most openhearted reader question how safe it is to trust the people they admire.
'A deliciously twisted love story that sneakily upends your expectations at every turn; a candy apple with a razor blade hidden inside.' Graham Moore, Academy Award-winning screenwriter of The Imitation Game
]]>A Treasury of Norse Mythology is one of Barnes & Noble's Collectible Editions classics. Each volume features authoritative texts by the world's greatest authors in an exquisitely designed bonded-leather binding, with distinctive gilt edging and a ribbon bookmark.
]]>H. A. Guerber was born in Mount Clemens, Michigan, in 1859. With the exception of her education, for which she went to Paris, France, she lived most of her adult life in New Jersey, where she died in 1929. A teacher by profession, Guerber devoted her life to educating her fellow citizens about European literary and cultural history through the publication of about three dozen books on a vast array of topics ranging from famous operas to Jewish history to Shakespeares plays.
]]>A Treasury of Greek Mythology is one of Barnes & Noble's Collectible Editions classics. Each volume features authoritative texts by the world's greatest authors in an exquisitely designed bonded-leather binding, with distinctive gilt edging and a ribbon bookmark.
]]>Set against a backdrop of Australia's central deserts, The Dingo's Noctuary explores themes of identity, belonging, and the fragile threads that connect all living beings. At the heart of the tale is a soul's dark night, the flight of a lady motorcyclist, in the prime of her invisibility, and her mongrel dingo Moon, into the Tanami desert. She's searching for a caravan of miraculous dog-headed beings, glimpsed in dreams and the dementia tales of an old desert lady.
The Dingo's Noctuary is an illustrated verse novel, complete at 70,500 words. It includes accurate hand drawn maps of the Australian central deserts, pressings of rare plants, and forty-seven lumachrome glass prints, afterlife portraits of animals and birds. The story unfolds through combinations of poetry and prose, alongside visual images- maps of land and stars, plant pressings, and forty-seven afterlife portraits of animals and birds. It is a single-authored book in which the images and texts are equally weighted. The book was written over thirty-seven desert crossings, sometimes on the motorcycle with the dog on the back. The entire second half of the book was written on a typewriter after a motorcycle crash (the unsuccessful 37th crossing) left me unable to use a computer. I made a motorcycle blog about one of the journeys in this book here https://judithnangalacrispin.medium.com.
Work from The Dingo's Noctuary has received a number of awards and prizes including the 2023 Sunshine Coast Art Prize and the 2020 Blake Prize for Poetry. It was highly commended in the 2023 Mullins Conceptual Photography Prize and shortlisted for the 2023 Milburn Art Prize, the 2023 and 2025 Ravenswood Prizes for Australian Women's Art, and the 2019 Olive Cotton Prize. Images and texts from this book were included in the Lunar Codex time-capsule which was deposited on the moon as part of the Blue Ghost mission in 2024. A mock-up of the complete book was shortlisted for the 2023 Arles Luma Recontres Dummy Book Prize.
]]>In this visionary collection, A. Frances Johnson's cautionary threnodies muse on environmental depletion, colonial dispossession and personal loss. These poems deftly criticise enduring theme-park notions of the natural in spheres poetic, and beyond.
]]>In this surprising and poignant story, four strangers meet on a journey from Edinburgh to London. Each has a tale of love and of railways: for Mark, a brief encounter on a railway platform leads to an impulsive and possibly dangerous decision; Kay recounts the long journey back to her childhood home in Australia and the love that was there; David remembers a teenage friendship that faded into love; and Michael makes a discovery that art and people may not be what they seem to be at first glance.
These are very different experiences, but throughout them all runs a deep current of love. And loving others, as one of the characters observes, is the good thing we do in our lives.
'writing as warm as cocoa exceedingly good' The Times
]]>When the owner of the patisserie is killed, Hannah is suspected of murdering her business rival. Her friend, Emily, is determined to clear Hannah's name. She seems to be facing an impossible task...until her little dog Poppy makes a surprising discovery.
]]>When their wealthy mutual friend Claire offers Roisin a significant amount of money under the guise of 'freelance work', Roisin thinks her luck might finally be changing. But Claire's proposal is not all it seems, and soon Roisin finds herself trapped. Paralysed by both her intense infatuation with Eve and her secret arrangement with Claire, Roisin must walk a delicate line to avoid losing what matters to her most.
'Everything about this book is alive. I inhaled it' Maria Sledmere, author and critic
'A spry tale of friendship and desire, best inhaled in a single sitting.Summer Hoursis astute, funny, and fizzing with life' Malachy Tallack
'Alessandra's writing is bothvivid and compelling, combining raconteurial warmth with sharpness, poise and an enviable instinct for rhythm' Daisy Lafarge
]]>There is no flash of light, no crumbling, no quaking. Each person in New York wakes up on an unfamiliar block when the buildings all switch locations overnight. The power grid has snapped, thousands of residents are missing, and the Empire State Building is on Coney Island for now. The next night, it happens again.
Esme Green and Arjun Varma work for the City of New York's Emergency Management team and are tasked with disaster response for the Unmapping. As Esme tries to wade through the bureaucratic nightmare of an endlessly shuffling city, she's distracted by the ongoing search for her missing fiance. Meanwhile, Arjun focuses on the ground-level rescue of disoriented New Yorkers, hoping to become the hero the city needs.
While scientists scramble to find a solution or at least a means to cope and mysterious 'red cloak' cults crop up in the disaster's wake, New York begins to reckon with a new reality no one recognises. For Esme and Arjun, the fight to hold the city together will mean tackling questions about themselves that they were too afraid to ask and facing answers they never expected. With themes of climate change, political unrest, and life in a state of emergency, The Unmapping is a timely and captivating debut.
]]>When a dilapidated distillery comes up for sale in rural Kintyre, Eilidh and her wife Morag jump at the chance. But their ambition to run the first women-owned whisky distillery in Scotland seems to be scuppered when a grisly, decades-old secret is revealed: two dead bodies have been stuffed into barrels, perfectly preserved in single malt.
To add to their woes, a TV crew has just arrived and the townsfolk will not leave them alone. Eilidh becomes obsessed with solving the murders while juggling whisky tastings, ceilidhs, protests and scandals everything you'd expect from a wee Scottish town imprisoned by its own geography. And no matter how hard you try, the locals will always find out your secrets.
]]>A visit to Glasgow for a job interview in 1931 unexpectedly places Cuthbert at the centre of a devastating crime. Unwittingly, he finds himself working at the intersection between rising British fascism, anti-Semitism and the infamous Glasgow razor gangs. To solve the case, Cuthbert needs to rely on all the expertise he can gather from those around him. But who can he trust?
]]>Welcoming a fresh roster of seaside spectres, tin-mine terrors and holiday haunters, this return to the bountiful fold of Cornish horror fiction features more lost classics from Victorian periodicals alongside atmospheric tales from the great twentieth-century writers of the Cornish weird such as Mary Williams, Mary Butts and Sabine Baring-Gould.
]]>Offering a bounty of lost or forgotten strange and Gothic tales set in Cornwall, Cornish Horrors explores the rich folklore and traditions of the region in a journey through mines, local mythology, shipwrecks, seascapes, and the coming of the railway and tourism.
With stories by Gothic luminaries such as Bram Stoker and Edgar Allan Poe, this new collection also features chilling yarns of the haunted peninsula from a host of underappreciated writers from the past two centuries.
]]>Though best known today as the author of The Thirty-Nine Steps, this new volume aims to foreground his contribution to the early weird tale, including some of his most classic stories alongside a number rescued from rare periodicals of the early twentieth century.
]]>James Machin is a researcher of British weird fiction, and editor of Handheld Press's British Weird anthology. He has worked with the John Buchan Society to promote Buchan's weird and uncanny fiction, and included a chapter on Buchan in his monograph Weird Fiction in Britain, 1880-1939.
]]>From misty moors, crags and clifftops comes a hoard of eighteen strange tales gathered by Johnny Mains, award-winning anthologist and editor of the British Library anthology Celtic Weird. Sourced from Scotland's storied literary heritage and bustling with witches, ghosts, devils and merfolk, this selection celebrates the works of treasured Scottish writers such as John Buchan, Robert Louis Stevenson, Dorothy K. Haynes and Neil M. Gunn alongside rare pieces by lesser-known authors including two tales translated from Scots Gaelic.
Brooding in the borderlands where strange folklore, bizarre mythology and twentieth-century hauntings meet, this volume promises chills and shivers as keen and fresh as the wind-whipped wilds of Scotland.
]]>Another of the series' popular anthologies celebrating forgotten classics and material not printed since its original publication. Perfect bitesize holiday reading for the Classic Crime enthusiast and the casual sleuther alike, featuring mysteries focused on British holidays and abroad.
]]>An Oxford Master is slain on campus during Pentecost. A headmaster faces off in a deadly battle of wits with a disgruntled parent. A sixth-form public school prank courts a murderous consequence.
In this new anthology theft, blackmail, murder and mystery run amok through the hush of the university library, the cacophonies of school corridors and the simmering tensions of the staff room. Delving into the stacks and tomes of the British Library collections, Martin Edwards invites you to a course on the darker side of scholarly ambition with an essential reading list of fifteen masterful short stories.
With a cohort of writers including Dorothy L. Sayers, Ethel Lina White, Jacqueline Wilson, Michael Innes and Edmund Crispin, this new anthology offers a selection of classics and rarities to provide a rewarding education in the beguiling art of mystery writing.
]]>Japan's master storyteller Ryunosuke Akutagawa (1892-1927) wrote more than 150 short stories. Widely regarded as 'the Father of the Japanese short story', he blended modern sensibilities with timeless themes to profound effect.
This new anthology offers the most comprehensive collection of Akutagawa's work ever published in English. It features fresh translations of his most celebrated stories alongside many lesser-known and never-before-translated pieces:
An essential volume for every serious reader of Japanese literature and a captivating introduction to one of the world's great literary voices.
]]>Richard Medhurst was born in the UK and lives in Yokohama. His translation of Akutagawa's An Odd Tale was published in Kyoto Journal in 2018, and his translation of Eiji Suzuki's Lingering Fragrance was published in the anthology Strokes of Brush and Blade (Kurodahan Press, 2018). He has worked as a translator, editor and writer for the online magazine Nippon.com for over a decade, specialising in literature and history. He has also written a popular series of articles about studying Japanese which have received tens of thousands of page views. His article on Japan's 72 microseasons helped popularise the concept in the English-speaking world.
]]>Sseki Natsume is Japan's most popular writer, well known in the West for his satirical novels like I Am a Cat, Botchan and Kokoro. However, he first made a name for himself in Japan as a poet, publishing hundreds of haiku over a period of several decades. Until now very few of these have appeared in English.
Sseki Natsume's Collected Haiku presents 1,000 of the author's most famous verses, selected and translated by Erik Lofgren, a leading Sseki expert. The poems are grouped into chapters corresponding to the five traditional Japanese seasons (New Year's, Spring, Summer, Autumn and Winter).
In these poems, Sseki explores themes ranging from wabi sabi Zen simplicity to his personal experiences including several years studying in England. His verses are evocative of the splendor of the natural world, the power of human emotions, and the serenity found in living a peaceful life.
Each poem is presented in the original Japanese with a Romanised version and English translation. Audio recordings of the English and Japanese versions are provided online.
]]>Erik Lofgren is Professor of East Asian Studies at Bucknell University where he teaches classes on Japanese language, literature, and film. He has published several works on the poetry of Umezaki Haruo, works of fiction by Furui Yoshikichi and Ooka Shohei, and the films Rashomon and Shin Gojira.
]]>A chance encounter irrevocably links a university student to an older man he simply calls Sensei ('Teacher'). Intrigued by Sensei's aloofness, the student visits him with increasing frequency, and Sensei and his beautiful wife eventually open their home and lives to him. The student graduates and is called home to care for his dying father, but Sensei draws him back with a letter revealing a secret that has shadowed him since youth.
Written in 1914, toward the end of Soseki's career, Kokoro provides a timeless psychological analysis of man's alienation from society. It is recognized as one of his most important works and a milestone in the emergence of the psychological novel in Japan. Its universal themes of friendship, betrayal and the struggle for meaning in a rapidly changing world continue to resonate today.
]]>Edwin McClellan was a leading scholar, translator and professor of Japanese literature at Yale University. He is noted for his translations of Soseki's Kokoro and Grass on the Wayside, and is the author of Two Japanese Novelists: Soseki and Toson. He was awarded the Noma Prize for literary translation and the Japanese government's Order of the Rising Sun.
J. Keith Vincent teaches Japanese literature at Boston University, where he also directs the MFA Program in Literary Translation. His translations include A Riot of Goldfish by Kanoko Okamoto, Devils in Daylight by Junichiro Tanizaki, and Soseki's novel Michikusa, forthcoming from Tuttle.
]]>The Art of War is one of the world's great masterpieces presenting timeless strategies that are as important in the boardroom as on the battlefield. Now, experience Sun Tzu's classic as never before in this riveting graphic novel brimming with battles, betrayals and political intrigues.
The book recounts the conflict between the kingdom of Wu as they plot to attack the far more powerful state of Chu, with both leaders navigating internal plots and power struggles that will forever alter the fate of China. The fascinating accounts in this book include:
Sun Tzu's Art of War brings to life not only the tactical brilliance of Sun Tzu's teachings but also the human drama behind them the ambition, sacrifice and the relentless pursuit of victory.
]]>Takashi Momonari is a manga artist from Narita, Japan. He has illustrated several best-selling manga including The Rise and Fall of the Three Kingdoms and a two-part biography of Sun Tzu.
Yoshihiro Watanabe is a professor in the School of Culture, Media and Society at Waseda University in Tokyo, Japan.
]]>Called The Mediterranean Flower for its beauty, Split has a complex history that is perhaps best explored within a mystery. In 1989, beautiful Silva doesn't come home. Young cop Gorki Sain discovers that she isn't what she seemed she dabbled in drugs and dealt in heroin. But Gorki soon finds himself out of a job as Yugoslavia plunges into a fratricidal war. Silva's brother stubbornly continues the search amid the upheavals of Croatian society, from the fall of communism through the 1991-1995 war. The former cop returns to solve the 30-year-old mystery in a different role, one less than ethically tied to toxic land speculation and corruption that comes with the tourist boom on the Dalmatian Coast.
'A masterpiece.' Liberation
'As inspiring as the Swedes Maj Sjwall and Per Wahl. Pavii brilliantly resorts to thenoir novel to accompany ordinary lives caught in the collapse of communism, the rise of nationalism and the shock of wars.' Le Monde
'The city of Split is more than a setting, almost a character. A tourist mirage in the summer, the Croatian port is confronted, out of season, with the aftermath of war, deindustrialization, and all kinds of depravity. Beyond the family drama and the police investigation, the metamorphosis of Croatia interests Pavii.' Telerama
]]>Matt Robinson, born in the UK in 1978, lives in Ljubljana, Slovenia. Formerly a foreign correspondent with Reuters, he now works as a freelance editor and literary translator. Red Water is the second novel he has translated.
]]>The headlines tell of war, unrest and religious clashes. But if you look beyond them you will see life in the Middle East as it is really lived adolescent love, the fragility of marriage, pain of the most quotidian kind. Mai Al-Nakib's luminous stories unveil the lives of ordinary people and the power of objects to hold extraordinary memories.
'A densely imagined and beautifully written debut.' Sydney Morning Herald
'With her compassion for an old, vanished world and her exceptional eye for the bruised landscape of the modern Middle East, Al-Nakib should be heralded as an exciting new literary voice.' The National
]]>After the sudden death of his father, Jordan Pearce reluctantly takes over the family's generations-old oyster-farming business on Louisiana's Gulf Coast. He's still adjusting to the new role when the Deepwater Horizon oil rig explodes offshore, triggering one of the worst environmental disasters in history and throwing his hardscrabble coastal town into crisis.
While looking after his distressed mother, Jordan struggles to keep the company afloat and is forced to seek help from his estranged brother, Benny, a beatnik musician living in New Orleans. In the face of impending tragedy, this small community searches for a way forward, just as the fractured Pearce family, finally reunited under one roof, must find the hope and courage to save their legacy.
'The complex characters and the lovingly described Louisiana setting bring this eco-tragedy sympathetically to life. Recommended to readers of issue-oriented fiction such as Charlotte McConaghy's Migrations and Barbara Kingsolver's Demon Copperhead.' Booklist
]]>Hara Duja Gatdula, queen of the island nation of Maynara, holds the divine power to move the earth. But her strength is failing and the line of succession gives her little comfort. Her heir, Laya, is a danger a petty and passionate princess who wields the enormous power of the skies with fickle indifference. Circling the throne is Imeria Kulaw the matriarch of a traitorous rival family who wields recklessly enhanced powers of her own with designs to secure a high-ranking position for her son and claim the crown for her family. Each woman has a secret weakness a lover, a heartbreak, a lie. But each is willing to pay the steepest price to bring down her rivals once and for all.
Filled with passion, romance, betrayal, and divine magic, Black Salt Queen journeys to a gorgeous precolonial island nation where women and secrets reign.
]]>After nine years as the people's beloved princess in the sun-soaked Kingdom of Carca, Vita witnesses the execution of her mother by her father's hand. Forced into exile, Vita fades into obscurity with her only friends the crows that visit her window.
Eleven years later, Vita is given a choice: marry an enemy general, granting him legitimacy to take the throne, or die as the forgotten princess. With time running out, Vita meets Soline, an intriguing lady-in-waiting who introduces her to the powerful-but-unstable magic of alchemy.
If Vita and Soline can learn to control it and the undeniable spark between them they could burn the world of men to the ground.
]]>Shortlisted for the NUS Singapore History Prize 2021
Shortlisted for the Singapore Book Awards 2018, Best Fiction Title
Siew Li leaves her husband and young children to fight for freedom in the jungles of Malaya. Decades later, a Malaysian journalist returns to her homeland to uncover the truth of a massacre committed during the Emergency, while Siew Li's son uncovers the truth of his family's past. Informed by years of painstaking research, Jeremy Tiang's debut novel dives into the tumultuous days of leftist movements and political detentions in Singapore and Malaysia. It follows an extended family from the 1940s to the present day as they navigate the choppy political currents of the region. State of Emergency questions whether we can grasp the truth after the fact. And yet, in the very telling of its interlocking stories, it reaffirms the importance of trying.
'State of Emergency is a compelling, important piece of work from one of Singapore's finest living authors.' The Straits Times
]]>The flight from New York to Cairo is long longer still for two siblings on a journey to bury their mother. When they discover their father's unforgivable betrayal, what's left of their family crumbles.
Hannah gives up her spot at Columbia Law to remain in Egypt, where she navigates romantic entanglements and a new culture. Back in America, Zain's self-destructive behaviour begins to catch up with him, leaving him to wonder whether he's any different from his father.
When the siblings reunite in Cairo months later, Zain is nearing rock bottom, and Hannah finds herself in the middle of the Arab Spring uprising. Together they confront shared secrets and reconcile their conservative upbringing with their new beliefs as adults. Will they heal together, or has the loss of their only bridge their mother set them permanently adrift?
A tender reflection on the effects of grief and loss, this deeply felt novel explores how siblings come together to mend a fractured family and, in the process, find themselves.
]]>A trans woman makes increasingly frequent hoax calls to a business where she's had a negative experience, watching the consequences with perverse joy. A group of aging queers turns to bank robbery to stop the sale of their bungalow complex to a development company. As the president prepares to give a speech, two women lurk among the journalists, ready to shoot him. And an aspiring author takes to stealing items from strangers' homes in a kind of cosmic redistribution each time one of her relationships fail.
In sixteen brilliant, wild-eyed stories, Be Gay, Do Crime delivers a celebration and reckoning of why queer people turn to crime unintentionally, as a means of survival, as protest, as rescue, or to right injustices big and small.
'Chaotic, sexy, and binge-worthy as hell, Be Gay, Do Crime is an EVENT.' Ruth Madievsky, author of All Night Pharmacy
]]>Anna Dorn is the author of the novels Perfume Pain, Exalted, and Vagablonde. Exalted was nominated for an L.A. Times Book Prize. Her next book American Spirits is forthcoming for Simon and Schuster. She lives in Los Angeles.
Aurora Mattia was born in Hong Kong and lives in Texas. Her first book, The Fifth Wound, is published by Nightboat Books. Her second book, Unsex Me Here, is published by Coffee House Press. Her stories have appeared in Zoetrope: All-Story, Prairie Schooner, SPASM, Joyland, and elsewhere; and also in exhibitions at the RISD Museum and the Renaissance society, accompanying portraits by Elle Perez. She's working on a new novel called Seven Come Eleven, and writing some country songs.
Emily R. Austin is the author of Everyone in This Room Will Someday Be Dead, Interesting Facts About Space, and the poetry collection, Gay Girl Prayers. She was born in Ontario, Canada, and has received two writing grants from the Canadian Council for the Arts. She studied English literature and library science at Western University. She currently lives in Ottawa, in the territory of the Anishinaabe Algonquin Nation.
francesca ekwuyasi is a learner, artist and storyteller born in Lagos, Nigeria. She was awarded the Writers Trust Dayne Ogilvie Prize for LGBTQ2S+ Emerging Writers in 2022 for her debut novel Butter Honey Pig Bread (Arsenal Pulp Press, 2020). Butter Honey Pig Bread was also shortlisted for a Lambda Literary Award, the Governor General's Literary Award for Fiction, the Amazon Canada First Novel Award and longlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize and the Dublin Literary Award.Butter Honey Pig Bread placed second on CBC's Canada Reads: Canada's Annual Battle of the Books, where it was selected as one of five contenders in 2021 for 'the one book that all of Canada should read'. She is co-author of Curious Sounds: A Dialogue in Three Movements, a multi-genre collaborative book with Roger Mooking. francesca was Queens University's 2023 Carolyn Smart Writer in Residence, her writing has appeared in the Malahat Review, Transition Magazine, Room Magazine, Brittle Paper, the Ex-Puritan, C-Magazine, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, Canadian Art, Chatelain and elsewhere. Her short story run is Heaven was longlisted for the 2019 Journey Prize.
Kayla Kumari Upadhyaya is a lesbian writer of essays, short stories, and pop culture criticism living in Orlando. She is the author of Helen House (Burrow Press 2022), a queer horror novelette. She is the managing editor of Autostraddle and the managing editor of TriQuarterly. Her short stories appear in McSweeney's Quarterly Concern, Catapult, The Offing, Joyland, The Rumpus, and others. She was a 2021 nonfiction fellow and a 2023 speculative fiction writer in residence at Lambda Literary's Writers Retreat for Emerging LGBTQ Voices. She is a 2023-2024 Tin House Reading Fellow.
Maame Blue is a Ghanaian-Londoner, creative writing tutor and author of the novel Bad Love, which won the 2021 Betty Trask award, and was shortlisted for the Betty Trask Prize. Her short stories have been published in Not Quite Right For Us (Flipped Eye Publishing), New Australian Fiction 2020 (Kill Your Darlings), and Joyful, Joyful (Pan Macmillan). Maame is a recipient of the 2022 Society of Authors Travelling Scholarship and was a 2022 POCC Artist-in-Residence. She contributes regularly to Royal Literary Fund publication Writers Mosaic and her writing has appeared in many places including Refinery29, The Independent and iNews. Her second novel The Rest Of You will be published by Amistad (US) and Verve Books (UK) in Autumn 2024.
Marisa (Mac) Crane is a queer, nonbinary writer. Their debut novel, I Keep My Exoskeletons to Myself, was a January Indie Next Pick and NYT Editors' Choice. Their work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Adroit Journal, The Offing, Joyland, No Tokens, Florida Review, Passages North, Lit Hub, TriQuarterly, and elsewhere, and their second novel, A Sharp Endless Need, is forthcoming from Dial Press in March 2025.
Myriam Gurba is the author of several books. Her most recent essay collection, Creep: Accusations and Confessions, is a finalist for a National Book Critics Circle Award in criticism. Her writing has also appeared in the Los Angeles Times, The New York Times, The Paris Review and the Believer. She enjoys solving crossword puzzles and binge watching Real Housewives.
Myriam Lacroix was born in Montreal to a Quebecois mother and a Moroccan father, and currently lives in Vancouver. She has a BFA in Creative Writing from the University of British Columbia and an MFA from Syracuse University, where she was editor in chief of Salt Hill Journal and received the New York Public Humanities Fellowship for creating Out-Front, an LGBTQ+ writing group whose goal was to expand the possibilities of queer writing.
Priya Guns wrote Your Driver is Waiting.
Sam Cohen is the author of Sarahland. Her fiction also appears in Bomb, Fence, O Magazine, Electric Literature, and others.
SJ Sindu is a Tamil diaspora author of two literary novels (Marriage of a Thousand Lies, which won the Publishing Triangle Edmund White Award; and Blue-Skinned Gods, which was an Indie Next Pick and a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award), two graphic novels (Shakti and Tall Water), and one collection of short stories (The Goth House Experiment). Sindu holds a PhD in English and Creative Writing from Florida State University and is a co-editor for Zero Street, a literary fiction series featuring LGBTQ+ authors through the University of Nebraska Press. Sindu is an assistant professor at Virginia Commonwealth University. More at sjsindu.com or @sjsindu on Twitter/Instagram/Threads.
Soula Emmanuel was born in Dublin to an Irish mother and a Greek father. She studied at universities in Ireland and Sweden, emerging with a master's in economic demography. In 2023, her debut novel Wild Geese was published by Footnote Press and the Feminist Press at CUNY. She currently lives on Ireland's east coast and is working on a second novel.
Temim Fruchter is a queer nonbinary anti-Zionist Jewish writer who lives in Brooklyn, NY. She holds an MFA in fiction from the University of Maryland, and is the recipient of fellowships from the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities, Vermont Studio Center, and a 2020 Rona Jaffe Foundation Writer's Award. She is co-host of Pete's Reading Series in Brooklyn. Her debut novel, City of Laughter, is out now from Grove Atlantic.
Works by Venita Blackburn have appeared in the New Yorker, NY Times, Harper's, McSweeney's, Story Magazine, the Virginia Quarterly Review, the Paris Review, and others. She was awarded a Bread Loaf Fellowship in 2014 and several Pushcart prize nominations. She received the Prairie Schooner book prize for fiction, which resulted in the publication of her collected stories, Black Jesus and Other Superheroes, in 2017. In 2018 she earned a place as a finalist for the PEN/Bingham award for debut fiction, finalist for the NYPL Young Lions award and was recipient of the PEN America Los Angeles literary prize in fiction. Blackburn's second collection of stories is How to Wrestle a Girl, 2021, finalist for a Lambda Literary Prize and was a NYTimes editor's choice. Her debut novel, Dead in Long Beach, California, is about the mania of grief, all of human history and a lesbian assassin at the end of the world. She is the founder and president of Live, Write, an organization devoted to offering free creative writing workshops for communities of color: livewriteworkshop.com. Her hometown is Compton, California, and she is an associate professor of creative writing at California State University, Fresno.
]]>A middle-aged Black woman exacts revenge on the aggressively average men she meets on dating sites. A girl buries pieces of herself in a hole beneath an apple tree, hoping to escape her mother's life of struggle and servitude. A group of teenage girls compete for the title of 'Worst Girl in America.' A young woman in Taiwan becomes infatuated with a female scam caller, a fleeting ghost of a love that blossoms from strangeness. And a wealthy woman goes to unconventional, and perhaps not entirely ethical, lengths to find her dream man.
In these sixteen stories, we see women at their most monstrous - as con artists and murderers, cutthroats and scalpers, ruled by ambition and grief and spite. Characters for those tired of being told to play nice. Dressed to the nines in morally gray, the stories in this anthology comprise an envelope full of teeth: each one distinct, unsettling, and sharp enough to rip out a throat.
List of contributors: Alice Ash, Alicia Elliott, Alison Rumfitt, Aliya Whiteley, Amanda Leduc, Chana Porter, Chantal V. Johnson, Chaya Bhuvaneswar, Deesha Philyaw, K-Ming Chang, Lauren Groff, Maisy Card, Megan Giddings, Sarah Rose Etter, Vanessa Chan, Yah Yah Scholfield
]]>Kristel Buckley is an editor, publicist and former publisher from the Big Smoke! She is more than happy to talk your ear off about the unfaithful representation of women in history, and her passion is a more equitable, inclusive future for all stories from all voices.
]]>Along the way Magnolia Din-Olden realises the road to the outback leads to an inland empire of mystery and terror. The result is an enthralling tale that fuses myth and folklore in a timeless landscape.
]]>Meet James Bond, the world's most famous spy, in these landmark 70th anniversary reissues of Ian Fleming's classic series.
In the novel that introduced James Bond to the world, Ian Fleming's agent 007 is dispatched to a French casino in Royale-les-Eaux. His mission? Bankrupt a ruthless Russian agent who's been on a bad luck streak at the baccarat table. 'Le Chiffre', has been a prime target of the British Secret Service for years. If Bond can wipe out his bankroll, Le Chiffre will likely be 'retired' by his paymasters in Moscow. But what if the cards won't cooperate?
Taut, tense, and effortlessly stylish, Ian Fleming's inaugural James Bond adventure has all the hallmarks that made the series a touchstone for a generation of readers.
'It was 1953 and it was very remarkable for the time, because Bond was so cruel. He's horribly tortured in the book and there are some very grim moments in it. But I also think it's Fleming's best writing. It wings along it's very hard to stop reading. It's also brilliant at place. He manages to summon up the smoky stench of a casino in a way that no one else has ever managed to do.' Ben Macintyre
]]>Auric Goldfinger is the richest man in England though his wealth can't be found in banks. He's been hoarding vast stockpiles of his namesake metal, and it's attracted the suspicion of 007's superiors at MI6. Sent to investigate, Bond uncovers an ingenious gold-smuggling scheme, as well as Goldfinger's most daring caper yet: Operation Grand Slam, a gold heist so audacious it could bring down the world economy and put the fate of the West in the hands of SMERSH. To stop Goldfinger, Bond will have to survive a showdown with the sinister millionaire's henchman, Oddjob, a tenacious karate master who can kill with one well-aimed toss of his razor-rimmed bowler hat.
'If you have never read a Bond novel in your life, read Goldfinger.Fleming was at the height of his powers with Goldfinger and had learned how to dash off a compelling story. He had also perfected a formula perfect for the dark days of the Cold War.' Wesley Wark
]]>His first novel, Casino Royale, was published in 1953 and introduced James Bond, Special Agent 007, to the world. The first print run sold out within a month. Following this initial success, he published a Bond title every year until his death. The Bond novels have sold more than 100 million copies and inspired a hugely successful film franchise which began in 1962 with the release of Dr No, starring Sean Connery as 007.
]]>An international diamond-smuggling pipeline has opened up and the British Treasury wants to know who's controlling it. Impersonating a captured courier named Peter Franks, Bond infiltrates the criminal ring and finds an unlikely ally in Tiffany Case. As the ring's stateside go-between, she may be just another link in the chain, but Tiffany is also Bond's best shot at finding the elusive figure at the head of the operation a syndicate boss known only by the initials 'ABC'. But if Bond's cover gets blown, he'll find that the only thing harder than a diamond is surviving the payback of a pair of murderous henchmen.
With a sparkling trail of smuggled gems as bait, Diamonds Are Forever leads Bond on a globe-hopping mission where deadly assassins lurk behind every corner.
]]>His first novel, Casino Royale, was published in 1953 and introduced James Bond, Special Agent 007, to the world. The first print run sold out within a month. Following this initial success, he published a Bond title every year until his death. The Bond novels have sold more than 100 million copies and inspired a hugely successful film franchise which began in 1962 with the release of Dr No, starring Sean Connery as 007.
]]>In the ground-breaking first novel of Ian Fleming's classic series, James Bond is dispatched to a French casino for an unforgettable and possibly lethal game of baccarat.
This prestige hardback features bonus content as well as brand new cover art by legendary designer Michael Gillette.
]]>His first novel, Casino Royale, was published in 1953 and introduced James Bond, Special Agent 007, to the world. The first print run sold out within a month. Following this initial success, he published a Bond title every year until his death. The Bond novels have sold more than 100 million copies and inspired a hugely successful film franchise which began in 1962 with the release of Dr No, starring Sean Connery as 007.
]]>From the jazz joints of Harlem to the shark-infested waters of Jamaica, James Bond takes on the feared Mr Big and his criminal empire.
This prestige hardback features bonus content as well as brand new cover art by legendary designer Michael Gillette.
]]>His first novel, Casino Royale, was published in 1953 and introduced James Bond, Special Agent 007, to the world. The first print run sold out within a month. Following this initial success, he published a Bond title every year until his death. The Bond novels have sold more than 100 million copies and inspired a hugely successful film franchise which began in 1962 with the release of Dr No, starring Sean Connery as 007.
]]>A woman on the run meets two hardened killers during one nightmarish night in the Adirondack Mountains. With time running out, can Bond save Vivienne and himself?
This prestige hardback features bonus content as well as brand new cover art by legendary designer Michael Gillette.
]]>His first novel, Casino Royale, was published in 1953 and introduced James Bond, Special Agent 007, to the world. The first print run sold out within a month. Following this initial success, he published a Bond title every year until his death. The Bond novels have sold more than 100 million copies and inspired a hugely successful film franchise which began in 1962 with the release of Dr No, starring Sean Connery as 007.
]]>Meet 007, England's last hope to thwart a deadly plan to turn the Coronation of King Charles III into a state funeral. If M can count on anyone can save the day, it's Bond, James Bond.
2 DAYS UNTIL THE CORONATION
Meet England's worst nightmare. His name is thelstan of Wessex, who has declared himself the rightful heir to the throne and plans to rewrite the course of history. And with a private army backing him, he might just succeed.
Charlie Higson, the author of the bestselling Young Bond series, returns to the world of James Bond for this blockbuster adventure of deception, where the future of the country hangs in the balance.
]]>The action ricochets across the globe to a volcanic Greek island, where the malign Colonel Sun Liang-tan of the People's Liberation Army of China is collaborating with the ex-Nazi commander, Von Richter, in planning a world-dominating conspiracy. Bond's allies the beautiful, brown-haired Greek agent, Ariadne Alexandrou; along with a tough-as-nails former World War II resistance fighter are quickly neutralised by the venomous Colonel Sun. Alone and unarmed, faces off against these two nefarious villains.
Stripped of all professional aids, James Bond faces the deadly devices of Colonel Sun and his Nazi cohort in a test that brings him to the verge of his physical abilities.
]]>In the Australian desert, a nuclear bomb explodes. There are no survivors and no clues about who has made it or detonated it. In England, two police officers are shot dead when they apprehend a cargo vessel in Portsmouth dock. Vast quantities of heroin are later found on board. And in Hong Kong, an explosion rips through one of the colony's famous floating restaurants, killing the entire Board of Directors of EurAsia Enterprises Ltd, a multi-billion dollar shipping corporation.
The People's Republic of China is about to resume control after a century and a half of British rule and the colony is a powder keg waiting to explode. The tension reaches breaking point when a solicitor from one of Britain's most prestigious law firms is killed in a car bomb at Government House.
These apparently random events are connected and Bond must find out how and why. From the heady casinos of Macau to the seedy strip clubs of Kowloon, 007's investigations bring him into conflict with ruthless Triad gangs, a power-hungry Chinese general and a beautiful night club hostess called Sunni Pei.
All inquiries seem to lead to EurAsia Enterprises Ltd and its assassinated owner. James Bond is about to come up against one of the most formidable adversaries of his career.
]]>*Longlisted for the Ngaio Marsh Award 2020*
She hasn't seen her brother in years. Now, he's dead.
When Judi Westerholme finds out her estranged brother has been murdered, she assumes it's connected to his long term drug addiction. Returning home, she is shocked to discover he had been clean for years, had a wife - now missing - a child and led a respectable life. But if he had turned his life around, why was he killed in a drug deal shooting? And where is his wife?
Desperate to know what really happened, Judi sets out to uncover the truth, even though it means confronting her own traumatic past. But she's not the only one looking for answers...
She turned her back on her brother before. Should she trust him now?
With a gutsy, unapologetic protagonist, Trust Me, I'm Dead is a gritty and bold crime thriller that explores the sacrifices people will make for their families.
'Trust Me, I'm Dead, is fast paced, well structured, twists and turns on almost every page some brutal, some tender, and hallelujah, Clark follows the great rule of writing crime novels.Keep the suspense level high make the reader wait. Halfway through I nearly flipped to the end but I restrained myself.Trust Me, I'm Deadis confident, funny, full of surprises. Highly recommended.'- Renee Taylor, author of The Wild Card and These Two Hands
]]>Judi Westerholme has been through it. Brave and strong-willed, she's just about coping in her new role as foster parent to her orphaned niece, taking a job at the local pub to help make ends meet. Then the pub's landlord and Judi's friend, army veteran Pete 'Macca' Maccasfield, is murdered, and her world is suddenly turned upside down.
Despite warnings from the city police to keep out of it, Judi can't help but get involved in the search for Macca's killer. But she soon becomes deeply entangled with some ruthlessly dangerous men. She must act fast and think smart to work out what they want - before anyone else gets hurt... Long buried secrets resurface in Sherryl Clark's pacey crime novel that pushes Judi Westerholme to her limits to protect the people she loves most.
]]>Already struggling to juggle co-running the local pub with her childcare responsibilities for her orphaned niece, Judi does not need life to become any more complicated.
Yet, as usual, complications arrive in spades: she starts receiving threatening, late-night phone calls before discovering one of her employees, Kate, shot dead.
Judi finds herself caught up in a murder investigation, as well as the hunt for the Kate's fourteen-year-old daughter, who has been missing since the murder.
Add in the uncertainty of her relationship with Melbourne-based DS Heath and the fact that her estranged mother's nursing home keeps urging her to visit, and Judi might finally be at breaking point.
]]>In her humorous and emotionally resonant debut, Emma Smith-Stevens follows the exploits and evolution of a young man known only as 'the Australian' over the course of a dozen years, from his time posing for tourist photos as Superman to his life in New York, chasing fame and fortune. Married to a woman he barely knows and struggling to forge a relationship with his son, the Australian travels between the US and Melbourne, seeking to reconnect with his deceased parents through his father's Australian Outdoor Geographic magazines and the Dreaming Tracks, sacred landmarks his mother longed to explore.
Through this quest for self-discovery, the Australian becomes both more and less enigma: 'the idea of this guy you could find in any city, a hostel anywhere in the world, smiling, suntanned, hauling a backpack.' A poignant and at times satirical meditation on masculinity, fatherhood, isolation, New York City, fame, and loss, The Australian examines the human tendency to fall in love with the idea of another person and the importance of knowing one's essential nature.
]]>These accounts of living in and emerging from the dark wrestle with the angel of language. Suffering does not preclude humour and may, in fact, require it, in poems written from the shadows but committed to the light. This work refuses to keep pain a secret. Shame is a lurking presence.
Gwyneth Lewis has won wide acclaim for her versatile and varied writing across genres, most notably in her award-winning poetry in both English and Welsh. This book shows a deepening of her technical, imaginative and intellectual resources which are challenged and exercised to the full. The poems map uneasy terrains with realism and most importantly with joy.
'The bracing latest collection from Welsh poet Lewis traces an arc from the trauma of maternal abuse...through aftershocks of chronic illness, self-harm, and shame...to recovery ("I am found"). Her lines both stun and revive, moving between Plathian imagery... and disarming candor ("Underneath, I'm a bit of a sweetie"). The collection radiates hard-won self-possession... Readers will enjoy discovering this writer of extraordinary gifts.' Publishers Weekly, starred review of First Rain in Paradise
]]>In this vulnerable meditation, aja monet reflects on her migration to South Florida in search of love, connection, and belonging, unearthing the delicate balance between the poet, lover, and community organiser. These poems lay bare the tender dance of relationships, entwining the personal with the political, as they confront the state's fractured history of racial prejudice, marooned peoples, and the unruly forces of nature.
In Florida Water, each poem is an artifact an offering from her time spent wading through the rising tides of climate change, heartbreak, and systemic violence. With each line, monet immerses us deeper into the water, where the currents of memory, struggle, and survival pull us toward both despair and hope.
]]>Finalist, 2023 National Book Award for Translated Literature
Winner, Dutch Literature Prize
Winner, P. C. Hooft Award
On a Woman's Madness tells the story of Noenka, a courageous Black woman trying to live a life of her own choosing. When her abusive husband of just nine days refuses her request for divorce, Noenka flees her hometown in Suriname, on South America's tropical northeastern coast, for the capital city of Paramaribo. Unsettled and unsupported, her life in this new place is illuminated by romance and new freedoms, but also forever haunted by her past and society's expectations.
Strikingly translated by Lucy Scott, Astrid Roemer's classic queer novel is a tentpole of European and post-colonial literature. And amid tales of plantation-dwelling snakes, rare orchids, and star-crossed lovers, it is also a blistering meditation on the cruelties we inflict on those who disobey. Roemer, the first Surinamese winner of the prestigious Dutch Literature Prize, carves out postcolonial Suriname in barbed, resonant fragments. Who is Noenka? Roemer asks us. 'I'm Noenka,' she responds resolutely, 'which means "Never Again."'
]]>Lucy Scott is a translator of Caribbean literature written in Dutch and French. Her short story and essay translations thus far have appeared in Shenandoah: The Washington and Lee Review and in Wilderness House Literary Review. She's the translator of Astrid Roemer's On a Woman's Madness and Off-White.
]]>From the author of Happy Stories, Mostly and Sergius Seeks Bacchus. Their first work originally written in English.
My Dream Job is a tender playground of intellect and wit where entire worlds collide: the English and Toba Batak languages; Christian and Batak mythology; colonial violence past and present. In a voice playful, daring and not pursuing legibility above all else, Pasaribu writes the ultimate eulogy for a postcolonial dream.
]]>In a company run by the mysterious Mr Tei, strange things are afoot incense sticks lead to a surprise encounter; a young man reflects on his mother's death; a foxlike woman finally finds her true calling. As female ghosts appear in unexpected guises, their gently humorous encounters with unsuspecting humans lead to deeper questions about emancipation and recent changes in Japanese women's lives.
]]>Winner, English PEN Translates Award
'What a life! She didn't like being here, and she didn't like going there.'
Mehar dreams of freedom and a life with her children. Asiya dreams of her daughter's happiness. Sajida dreams of becoming a doctor. Subaida dreams of the day when her family will become free of woes. Parveen dreams of a little independence, a little space for herself in the world. Mothers, daughters, aunts, sisters, neighbours...
In this tiny Muslim village in Tamil Nadu, the lives of these women are sustained by the faith they have in themselves, in each other, and the everyday compromises they make. Salma's storytelling crystalline in its simplicity, patient in its unravelling enters this interior world of women, held together by love, demarcated by religion, comforted by the courage in dreaming of better futures.
A beautiful novel by writer and activist Salma, translated from Tamil by Meena Kandasamy.
]]>Meena Kandasamy is a poet, fiction writer, translator and activist who lives in Chennai and London. She has published two collections of poetry, Touch and Ms. Militancy, and the critically acclaimed novels The Gypsy Goddess and When I Hit You, Or, The Portrait of the Writer as a Young Wife, which was shortlisted for the Women's Prize for Fiction in 2018. She is the editor of the poetry collection Desires Become Demons (Tilted Axis Press 2019), in which her translations of four Tamil women poets are included alongside some by the late Lakshmi Holmstrm.
]]>Love in the Big City is an exploration of millennial loneliness as well as the joys of queer life, that should appeal to readers of Sayaka Murata, Han Kang, and Cho Nam-Joo.
]]>From the International Booker Prize-winning author-translator duo of Tomb of Sand, a powerful, kaleidoscopic novel about a fractured India, caught between rising fundamentalism and waning progressive ideals.
A city teeters on the edge of chaos. A society lies fractured along fault lines of faith and ideology. A playground becomes a battleground. A looming silence grips the public.
Against this backdrop, Shruti, a writer paralysed by the weight of events, tries to find her words, while Sharad and Hanif, academics whose voices are drowned out by extremism, find themselves caught between cliches and government slogans. And there's Daddu, Sharad's father, a beacon of hope in the growing darkness. As they each grapple with thoughts of speaking the unspeakable, an unnamed narrator takes on the urgent task of bearing witness.
First published in Hindi in 1998, Our City That Year is a novel that defies easy categorisation. It's a time capsule, a warning siren, and a desperate plea. Geetanjali Shree's shimmering prose, in Daisy Rockwell's nuanced and consummate translation, takes us into a fever dream of fragmented thoughts and half-finished sentences, mirroring the disjointed reality of a city under siege. Readers will find themselves haunted long after the final page, grappling with questions that echo far beyond India's borders.
Daisy Rockwell is a painter, writer and translator living in the US. She has translated a number of classic works of Hindi and Urdu literature, including Upendranath Ashk's 'Falling Walls', Bhisham Sahni's 'Tamas', and Khadija Mastur's 'The Women's Courtyard'. Her 2019 translation of Krishna Sobti's 'A Gujarat Here, a Gujarat There' was awarded the Modern Language Association's Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Translation Prize. She is the winner of the 2022 International Booker Prize.
]]>Like an amateur sleuth, she trails Polotsky through the streets of Paris, sneaking behind him as he goes about his usual routines. Meanwhile, she researches her mother's past zigzagging across France and Vietnam trying to find clues to the spiralling, deepening questions her mother left behind unanswered and perhaps unanswerable.
]]>On New Years' Eve 1938, the writer Abdulla Qodiriy is taken from his home by the Soviet secret police and thrown into a Tashkent prison. There, to distract himself from the physical and psychological torment of beatings and mindless interrogations, he attempts to mentally reconstruct the novel he was writing at the time of his arrest based on the tragic life of the Uzbek poet-queen Oyhon, married to three khans in succession, and living as Abdulla now does, with the threat of execution hanging over her. As he gets to know his cellmates, Abdulla discovers that the Great Game of Oyhon's time, when English and Russian spies infiltrated the courts of Central Asia, has echoes in the 1930s present, but as his identification with his protagonist increases and past and present overlap it seems that Abdulla's inability to tell fact from fiction will be his undoing.
The Devils' Dance brings to life the extraordinary culture of 19th century Turkestan, a world of lavish poetry recitals, brutal polo matches, and a cosmopolitan and culturally diverse Islam rarely described in western literature. Hamid Ismailov's virtuosic prose recreates this multilingual milieu in a digressive, intricately structured novel, dense with allusion, studded with quotes and sayings, and threaded through with modern and classical poetry.
With this poignant, loving resurrection of both a culture and a literary canon brutally suppressed by a dictatorship which continues today, Ismailov demonstrates yet again his masterful marriage of contemporary international fiction and the Central Asian literary traditions, and his deserved position in the pantheon of both.
]]>Donald Rayfield is professor of Russian and Georgian at Queen Mary University of London. He is an author of books about Russian and Georgian literature, and about Joseph Stalin and his secret police. He is also a series editor for books about Russian writers and intelligentsia. He translated Georgian and Russian poets and prose writers.
]]>Mary Reddish, a young housemaid unjustly committed after defying her employer's advances, must navigate the brutal treatments of the county asylum while trying to prove her sanity. Meanwhile, Ann and Thomas Morris, the asylum's matron and director, struggle to uphold humane practices against outdated medical methods that haunt the institution.
As Mary forms an unlikely alliance with a fellow patient, she finds herself at the centre of a battle between compassion and cruelty that will determine the course of her life and the future of the asylum itself.
'A fascinating and eye-opening work intelligently written, vividly imagined, a compulsive read.' Alison Moore
'An impeccably researched and page-turning historical novel...A powerful debut.' Jane Harris
'A brilliant read...unputdownable!' G. J. Williams
]]>Johnny spots her ex, Alice, at the local cafe with a vague sense that she's been there before. Though she's still angry about their breakup and Alice's subsequent ghosting, Johnny can't resist the draw of a second shot at their relationship and accepts Alice's invitation back to her apartment. Once there, promises are exchanged. There's talk of wonder and change and dreams made real. But after spending the night together, they face a morning in which Alice is still Alice, Johnny is still Johnny, and the dog has doubled in size.
Over the course of a week, increasingly bizarre changes in the world around them force Johnny to consider whether the pair can change just as easily, if they can change at all. Or if both her relationship and the bounds of reality are destined to implode. The narrative of I Can Fix Her operates on nightmare logic, putting forth an irresistible tale in which the world, the narrator, and time itself are not to be trusted.
]]>Agent Richard Chance is on a relentless mission to avenge his partner's murder by bringing down master counterfeiter Eric Masters. As Chance delves into the dangerous underworld of Los Angeles, he faces a high-stakes game of cat and mouse where every move could be his last.
The novel that inspired the iconic film of the same name, To Live and Die in L.A. is a gripping thriller with a vivid portrayal of the darker side of the City of Angels.
]]>Clara Bishop hasn't touched a piano since a concert hall fire nearly took her life a decade ago, ending her career as a rising star in the world of classical music. Significantly scarred and unable to play, she has turned away from everything and everyone associated with music, especially her ruthless mentor Madame, whom Clara blames for her injuries.
Her life is upended when Madame dies, leaving Clara an unexpected inheritance: an ornate nineteenth-century metronome with a cryptic message hidden inside.Convinced this is not a gift but a puzzle Madame wants her to solve, Clara comes to suspect that the unusual bequest is the long-lost metronome of the composer Aleksander Starza a priceless object missing since 1885, when Starza was murdered by the brilliant female pianist Constantia Pleyel.
As Clara works to uncover the metronome's haunted past and protect it and herself from those who wish to obtain it, she discovers that nothing about Starza and his murder are what they seem. History has remembered Constantia Pleyel as an unstable artist who killed Starza in a fit of madness. The truth could rewrite the history of music and give Clara the second chance she has been longing for.
This moving tale is perfect for fans of Brendan Slocumb's The Violin Conspiracy.
]]>'Leaves the reader in a mood of chastened wonder...A revelation of life...A work of art.' Los Angeles Times
Set in during the Roaring Twenties, this masterfulstory by F. Scott Fitzgerald is told through the eyes ofNick Carraway, a young man who moves to Long Island andattemptsto learn the bond business in New York City after the war. There,he co-mingles on Long Islandwith his affluent and wealthy socialitecousin Daisy Buchanan,her brute of a husband Tom, and friend Jordan Baker.
Nick's new residencesits across the bay from Daisy and Tom's house, and right next to a mysterious mansion. He begins to hearrumours of an infamous man named Gatsby who resides there. Eventually, when Gatsbylearns of Nick's ties to Daisy, he extends Nick an invitation to one of his lavishparties. Gatsby's plan to courtDaisy, in an attempt to revive a previous love affair,eventually bubbles to the surface and tragedy ensues.
Dubbed the Great American Novel more than any other piece of literature to date, The Great Gatsby is sure to captivate readers with it's exquisitely crafted prose and poignant message about trying to relivethe past.
Packaged in handsome and affordable trade editions, Clydesdale Classics is series of essential literary works. From the musings of literary geniuses such as Mark Twain in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, to the striking personal narratives from Harriet Jacobs in Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, this new series is a comprehensive collection of our literary history through the words of the exceptional few.
]]>Mary Lennox, a spoiled, ill-tempered, and unhealthy child, comes to live with her reclusive uncle in Misselthwaite Manor on England's Yorkshire moors after the death of her parents. There she meets a hearty housekeeper and her spirited brother, a dour gardener, a cheerful robin, and her wilful, hysterical, and sickly cousin, Master Colin, whose wails she hears echoing through the house at night.
With the help of the robin, Mary finds the door to a secret garden, neglected and hidden for years. When she decides to restore the garden in secret, the story becomes a charming journey into the places of the heart, where faith restores health, flowers refresh the spirit, and the magic of the garden, coming to life anew, brings health to Colin and happiness to Mary.
]]>This edition also includes Voltaire's satirical novella, L'Ingenue, which tells the story of a Frenchman named 'Child of Nature' who had been raised by Hurons and who has returned to his fatherland, in the French province of Brittany. Once there, he gets a glimpse of the corruption of the realm and befalls victim of it.
]]>These myths have inspired some of the greatest paintings and sculptures in western art. This volume is illustrated with more than sixty reproductions of classical art that span five centuries and bring these tales of heroes and heroines and their adventures with the gods and goddesses of antiquity vividly to life.
]]>Illustrated throughout and including more than thirty full-colour plates by Arthur Rackham, Grimm's Fairy Tales is a treasure trove of magical stories that will appeal to readers of all ages.
]]>Lewis Carroll's novels Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass (first published in 1865 and 1871, respectively) have entertained readers young and old for more than a century. Their magical worlds, amusing characters, clever dialogue, and playfully logical illogic epitomise the whit and whimsy of Carroll's writing.
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland transports you down the rabbit-hole into a wondrous realm that is home to a White Rabbit, a March Hare, a Mad Hatter, a tea-drinking Dormouse, a grinning Cheshire-Cat, the Queen of Hearts and her playing card retainers, and all manner of marvellous creatures. Through the Looking-Glass is your passport to a topsy-turvy world on the other side of the mirror, where you have to run fast just to stay in place, memory works backwards, and it is possible to believe as many as six impossible things before breakfast. Both stories feature the classic illustrations of John Tenniel in full colour.
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass is one of Barnes & Noble's leatherbound classics for children. It features classic illustrations, an elegant bonded leather binding, a satin-ribbon bookmark, and distinctive gilt edging. It will provide hours of enjoyment for readers of all ages.
]]>Abraham Quin is in his mid-seventies, a migrant, thrice-divorced, a one-time postman and professor, a writer now living alone in the Adelaide Hills. In The Chinese Postman he reflects on his life with what he calls 'the mannered and meditative inaction of age', offering up memories and anxieties, obsessions and opinions, his thoughts on solitude, writing, friendship and time. He ranges widely, with curiosity and feeling, digressing and changing direction as suits his experience, and his role as a collector of fragments and a surveyor of ruins. He becomes increasingly engaged in an epistolary correspondence with Iryna Zarebina, a woman seeking refuge from the war in Ukraine. As the correspondence opens him to others, the elaboration of his memories tempers his melancholy with a playful enjoyment in the richness of language, and a renewed appreciation of the small events in nature. This understanding of the experience of old age is something new and important in our literature. As Quin comments, 'In Australia, the old made way for the young. It guaranteed a juvenile legacy.'
]]>**Winner, NSW Literary Awards 2025, Kenneth Slessor Prize for Poetry**
**Shortlisted, Prime Minister's Literary Awards 2025, Poetry**
**Shortlisted, NSW Literary Awards 2025, Glenda Adams Award for New Writing**
**Shortlisted, Victorian Premier's Literary Awards 2025, Poetry**
A moving testament to the displacement and dispossession of the Palestinian people.
rock flight is a book-length poem that, over five chapters, follows a personal and historical narrative, to compose an understated yet powerful allegory of Palestine's occupation. The poem uses refrains of suffocation, rubble, and migratory bird patterns to address the realities of forced displacement, economic restrictions and surveillance technology that Palestinians face both within and outside Palestine. It depicts a restlessness brought about by dispossession, and a determination to find significance in fleeting objects and fragments. It looks to the literary form as an interactive experience, and the book as an object in flux, inviting the reader to embark on an exploration of space, while limited by the box-like confines of the page. Formally claustrophobic, the poem morphs into irony, declaring everything a box while refusing to exist within one.
'Here is a poetry of passion; a poetry of necessity; a poetry of survival, and a poetry-triumphant.' Maxine Beneba Clarke
'rock flight is a work of timelessness, rigour, precision, relationality and guts just like its poet. A must-read for all of us who yearn and stretch and reach for a world beyond colonies, and an even more urgent read for those who don't.' Alison Whittaker
]]>**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.
]]>A brand-new collection of four intense, claustrophobic and terrifying horror tales from the Bram Stoker Award (R)-nominated and Splatterpunk Award-winning author of Things Have Gotten Worse Since We Last Spoke.
Four devastating tales from a master of modern horror...
This Skin Was Once Mine. When her father dies under mysterious circumstances, Jillian Finch finds herself grieving the man she idolised while struggling to feel comfortable in the childhood home she was sent away from nearly twenty years ago by her venomous mother. Then Jillian discovers a dark secret in her family's past - a secret that will threaten to undo everything she has ever known to be true about her beloved father and, more importantly, herself. It's only natural to hurt the things we love the most...
Seedling. A young man's father calls him early in the morning to say that his mother has passed away. He arrives home to find his mother's body still in the house. Struggling to process what has happened he notices a small black wound appear on his wrist-the inside of the wound as black as onyx and as seemingly limitless as the cosmos. He is even more unsettled when he discovers his father is cursed with the same affliction. The young man becomes obsessed with his father's new wounds, exploring the boundless insides and tethering himself to the black threads that curl from inside his poor father...
Prickle. Two old men revive a cruel game with devastating consequences...
All the Parts of You That Won't Easily Burn. Enoch Leadbetter goes to buy a knife for his husband to use at a forthcoming dinner party. He encounters a strange shopkeeper who draws him into an intoxicating new obsession and sets him on a path towards mutilation and destruction...
Content warning found inside book.
]]>Five childhood friends are forced to confront their own dark past as well as the curse placed upon them in this horror masterpiece from the bestselling author of Come with Me.
Maybe this is a ghost story...
Andrew Larimer has left his past behind. Rising up the ranks in a New York law firm, and with a heavily pregnant wife, he is settling into a new life far from Kingsport, the town in which he grew up. But when he receives a late-night phone call from an old friend, he has no choice but to return home.
Together, the five friends will have to confront the memories - and the horror - of a night, years ago, that changed everything for them.
Because Andrew and his friends have a secret. A thing they have kept to themselves for twenty years. Something no one else should know. But the past is not dead, and Kingsport is a town with secrets of its own.
One dark secret...
One small-town horror...
]]>A mindbending and visceral experimental horror about a young man trapped in an infinite Montreal subway station, perfect for readers of Mark Z. Danielewski and Susanna Clarke.
Vicken has a plan: throw himself into the Saint Lawrence River in Montreal and end it all for good, believing it to be the only way out for him after a lifetime of depression and pain. But, stepping off the subway, he finds himself in an endless, looping station.
Determined to find a way out again, he starts to explore the rooms and corridors ahead of him. But no matter how many claustrophobic hallways or vast cathedral-esque rooms he passes through, the exit is nowhere in sight.
The more he explores his strange new prison, the more he becomes convinced that he hasn't been trapped there accidentally, and amongst the shadows and concrete, he comes to realise that he almost certainly is not alone.
A terrifying psychological nightmare from a powerful new voice in horror.
]]>A young woman, committed to an asylum, undergoes a bizarre treatment that unlocks a vast well of power in this cosmic horror novella, perfect for fans of T. Kingfisher.
Veronica Brinkley has been committed to The Barrowfield Home, run by Dr. Cull, to treat her depression. The institution is built on the crypt of a giant Lunar Spider, tended to by a monastic group of worshippers called the Alabaster Scholars. Dr. Cull is using the lunar silk from the dead spider to 'repair' people's brains. As Veronica's memories are tampered with, she finds a surprising reserve of power within herself, upending everyone else's plans for her and stepping into a grand new role she had never imagined for herself.
]]>Shame Shadows My Name is the story of Marzano's investigation, retracing the journey of her grandfather Arturo, a respected magistrate and, she is to discover, a follower of Benito Mussolini and fascist of the first hour.
As she gets deeper into her research, Marzano reconstructs her own discomfort with the familial atmosphere in which she grew up, the clashes with her father, the suffering caused by his contempt for her mother and brother.
Fascism, buried beneath the ashes of shame, resurfaces in behaviours and relationships. The only antidote is to unearth it and stare it in the face.
]]>Michela Marzano was born in Rome in 1970. She studied at the Normale Superiore in Pisa and since 1998 has been living in Paris, France, where she teaches moral philosophy at the Universite Paris Descartes.
She writes for La Repubblica and La Stampa.
She is the author of a number of fiction and non-fiction books in French and Italian, which have been translated into many languages. L'amore e tutto: e tutto ci che so dell'amore (UTET) won the Premio Bancarella 2014.
Her memoir Stirpe e vergogna (Rizzoli), won the Premio Mondello in 2022 and is published in English in 2024 by Gazebo Books as Shame Shadows My Name.
]]>In Dreaming Out Loud, award-winning writer Lydie Salvayre pens a series of letters to Cervantes both satirical and sincere interrogating his intentions and reflecting on our modern world. Using the enduring figure of Don Quixote as a lens, Salvayre explores how we can resist forces that threaten our humanity. By bridging art and life, the absurd and the profound, she reveals what is truly timeless and inevitable.
Written with wit, passion, and the energy of a devoted reader, Dreaming Out Loud captures the indomitable human spirit.
'A magnificent defence of literature, this remarkable book is also a joyful antidote to the disillusionment of our times.' Les Inrockuptibles
]]>Alison L. Strayer is a Canadian writer and translator. She won the Warwick Prize for Women in Translation, shared with Nobel Prize winner Annie Ernaux, and the French-American Prize for Translation (both for The Years). Her novel Jardin et prairie, written in French, was shortlisted for the Governor General's Award for Literature, the Grand Prix du livre de Montreal, and longlisted for the Prix litteraire France-Quebec. Her work has also been longlisted for the Albertine Prize (Abdellah Taa, Infidels), the Warwick Prize (Annie Ernaux, A Girl's Story) and shortlisted for the Governor General's Award for Translation (Mavis Gallant, Rencontres fortuites, a co-translation), as well as the Man Booker International Translation Prize (The Years), an honour shared with the author. She lives in Paris.
]]>In Bad Music, a music teacher named Sonata, the daughter of a famous composer, contemplates the path she has taken. Through correspondence with her roommate Sae, a painter, she discovers art's capacity to exceed the boundaries of acceptable behaviour or perhaps, to stay within them. As she plots something perverse enough to risk her job, Sonata considers how truth is lost or found through performance.
Darkly funny and stunningly mysterious, these two novellas pinpoint the effects of technology, conflicting desires, and the shifts and rifts in relationships. Rie Qudan, winner of one of Japan's most prestigious literary awards, the Akutagawa Prize, explores the affectation and compromise required of us all, providing a disquieting view of the many faces of modern life.
]]>Haydn Trowell is a literary translator of modern and contemporary Japanese fiction. His translations include Touring the Land of the Dead and Love at Six Thousand Degrees by Maki Kashimada, The Forest Brims Over by Maru Ayase, and The Rainbow by Yasunari Kawabata.
]]>Several days after a once-in-a-century flood moves through the Indian city of Chennai, choking the Adyar River with the titular mud, a Japanese woman contracted to an IT company as a language instructor finds herself caught up in a deluge of flashbacks and memories, reflecting on unspoken words and unlived lives and contemplating the muddy chaos of her own karma.
Told in a magic realist stream-of-consciousness style evocative of the subtle, wry sense of humour found in the traditional Japanese narrative art of rakugo, The Mud of a Century explores the interrelated bonds between self and other, Japan and India, past and present, fact and fantasy, and material and spirit.
]]>In 2014 Ishii moved to Chennai, India, where her husband worked as a Sanskrit language researcher, and started working as a Japanese language teacher. She made her literary debut at age 54 with her novel Hyakunen doro (The Mud of a Century), based on her experiences in Chennai during the 2015 South Indian floods. The book won the 49th Shincho Prize for New Writers and the prestigious Akutagawa Prize.
]]>Four women speak. They speak to the same man. He is the son of the first, the great-yet-impossible love of the second, the platonic companion of the third, the older brother of the last. Speaking to him in his absence, it is to themselves that these women turn, examining their own stories to make sense of their journey, from twilight to twilight, through a mysterious stormy night in the middle of the dry season.
These voices perform a powerful and sometimes discordant jazz-inspired chorus about issues such as the intrusion of history into the intimate lives of people, the experience of people of African descent, femininity, sexuality, and self-love. Blackness confronts African-ness, love is sometimes discovered in the arms of another woman, the African renaissance tries to establish itself on the rubble of a self-esteem damaged by history.
Each of these women, with her own language and rhythm, ultimately represents a specific aspect of the tormented history of the people of African descent in today's world, and at the end of the night they will each arrive at a dawn of hope and completeness.
From the author of the critically acclaimed Season of the Shadow comes Twilight of Torment: Melancholy, the first of a two-volume novel of unparalleled power and sensuality.
]]>Leonora Miano was born in 1973 in Doula, Cameroon. She is author of nearly twenty works of fiction and non-fiction. Her writing has won numerous literary awards, including France's Prix Femina in 2013 for Season of the Shadow.
]]>In Greek mythology, it is Hera who blinds the hero Heracles, so that, in a fit of fury, he kills his own family. In the twenty-first century, the gods have another name. So did the three young men who stormed a magazine's editorial office and a Jewish supermarket in Paris in January 2015 and murdered twelve people. The blind fury, however, remained and more virulent than ever, not least because the weapons were so much more effective.
In this raging text, arguably one of her darkest, Nobel Prize winner Elfriede Jelinek investigates topical political events in the context of enduring history and myths. Fury expresses itself not only multi-voiced and from the changing perspective of Islamist terrorists, in the shape of furious German citizens, individual narcissistic humiliation, or brutal distribution battles around the globe. Rather, fury also appears as the motor that has driven people with a devastating force for centuries.
With her characteristic linguistic power, Jelinek articulates her own disconcertedness in the face of these crimes. In passing, she returns repeatedly to the contradiction between religious laws against representation and the deluge of images online, where movies of assassination, severed heads, and other atrocities are exhibited for millions to see. Fury is a compact grand epic that starts in primal times and attempts to describe the indescribable, relating the inexplicable in our times.
]]>Elfriede Jelinek was born in 1946 in Mrzzuschlag, Austria, and grew up in Vienna, where she studied music and, later, theatre and art history. She began writing poetry and established herself as a leading, if controversial, member of post-war Austria's first generation of artists who struggled to come to terms with the legacy of the Holocaust.
Among her most famous novels are The Piano Teacher (1983), Lust (1989), and The Children of the Dead (1995). However, Jelinek considers herself primarily a playwright. The translation of her satirical monologue on Donald Trump, On the Royal Road: The Burgher King, was published by Gazebo Books in February 2021.
Jelinek's work has been translated into more than 30 languages and she received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2004 'for her musical flow of voices and counter-voices in novels and plays that with extraordinary linguistic zeal reveal the absurdity of society's cliches and their subjugating power'.
]]>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.
]]>He can, if he is accompanied by a black rooster, his protector and friend. And if he is Martin, orphaned after a massacre, full of wisdom, courage and a pure heart. Too good for the selfish and idiotic villagers around him, his integrity entrances an itinerant painter with whom he departs on a quest. His heroic adventures through a morally abhorrent landscape, physically ravaged by war and famine, keep the reader cheering for him and his companion as this fairy tale for adults unfolds.
Set against a pseudo-medieval post-apocalyptic backdrop reminiscent of Cormac McCarthy, Angela Carter and Missouri Williams, this bestselling novel shines with the inner radiance of good deed in a naughty world that will leave you haunted, horrified, and completely riveted.
'This novel is a danse macabre, a memento mori, a vision of good and evil pared down to the bones. Boy with a Black Rooster beckons the reader into a nightmare landscape of war, famine, plague and madness, and Stefanie vor Schulte's storytelling verve is such that we make the journey gladly.' Sam Thompson, author of Communion Town, Longlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2012
'Wow, what a book! Fabular but true, this meticulously crafted and deceptively simple tale stole my heart, broke it, and put it back together again. Vor Schulte is unflinching in her depiction of the worst of humankind, its cruelty and violence, but she also shows how love and kindness can flourish in even the darkest times. A beautiful, heart-rending book.' Victoria MacKenzie, author of For Thy Great Pain Have Mercy On My Little Pain
'This appears light as a feather, yet elaborately crafted all the same.' Rose-Maria Gropp
'It feels like an old story, one of those that stays with you forever, but every part of it is surprising and wonderful. I want to go straight back and read it all again.' Sin Hughes, author of Pearl
'A debut that is both admirable and truly unique.' Jean-Baptiste Hamelin, Page des Libraires
'Halfway between macabre tale and surrealist epic.' Camille Thomine, Lire magazine litteraire
]]>Alexandra Roesch studied languages and business and worked in banking before becoming a literary translator. In 2018, she was long-listed for the Goethe Institute's Helen & Kurt Wolff Prize. Previously translated authors include Hans Fallada, Seraina Kobler and Merle Krger.
]]>In this masterful novel, author Juli Zeh skillfully shifts away from the conventional tale of a middle-aged, middle-class father out for a New Year's Day bike ride to an unexpectedly dark, psychological family drama.
Lanzarote on New Year's Day: Henning is cycling up the steep path to Femes. As he struggles against the wind and the gradient he takes stock of his life. He has a job, a wife, two children-yet hardly recognizes himself anymore. Panic attacks have been pouncing on him like demons. When he finally reaches the pass in utter exhaustion, a mysterious coincidence unveils a repressed yet vivid memory, plunging him back into childhood and the traumatic event that almost cost him and his sister their lives. In this masterful novel, bestselling author Juli Zeh skillfully turns a New Year's Day bike ride into an unexpectedly dark, psychological family drama.
]]>Alta L. Price runs a publishing consultancy specialized in literature and nonfiction texts on art, architecture, design, and culture. A recipient of the Gutekunst Prize, she translates from Italian and German into English. Her work has appeared on BBC Radio 4, 3 Quarks Daily, Words Without Borders, and elsewhere. Her latest publications include books by Martin Mosebach, Dana Grigorcea, Anna Goldenberg, and Alexander Kluge.
]]>Giorgia was a talented actress before she abandoned her stage career and fell in love with Filippo. She settles into a life of quiet compromise - until one day she bumps into her old theater director, Mauro, who fans the acting flame back to life. But setting a restless soul on fire can be dangerous if she loses sight of the boundary between reality and fiction - and Giorgia collapses, ending up in a clinic. Filippo and Mauro find themselves both accomplices and adversaries, seduced by a dangerous game to heal and win back Giorgia: by writing the script for her perfect life. In this dazzling debut, Petrucci explores the ambiguous borders between love, possession, and control in clear, magnetic prose.
]]>ANNE MILANO APPEL, based in California, has translated works by a number of leading Italian authors for a variety of publishers in the US and UK. Her most recent translations include works by the award-winning Antonio Scurati and Paolo Maurensig. Her awards include the Italian Prose in Translation Award, the John Florio Prize for Italian Translation, and the Northern California Book Award for Translation. Her website is: amilanoappel.com.
]]>In this spellbinding novel, which has been compared to the work of Jonathan Franzen, Dave Eggers and Jeffrey Eugenides, Saskia de Coster provides a uniquely European take on the tradition of 'The Great American Novel'. With the family unit and some of life's most pressing questions at its center, the award winning We and Me paints a captivatingly haunting picture of bourgeois family life.
Written from several different perspectives, We and Me covers the time period between 1980 and 2013 and focuses on the aristocratic Vandersanden family. Set in their opulent private estate located atop a mountain, neuroses, claustrophobia, scandal and rebellion run rife. At the heart of the family and the novel is Sarah, whose coming of age is both daringly and sensitively explored in de Coster's skillful prose.
With her characteristically incisive approach, de Coster excavates the nuanced underbelly of human emotions with humor, understanding and a lightness of touch. We and Me is a remarkable and compelling tale by one of the greatest Belgian writers of our time.
]]>NANCY FOREST-FLIER is a New Jerseyborn translator who moved to Europe in 1982 and has worked in the Netherlands since 1988. She lives in Alkmaar. Her literary translations include The King by Kader Abdolah, Dissident for Life by Koenraad de Wolf, Gliding Flight by Anne-Gine Goemans, We and Me by Saskia de Coster, Mr. Miller by Charles den Tex, Departure Time by Truus Matti, Hex by Thomas Olde Heuvelt, and The Story of Shit by Midas Dekkers. Nancy also translates children's literature and has translated for numerous Dutch museums and institutes, including The Anne Frank House and the Krller-Mller Museum (home to the world's second largest Van Gogh collection).
]]>With a sharp and observational eye, Annelies Verbeke takes a funny, imaginative and perceptive look at the realities and absurdities of human interactions, relationships and everyday life.
Verbeke matches poetic prose with a cast of intriguing characters and unexpected plot twists. Our protagonist is Alphonse, a Senegalese immigrant who uproots his life in Brussels to become a handyman in a rural district in Flanders. Likeable and charismatic, people cannot help but reveal their secrets, desires and unexpected dreams to him. In her typically astute style, Verbeke weaves a vivid and thought-provoking tale of contemporary life, subtly touching upon timely themes such as refugees and racism.
'Verbeke has written a bold, busy, textured novel. Read it once and you may well read it twice.' - The Irish Times
]]>LIZ WATERS is a Dutch-to-English translator based in Lelystad, the Netherlands. After finishing her studies at the University of Manchester, she worked for some years with English-language texts and at a literary agency in Amsterdam before becoming a full-time translator of literary fiction and non-fiction. Authors whose books she has translated include Ida Simons, Geert Mak, Linda Polman, Fik Meijer, Paul Scheffer, Lieve Joris, Jaap Scholten, Luuk van Middelaar, and Douwe Draaisma.
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