Europa Editions

A deluxe cloth hardcover with sprayed edges and colored end papers illustrating the Bay of Naples.

#1 BEST BOOK OF THE CENTURY —NEW YORK TIMES

“An unconditional masterpiece.” —Jhumpa Lahiri 

When Elena Ferrante set out to write the story of Elena and Lila, she conceived it as one single work of fiction, one expansive novel that would capture the reality and ambivalence of female friendship, motherhood, marriage, class and adolescence.  

2025 marks 10 years since publication of the quartet was completed. To celebrate this anniversary, as well as honor and acknowledge the author’s original conception, we are releasing the four novels in one volume.    

Described by the New Yorker’s James Wood as “large, captivating, amiably peopled...a beautiful and delicate tale of confluence and reversal,” the Neapolitan Quartet tells a poignant, universal story about friendship and belonging.   

“The capacity of stories to speak to anyone and in any time is the fruit of a mysterious mixture of sensibility, ability, and luck, and no writer really knows how that fruit ripens and if it has fully matured.” —Elena Ferrante 

Contains the four Neapolitan Novels: My Brilliant Friend; The Story of a New Name; Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay; The Story of the Lost Child

2025 Indies Introduce & Indie Next Pick
The Globe and Mail Best Books of 2025
New York Times Editors’ Choice
WSJ Notable Book of 2025

★ “A small treasure... A bloody and beautiful sojourn in the distant past.”—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

A brilliant Scottish debut, shortlisted for the Highland Book Prize and the Bookmark Book Festival Book of the Year.

The year is 825 CE. In the aftermath of a vicious attack by raiders from the north, an unlikely trio finds themselves the lone survivors on a remote Scottish isle. Still breathing are young Brother Martin, the only resident of the local monastery to escape martyrdom; Una, a beekeeper and mead maker who has been relieved of her violent husband during the slaughter; and Grimur, an aging Norseman who claws his way out of the hasty grave his fellow raiders left him in, thinking him dead. 

As the seasons pass in this wild and lonely setting, their inherent distrust of each other melts into a complex meditation on the distances and bonds between them. Told with humor and alive with sharply exquisite dialogue, David Greig deftly lifts the curtain between our world and the past. The Book of I is an entirely unique novel that serves as a philosophical commentary on guilt and redemption, but also humanity, love, and the things we choose to believe in.

“Gruesome, exciting... I haven’t read many books that are at once so murderous and so breezily cheerful.”—Sam Sacks, Wall Street Journal

New York Times Bestseller • Barnes & Noble 2025 Book of the Year • Boston Globe Best Book of the Year • National Indie Bestseller • Top Ten Indie Next Pick • Indigo Heather’s Pick

Ten-year-old Mona and her beloved grandfather have only fifty-two Wednesdays to visit fifty-two works of art and commit to memory “all that is beautiful in the world” before Mona loses her sight forever.

While the doctors can find no explanation for Mona’s brief episode of blindness, they agree that the threat of permanent vision loss cannot be ruled out. The girl’s grandfather, Henry, may not be able to stop his granddaughter from losing her sight, but he can fill the encroaching darkness with beauty. Every Wednesday for a year, the pair abscond together and visit a single masterpiece in one of Paris’s renowned museums. From Botticelli to Basquiat, Mona learns how each artist’s work shaped the world around them. In turn, the young girl’s world is changed forever by the power of their art. Under the kind and careful tutelage of her grandfather, Mona learns the true meaning of generosity, melancholy, love, loss, and revolution. Her perspective will never be the same—nor will the reader’s.

Mona’s Eyes is a heartfelt, enlightening journey across five centuries of Western art history. With the emotional impact of The Elegance of the Hedgehog and the readability of The Little Paris Bookshop, Thomas Schlesser’s sensational debut novel is at once a moving book about the beauty of life and a deeply touching story about the special bond between a girl and her grandfather.

“Vibrant debut ... Schlesser seamlessly interweaves the art lessons with Mona’s story... Readers of Jostein Gaarder’s Sophie's World will love this.”—Publishers Weekly

Discover all 52 masterpieces inside the fold-out dustjacket.

NEW YORK TIMES 100 NOTABLE BOOK OF 2025・BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR - Washington Independent Review of Books 

“A gorgeous novel.”—New York Times

Based on a true story, The Rarest Fruit is a captivating tale of resilience, discovery, and the secret history of a beloved flavor.

Born into slavery, orphaned at an early age, and raised by a passionate botanist on Réunion Island, Edmond Albius will defy the expectations of his time and, with his extraordinary natural talent for botany, revolutionize global culinary culture by discovering the secret life of vanilla orchids.

A novel of 19-century adventure, perseverance, a book at the intersection of science, exploration, and cuisine, The Rarest Fruit brings to light the contributions of a Black botanical innovator, who, during a time of colonial exploitation and against all odds, changed food culture forever. It is both a poignant tribute to the unsung heroes of history and a vivid portrayal of intertwined destinies shaped by a single discovery.

“The book is that rare find: a revealing, history-infused novel that spills its tale with the eager breathlessness, wry commentary, and frank truths of a close friend... exquisite.”—Christian Science Monitor

At once a subversive autobiography of a mercurial woman and a mesmerizing history of the body as a site of resistance to power.

“I bite my friends to heal them.”—Diogenes the Cynic, c. 350 BCE

From a Roman amphitheater where 4th century martyrs are fed to wild beasts to the S&M leather bars of New York in the 1970s, this sinuous and illuminating book by novelist and cultural critic Fernanda Eberstadt explore the lives of uncommonly brave men and women—saints, philosophers, artists--who have used their own wounded or stigmatized bodies to challenge society’s mores and entrenched power structures.

The Greek Cynic philosopher Diogenes who lived “a dog’s life,” sleeping, teaching, having sex in the public square; Saints Perpetua and Felicitas, two early Christian martyrs; twentieth-century prophets of bodily freedom like filmmaker-poet Pier Paolo Pasolini and philosopher Michel Foucault; Russian punk feminist group Pussy Riot; the political artist Piotr Pavlensky, who nailed his scrotum to the pavement of Red Square to protest Vladimir Putin’s tyranny; these are the outrageous, uncommon, but deeply committed activists featured through original interviews and careful case studies in Eberstadt’s immensely readable book, which is part political treatise, part manifesto, part memoir.

Running through her narrative of the Body Militant is Eberstadt’s own story and the story of her mother, a New York writer and glamor figure of the 1960s, whose illness-scarred body first led Eberstadt to seek connections between beauty, belief, and the truths taught through the body.

Eberstadt asks crucial questions for our time: what drives certain individuals to risk pain, disgrace, even death, in the name of freedom? And, what can we learn from their example to become braver ourselves?

From prize-winning author Su Bristow comes a fascinating coming-of-age novel about magic and the choices that define future generations.

It’s 1959. To eight-year-old Felicity—who lives on a dying farm in England—the fairies in the woods have much more to offer than the people in her everyday life. As she becomes more rooted in their world, she learns that their magic is far from safe. Their queen, Elfrida, offers Felicity a gift. But fairy bargains are never what they seem.

As an adult, Felicity leaves for university. Unfortunately, books are not her only company at school: Elfrida and Hobb—the queen’s constant companions—wield the ability to appear at any time, causing havoc in her new friendships and love life. Desperate, Felicity finally begins to explore the true nature of the Fair Folk and their magic. Her ally, the folklorist Professor Edgerley, asks, “What do they want from you?” The answer lies in the distant past, and in the secrets of her own family.

As the consequences of the “gift” play out, Felicity must draw on her courage to confront Elfrida, and make the right choice. Interwoven with traditional stories and striking characters, The Fair Folk poses questions about how we care for our children, our land, and our love-hate relationship with what we desire most.

Set between London and Baghdad, Saleem Haddad’s brilliant second novel is a sweeping, multigenerational tale of art, exile, memory, and the enduring legacies of war. 

In the summer of 2014, three long estranged Iraqi-British sisters are pulled back into each other’s orbit by the rediscovery of their late father’s long-lost paintings. Beautiful, elusive Zainab; embittered, practical Mediha; and headstrong, queer Ishtar each lay claim to their father’s legacy—an artistic and personal inheritance entwined with betrayal, exile, and a homeland they no longer recognize. 

As the sisters fight to preserve, erase, or repurpose the past, Zainab’s estranged son Nizar, a war correspondent haunted by trauma and heartbreak, returns to the family fold. With the reemergence of buried memories comes a reckoning, and the family is forced to confront the personal and political betrayals that tore them apart.

Spanning continents and decades—from 1950s Baghdad to contemporary London, from the Tigris River to Yemeni refugee camps—Floodlines is at once an intimate family drama and, in its scope, a modern epic. It is a rare novel that bridges the historic and the immediate and a heartfelt meditation on what it means to belong, to create, to endure. 

A searing story of identity, ambition, and the cost of leaving home, from one of Italy’s most vital contemporary voices

Gabriele left Rome to reinvent himself. He traded the working-class streets of his childhood for the sleek design studios of Milan, where he’s built a successful career and a new life—one carefully distanced from the neighborhood he came from.

But when he returns home for a family celebration, Gabriele is pulled back into a world that feels both comforting and claustrophobic: the slow rhythms of Rome, his loving but provincial family, and childhood friends whose lives have remained circumscribed by the same few blocks. Torn between nostalgia and shame, Gabriele is forced to reckon with everything he tried to leave behind.

And when a rumor about the true source of his success begins to circulate, the careful identity he’s constructed in Milan begins to crumble. In the space between who he was and who he’s become, Gabriele must confront the of where he truly belongs.

Written with grace, empathy, and psychological precision, The Burning Origin is a powerful story about social mobility, self-invention, and the double-edged freedom of those who leave.

Both a love letter and a window into the rural places that have shaped many, In a Distant Valley sets the stage for a final act to play out across a deep winter in snowy Maine. 

For a while, Rose Douglas believed life had given her a break. She was enjoying a steady job at the local clinic in Dalton; her two young boys, Adam and Brandon, were doing well in school; and their little family had found an easy friendship with widower Nate Theroux and his daughter, Sophie. The possibility of something deeper even hung between her and Nate—until the day Tommy Merchant, her ex and the father of her sons, showed up without warning on her doorstep. While Rose knows all too well his erratic and abusive nature, he swears he’s clean, and ready to turn over a new leaf. 

Tommy isn’t the only one who’s found his way back to the town that defined him. Lost after a disastrous stint living down south with her father, Angela Muse has returned home to Dalton. There she runs into Greg Fortin, the friend who once saved her life when they were children and finally starts to believe there may be someone who understands her in a world that offers more questions than answers.  

But secrets are the lifeblood of a small town, and everyone in Dalton soon finds themselves part of a chain of events hurtling towards outcomes beyond their control, where more than one future will be decided. Brimming with compassion and heart, In a Distant Valley is the remarkable conclusion to the story readers have been following since Shannon Bowring’s debut novel, The Road to Dalton. 

A NEW YORK TIMES EDITORS’ CHOICE

From the horrors of WWII to the spy games of the Cold War: a haunting tale of survival, vengeance, and the enduring shadows of history

“Stunning... Every line is a jewel.”—Lea Carpenter, New York Times

Shlomo Libowitz and Anton Epstein, two Jewish prisoners subjected to horrific experiments in a Nazi concentration camp, survive the unimaginable. Decades later, their lives converge again as they hunt Hans Lichtblau, the SS officer who tormented them, now operating in the shadowy world of Cold War geopolitics.   

Their pursuit takes them from the ashes of Europe to the jungles of Central America, where justice and revenge blur against the backdrop of CIA conspiracies and a haunting past. But one life may be too short to settle all accounts, and Anton and Shlomo’s belated revenge is also a race against time...  

With vivid characters and a masterful blend of fact and fiction, perfectly balanced between two continents and two eras, The Feeling of Iron confronts the moral ambiguities of vengeance and the inescapable echoes of history.  

A NEW YORK TIMES EDITORS’ CHOICE

The English-language debut of one of the most exciting voices in contemporary Brazilian literature, The Tokyo Suite is a gripping exploration of the complexities of modern family dynamics and the tensions hiding just under the surface of ordinary lives. 

It’s a seemingly ordinary morning when Maju, a nanny, boards a bus with Cora, the young girl she’s been caring for, and disappears. The abduction, an act as impulsive as it is extreme, sets off a series of events that will force each character to confront their deepest fears and desires.

Fernanda, Cora's mother, is a successful executive who is so engulfed in her own personal crisis that she initially fails to notice her daughter's disappearance. Her marriage is strained, and she finds solace in an affair, distancing herself further from her family. Meanwhile, her husband, overwhelmed by the complexities of their domestic life, remains emotionally detached. As Maju navigates the streets of São Paulo with Cora, the “white army” of nannies, a term coined by Fernanda, seems to watch her every move, heightening her sense of paranoia and urgency. 

Madalosso’s narrative delves deep into the human psyche, examining themes of maternal guilt, societal expectations, and the search for personal identity. Rich and multi-layered, The Tokyo Suite is a poignant and gripping tale that captures the essence of modern urban life and the lengths to which people will go to reclaim a sense of control and meaning in their lives. 

A SEPTEMBER 2024 INDIE NEXT PICK

Return to Dalton as Shannon Bowring draws another stunningly human portrait of small town America. 

It’s been five years since Bridget Theroux’s death shocked the small town of Dalton, Maine, leaving behind husband Nate and daughter Sophie, now a vibrant young child. Nate doesn’t always know how to answer her questions, but he is intent on raising her with joy—and shielding her from her grandmother, Annette, who remains dangerously locked away in her grief.

After his first year away at college, Greg Fortin is back in town for the summer to work at the family store. It’s expected he'll take over the hardware business eventually, but finding the words to tell them no—and the truth about who he is—has become his own Everest. Rose’s abusive ex, Tommy finally disappeared a few years ago, though sometimes his presence in the eyes of her oldest son unnerves her. She and Nate are finding themselves drawn together by their children’s playdates, and into a delicate balance between friendship and the possibility of more. 

And Trudy and Bev, always so sure of their love for each other, find themselves rocked when Trudy’s husband Richard suffers a heart attack, bringing into focus all the guilt she has felt about their empty marriage for years.

Shannon Bowring demonstrates once again that she understands exactly where the heart of a story lies. Where the Forest Meets the River is a poignant return to the small town of Dalton, whose inhabitants continue to startle and humble both themselves—and us.

This meticulously researched and brilliantly told historical novel, the first of the Machiavelli trilogy, recounts the enigmatic life of Niccolò Machiavelli, revealing the complex man behind the infamous political strategist.

October 1502. As Cesare Borgia sets out to invade the Florentine Republic, Niccolò Machiavelli is sent to spy on him and to glean details of his nefarious plan. But when Borgia asks Machiavelli to write his life story, their bond gains complexity and nuance: ultimately, they both aspire to everlasting fame and to achieve it, they need each other, for the one’s sword can only rule in eternity via the pen of the other.

Set against the backdrop of the Renaissance, rife with political intrigue and cultural flourishing, Bernini's richly imagined novel masterfully captures a society teetering on the brink of change and revolution, as one man takes his chance at greatness, navigating the treacherous corridors of power with guile and charisma.

The Throne is a captivating reflection on ambition, morality, and the pursuit of power and influence. As elucidating as Robert Caro’s The Power Broker, as gripping and stylish as Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall, and as atmospheric as Maggie O’Farrell’s The Marriage Portrait, The Throne reveals one of the most impactful and controversial minds in political history, and questions and asks to what lengths can one justifiably go to achieve greatness.

From one of Italy’s most brilliant psychiatrists, a moving and transformative journey into the most mysterious, heartbreaking, and awe-inspiring corners of the human mind

We speak of doctors most often as heroes, martyrs, or victims. Drawing from forty years of experience working in an emergency psychiatric ward, Paolo Milone offers a more complex—and more compelling—picture. With prose at once direct and lyrical, he transports us inside Ward 77, where mental illness coexists with the ordinary lives of those who, at the end of their shifts, take their white coats off and have to remember to buy milk.

In this unsettling, absorbing, and transformative memoir Milone vividly conveys the curiosity and passion, the recurring sense of exasperation and dismay, and the humility and sense of wonder of those who have chosen to “look into the abyss through the eyes of the other.”

The Art of Binding People challenges many of our assumptions about mental health, as we follow nurses, doctors, and patients along the hospital corridors, we listen to their screams and silences, and we enter the lives of those living on both sides of the invisible, arbitrary line that separates the healthy from the sick.

Told with humor and compassion, Paolo Milone’s English-language debut is a work of striking humanity that conjures lasting beauty out of the darkness.

A NPR BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR

From debut author Shannon Bowring comes a novel of small town America that Pulitzer-winner Richard Russo calls, “measured, wise, and beautiful.”

In most small towns, the private is also public. In the town of Dalton, one local makes an unthinkable decision that leaves the community reeling. In the aftermath, their problems, both small and large, reveal a deeper understanding of the lives of their neighbors, and remind us all that no one is exactly who we think they are.

It’s 1990. In Dalton, Maine, life goes on. Rose goes to work at the diner every day, her bruises hidden from both the customers and her two young boys. At a table she waits, Dr. Richard Haskell looks back on the one choice that’s charted his entire life, before his thoughts wander back to his wife, Trudy, and her best friend.

Trudy and Bev have been friends for longer than they can count, and something more than lovers to each other for some time now—a fact both accepted and ignored by their husbands. Across town, new mother Bridget lives with her high school sweetheart Nate, and is struggling with postpartum after a traumatic birth. And nearer still is teenager Greg, trying to define the complicated feelings he has about himself and his two close friends.

The Road to Dalton offers valuable understandings of what it means to be alive in the world—of pain and joy, conflict and love, and the endurance that comes from living.

A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR
TIME Magazine・NPR・Library Journal・The Globe and Mail・Lilith・Forward Magazine・Toronto Star・The New Yorker

Winner of the Choix Goncourt Prize, Anne Berest’s The Postcard is a vivid portrait of twentieth-century Parisian intellectual and artistic life, an enthralling investigation into family secrets, and poignant tale of a Jewish family devastated by the Holocaust and partly restored through the power of storytelling.

January, 2003. Together with the usual holiday cards, an anonymous postcard is delivered to the Berest family home. On the front, a photo of the Opéra Garnier in Paris. On the back, the names of Anne Berest’s maternal great-grandparents, Ephraïm and Emma, and their children, Noémie and Jacques—all killed at Auschwitz.

Fifteen years after the postcard is delivered, Anne, the heroine of this novel, is moved to discover who sent it and why. Aided by her chain-smoking mother, family members, friends, associates, a private detective, a graphologist, and many others, she embarks on a journey to discover the fate of the Rabinovitch family: their flight from Russia following the revolution, their journey to Latvia, Palestine, and Paris. What emerges is a moving saga that shatters long-held certainties about Anne’s family, her country, and herself.

From the best-selling author of The Elegance of the Hedgehog comes this delightful, delicate tale that pays tribute to the poetry of the everyday, to Japanese philosophy, and to the ingenuity and sardonic humor of cats. 

What a mysterious, confounding thing is a writer! Yet, spend a little time with the writer’s cats and one might just understand her better. 

Muriel Barbery, via her feline friends and co-conspirators, takes readers into her atelier, offering them a behind-the-scenes peek into her process and problems, joys and disappointments. The tale is told from the perspective of one of the writer’s four cats, Kirin, who, together with her cohort, may or may not be a reliable narrator. There’s Ocha, the leader of the gang, a tough guy with a soft heart; the bandy-legged and affectionate Mizu, Ocha’s sister; the phlegmatic and refined Petrus, lover of flowers; and finally, pretty Kirin, narrator of this bewitching story. 

A superb, funny, and touching text for writers, readers, fans of Muriel Barbery’s best-selling novels, and cat lovers.

A “beguiling fairy tale” by the bestselling author of The Elegance of the Hedgehog (The New York Times).

The villagers had never seen anything like it: dense white curtains of snow that instantly transformed the landscape. Not in autumn, not here in Burgundy. And on the same night a baby was discovered, dark-eyed little Maria, who would transform all their lives. Hundreds of miles away in the mountains of Abruzzo, another foundling, Clara, astonishes everyone with her extraordinary talent for piano playing. But her gifts go far beyond simple musicianship. As a time of great danger looms, though the girls know nothing of each other, it is the bond that unites them and others like them which will ultimately offer the only chance for good to prevail in the world.

“Vivid imagery and a thread of mystery draw readers into the timeless and ethereal world of these young girls with a destiny to fulfill.”—Booklist

“The novel is essentially a parable about the power both of art, which abolishes the ‘border between earth and mind,’ and of women.”—The New Yorker

“Fans of both Barbery and fantasy from writers like Alice Hoffman and Sarah Addison Allen will be enchanted.”—Library Journal

Amazon Best Sci-Fi/Fantasy Book of 2018

One of Entertainment Weekly's 10 Best YA Books of 2018

One of Publishers Weekly's Best YA Book of the Year

A National Indie Bestseller

Longlisted for Irish YA prize Great Reads Award

Lose yourself in the fantastic world of the arks and in the company of unforgettable characters in this French runaway hit, Christelle Dabos’ The Mirror Visitor quartet.

Plain-spoken, headstrong Ophelia cares little about appearances. Her ability to read the past of objects is unmatched in all of Anima and, what’s more, she possesses the ability to travel through mirrors, a skill passed down to her from previous generations. Her idyllic life is disrupted, however, when she is promised in marriage to Thorn, a taciturn and influential member of a distant clan. Ophelia must leave all she knows behind and follow her fiancé to Citaceleste, the capital of a cold, icy ark known as the Pole, where danger lurks around every corner and nobody can be trusted. There, in the presence of her inscrutable future husband, Ophelia slowly realizes that she is a pawn in a political game that will have far-reaching ramifications not only for her but for her entire world.

The World of the Arks

Long ago, following a cataclysm called the Rupture, the world was shattered into many floating celestial islands, now known as arks. Over each, the spirit of an omnipotent and immortal ancestor abides. The inhabitants of these arks each possess a unique power. Ophelia, with her ability to read the pasts of objects, must navigate this fantastic, disjointed, perilous world using her trademark tenacity and quiet strength.

An unforgettable heroine, a rich and bountiful universe, intrigue and suspense: A Winter’s Promise is perfect for readers of Margaret Rogerson’s An Enchantment of Ravens, Melissa Albert’s The Hazel Wood, V.E. Schwab’s “Shades of Magic” series, Tomi Adeyemi’s Children of Blood and Bone, Kenneth Oppel’s “Airborne” series, and N.K. Jemisin “Broken Earth” series.

Extract:

I think we could have all lived happily, in a way, God, me and the others, if it weren’t for that accursed book. It disgusted me. I knew what bound me to it in the most sickening of ways, but the horror of that particular knowledge came later, much later. I didn’t understand straight away, I was too ignorant.

From the author of the Mirror Visitor quartet, comes a new, heart-stopping adventure. Everyone has an Instinct. And everything is perfect.  

In a world ruled by “We” each person has a role, a direction, a mission assigned by their Instinct.  No choice. No deviation. No freedom.   

But when some students disappear into silence, Claire, who has always felt out of place, and Goliath, determined to become a Saint before time runs out, find themselves questioning everything.  As they follow forbidden trails, escape a murderous Archangel, and discover that “We” is not at all what it seems, all their certainties will be shattered.  

SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2025 BOOKER PRIZE 
NEW YORK TIMES EDITORS’ CHOICE 
NPR BEST BOOK OF 2025 
NEW YORKER BEST BOOK OF 2025 
SHELF AWARENESS BEST BOOK OF 2025 

WINNER 
2025 Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction 
2025 Winston Graham Historical Prize for Fiction 

“This book is really special.” —Sarah Jessica Parker, 2025 Booker Prize Judge 

December 1962: Deep in the English countryside, two couples begin the day. Local doctor Eric commences his rounds in the village while his pregnant wife, Irene, wanders the rooms of their home. Across the field in a neighboring farmhouse, Rita is also expecting. Funny but troubled, her mind swims with a past that her husband, Bill, prefers to forget.  

When the two women meet, a clock starts. Affection still lingers in both homes; neither marriage is over. But when the ordinary cold of December gives way—ushering in violent blizzards of the harshest winter in living memory—so do the secret resentments harbored in all four lives. A masterclass in storytelling, The Land in Winter is proof yet again that Andrew Miller is one of our most dazzling chroniclers of the human heart. 

“Tender, elegant, soulful and perfect...Superb.”—Samantha Harvey, Booker Prize-winning author of Orbital  

“A writer of such intimate and insightful prose that stealing away with him for a few hours in another world feels closer to trespassing than reading.” —Ron Charles, Washington Post 

NEW YORK TIMES 100 NOTABLE BOOK OF 2025・BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR - Washington Independent Review of Books 

“A gorgeous novel.”—New York Times

Based on a true story, The Rarest Fruit is a captivating tale of resilience, discovery, and the secret history of a beloved flavor.

Born into slavery, orphaned at an early age, and raised by a passionate botanist on Réunion Island, Edmond Albius will defy the expectations of his time and, with his extraordinary natural talent for botany, revolutionize global culinary culture by discovering the secret life of vanilla orchids.

A novel of 19-century adventure, perseverance, a book at the intersection of science, exploration, and cuisine, The Rarest Fruit brings to light the contributions of a Black botanical innovator, who, during a time of colonial exploitation and against all odds, changed food culture forever. It is both a poignant tribute to the unsung heroes of history and a vivid portrayal of intertwined destinies shaped by a single discovery.

“The book is that rare find: a revealing, history-infused novel that spills its tale with the eager breathlessness, wry commentary, and frank truths of a close friend... exquisite.”—Christian Science Monitor

A NUMBER ONE INTERNATIONAL BEST-SELLER

A NEW YORK TIMES EDITORS’ CHOICE

A vibrant tale of love, companionship, and renewal set against the transformations of 1960s Vienna.

“How I loved this book! Filled with truth after truth, poignantly rendered and given to us with tender open-handedness.”—Elizabeth Strout, author of Olive Kitteridge

Summer 1966. Robert Simon is in his early thirties and has a dream. Raised in a home for war orphans, Robert has nonetheless grown into a warm-hearted, hard-working, and determined man. When the former owners of the corner café in the Carmelite market square shutter the business, Robert sees that the chance to realize his dream has arrived.

The place, dark and dilapidated, is in a poor neighborhood of the Austrian capital, but for some time now a new wind has been blowing, and the air is filled with an inexplicable energy and a desire for renewal. In the newspapers with which fishmongers wrap the char and trout from the Danube, one can read about great things to come, a bright future beginning to rise from the quagmire of the past. Enlivened by these promises, Robert refurbishes the café and, rewarding him for his efforts and search of a congenial place to gather, talk, read, or just sit and be, customers arrive, bringing their stories of passions, friendships, abandonments, and bereavements. Some are in search of company, others long for love, or just a place where they can feel understood. As the city is transformed, Robert’s café becomes at once a place of refuge and one from which to observe, mourn, and rejoice.

Combining the enchantment of warm prose with tender humor, Robert Seethaler has written a charming parable of human existence animated by unforgettable characters and a kaleidoscope of human stories.

★ “A gem of a novel, whimsical and bittersweet but never sentimental, with indelible characters and a powerful sense of place.”—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

A sweeping, emotionally resonant, multigenerational novel from award-winning Cameroonian author Hemley Boum, tracing the fate of a family divided by migration, memory, and the violent reshaping of their homeland.  

“Boum is a magnificent storyteller.”—Le Monde 

Winner of the Grand Prix Afrique 2025 and the Prix des cinq continents de la Francophonie 2025, The Fisherman’s Dream is a brilliantly crafted novel that braids together the destinies of a grandfather and grandson, each carrying the weight of a world transformed by globalization, displacement, and the delicate inheritance of love. 

Zacharias is a fisherman in Campo, a coastal village in southern Cameroon. His community—shaped for generations by the river’s rhythms and the meeting of forest and ocean—is upended by the arrival of logging companies, industrial trawlers, and predatory economic interests that exploit both land and people. Violence, upheaval, and irreversible change tear apart Zacharias’s family. 

Decades later, his grandson—also named Zacharias—has fled Douala for Paris’s 18th arrondissement. Isolated and adrift, Zack is haunted by a grandfather he never knew and a country whose wounds he carries in his body. The novel moves back and forth across eras and continents, revealing the long arc of memory and the things that are passed across generations. 

A work of rare lyricism and political force, The Fisherman’s Dream explores migration, ecological devastation, colonialism and its aftermath, and the rupture of traditional worlds, all while telling a moving multi-generational family story. 

“This is the stuff we live for—a spinning dream of a book, pure heart-in-your-throat magic. I can’t say this enough: read it, today, now.”—Paul Yoon, author of The Hive and the Honey, winner of The Story Prize 

A taut, emotionally gripping, and surprisingly funny novel about a father and daughter stranded in an airport at the end of the world.  

Ivan is a solitary man in his seventies, set in his ways and haunted by the failures of his past. His smart and cynical daughter, Nina, is in the twilight of her twenties and has long kept a distance from her sentimental father. But when Ivan proposes a trip to Europe in hopes that it will bring them closer together, Nina reluctantly agrees. They meet at LAX, where their departure is delayed. And delayed again. And again. As the hours drag on, their sharp, caustic and wide-ranging conversation reveals a lifetime of misunderstandings, unhealed wounds, and stubborn love. 

Soon more flights are canceled, security tightens, airport staff grow evasive, and it becomes clear to Ivan and Nina that something is wrong. They begin to suspect that they’re being held prisoner—sequestered from the world without explanation. At last, the surreal starts to overtake the mundane, and their need to escape—and to protect each other—turns increasingly urgent. 

What begins as a piercing portrait of a father and daughter becomes a novel of eerie suspense, as Nina and Ivan navigate not only their fractured bond but also a world teetering on the brink of collapse. A story of loving across gaps—between parent and child, between things said and unsaid—and about what happens when the outside world finally mirrors the chaos within, Passengers is Maksik’s most timely and accomplished novel yet.   

A genre-defying feminist gothic novel blending Indonesian folklore, Islamic mysticism, horror, and political reckoning. 

International literary sensation Intan Paramaditha—prizewinning Indonesian novelist, feminist thinker, and author of The Wandering (English PEN Translates Award; longlisted for the Stella Prize)—returns with her most ambitious and haunting work to date. Night of a Thousand Hells has been a long-selling bestseller for its Indonesian publisher, Gramedia, and was shortlisted for Tempo magazine’s 2023 Best Literary Fiction Award. Its English publication marks a major global moment for one of Southeast Asia’s most visionary storytellers. 

The novel opens with a devastating act: the youngest of three sisters becomes a suicide bomber. In the aftermath, her surviving siblings are forced to confront the violent, buried truths of their family history. Their search leads them to long-concealed secrets—including the existence of another sister who had lived among them unseen—and to the prophecies of their grandmother, whose shadowy wisdom has shaped their fates. Set across Indonesia, the United States, and Australia, the novel explores class divides, sisterhood, migration, shame, abandonment, and the politics of care—all through a ghostly, atmospheric lens that draws on Asian folktales and occult traditions. 

Readers have compared Night of a Thousand Hells to the work of Mariana Enriquez and Shirley Jackson, calling it “a masterclass in atmospheric tension” and “utterly unputdownable.” With its blend of political urgency, mythic resonance, and psychological depth, it is a singular contribution to global feminist literature. 

A compact, emotionally gripping literary novel from the author of Patria that blends a real-life tragedy with an intimate psychological portrayal of its aftermath.  

International bestseller Fernando Aramburu—winner of Spain’s National Prize for Narrative, the Strega Europeo, and the Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa Prize—returns with his most intimate and emotionally gripping novel yet. With The Child, Aramburu turns from the broad canvas of history to the private shadows of a single Basque family shaken by an unspeakable tragedy. 

Based on a real-life school explosion near Bilbao that killed fifty children in 1980, The Child follows one family—parents, grandparents, and the lost boy of the novel’s title—through the long, painful arc of grief. Aramburu’s gift lies in his ability to portray ordinary people with extraordinary humanity: small gestures, fleeting thoughts, contradictory impulses, the quiet heroism of resilience. His prose is unadorned, piercing, and all the more powerful for its restraint. The grandfather who refuses to believe the boy is gone; the parents determined to “be strong;” the town that both remembers and forgets—each is rendered with exacting truth and tenderness in careful, and caring, prose.  

Spanish readers have described The Child as “heart-breaking and unforgettable,” and “Aramburu at his most intimate.” With echoes of Russell Banks’ The Sweet Hereafter, The Child is a novel about trauma and its wake, about tight-knit communities, about the long shadow of loss, and about the possibility of healing. It is perfect for readers of emotionally driven, character-centered fiction that explores how ordinary families survive the unimaginable. 

A dazzling literary portrait of Sergei Eisenstein and the radical dream of cinema 

In Eisen, Guzel Yakhina turns her formidable historical imagination to the life of Sergei Eisenstein, the revolutionary filmmaker who reshaped cinema—and was nearly crushed by the system he helped glorify. From the triumph of Battleship Potemkin to the torment of censorship, exile, and artistic compromise under Stalin, Yakhina traces Eisenstein’s life as a drama of creation under pressure. 

Rather than a conventional biography, Eisen is a literary portrait, rendered in vivid, episodic scenes that mirror Eisenstein’s own theory of montage. Moscow, Berlin, Paris, and Mexico flicker past as art, politics, sexuality, and power collide. Yakhina explores the cost of genius in an authoritarian world, the body as both instrument and battleground, and the impossible demand placed on artists to serve ideology without losing themselves.   

Ambitious, visually charged, and intellectually daring, Eisen is a novel about cinema, history, and what it means to create when freedom is contingent.  

In Dream Your Animal Dreams, Carole Martinez crafts a haunting, visionary novel that entwines the personal with the global in a tale of dreams, survival, and transformation.  

With her eight-year-old daughter Lucie in her arms, Eva—a neurologist specializing in sleep—retreats to the isolated marshlands of the Camargue to protect them both from a violent man and a world that appears to be unraveling. 

At first their retreat appears idyllic. Then, one night, Lucie wakes in tears after a disturbing dream. It soon emerges that children all over the world are emitting a powerful, universal cry in their sleep—a phenomenon that quickly ripples into waking life, heralding inexplicable calamities that recall ancient plagues. There in the Camargue, between the whispering reeds and the ever-watchful horizon, Eva faces the narrow frontier between waking and dreaming, love and loss, humanity and the natural world. 

Martinez’s prose is at once lyrical and visceral, blending myth and psychological insight to explore how collective dreams might be messages from a beleaguered planet. Structurally bold and emotionally potent, the novel addresses themes of motherhood, violence, ecological collapse, and the universal search for meaning in chaos. Rich in atmosphere and moral urgency, Dream Your Animal Dreams is an unforgettable novel by one of France’s most beloved novelists. 

A bold debut novel about male desire and alienation, and an exploration of the body as terrain of self-discovery 

In Black Male, a Senegalese anthropologist living in France drifts through Paris in the aftermath of his PhD, caught between casual relationships, intellectual ambition, and a deepening sense of emotional distance. Estranged from Senegal yet unable to fully belong in France, he navigates desire, loneliness, and the racialized expectations placed on his body and identity. 

A long-awaited visit from his mother forces him to confront family ties he has kept at arm’s length, while his relationships with women—both Black and white—bring questions of intimacy, power, and self-understanding into sharp focus. As love begins to feel possible, he must decide what kind of life, and what kind of man, he is willing to claim. 

Intimate, incisive, and unsentimental, Black Male is a powerful debut novel about masculinity, migration, and the difficult work of learning to love. 

Boldly original, highly readable, and infinitely enjoyable—an audacious, swashbuckling entertaining epic that combines propulsive narrative drive with literary ambition—The Wreckers is richly layered, darkly comic, bursting with plot, and unforgettable characters.  

Spanning four hundred years and multiple continents—from Cuba to Portugal to Angola during the chaos of the civil war—The Wreckers unfolds like a set of nesting dolls. It begins with a Last Will and Testament of Garoto Bárbaro de Castro, which reads like a novel in miniature and expands into a globe-trotting saga of pirates, con men, revolutionaries, poets, priests, ghouls, and ghosts.  

Garoto Bárbaro de Castro is the son of a Portuguese slave trader who wears his father’s teeth in brass dentures; he is the reader's introduction to the tall tales that follow. Mamzelle Guzman is a fearsome pirate and Garoto’s doomed love. Commodore Lafitte is a Byron-esque narcissist obsessed with spectacle. Nuno Bárbaro de Castro, an artifact hunter and graverobber whose schemes entangle Felix Guzman, a reluctant descendant of de Castro and Mamzelle Guzman, trying—and failing—to escape history’s grip. 

The Wreckers tackles colonialism, power, the slave trade, inheritance, and revolution with intelligence and bite—while remaining compulsively readable. 

The Wreckers, Zimbabwean author George Makana Clarke’s American debut novel, will appeal to readers of García Márquez, Eleanor Catton, Carlos Ruiz Zafón, A.S. Byatt, Richard Flanagan, Patrick O’Brian, Susanna Clarke, Yaa Ghasi, David Mitchell, and Colum McCann. Ambitious yet accessible, literary yet commercial, this is a rare, audience-expanding novel. 

2025 Indies Introduce & Indie Next Pick
The Globe and Mail Best Books of 2025
New York Times Editors’ Choice
WSJ Notable Book of 2025

★ “A small treasure... A bloody and beautiful sojourn in the distant past.”—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

A brilliant Scottish debut, shortlisted for the Highland Book Prize and the Bookmark Book Festival Book of the Year.

The year is 825 CE. In the aftermath of a vicious attack by raiders from the north, an unlikely trio finds themselves the lone survivors on a remote Scottish isle. Still breathing are young Brother Martin, the only resident of the local monastery to escape martyrdom; Una, a beekeeper and mead maker who has been relieved of her violent husband during the slaughter; and Grimur, an aging Norseman who claws his way out of the hasty grave his fellow raiders left him in, thinking him dead. 

As the seasons pass in this wild and lonely setting, their inherent distrust of each other melts into a complex meditation on the distances and bonds between them. Told with humor and alive with sharply exquisite dialogue, David Greig deftly lifts the curtain between our world and the past. The Book of I is an entirely unique novel that serves as a philosophical commentary on guilt and redemption, but also humanity, love, and the things we choose to believe in.

“Gruesome, exciting... I haven’t read many books that are at once so murderous and so breezily cheerful.”—Sam Sacks, Wall Street Journal

A dazzling journey into the eccentric, troubled, and luminous minds that shaped literature.

In this bold, personal, and deeply researched blend of memoir, essay, literary analysis, psychological reflection, and intellectual sleuth story, Montero draws on psychology, neuroscience, creative literature, and the testimonies and biographies of authors and artists to weave a fascinating narrative on the connection between creativity and mental instability.

With intelligence, generosity, and narrative élan, Montero brings to life figures such as Franz Kafka, Virginia Woolf, Emily Dickinson, Sylvia Plath, Marcel Proust, Joseph Conrad, and Doris Lessing, painting a fresco of the ways in which the brain works, its quirks and dark corners. She breaks down the forces that influence creativity and miraculously reassembles them before the reader’s eyes over three hundred gripping pages.

Like a masterfully plotted detective story, each clue leads readers one step closer to new definitions of both the creative act and of what is and is not “normal.” Blending intimate memoir with wide-ranging cultural history, The Danger to Be Sane is a moving and inspirational homage to minds and lives that are outside of the mean.

’Twas a Divine Insanity— 
The Danger to be Sane 

From Emily Dickinson, Poem 593 

A light, humorous, amiably peopled, and tender novel about found families, the people who shape our lives, and the complexities of non-traditional family ties.  

Yuko has had four different surnames and been brought up in several families. The parental figures in her life, despite not being related by blood, have always cared deeply for her. Through it all, pragmatic and resilient and Yuko has navigated life’s changes and its occasional conflicts without bitterness, always managing to find a kind of equilibrium.   

As an adult, Yuko falls in love with Hayase, a talented pianist she’s known since her school years. Now a married woman, she embarks on a journey to reconnect with the various parental figures from her past to seek their blessing for her marriage. Along the way, she revisits her former life and the people in it and gains a deeper understanding of what truly defines a family.  

Cages is a sweeping, polyphonic portrait of a man seen through the eyes of those who loved him, feared him, and betrayed him. At its center is Felix—a zookeeper in 1960s Cuba, an exile in London, and finally a dying man in Miami.  His story is pieced together like a puzzle that can never fully be solved by one who knew him only as an absence and seeks to know him before it is too late. 

In Cuba, during the Missile Crisis, Felix risks everything for an illicit love affair with René, a fellow keeper. In a society where homosexuality is branded “counterrevolutionary,” their tenderness unfolds in the shadow of danger, betrayal, and political oppression. In London, Felix and his wife Anabel navigate exile and reinvention, while an aspiring actress named Claudia finds herself drawn into their orbit, her ambitions and desires colliding with Felix’s own hunger for connection. Years later, Virgilio—Anabel’s devoted brother—recounts the disintegration of Felix’s marriage and the exile that follows, even as he steps in to protect the family Felix abandoned. 

From Anabel, long silent about her complicity in the events that forced Felix’s flight from Cuba, to Rita, the daughter who knew him differently, each voice brings a sliver of truth. Together, these testimonies form a mosaic of longing, deception, survival, and reconciliation. 

Spanning Havana, London, and Miami, Acevedo’s luminous, formally inventive novel explores exile, forbidden love, fractured families, the nature of truth, and the stories we tell to make sense of the people we cannot forget. 

A word-of-mouth phenomenon turned cult classic in Korea, Hunger is a visceral, psychologically daring novel that reveals how love and money shape, wound, and consume us.

“A feast for the literary senses.”—Anton Hur, Judge of the International Booker Prize

On an ordinary afternoon, a woman sees her partner murdered in the street. Time freezes. She lifts his body from the pavement, cradles him home, disinfects each inch of skin—and sits down to begin.

As he witnesses his own funeral from beyond, their two voices—living and dead—lament a lifetime of bone-grinding labor in a society that devours everyone whole. But the woman is no longer willing to bow before law, God, or money. In an act of love and rebellion, she transforms his body into her own, entombing him within her flesh so that he may live again.

Raw, furious, and unflinchingly intimate, Hunger is the Korean underground phenomenon that indicts capitalism, mourns lost love, and pushes the boundaries of what the body can endure for justice and survival. A psychologically and philosophically thrilling novel, it cuts to the core of how we are consumed by the world—and how we might consume it back.

“An instant cult classic… You have to read it.”—Harper’s Bazaar

The first novel written about the enigmatic literary legend

“A pure delight.”—Elle

“Lapierre’s best novel so far.”—Le Nouvel Obs

Australia, 1901. Miles Franklin, the young daughter of poor bush farmers, manages to publish her first novel against all odds. A work of remarkable boldness and passion, it becomes an immense success in the English-speaking world. While she strives to maintain her anonymity under a male pseudonym, her identity is revealed and she is exposed to the misogynistic prejudices of her time.

Restless, indomitable, and unwilling to be silenced, Miles reinvents herself again and again across three continents. In Sydney, she pens a searing exposé of working women’s lives. In America, she throws herself into the suffrage movement. She volunteers with the Serbian Red Cross during the First World War, then joins the radical circles of 1920s Europe, sparring with critics and mingling with writers and artists.

She forges countless friendships, experiences magnificent loves, and, through it all, nurtures her passion for writing and her ambition for literary success. 

Guided by her generosity and sense of humor, Miles eventually returns to Australia, where she will deliver a final blow to the critics who proclaimed that her wit and her genius had dried up. 

The definitive study of the rise and fall of Oscar Wilde after his death, written by Wilde’s only grandson 

“A fascinating sweep through a hundred years from Wilde’s death to now.”―Stephen Fry 

Oscar Wilde died in November 1900, exiled in Paris and exhausted by scandal and prison life. The details of his life in the limelight are well known; what have regularly been ignored are the reverberations of the scandal for decades after his death. 

With pathos, humor, and his grandfather’s signature wit, Holland charts the extraordinary afterlife of the legendary writer and thinker, and traces the dramatic fluctuations in Wilde’s posthumous reputation over the past 125 years. A true feat of storytelling and scholarship, including 56 illustrated pages, After Oscar tells the story of Oscar’s wife Constance and his sons Cyril and Vyvyan; his lovers, friends, and enemies; the afterlife of De Profundis; sightings from beyond the grave; the fate of the Wilde estate; and Oscar’s contemporary status as a gay icon.  

One of the most important works on Wilde in over fifty years, After Oscar exposes decades of sensationalist conjecture surrounding the Wilde family, and documents a century of homophobia within the British establishment. Illuminating and heartbreaking, Holland has written a book that will amuse, infuriate, fascinate, and shock. Readers beware―you’re in for a Wilde ride. 

A Publishers Weekly Most Anticipated Book

Valérie Perrin’s First New Novel since her breakout bestseller Fresh Water for Flowers

“Tata is Perrin’s most ambitious, most intimate, most liberating, most important book yet.”—Le Parisien 

When Agnes hears from the local police her Aunt Colette has died, she can’t believe her ears.  Her father’s sister Colette, her Tata, died three years ago and has been resting in peace in the cemetery of Gueugnon. 

Agnes is called to identify the body: there is no doubt, it’s Aunt Colette. But then, who rests under the stone engraved with Colette’s name? And why did she fake her own death? So begins an investigation back in time, as Agnes pieces together the multitude of stories that lie behind her aunt's second death.       

An intricate, compelling web of stories told with irony, delicacy and depth, Tata will keep readers glued to every page.  

“Valérie Perrin is a prodigious storyteller.”—Elle  

An intimate portrait of genius, love, and betrayal at the end of Gustav Mahler’s life. 

In the spring of 1910, Gustav Mahler—wrapped in a wool blanket—sits on the deck of the Amerika, sailing back to Europe. The ocean around him is gray and endless, the air sharp with wind and steel. Not yet fifty, Mahler is already a legend: in Vienna and New York, audiences fight for tickets to see the restless, small man who commands the most stubborn orchestra in the world. 

Yet his fame is shadowed by illness. His body is failing, his wife Alma has fallen in love with another man: the young architect Walter Gropius. Mahler has begged, humiliated himself, tried everything to keep her. Nothing worked, except the certainty of his approaching death. Alma has stayed, tending to him with care, perhaps to ease his final passage. 

On board, Mahler reflects on life, art, and above all, love. Finalist for the Deutscher Buchpreis and one of the most acclaimed German novels of recent years, Robert Seethaler’s The Last Movement is a haunting, tender portrait of a great artist confronting his farewell to life. 

“Luminous, evocative, and original.”—Christina Baker Kline

A daring, erotically charged novel about ambition, desire, and the dangerous pursuit of self-knowledge. 

Ina is a 41-year-old literary scholar on the cusp of professional success. With a coveted university job, a kind husband, and a book on Eugene O’Neill due in months, her life appears enviably stable. But when an impulsive kiss with a stranger shatters her self-control, Ina finds herself plunged into an erotic and emotional freefall. 

She tells herself it’s research—a brief detour before returning to real life. But what begins as a flirtation becomes a reckoning with everything Ina thought she wanted: marriage, intellect, control. As she navigates the ecstatic confusion of newfound desire, she risks upending her work, her relationship, and her understanding of who she is. 

Set in Brooklyn and Manhattan at the turn of the millennium, Don’t Stop is a bold, immersive debut that explores what happens when a woman dares to want more—of the world, of her body, of herself. Bonnie Friedman delivers a novel of transgression, transformation, and unapologetic longing. 

“A moving, laser-eyed story about love, desire, betrayal, and destiny, which manages, mysteriously, to be simultaneously funny and profound.”—Michael Cunningham

A saga inspired by the incredible but true story of the iconic Klimt painting 

Painted in Vienna in 1910, Gustav Klimt’s “Portrait of a Lady” was purchased by an anonymous collector in 1916, retouched by the master a year later, then stolen in 1997 before reappearing in the gardens of an Italian modern art museum in 2019.  

No art experts, museum curators, or police investigators know the identity of the young woman in the painting, nor the mysteries that surround the turbulent history of her portrait.   

From the streets of Vienna in 1900 to Texas in the 1980s, and from Manhattan during the Great Depression to contemporary Italy, de Peretti imagines the destiny of this young woman as well as that of her descendants, and creates a masterful fresco that intertwines family secrets, disappearances, and thwarted loves.  

A May 2025 Indie Next List Great Read 

“Gabriële is a revealing, heartrending biographical novel about a complicated woman whose imprint on art history is undeniable.”—Foreword Reviews 

What if revolutions in art and society began with a revolution in love? 

Written by Anne Berest (The Postcard) and her sister, Claire Berest, Gabriële is a bold, immersive “true novel” about desire, creativity, and the radical reimagining of how to live. 

Paris, 1908. At the height of the Belle Époque, Gabriële Buffet—a brilliant young musician fresh out of Europe’s most elite conservatory—meets Francis Picabia, a charismatic and explosive Spanish painter. Their intense love affair plunges them into a Paris alive with artistic experimentation and social rebellion. Soon after, Gabriële meets Marcel Duchamp—younger than Picabia and Gabriële, brilliant, and enigmatic—and before long the three have embarked on a passionate and unconventional relationship that will define their personal stories—and in the process reshape modern art. 

As Europe moves from exuberance to upheaval, and World War I looms, Gabriële, Francis Picabia, and Marcel Duchamp and their milieu challenge every convention: about marriage, sexuality, authorship, and artistic freedom. Moving between Paris, New York, Zurich, Berlin, Barcelona, London, and Saint-Tropez, the novel asks a question that feels urgently contemporary: can new ways of loving and being in the world create new ways of thinking? 

At once intimate and sweeping, Gabriële restores a pioneering woman to the center of a story long told through men, inviting readers to reconsider genius, collaboration, and the invisible labor behind cultural revolutions. 

A sweeping ecological fantasy from one of Japan’s most beloved storytellers—where two girls must unlock a forgotten power to save their world from collapse. 

The vast Umar Empire has flourished for centuries thanks to the miraculous Ohaleh rice, a sacred grain brought by the first Empress Kokun from a distant land. Resistant to all parasites, the rice has sustained peace and prosperity—until now. When a mysterious infestation strikes, famine spreads, and the empire begins to crumble. 

Fifteen-year-old Aisha, granddaughter of the deposed king of the West Kantar domain, flees to the imperial capital with her younger brother after a violent coup. There, she meets the reigning Kokun, Olie—an enigmatic girl worshipped for her supposed gift of scent, yet secretly powerless. As Aisha uncovers her own latent ability to perceive the natural world through smell, she and Olie form an unlikely alliance. 

Together, they must confront a hidden history, uncover the truth behind the Ohaleh rice, and confront forces that threaten not just the empire’s survival, but the very balance of nature. 

Kokun: Volume 1 marks the beginning of an epic tale of rebellion, inheritance, and the fight to reconnect with a world on the brink of collapse. 

★ “Powerfully poetic...a testament to American virtues—and flaws.”—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

A deeply moving family story unfolding in richly evocative prose and a poetic portrayal of a town in decline during the final decades of the American century, Ashland is a book of metamorphoses—of the dance between permanence and transformation. 

In Ashland, New Hampshire, Carolyn, born of a teenage pregnancy, grows up alongside her mother Ellie, her aunt Jennie, and her cousins. Ashland is the type of place that most people plan to leave, but few do. Beauty can be found in small things—the trees in the wind, the sky’s particular shade of blue, a swim in the river, love, and family. But life can often be unforgiving and solace hard to come by. Carolyn reconciles the losses in her own life with an education at Plymouth State, the local university, and then by capturing in words her world and the people who inhabit it.

Recalling the novels of Richard Russo, Paul Harding, Marilynne Robinson, and Elizabeth Strout, Ashland is a debut novel of great intensity and poetry told in the voices of many vivid characters and, through them, in the voice of Ashland itself. 

WINNER 

Prix Goncourt des Lycéens 

American Choix Goncourt 

A Masterful New Novel by Sandrine Collette, One of France’s Most Daring and Acclaimed Writers. 

In a time outside time, in a world hemmed in by dark woods and silence, the villagers of Les Montées endure a life of hardship and submission. The land is stingy, the lords are merciless, and resistance is a dream dreamt by the village women.  

Twin sisters Aelis and Ambre are born with an otherworldly beauty that turns heads and decides destinies. Ambre, childless and quietly suffering in a loveless marriage, adopts a wild, starving foundling who appears one day at the edge of the forest. Madeleine’s arrival unsettles the fragile order of Les Montées. She is fierce, brave, mysterious, magnetic, brilliant, and shockingly adept with an axe. One day, she slaughters a stag in defiance of the lord’s decrees. The land, the laws, and the lives of those around her tremble in response, and a new destiny begins to take root, one lit by rebellion and fed by ancient wounds.

Narrated by Bran, a boy Madeleine’s age who watches her with a mix of awe and dread, Madelaine Before the Dawn is a wild, lyrical novel about the inheritance of silence, the fire of female defiance, and the long-suppressed urge to upend the rules of a world written by men. 

Collette’s storytelling evokes the brutal beauty of Zola’s Germinal and possesses the sweep of the novels of García Márquez. Hers is an elemental, undeniable voice, and with Madelaine Before the Dawn, she delivers the most ambitious novel of her career—an electrifying vision of revolt and resilience at the edge of civilization. 

Winner of the International Prize for Arabic Fiction 

A bold, psychologically rich novel of identity, exile, and resistance from one of Palestine’s most vital literary voices—written entirely from behind bars. 

Nur, a young Palestinian refugee from a camp near Ramallah, is often mistaken for an Ashkenazi Jew. Fluent in Hebrew and with a degree in archaeology, he dreams of freedom beyond the fences of the camp—and of writing a novel about Mary Magdalene based on the Gnostic Gospels. When he discovers an Israeli ID card in the pocket of a secondhand coat, he assumes a false identity and is hired for an archaeological dig near Megiddo. Passing as an Israeli, he moves through a world previously off-limits, gaining insight into the lives and beliefs of those he’s been taught to see as enemies. 

But as Nur’s borrowed identity deepens, so does the rift within: between Nur, the Palestinian, and “Ur,” the Israeli. By exploring this internal conflict, unfolding alongside friendships and love affairs, Bassem Khandaqji offers a meditation on the personal toll of occupation and the elusive desire to belong somewhere—fully, honestly, and without fear. 

New York’s five boroughs tell a million human stories of revolution, rebellion, and resistance in this singular and timely guide to the city that never sleeps. 

Cities are multifaceted creatures and nowhere is that truer than in New York. Opulent, venal, frenetic, frivolous, full of hubris, it is also a city alive with stories of revolt, rebellion, iconoclasm, creativity, kindness, and transgression. It is the birthplace of vibrant progressive politics, historic organized labor movements, mutual care organizations, and radical ideas that not only thrived in their native soil but have traveled and flourished abroad. New York as the home of Stonewall and the Gay Liberation Movement, the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union ,of  Occupy Wall Street, of the Harlem Renaissance, Tin Pan Alley, Abstract Expressionism, of the Beat poets, the Living Theater, punk music, hip hop, and bebop! 

In this entertaining and easy-to-use guide to the city that never sleeps, readers are invited to soak up New York’s subversive history—the New York of  Frederick Douglass, Thomas Jefferson, Harriet Tubman, Giuseppe Garibaldi, Emma Goldman, Sacco and Vanzetti, Leon Trotsky, Langston Hughes, Walt Whitman, and popular movements the birthplaces of which still evoke a spirit of rebellion and resistance.  Some of the most powerful dissenting voices in American politics, art and literature found their voices in New York—among them, Angela Davis, Malcolm X, the Black Panthers, and the pioneers of countless musical revolutions and innovations. 

A Philosophy of Walking meets Atlas Obscura meets Patti Smith’s Just Kids, Rebel City also includes a comprehensive index that cross references NYC boroughs, locations, and locales with the unforgettable personalities that give life to this book. There’s also extensive bibliography for readers who want to discover more about New York’s rebel history. This is a unique, indispensable, informative, and entertaining guide to New York’s wild side—past, present, and future. 

New York Times Bestseller • Barnes & Noble 2025 Book of the Year • Boston Globe Best Book of the Year • National Indie Bestseller • Top Ten Indie Next Pick • Indigo Heather’s Pick

THE SENSATIONAL #1 INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER THAT HAS TAKEN THE WORLD BY STORM, IN A LARGE PRINT EDITION

"Vibrant debut ... Schlesser seamlessly interweaves the art lessons with Mona's story ... Readers of Jostein Gaarder's Sophie's World will love this." —Publishers Weekly

Ten-year-old Mona and her beloved grandfather have only fifty-two Wednesdays to visit fifty-two works of art and commit to memory "all that is beautiful in the world" before Mona loses her sight forever.

While the doctors can find no explanation for Mona's brief episode of blindness, they agree that the threat of permanent vision loss cannot be ruled out. The girl's grandfather, Henry, may not be able to stop his granddaughter from losing her sight, but he can fill the encroaching darkness with beauty.

Every Wednesday for a year, the pair abscond together and visit a single masterpiece in one of Paris's renowned museums. From Botticelli to Basquiat, Mona learns how each artist's work shaped the world around them. In turn, the young girl's world is changed forever by the power of their art. Under the kind and careful tutelage of her grandfather, Mona learns the true meaning of generosity, melancholy, love, loss, and revolution. Her perspective will never be the same — nor will the reader's.

Mona's Eyes is a heartfelt, enlightening journey across five centuries of Western art history. With the emotional impact of The Elegance of the Hedgehog and the readability of The Little Paris Bookshop, Thomas Schlesser's sensational debut novel is at once a moving book about the beauty of life and a deeply touching story about the special bond between a girl and her grandfather.

“Italian literature has been waiting years for a novel like this.”—Vincenzo Latronico, author of Perfection

A luminous debut about the search for belonging, the tension between departure and return, and the legacy of migration, Tangerinn is a novel of memory, a stirring meditation on culture, identity, and inheritance set between London and the windswept beaches of southern Italy.

Mina is thirty and living in London. She fled there at twenty to reinvent herself to escape her small-town past, but a decade later she is drifting, untethered and uncertain. When her Moroccan-born father Omar dies, she returns to her childhood home on the Calabrian coast, where he ran a bar called the Tangerinn. It was more than just a bar—it was a gathering place, a haven for migrants and misfits, a dream that Mina’s sister, Aisha, is struggling to keep alive.

In searching for traces of her father, Mina begins to piece together her own fractured sense of identity. As she reconnects with the memories embedded in the land, she must confront what it means to belong—not just to a place, but to a lineage, a language, a self.

With precise, sensual prose and an acute sensitivity to atmosphere and emotion, Anechoum delivers a novel that is at once tender and fierce, local and borderless, as intimate as it is political. 

A New York Times Editors’ Choice・Book Riot Best Book of 2025・Guardian Best Book of 2025・Irish Book of the Year 2025

★ “Mesmerising, tragic, horrifying, utterly unputdownable... An outstanding read for fans of WWII fiction and of writers like Anthony Doerr.”—Emily Melton, Booklist (Starred Review)

In the final, perilous months of WWII, a secret network known as The Choir smuggles thousands out of Nazi-occupied Rome via a route known only as the Escape Line. But when a wounded airman falls from the sky, the entire operation is thrown into jeopardy. From the Vatican, Monsignor Hugh O’Flaherty struggles to maintain the fragile network as the ruthless SS Commander Paul Hauptmann closes in. Enter Contessa Giovanna Landini, a bold and defiant member of the Resistance whose actions will tip the balance of power. But in whose favor?

Brimming with suspense, unforgettable characters, and historical resonance, The Ghosts of Rome is a masterfully written novel of resistance, sacrifice, and survival from an acclaimed and bestselling storyteller. 

“The power of The Ghosts of Rome comes from the dazzling variety of voices... not just a wartime thriller, but a meditation on how we remember, how we resist, and how, even in the darkest times, humanity endures.”—The New York Times Book Review 

SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2025 BOOKER PRIZE・NEW YORK TIMES EDITORS’ CHOICE・NPR BEST BOOK OF 2025・NEW YORKER BEST BOOK OF 2025・SHELF AWARENESS BEST BOOK OF 2025・WINNER 2025 Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction・ WINNER 2025 Winston Graham Historical Prize for Fiction

“Tender, elegant, soulful and perfect...Superb.”—Samantha Harvey, Booker Prize-winning author of Orbital

December 1962: In a village deep in the English countryside, two neighboring couples begin the day. Local doctor Eric Parry commences his rounds in the village while his pregnant wife, Irene, wanders the rooms of their old house, mulling over the space that has grown between the two of them.

On the farm nearby lives Irene’s mirror image: witty but troubled Rita Simmons is also expecting. She spends her days trying on the idea of being a farmer’s wife, but her head still swims with images of a raucous past that her husband, Bill, prefers to forget.

When Rita and Irene meet across the bare field between their houses, a clock starts. There is still affection in both their homes; neither marriage has yet to be abandoned. But when the ordinary cold of December gives way—ushering in violent blizzards of the harshest winter in living memory—so do the secret resentments harbored in all four lives.

An exquisite, page-turning examination of relationships, The Land in Winter is a masterclass in storytelling—proof yet again that Andrew Miller is one of the most dazzling chroniclers of the human heart.

“Andrew Miller’s writing is a source of wonder and delight.”—Hilary Mantel

“This book is really special.”—Sarah Jessica Parker, 2025 Booker Prize Judge

A powerful, unflinching portrait of a generation fighting for change in Iran, Afghanistan, and Ukraine 

In The Fire, acclaimed journalist Cecilia Sala takes readers on a gripping journey through some of the world’s most volatile regions, from Eastern Europe to the Middle East. Through the eyes of young people like Kateryna, a Ukrainian soldier; Assim, an Iranian student at the forefront of the “Woman, Life, Freedom” protests; Nabila, a Muslim kickboxing champion and lesbian; and Zarifa, a political activist in Afghanistan, Sala offers an intimate portrayal of lives caught amidst turmoil and fighting for a better life.

By immersing herself in their worlds—in their daily lives and political battles—Sala crafts a poignant narrative that captures the human dimension of some of the world’s most intense conflicts. The Fire is a testament to the courage and hunger for freedom of a generation at the forefront of global change.

“This is essential reading for understanding the present.”—Il Messaggero

★ “The Golden Age is pretty much perfect.”―Publishers Weekly (starred review)

Frank Gold’s Jewish Hungarian family have fled Europe and the looming threat of Nazi Germany for the safety of Australia. Not long after their arrival, however, thirteen-year-old Frank is diagnosed with polio and is sent to a sprawling children’s hospital called the Golden Age. There he meets Elsa, the most beautiful and radiant girl he has ever seen.

Frank and Elsa’s love fuels their rehabilitation, allows them to face the perils of their illness with humor and bravery, and scandalizes the prudish staff of the Golden Age. Meanwhile, their parents are coping with challenges of their own. Frank and his family are isolated newcomers in a country they do not love and that does not seem to love them. His mother, a renowned pianist in Hungary, refuses to let the empty western deserts of Australia become her home. While Elsa’s mother must reconcile her big dreams with the new realities of her daughter’s sickness.

The Golden Age is a deeply moving, inspiring, and prize-winning novel about resilience, youth, and the will to live life to the fullest, whatever the odds.

WINNER OF THE PRIME MINISTER’S LITERARY AWARD AND THE PATRICK WHITE AWARD
FINALIST FOR THE MILES FRANKLIN AWARD

WINNER of the Philip K. Dick Award for BEST Science Fiction

In a near and mildly dystopic future, Francine has finally been freed from years of undiagnosed pain—a recent surgery has provided relief. Her subversive “Theory of Bastards,” which has unseated public figures and past presidents, has proven fruitful for other scientists and rewarded her with a generous grant and a prestigious placement at The Foundation. Now she is spearheading further research on a group of remarkable animals, bonobos. Her steady, significant progress is interrupted when windstorms sweep up out of the abandoned places and her colleagues retreat to safety. Francine and the man she has come to love stay behind to weather the storm, protect their simian research subjects, and continue the work, as a new and better future begins to emerge from the dust.

Audrey Schulman has once again written a spellbinding, original novel that never loses sight of its humanity.

A NEW YORK TIMES BEST BOOK OF THE 21st CENTURY

“Remarkable, lucid, austerely honest.”—The New Yorker

Elena Ferrante’s shattering English-language debut remains an unforgettable reading experience for her die-hard readers and a thorny pleasure still to be discovered for the millions of fans who only know her from My Brilliant Friend. “A masterpiece,” according to the Philadelphia Inquirer; “Stunning,” says The New Yorker; “Nothing prepares you for the ferocity of it,” wrote Amy Rowland in The New York Times. Even two decades after its first publication, The Days of Abandonment remains a groundbreaking, propulsive, and cathartic account of a woman’s wrath.

Olga’s husband of fifteen years has announced that he is leaving her. In a “raging, torrential voice” (New York Times) that is nonetheless “intelligent and darkly comic” (Publishers Weekly), Olga recounts her journey from denial to devastating emptiness. When she finds herself trapped within the four walls of her apartment, she is forced to confront her ghosts, the potential loss of her own self, and the possibility that life may never return to normal. 

“If that's not a great literary novel, I don't know what is.”—Kate Christensen, ELLE

An ode to memory, to home, and to the beauty of the natural world 

What remains of the springs, summers, autumns, and winters of a woman’s life? 

Isadora, now an old woman relegated to a hospice, looks back on her life and how intimately intertwined it was with that of the big, sprawling house where she spent almost her entire existence. 

Her memories of childhood and beyond come back to her, season by season: from the games and warmth of Summer and the back-to-school days of Autumn, to the crisp, cold days of Winter—days of loneliness and death—and to Spring’s promise of renewal, and of the return to the house that meant so much to her. 

Told in lyrical, beguiling language, Isadora guides the reader through the maze of her memory by classifying, like a watercolor painter, her recollections by season. 

“A masterly, hypnotic book I read in just two sittings.”—Edmund White

A propulsive, enigmatic novel that moves fluidly between London, Germany, Belgrade, Cape Town, and Tokyo, Fathers and Fugitives is a formally inventive and emotionally charged book about fatherhood and family, loyalty and betrayal, inheritance, loss, and belonging. 

Estranged from his elderly, senile father, Daniel nonetheless returns to South Africa to care for him during his final months. Shortly after arriving in Cape Town, however, Daniel learns of an unusual clause in the old man’s will: he will inherit his share of his father’s estate only if he spends time with Theon, a cousin whom he hasn’t seen since they were boys, and who lives on a sprawling farm in the Free State. With the conditions bearing on Daniel’s inheritance shifting in real time, Theon and Daniel travel to Japan to seek out an experimental cure for the son of the woman Theon lives with. The trip will change their lives forever.

S.J. Naudé’s masterful novel is many things at once: a literary page page-turner full of vivid, unexpected characters and surprising twists; a loving and at times shockingly raw portrayal of its protagonist’s complex psyche; and a devastatingly subtle look into South Africa’s fraught recent history. 

“Coolly funny, frequently surprising and in parts almost overwhelming in its emotional force…One of the best novels of the year.”—The Guardian

Love is the only lifeline.

“A historical romance of a grand, old-fashioned and very British variety, with hints of L.P. Hartley, D.H. Lawrence and Evelyn Waugh... Compelling and ultimately convincing, which is one of the most difficult things a love story can be.”—Mary Marge Locker, The New York Times Book Review

Post-WWI England is a nation in upheaval, its foundations shaken by the Great War and the collapse of genteel Edwardian society. The streets are haunted by shell-shocked men, runaways, mutilated veterans, damned poets, and revolutionaries.

Marion has fled Galway for Oxford after her elopement with a violent man ended violently. In the City of Dreaming Spires, where the cobbled streets, barely lit pubs, and underground book presses hum with restless energy, she meets Jamie, a damaged soul like her who is struggling to recover from his experiences at the front. He alone sees her scars. She alone knows his secret name. Their love is wild, anarchic, dangerous, absolute. Everything, it seems, is at stake. When the “talkers” in Marion’s head get too loud and the circumstances of her life too dire, she disappears, leaving Jamie bereft and without word. But their love is like gravity--an undeniable force pitted against the dark forces that would keep them apart.

At once an erotic drama, a formally inventive romantic epic, and a historical novel written with an emotional intensity that bears comparison to classics like Wuthering Heights, Patrick Hamilton’s Hangover Square, and Madame Bovary, Amanda is a poignant, atmospheric meditation on love, trauma, and redemption. H.S. Cross delivers an unforgettable novel on the infinite varieties of human experience.

From the author of Ties and The House on Via Gemito 

★ “Starnone’s sensitivity, nuance, and subtlety are wonderful to behold.”—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

Domenico Starnone’s The Old Man by the Sea is a slim masterpiece of a novel about an 82-year-old Neapolitan man, Nicola, who has spent his entire life telling stories, becoming very, very good at it. In words, with his pen, in the notebook he carries with him everywhere, he records life’s minutiae, its ephemera, those vibrating essences and almost imperceptible atoms of existence that most of us barely notice but that constitute the very stuff of life. Yes, recording the universe in each grain of sand has become second nature to Nicola. But of course, there is always something that escapes. Something unnamable that resists, remaining on the margins, slithering away, a movement intuited rather than identified. And this fact, for Nicola, is a source of deep anxiety and a growing sense of failure.

Now, ensconced in a house on the dunes south of Rome, Nicola spends his mornings writing, watching the waves, and observing Lu, a store clerk in her twenties whose graceful canoeing stirs faint echoes of his mother—a glamorous, headstrong woman who defied convention with her beauty and creativity. As Nicola reflects on the women who shaped him and the passions he has never outgrown, he finds himself drawn into the nefarious intrigues of the small seaside town and its inhabitants. He will end by embarking on an improbable and ill-advised kayak adventure of his own with Lu’s young son, as Starnone himself brings this slim, virtuoso novel about eros and melancholy, memory and reinvention, age and imagination, to an unexpected conclusion.

Tales from Japan that blend humor, surrealism, and sharp societal critique, by the acclaimed author of Where the Wild Ladies Are

“Piercing and sometimes surreal... Matsuda shines.”—Publishers Weekly

In The Woman Dies, renowned author Aoko Matsuda approaches often-thorny subjects such as sexism, prejudice, the normalizing effect of violence against women on screen, or the aesthetics associated with technology, with an inventiveness and quirky humor that keep these stories on the thrilling cusp between seriousness and levity.

Wordplay evolves into something much more complex, inanimate objects are endowed with their own point of view, and hard-hitting feminist stances are conveyed with a dry, detached humor that makes them even more undeniable.

Not so much a rollercoaster ride, rather an entire theme park, The Woman Dies is an out-of-the ordinary space readers will step into with feelings of wonder and discombobulation in equal parts. 

In this high-spirited, kaleidoscopic story, key moments of Iranian history, politics, and culture punctuate stories of family drama and triumph.

Kimiâ Sadr fled Iran at the age of ten in the company of her mother and sisters to join her father in France. Now twenty-five and facing the future she has built for herself as well as the prospect of a new generation, Kimiâ is inundated by her own memories and the stories of her ancestors, which come to her in unstoppable waves. In the waiting room of a Parisian fertility clinic, generations of flamboyant Sadrs return to her, including her formidable great-grandfather Montazemolmolk, with his harem of fifty-two wives, and her parents, Darius and Sara, stalwart opponents of each regime that befalls them.

It is Kimiâ herself––punk-rock aficionado, storyteller extraordinaire, a Scheherazade of our time, and above all a modern woman divided between family traditions and her own “disorientalization”––who forms the heart of this bestselling and beloved novel.

“A wonder and a pleasure to read.”—Rivka Galchen, author of Atmospheric Disturbances

“What begins as a cruel comic romp ends as a surprisingly winning story of hardship and resilience.”—The New Yorker

The story of three women tangled up in a family dynamic at turns hilarious and tragic.

When Rosa Achmetowna discovers that her seventeen-year-old daughter Sulfia is pregnant, she tries every bizarre home remedy to thwart the pregnancy. But despite her best efforts, the baby girl is born—and immediately wins Rosa’s heart. Dark-eyed Aminat is a Tartar through and through, just like Rosa, who wastes no time in plotting to steal her away from Sulfia.

When Aminat, now a willful teenager, catches the eye of a sleazy German cookbook writer researching Tartar cuisine, Rosa is quick to broker a deal that will guarantee all three women passage out of the Soviet Union. But as soon as they are settled in the West, the ties that bind mother, daughter, and grandmother begin to fray.

“Alina Bronsky writes with a gritty authenticity and unputdownable propulsion.”—Vogue

“A masterpiece of storytelling.”—The Dallas Morning News

Sir Edward Feathers has had a brilliant career, from his early days as a lawyer in Southeast Asia, where he earned the nickname Old Filth (FILTH being an acronym for Failed In London Try Hong Kong) to his final working days as a respected judge at the English bar. Yet through it all he has carried with him the wounds of a difficult childhood. Now an eighty-year-old widower living in comfortable seclusion in Dorset, Feathers is finally free from the regimen of work and the sentimental scaffolding that has sustained him throughout his life. He slips back into the past with ever mounting frequency and intensity, and on the tide of these vivid, lyrical musings, Feathers approaches a reckoning with his own history. Not all the old filth, it seems, can be cleaned away.

“An extraordinary novel—the structure, the characters, the sweep of time.”—Ann Patchett, author of Tom Lake

The story of one man’s love for a woman, that woman’s love for her music and her country, and of an entire world’s love for its idols.

A poet and a singer, unrequited love and a troubled national history: these are the subjects of Sélim Nassib’s I Loved You for Your Voice. Inspired by the life and legacy of one of the world’s most beloved singers, the story of Om Kalthoum is told here through the eyes of Ahmad Rami, the poet who wrote her lyrics and loved her in vain all his life. Kalthoum, forced to disguise herself as a boy at the outset of her career, eventually rises to international fame and becomes a living symbol of her country’s rebirth. Spanning five decades, Kalthoum’s story intertwines with the history of Egypt in a novel that is as faithful as it is imaginative.

“A dazzling masterpiece.”—Nigrizia (Italy)

A cast of affecting characters lovingly portrayed by Eric-Emmanuel Schmitt animates these eight contemporary fables about people in search of happiness.

One of Europe’s most popular and bestselling authors, Eric-Emmanuel Schmitt captivates the reader with his spirited style and enchanting stories that move effortlessly from the everyday to the fantastical. The eight stories in this collection represent his best and most imaginative storylines: from the touching and surprising love story between Balthazar, a wealthy author, and Odette, a shop clerk, to the tale of a barefooted princess; from the moving title story of about a group of female prisoners in a Soviet gulag to the entertaining portrait of a perennially disgruntled perfectionist. Behind each story lies a simple, if elusive, truth: though we may frequently be blind to it, happiness is often right in front of our eyes.

“There is a surprising sweetness to these stories of redemption and reconciliation. They carry a slight pleasant aftertaste, a lingering hint of delight.”—Barbara Fisher, Boston Globe

Maria Sirena tells stories. She does it for money, and for love. But now she will be asked to tell one last story so that eight women can keep hope alive.

Cuba, 1963. Hurricane Flora is bearing down on the island. Seven women have been evacuated from their homes into the former governor’s mansion, where they are watched over by another woman, Ofelia, a young soldier of Castro’s new Cuba. Outside the storm is raging. In a single room on the top floor of the governor’s mansion, Maria Sirena begins to tell the incredible story of her childhood during Cuba’s Third War of Independence. Stories, however, have a way of taking on a life of their own, and Maria Sirena will end up revealing more than she or anyone ever expected.

“The Distant Marvels, like love itself, is both storm and shelter at once.”—Justin Torres, National Book Award-winning author of Blackouts

“A love letter to the novel . . . and a profound exploration of human nature.”—Library Journal

Ivan and Francesca decide to open a bookstore devoted to their love of books. Tucked away in a corner of Paris, the store offers a selection of literary masterpieces chosen by a top-secret committee of literary connoisseurs. To their amazement the little dream store quickly proves a success. And that is precisely when their troubles begin. At first, both owners shrug off the anonymous threats that come their way and the venomous comments circulating on the Internet, but when three members of the supposedly secret committee are attacked, they decide to call the police. As the pieces of this puzzle fall ominously into place, it becomes increasingly evident that Ivan and Francesca’s dreams will be answered with pettiness, envy and violence.

“Charming and compelling and very readable.”—Words Without Borders

At once a bittersweet comedy and a drama of racial identity, this book brings to life the hilarious imbroglios of the modern metropolis.

Piazza Vittorio is home to a polyglot community of immigrants who have come to Rome from all over the world. But when a tenant is murdered in the building’s elevator, the delicate balance is thrown into disarray. With language as colorful as the neighborhood it describes, each character in this choral novel takes their turn “giving evidence,” and the stories that emerge provide an all-access pass into the most fascinating of Roman neighborhoods.

“Do we have an Italian Camus on our hands? Just possibly.”—Philadelphia Inquirer

A moving, funny, triumphant novel that exalts the quiet victories of the inconspicuous.

In an elegant apartment building in the heart of Paris, Renée, the concierge, scrutinizes the vacuous lives of its well-to-do tenants. Outwardly she conforms to every stereotype of the concierge: plump, cantankerous, addicted to television. Yet, unbeknownst to her employers, Renée is a sophisticated autodidact who adores art, philosophy, music, and Japanese culture.

Then there’s Paloma, twelve years old. Convinced of the meaninglessness of life, she’s decided to end her own on her thirteenth birthday. Until then she will continue behaving as everyone expects her to behave, hiding behind the mask of an average pre-teen.

Paloma and Renée hide both their true talents and their finest qualities from a world they suspect will not appreciate them. The arrival in the building of a wealthy Japanese tenant changes a delicate and fragile equilibrium.

“This story, like all great tales, will break your heart, but it will also make you realize—or remember—that sometimes the pain is worth it.”—Chicago Sun-Times

SHORTLISTED FOR THE NERO BOOK AWARDS 2023 
A SUNDAY TIMES’ BEST HISTORICAL FICTION BOOK OF 2023 

Isolated from society, Emily Brontë and her siblings spend their days inventing elaborate fictional realms or roaming the wild moors above their family home in Yorkshire. When the time comes for them to venture out into the world to earn a living, each of them struggles to adapt, but for Emily the change is catastrophic. Torn from the landscape to which she has become so passionately bound, she is simply unable to function.  

To the outside world, Emily Brontë appears taciturn and unexceptional, but beneath the surface her mind is in a creative ferment. A violent phenomenon is about to burst forth that will fuse her imaginary world with the landscape of her beloved Yorkshire and change the literary world forever.  

Fifteen Wild Decembers is the dazzling second novel from a writer who has been compared to Shirley Hazzard and Graham Greene, and whose first novel was described as “utterly stunning,” mesmerizing' and hailed as “a masterpiece.” 

WINNER OF THE 2024 STREGA PRIZE AND THE 2024 YOUTH STREGA PRIZE

★ “A gut-wrenching excavation of generational trauma... this contemplative novel offers a subtle but piercing meditation on the complex dynamics between parents and children.”—Publishers Weekly (starred review)

Acclaimed Italian author Donatella Di Pietrantonio’s best-selling novel to date, The Brittle Age is a powerful mother and daughter story and a profound exploration of human fragility and the haunting shadows of the past 

In the 1990s, deep in the Maiella mountains of Central Italy, a brutal crime shatters the peace of the local community. Two young women are murdered, a third left for dead. Lucia is twenty years old back, and the only survivor is her best friend.    

Now, Lucia is a physiotherapist, separating from her husband, her daughter Amanda studying in Milan.  When the pandemic forces Amanda to return to the family’s home near Pescara, Lucia’s memories are reawakened, and with them the impact of past trauma.  

Set against the backdrop of the rugged Apennine mountains, this gripping psychological family drama weaves Lucia and Amanda’s personal struggles with the mystery of the tragedy that marked their familial land decades earlier.   

Inspired by true events, The Brittle Age is a tale of individual resilience, and a commentary on the indelible impact of historical events on personal lives and the broader community.    

An unforgettable story about an unlikely friendship and about healing the wounds of a broken past from the million-copy bestselling author of Fresh Water for Flowers 

Justine is 21 years old and has lived with her grandparents and her cousin Jules since the death of her parents. As a nursing assistant at a retirement home, she spends much of her days listening to her residents’ stories.  

After bonding with Hélène, an almost 100-year-old resident, the two women slowly reveal their stories to one another. Whilst Justine helps Hélène to relive her memories of love and war, Hélène encourages Justine to confront the secrets of her own past, and the loss she keeps buried deep within. One day, a mysterious phone detailing a shocking revelation shakes the retirement home to its core. 

At once humorous and melancholic, Valérie Perrin’s novel depicts the consequences of undeclared love and, in her inimitable way, portrays once again how the past is never really past. 

This meticulously researched and brilliantly told historical novel, the first of the Machiavelli trilogy, recounts the enigmatic life of Niccolò Machiavelli, revealing the complex man behind the infamous political strategist.

October 1502. As Cesare Borgia sets out to invade the Florentine Republic, Niccolò Machiavelli is sent to spy on him and to glean details of his nefarious plan. But when Borgia asks Machiavelli to write his life story, their bond gains complexity and nuance: ultimately, they both aspire to everlasting fame and to achieve it, they need each other, for the one’s sword can only rule in eternity via the pen of the other.

Set against the backdrop of the Renaissance, rife with political intrigue and cultural flourishing, Bernini's richly imagined novel masterfully captures a society teetering on the brink of change and revolution, as one man takes his chance at greatness, navigating the treacherous corridors of power with guile and charisma.

The Throne is a captivating reflection on ambition, morality, and the pursuit of power and influence. As elucidating as Robert Caro’s The Power Broker, as gripping and stylish as Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall, and as atmospheric as Maggie O’Farrell’s The Marriage Portrait, The Throne reveals one of the most impactful and controversial minds in political history, and questions and asks to what lengths can one justifiably go to achieve greatness.

"Lovers of Europa Editions' other titles My Brilliant Friend and Fresh Water for Flowers will fall hard for this beautiful, heartbreaking, and healing story. Grab a box of tissues!" — Electric Lit

Sisters Emma and Agathe were thick as thieves when they were young but have always been as different as can be. Five years older, Emma was the defender, protector, and worrier for her fiery younger sister until tragedy marred their relationship.

For a long time, Emma has kept her distance from Agathe and her chaos. But when their adored grandmother dies, they must return together to Spain to empty out her house and, in the process, reconcile, remember, and pour out what is hidden inside their hearts.

Alternating between the sisters' childhood and the present day, Grimaldi's delicately wrought prose paints complex portraits of the two women, asking if the scars of the past can ever truly be healed, and what, in the end, is a good life.

Laughter, tears, and the transformative power of love — these are the ingredients that combine to make this uplifting, unputdownable literary novel the summer read of 2024.

A May 2025 Indie Next List Great Read

“Like Gabriële herself, this book takes on big ideas about modern art and modern life.”—The New York Times

The story of a passionate love affair that triggered a revolution.

An atmospheric, exuberant novel from the best-selling author of The Postcard, Anne Berest, and her sister, Claire Berest, about love and sex, art and revolution, experimentation and creativity, and three young people who changed the world.

The year is 1908, the height of the Belle Époque, and a brilliant, young French woman named Gabriële, newly graduated from the most elite music school in Europe, meets a volcanic Spanish artist named Francis. Following a whirlwind romance, they marry and fall headlong into a Paris that is experimenting with new forms of living, thinking, and creating. Soon after marrying Francis, Gabriële meets Marcel, another young artist, five years her junior. Soon, Francis, Marcel, and Gabriële are all involved in a fervent affair that will change the course of art history and redefine the avant-garde.

As the Belle Epoque gives way to rebellion and revolution, and the world descends into the devastation of World War I, Francis Picabia, Marcel Duchamp, and Gabriële Buffet revolutionize art and open up new ways of seeing and thinking, along the way posing a vital question for their age and ours: what is the connection between new ways loving and new ways of creating?

Moving between Paris, New York, Berlin, Zurich, Barcelona, London, and Saint-Tropez, Gabriële is as audacious, uninhibited, intimate, and unforgettable as its central character, the mercurial, pioneering Gabriële Buffet.

From International Booker Prize and National Book Award finalist Shokoofeh Azar, comes a stylistically audacious and emotionally powerful novel about one large, complicated family and a love affair lasting decades.

★ “A wildly ambitious novel about Iran's past, present, and future filled with longing and fury.”—Kirkus Reviews (Starred Review)

Spanning fifty years in the history of modern Iran, this lush, layered story embraces politics and family, revolution and reconstruction, loss and love as it recounts the colorful destinies of twelve children who get lost one long-ago night inside a mysterious palace.

Azar’s first novel, The Enlightenment of the Greengage Tree (Europa Editions, 2020), was shortlisted for the Stella Prize for Fiction and the International Booker Prize; it was longlisted for the PEN America Award and the National Book Award for Translated Literature.

In Azar’s new novel, each lost child’s story unfolds against the backdrop of immense cultural and political transformation; lovers must survive war, revolution, and rigid social strictures to keep their love alive; family bonds are tested, especially those indissoluble connections between the living and the dead. The Gowkaran Tree in the Middle of Our Kitchen is also the moving story of one family’s efforts to preserve the richness of Iranian culture in the face of Islamic hegemony following the 1979 revolution.

A New York Times Editors’ Choice
An NPR Most Anticipated Book of Summer 2025

A darkly funny, heart-wrenching satire that tears through the guts of the war news industry.

Catch-22 on speed and set in the Middle East, Vulture is a fast-paced satire of the war news industry and a tragi-comic coming-of-age novel.

In November 2012, Sara Byrne, an ambitious young journalist, is sent to Gaza to cover a war from The Beach. At the four-star hotel, staff work tirelessly to provide safety, comfort and generator-powered internet for the world's media, even as their own homes and families are under threat. 

Sara is determined to use this war to launch her stalling career and win back her lover. So, when her fixer Nasser refuses to set up the dangerous story she thinks will make her name, she turns instead to Fadi, the youngest member of a powerful militant family. Driven by the demons of a damaging, entitled, childhood, Sara will stop at nothing to prove herself, even if it brings disaster upon those around her.

Greenwood’s debut novel draws readers into the dark heart of western media, and with audacity and humour, questions its complicity in the tragedies that feed it.

“So sharp and funny… A superb novel on reporting and war.”
—Phil Klay, National Book Award-winning author of Redeployment

A blisteringly funny political critique wrapped up in a murder mystery, from one of Britain’s most beloved novelists

Post-university life doesn’t suit Phyl. Time passes slowly living back home with her parents, working a zero-hour contract serving Japanese food to tourists at Heathrow’s Terminal 5. As for her budding plans of becoming a writer, those are going nowhere.

That is, until family friend Chris comes to stay. He’s been on the path to uncover a sinister think-tank, founded at Cambridge University in the 1980s, that’s been scheming to push the British government in a more extreme direction. One that’s finally poised to put their plans into action. But speaking truth to power can be dangerous—and power will stop at nothing to stay on top.

As Britain finds itself under the leadership of a new Prime Minister whose tenure will only last for seven weeks, Chris pursues his story to a conference being held deep in the Cotswolds, where events take a sinister turn and a murder enquiry is soon in progress. But will the solution to the mystery lie in contemporary politics, or in a literary enigma that is almost forty years old?

Darting between decades and genres, The Proof of My Innocence is a wickedly funny and razor-sharp new novel from one of Britain’s most beloved novelists, showing how the key to understanding the present can often be found in the murkiest corners of the past.

A story of love, blood and dreams, set in early 20^th century China

In the early 20th century, China is a land undergoing a momentous social and cultural shift, with a thousand-year-old empire crumbling and the nation on the brink of modernity. Against this backdrop, a quiet man from the North embarks on a perilous journey to a Southern city in the grip of a savage snowstorm. He carries with him a newborn baby: he is looking for the child’s mother and a city that isn’t there.

This is a story of two people: a man who finds unexpected success after having journeyed to the hometown of the woman who abandoned him; and the woman he is searching for, who mysteriously disappeared to embark on her own eventful journey. This is a story about vanished crafts and ancient customs, about violence, love, and friendship. Above all, it’s a story about change and about storytelling itself, full of vivid characters, ranging from bandits to vengeful potentates, from prostitutes to deceitful soothsayers, and surprising twists—an epic tale, as inexorable as time itself and as gripping as a classic adventure story.

A mega best-seller in Sweden, with rights sold to over a dozen countries and a TV adaptation underway, Annika Norlin’s debut novel The Colony is the biggest Swedish literary phenomenon since Fredrik Backman’s A Man Called Ove.

“A disturbing, engrossing portrait of a tiny community living beyond society.”—Joumana Khatib, The New York Times Book Review

Winner of the Vi Literature Award and Swedish Radio’s Novel Prize, two of Sweden’s biggest literary awards, The Colony is a gripping portrayal of contemporary society and its alternatives.

Burnt-out from a demanding job and a bustling life in the city, Emelie has left town to spend a few days in the country. Once there, in the peaceful, verdant hills, down by the river she encounters a mysterious group of seven people, each with personal stories full of pain, alienation, and the longing to live differently. They are misfits, each in their own way, and all led by the enigmatic and charismatic Sara.

How did they end up there? Are they content with the rigid roles they’ve been assigned? And what happens when an outsider appears and is initially drawn to their alternative lifestyle but cannot help but stir things up?

A masterful blend of humor, emotion, unforgettable characters, and sharp social commentary, The Colony is a magnetic and deeply touching story about love, community, and the unfathomable power we other others and that others have over us.

★ “Norlin’s writing (as translated by Olsson) is clever and incisive, poking fun at modern society and the woodland community in equal measure... Ultimately, this is a treatise on humanity, on the things people need and the power and frailty of human connection. This is a novel that will stick with you.”—Kirkus Reviews (Starred Review)

A New York Times Editors’ Choice・Book Riot Best Book of 2025・Guardian Best Book of 2025・Irish Book of the Year 2025

★ “Mesmerising, tragic, horrifying, utterly unputdownable... An outstanding read for fans of WWII fiction and of writers like Anthony Doerr.”—Emily Melton, Booklist (Starred Review)

In the final months of World War II, a clandestine group known as The Choir successfully smuggles thousands of escapees out of Nazi-occupied Rome via a secret route known as the Escape Line. When an unidentified airman falls wounded from the sky, The Choir is plunged into danger and the survival of the Escape Line itself is threatened.

The Escape Line’s collapse would leave thousands stranded. Monsignor Hugh O’Flaherty, its architect and the acknowledged leader of The Choir, broods inside the Vatican, paralyzed by the perils of keeping his Roman underground railroad functioning. Meanwhile, SS Commander Paul Hauptmann has been tasked with destroying the entire operation, and the price of failure is high—his wife and children are under Gestapo lock-and-key in Berlin. Into this deliriously thrilling melee steps Contessa Giovanna Landini, a reckless, audacious, and magnetic member of the Italian Resistance who has the nerve to challenge Hauptmann’s authority.

Beautifully written and expertly crafted, The Ghosts of Rome is a historical suspense novel bursting with action, atmosphere, and unforgettable characters by one of contemporary fiction’s most acclaimed and beloved writers.

“The power of The Ghosts of Rome comes from the dazzling variety of voices employed, the sense of a world constructed in multiple dimensions... What emerges is not just a wartime thriller, though it is that, but a meditation on how we remember, how we resist and how, even in the darkest times, humanity endures.”—Alex Preston, The New York Times Book Review

A NUMBER ONE INTERNATIONAL BEST-SELLER

A NEW YORK TIMES EDITORS’ CHOICE

A vibrant tale of love, companionship, and renewal set against the transformations of 1960s Vienna.

“How I loved this book! Filled with truth after truth, poignantly rendered and given to us with tender open-handedness.”—Elizabeth Strout, author of Olive Kitteridge

Summer 1966. Robert Simon is in his early thirties and has a dream. Raised in a home for war orphans, Robert has nonetheless grown into a warm-hearted, hard-working, and determined man. When the former owners of the corner café in the Carmelite market square shutter the business, Robert sees that the chance to realize his dream has arrived.

The place, dark and dilapidated, is in a poor neighborhood of the Austrian capital, but for some time now a new wind has been blowing, and the air is filled with an inexplicable energy and a desire for renewal. In the newspapers with which fishmongers wrap the char and trout from the Danube, one can read about great things to come, a bright future beginning to rise from the quagmire of the past. Enlivened by these promises, Robert refurbishes the café and, rewarding him for his efforts and search of a congenial place to gather, talk, read, or just sit and be, customers arrive, bringing their stories of passions, friendships, abandonments, and bereavements. Some are in search of company, others long for love, or just a place where they can feel understood. As the city is transformed, Robert’s café becomes at once a place of refuge and one from which to observe, mourn, and rejoice.

Combining the enchantment of warm prose with tender humor, Robert Seethaler has written a charming parable of human existence animated by unforgettable characters and a kaleidoscope of human stories.

★ “A gem of a novel, whimsical and bittersweet but never sentimental, with indelible characters and a powerful sense of place.”—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

A finalist for the 2021 International Prize for Arabic Fiction, a compelling saga of two families that illuminates the lives of women in modern Tunisia 

Tunisia, 1930s. Against the backdrop of a country in turmoil, in search of its identity, the lives and destinies of the members of two important upper-class families of Tunis intertwine: the Ennaifer family, with a rigidly conservative and patriarchal mentality, and the Rassaa, open-minded and progressive. 

One terrible night in December 1935, the destiny of both families changes forever when Zbaida Ali Rassaa, the young wife of Mohsen Ennaifer, is accused of having had a clandestine love affair with Tahar Haddad, an intellectual of humble origins known for his union activism and support for women’s rights. The events of that fateful night are told by eleven different narrators, members of the two families, who recall them in different historical moments, from the 1940s to the present day. The result is a complex mosaic of secrets, memories, accusations, regrets, and emotions, taking the reader on an exciting journey through the stories of individuals caught up in the upheavals of history.  

A brilliant and darkly funny story of a friendship and its unraveling, and a powerful examination on the disruptive impact of social media on our lives

Once an ambitious and promising student at an elite university in Paris, Maia is now 26, living in Milan, and stuck in a dead-end job at a cafe and a dysfunctional relationship with an older man. Until one day her life seems to change: thanks to a friend’s recommendation, and despite not knowing anything about social media, she is hired to work for Gloria, an 18-year-old influencer with millions of followers.

Slowly, Maia understands that her disdain for the world of influencers is precisely why she was chosen for the job: as an outsider, Maia can keep Gloria grounded, tethered to reality—remind her that the image she projects online is only an illusion.

As the two women weave a complex and intense relationship, however, it is Maia’s life that starts to unravel. Exposed to the tricks and hypocrisy of social media, Maia is increasingly unable to avoid confronting the lies she’s been telling herself. The closer she gets to Gloria, the more porous the boundary between their feelings and identities becomes, in a dangerous game of mirrors that threatens Maia’s very sense of self.

Sharp, wry, and absorbing, The Other Profile is a revealing exploration of the light and dark of human relationships in the digital age.

“Gaza has always been rebellious... stubborn, addictive. I’m her daughter, and I look like her.”

Born in Rafah, raised in Gaza, subjected both to Israeli bombs and to Islamist tyranny, and in the face of prison, death threats, abuse, misogyny, violence, and repression, Asmaa al-Ghoul has continued to speak her truth. She has continued to live and to love, to laugh and to protest. In this moving memoir of growing up Gaza with a hunger for freedom and a passionate attachment to the places she calls home, journalist, writer, and activist, al-Ghoul recounts her lifelong resistance to religious fanaticism, state sponsored violence, and all forms of repression and subjugation. Al-Ghoul has been called “too strong minded,” criticized for not covering her hair, derided for ignoring warnings and speaking out against injustice. Her pure, clarion voice is raised wholly in support of dialogue, peace, love, and honesty. 

Nothing, it seems, can stop her.

Offering an intimate look into life, politics, and survival in Gaza in recent years, al-Ghoul’s A Rebel in Gaza offers readers a nuanced and singular perspective on the current conflict.

LONGLISTED FOR THE INTERNATIONAL BOOKER PRIZE 

A NEW YORK TIMES EDITORS’ CHOICE 

A WASHINGTON POST BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR 

The modest apartment on Via Gemito smells of paint and white spirit. The furniture is pushed up against the wall to create a make-shift studio, and drying canvases must be moved off the beds each night. 

Federí, a railway clerk, is convinced that if he didn’t have a family to feed, he’d be a world-famous painter. Talented, ambitious, and frustrated, his life is marked by bitter disappointment. His long-suffering wife and their four children bear the brunt. Years later, his first-born son will tell the story of a man he spent his whole life trying not to resemble. 

Narrated against the background of a Naples still scarred by WWII, The House on Via Gemito is a sweeping family drama by one of Italy's most acclaimed and beloved novelists. 

“Starnone uses language the way a great painter works with color.”—Jhumpa Lahiri 

A Russian journalist’s first-hand account of the heartbreak and resilience of ordinary Ukrainians faced with Putin’s aggression

Unique among books about Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Displaced tells the stories of ordinary and extraordinary civilians whose lives have been upended in the conflict. Russian dissident and journalist Valery Panyushkin gives readers an immersive and humanizing account of what it means to wake up one day and find yourself a refugee, or to feel compelled to devote your life to helping refugees.

Panyushkin’s achievement in this singular book is the proximity he creates between his readers and his subjects. All the small annoyances, the major catastrophes, the special occasions, quiet rewards, challenges, joys, and triumphs that constitute a life—how do these play out when you have been forced to leave your home with only a few possessions and no guarantee you’ll ever be back? What does it mean to be HIV positive, to have a toothache that needs attention, to be midway through gender reassignment therapy, to be pregnant, seeking an abortion, out of work, close to retirement, suffering from addiction, caring for a neighbor’s pets, when you are a refugee? How do you keep up the insurance payments, celebrate birthdays and anniversaries, conclude a business deal, stay healthy, find a purpose? Above all, Panyushkin asks, how long will it be before all of us—even those who today feel most shielded from such a fate—know the answers to these questions from direct experience of forced displacement?

In the tradition of Ryszard Kapuściński and Nobel Prize winner Svetlana Alexievich, Panyushkin brings us directly into the daily lives of people who have been forcibly displaced by war. Ultimately a hopeful book in its appeal to compassion, its portrayal of resilience, and its focus on our shared humanity, Displaced is an unforgettable account of the dramatic effects of Russia’s war.

From the National Book Award Finalist Domenico Starnone comes a new novel about childhood, memory, obsession, and the fictions we live by.

Children can be cruel, and children can love as passionately and obsessively as adults. These two observations combine, igniting the imagination of Italy’s greatest contemporary novelist and producing a seemingly candid novel that belies remarkable psychological depths and infinite degrees of enchantment.

Imagine a child, a daydreamer, one of those boys who is always gazing out windows. His adoring grandmother, busy in the kitchen, keeps an eye on him. The child stares at the building opposite, watching a black-haired girl as she dances recklessly on her balcony. He is in love. And a love like this can push a child to extremes. He can become an explorer or a cabin boy, a cowboy or castaway; he can fight duels to the death, or even master unfamiliar languages. His grandmother has told him about the entrance to the underworld, and he knows the story of Orpheus’s failed rescue mission. He could do better, he thinks; he wouldn’t fail to bring that dark-haired up from the underground if she were dead, and it only he had the chance.

A short, sharp, perfectly styled and unforgettable novel about love, desire, memory, and death by the Strega Prize-winning Italian author of Ties and International Booker Prize-longlisted author of The House on Via Gemito.

From the master of French noir and winner of the French Voices Prize, a gripping mystery about the blossoming of poisonous passions set in the brooding landscapes of Gironde, France

When Franck gets out after five years in jail, he expects to find the brother he protected with his silence—instead, waiting for him is his brother Fabien’s girlfriend. Jessica takes him to the gloomy country house where she lives with her cantankerous, hard-drinking parents, her eight-year old daughter, Rachel—who doesn’t speak, hardly eats, and seems to be carrying a secret much bigger than herself—and a large mastiff dog they all seem to fear.

Time passes, Fabien doesn’t return, and Franck is increasingly mystified by Jessica’s behavior, seductive at times, hostile at others. Nonetheless, Franck follows her around on her crazy nocturnal rounds until he finds himself with a gun pointed at his head. It’s the beginning of a crescendo of retaliation in a gang war in which Franck believes he is participating, only to realize he’s merely a sacrificial pawn.

In the scorching heat of the summer, love and violence, sweetness and blood, will result in an unpredictable ending, one that perhaps only the little girl knew from the start. 

The turbulent life story of Flor de Oro Trujillo, the eldest child of one of the world’s most brutal dictators. 

Flor de Oro was born in 1915 in San Cristóbal, Dominican Republic. Her father rose from small-time gangster to dictator and ruthlessly ruled the country for three decades until his assassination in 1961. 

El Jefe controlled his daughter with the same tight grip with which he ruled the country. It is a toxic love and Flor will fight all her life to free herself from her father’s yoke. A father she both loves and loathes. Flor’s journey includes nine marriages and many exiles which take her to France, Nazi Germany, and the United States.  

Flor’s life is a story of abuse, and struggles, and mistakes. It is a life story worthy of a novel. 

WINNER OF THE JANN MEDLICOTT ACORN PRIZE FOR FICTION AT THE 2023 OCKHAM NEW ZEALAND BOOK AWARDS

A dazzling portrayal of humanity and the natural world that perfectly balances violence and humor

Tama is just a helpless chick when he is rescued by Marnie, and this is where his story might have ended. “If it keeps me awake,” says Marnie’s husband Rob, a farmer, “I’ll have to wring its neck.” But with Tama come new possibilities for the couple’s future. Tama can speak, and his fame is growing. Outside, in the pines, his father warns him of the wickedness wrought by humans. Indoors, Marnie confides in him about her violent marriage. The more Tama sees, the more the animal and the human worlds—and all the precarity, darkness and hope within them—bleed into one another. Like a stock truck filled with live cargo, the story moves inexorably towards its dramatic conclusion: the annual Axeman’s Carnival.

Part trickster, part surrogate child, part witness, Tama the magpie is the star of this story. Though what he says aloud to humans is often nonsensical (and hilarious), the tale he tells us weaves a disturbingly human sense. The Axeman’s Carnival is Catherine Chidgey at her finest—comic, profound, poetic and true.

“A writer of formidable resources, a deft stylist possessed of uncanny imaginative acuity.”—The Guardian

From the author of Nives, a story of love, redemption, and resistance set in Italy during WWII

Tuscany, November 1943. The village of Le Case is miles from any big city and appears rooted in an earlier century. Seen from there, even the war looks different—it is mostly a matter of waiting, praying, and mourning. As a fierce winter threatens, an order is issued by the local Fascist authorities: all Jews must be rounded up and detained in the bishop’s villa to await deportation.

Shy, solitary, and taciturn René is the town’s cobbler. His only friend is the widow Anna, a woman with whom he has been secretly in love for years. When Anna’s son joins the Resistance and is swiftly captured and shot by the Wehrmacht, the grieving woman vows to continue her son’s mission, and one evening, she disappears into the woods. René later learns that a group of Resistance fighters has been ambushed and the survivors are imprisoned in the bishop’s villa. A woman is among them, they say, a grieving mother and former inhabitant of Le Case.

René can no longer stand by and watch as his town, his country, and his one great love become victims of the Nazis and their Fascist enablers, and he decides to take action. Perhaps for the first time in his life.

Based on the true story of a nefarious collaboration between the Catholic diocese of Grosseto and the Fascist authorities, The Bishop’s Villa is a masterful weaving together of fact and fiction by one of Italy’s most exciting young writers.

From one of Europe’s most original and brilliant classicists, an inspiring and deeply personal reflection on loss, memory, and what we owe the past and others, inspired by a night spent in Athens’ Acropolis Museum 

One day in late spring, Andrea Marcolongo walks into an outdoor store in Paris to buy a camp bed, a sleeping bag, and a flashlight. Her destination: not a remote forest or mountain peak, but the deserted halls of one of the most famous museums in the world, the Acropolis Museum in Athens, Greece, where she has been invited to spend a night completely alone. 

But it’s hard to be truly alone when you’re surrounded by the scarred beauty of the Parthenon, lit only by the moon and summoning echoes and ghosts from the past. One of the shadows visiting Marcolongo is that of Lord Elgin, the English diplomat who in the early 19th century orchestrated the controversial removal of the Parthenon marbles from Ottoman Greece to London, where they remain today. The other is the memory of Andrea’s father, whose recent death she is still mourning. 

Drawing on a lifetime of engagement with classical culture and its legacy, Marcolongo examines the burning question of the restitution of works of art removed during the age of imperialism, and the broader issue of the role of power and inequality in the history of art. As the night goes by, however, the empty space left by the missing statues—a wound filled with white plaster—starts evoking other, more personal absences. Surrounded and inspired by the ruins and splendor of the classical world, Marcolongo reflects on the ever-changing relationship between present and past, and on the choices and people that make us who we are, even—or perhaps especially—when we have to leave them behind. The result is a powerful and courageous book, one that crosses time and space to remind us that we cannot live in isolation but are continuously connected and indebted to others. 

“Marcolongo is today’s Montaigne…There is wisdom and grace here to last the ages.”—André Aciman, author of Call Me by Your Name 

A debut literary page-turner from a new South African voice about fatherhood and family, loyalty and betrayal, inheritance and belonging. 

Daniel is a worldly and urbane journalist living in London. His relationships appear to be sexually fulfilling but sentimentally meager. A young gay man with no relationships outside of sexual ones, he can seem at once callow and, at times, cold to the point of cruel with his lovers. Emotionally distant from his elderly, senile father, Daniel nonetheless returns to South Africa to care for him during his final months. Following his father’s death, Daniel learns of an unusual clause in the old man’s will: he will only inherit his half of his father’s considerable estate once he has spent time with Theon, a cousin whom he hasn’t seen since they were boys, who lives on the old family farm in the Free State. Once there, Daniel discovers that the young son of the woman Theon lives with is seriously ill. With the conditions bearing on Daniel’s inheritance shifting in real time, Theon and Daniel travel with the boy to Japan for an experimental cure and a voyage that will change their lives forever. 

S.J. Naudé’s masterful novel is many things at once: a literary page-turner full of vivid, unexpected characters and surprising twists; a loving and at times shockingly raw portrayal of its protagonist’s complex psyche; and a devastatingly subtle look into South Africa’s fraught recent history.  

A CRIMEREADS AND WORLD LITERATURE TODAY NOTABLE BOOK OF 2023

A spellbinding, best-selling work of true crime about one of the most shocking murders in recent Italian history and set in a Rome that will be a constant revelation to anyone who knows only the city’s well-worn tourist paths.

In March 2016, in a nondescript apartment on the outskirts of Rome, Manuel Foffo and Marco Prato, two “ordinary” young men from good families, brutally murdered twenty-three year old Luca Varani. News of the seemingly inexplicable crime sent shockwaves through Rome and beyond. What motivated such extreme violence? Were the killers evil or in the grip of societal evils? Did they know what they were doing? Or were they possessed? And if the latter, possessed by what?

Going beyond anything that has ever been written on the crime, based on months of interviews, court documentation, and correspondence with the killers themselves, The City of the Living not only reads like a fast-paced, revelatory thriller in the style of Lisa Taddeo’s Animal but is also a descent into the dark heart of Rome—a city plagued by corruption, drugs, hidden violence that sometimes erupts.

Nicola Lagioia leads us through a maze of betrayed expectations, sexual confusion, inability to grow up, economic grievances, crises of identity—progressively tightening the focus of the analysis to locate the point after which anything is possible. As hypnotic as Erik Larson’s Devil in the White City, an heir to Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood, The City of the Living is Nicola Lagioia’s most gripping, bestselling, and critically acclaimed book to-date, the story not only of a crime but of a society and the human natures that make such a crime possible.

A cautionary tale for a world in which social media has shattered the boundaries of intimacy.

The first time that Mélanie met Clara, she was stunned by Clara’s sense of authority, and for her part, Clara was struck by Mélanie’s pink, glittery nails, which shimmered in the dark. “She looks like a child,” thought the first. “She looks like a doll,” pondered the second.

These two women, both of the same generation and exposed to the same forms of media throughout their lives, could not be more different in adulthood. Mélanie is a social media superstar, broadcasting her children's daily lives on a family YouTube channel. Clara is a young police officer, assigned to the case after Mélanie’s daughter Kimmy is abducted.

Traversing the Big Brother generation, the social media influencer generation, and right up to the 2030s, Delphine de Vigan offers a bone-chilling exposé of a world where everything is broadcasted and monetized, even family happiness.

A symphony of interconnected lives that offers a compelling reflection on life in modern-day metropolises at the intersection of isolation and intimacy in Yoshida’s English-language debut

Set over several nights, between the hours of 1:00 a.m. and 4:30 a.m., in and around Tokyo, this mind-blowingly constructed book is an elaborate, energetic fresco of human nocturnal existence in all its mystery, an enigmatic literary mix of Agatha Christie, Teju Cole, and Heironymous Bosch.

On this journey through the labyrinthine streets and hidden corners of one of the world’s most fascinating cities, everybody is searching for something, and maybe searching in the wrong places. Elements of the fantastical and the surreal abound, as they tend to do in the early pre-dawn hours of the morning, yet the settings, the human stories, and each character’s search are all as real as can be.

Goodnight Tokyo offers readers a unique and intimate take on Tokyo as seen through the eyes of a large cast of colorful characters. Their lives, as disparate and as far apart as they may seem, are in fact intricately interconnected, and their fates converge against the backdrop of the city’s neon-lit streets and quiet alleyways. In his English-language debut, Yoshida masterfully portrays in captivating and lyrical prose the complexities of human relationships, the mystery of human connection, and the universal quest for meaning.

An unforgettable story about an unlikely friendship and about healing the wounds of a broken past from the million-copy bestselling author of Fresh Water for Flowers

Justine is 21 years old and has lived with her grandparents and her cousin Jules since the death of her parents. As a nursing assistant at a retirement home, she spends much of her days listening to her residents’ stories. 

After bonding with Hélène, an almost 100-year-old resident, the two women slowly reveal their stories to one another. Whilst Justine helps Hélène to relive her memories of love and war, Hélène encourages Justine to confront the secrets of her own past, and the loss she keeps buried deep within. 

One day, a mysterious phone detailing a shocking revelation shakes the retirement home to its core. At once humorous and melancholic, Valérie Perrin’s novel depicts the consequences of undeclared love and, in her inimitable way, portrays once again how the past is never really past.

"Lovers of Europa Editions' other titles My Brilliant Friend and Fresh Water for Flowers will fall hard for this beautiful, heartbreaking, and healing story. Grab a box of tissues!" — Electric Lit

Sisters Emma and Agathe were thick as thieves when they were young but have always been as different as can be. Five years older, Emma was the defender, protector, and worrier for her fiery younger sister until tragedy marred their relationship.

For a long time, Emma has kept her distance from Agathe and her chaos. But when their adored grandmother dies, they must return together to Spain to empty out her house and, in the process, reconcile, remember, and pour out what is hidden inside their hearts.

Alternating between the sisters' childhood and the present day, Grimaldi's delicately wrought prose paints complex portraits of the two women, asking if the scars of the past can ever truly be healed, and what, in the end, is a good life.

Laughter, tears, and the transformative power of love — these are the ingredients that combine to make this uplifting, unputdownable literary novel the summer read of 2024.