Europa Editions

An enthralling historical novel based on the little-known female warrior in nineteenth century India who led a revolt against the British.

Here is the long-forgotten story of Begum Hazrat Mahal, queen of Awadh and the soul of the Indian revolt against the British, brought to vivid life by the author of Regards from the Dead Princess, a major bestseller in her native France.Begum was an orphan and a poetess who captured the attentions of King Wajid Ali Shah of Awadh and became his fourth wife. As his wife, she incited and led a popular uprising that would eventually prove to be the first step toward Indian independence.
Begum was the very incarnation of resistance: as chief of the army and the government in Lucknow, she fought battles on the field for two years; she was a freedom fighter, a misunderstood mother, and an illicit lover. She was a remarkable woman who risked everything only to face the greatest betrayal of all.

The clearing of a cemetery stokes the fires of revolution in eighteenth-century France in this Costa Prize–winning “novel of ideas disguised as a ghost story” (The New York Times).

Paris, 1785. An ambitious young engineer, Jean-Baptiste Baratte arrives in Paris charged with emptying the overflowing cemetery of Les Innocents, an ancient site whose stench is poisoning the neighborhood’s air and water. A self-styled modern man of reason, Baratte sees his work as a chance to clear away the burden of history. But he soon suspects that the destruction of the cemetery might be a prelude to his own fate—and the demise of the social order. As unrest against the court of Louis XVI mounts, the engineer realizes that the future he had planned may no longer be the one he wants. His assignment sets him on a path of discovery and desire, as well as relentless labor, assault, and sudden death.

“Pure is a compelling, timely novel—with its throb of revolution, of ordinary people arising in anger—a narrative that takes death as its subject yet races with life.”—The Guardian

This dark satire about an entitled young banker in a downward spiral is “a very modern and thoroughly haunting piece of work” (The Sunday Telegraph).

It’s 2008 and Matt Freeman is living in London, desperately trying to keep a toehold in the financial world by running a shadow banking business with contacts in North Korea and Iran. He is furious with the emptiness and impermanence of twenty-first century life—but addicted to the allure of luxury possessions: cars, watches, bespoke suits. And meanwhile, there is the question of why the women in Matt Freeman’s life seem to disappear.
Capturing one of the world’s financial capitals at a crucial moment, poised between extravagant excess and a terrifying recession, Get Me Out of Here is a satirical psychological thriller about the rage and desperation that come with the expectation of money for nothing. By turns darkly comic and unnerving, Sutton’s novel possesses a moral authority rare in contemporary fiction.

Two lost young Parisians discover new paths for their lives in this charming pair of novellas by the international-bestselling author of Billie.

Twenty-four-year-old Mathilde has abandoned her studies in art history for a job leaving anonymous negative comments on websites. One day she loses her bag in a café—a bag that happens to contain ten thousand Euros. When an unknown man returns it to her a week later, Mathilde becomes obsessed with the mysterious encounter
Twenty-six-year-old Yann works as a sales assistant in a home appliances store while he waits for better days to come. He wouldn’t say he is unhappy. But sometimes, late at night, when he is crossing a bridge over the River Seine, he imagines jumping. One day he does a favor for one of his neighbors and is asked to stay for dinner as thanks. The following morning Yann throws caution to the wind and decides to change his life entirely.
These two novellas by bestselling author Anna Gavalda are among her most moving and inspiring. Life, Only Better is a touching, cleverly crafted book about choices and their consequences.

From the author of The Angry Buddhist: “An intoxicating and ultimately moving modern romance . . . A story that’s all the sweeter for its shadows” (Los Angeles Review of Books).

I Regret Everything confronts the oceanic uncertainty of what it means to be alive, and in love. Jeremy Best, a Manhattan-based trusts and estates lawyer, leads a second life as published poet Jinx Bell. To his boss’s daughter, Spaulding Simonson, at thirty-three years old, Jeremy is already halfway to dead. When Spaulding, an aspiring nineteen-year-old writer, discovers Mr. Best’s alter poetic ego, the two become bound by a devotion to poetry, and an awareness that time in this world is limited. Their budding relationship strikes at the universality of love and loss, as Jeremy and Spaulding confront their vulnerabilities, revealing themselves to one another and the world for the very first time. A skilled satirist with a talent for biting humor, Seth Greenland creates fully realized characters that quickly reveal themselves as complex renderings of the human condition—at its very best, and utter worst. I Regret Everything explores happiness and heartache with a healthy dose of skepticism, and an understanding that the reality of love encompasses life, death, iambic pentameter, regret, trusts, and estates.

“Affecting and funny.”—The New York Times

“Edgy and sweet, witty and wise, I Regret Everything is rollicking good fun. It’s also, in the end, a deeply moving love story between two unforgettable characters discovering what it means to truly be alive.”—Maria Semple, New York Times–bestselling author of Where’d You Go Bernadette

“A poignant story of dreams and the way they can crash into the reality of the dreamers.”—Booklist.

This is a funny, moving, "exotic" novel about travel, France, champagne, and, above all, about women's friendship. The on-again/off-again friendship between Pétronille and the main character in the book, who happens to be a writer by the name of Amélie Nothomb, gives the story its verve and the novel its heart. This is literary Thelma & Louise, with a little bit of French panache and a whole lot of champagne thrown in. 

A Man Booker Prize finalist: “This tale of ill-fated journeys through Greece, Africa and India shows” the author of The Quarry “at a superb new high” (The Guardian).

In this newest novel from South African writer Damon Galgut, a young loner travels across eastern Africa, Europe, and India. Unsure what he’s after, and reluctant to return home, he follows the paths of travelers he meets along the way. Each new encounter—with an enigmatic stranger, a group of careless backpackers, and a woman on the verge—leads him closer to confronting his own identity. Traversing the quiet of wilderness and the frenzy of border crossings, every new direction is tinged with surmounting mourning, as he is propelled toward a tragic conclusion.

Shortlisted for the 2010 Man Booker Prize, In a Strange Room is a hauntingly beautiful evocation of life on the road. It was first published in the Paris Review in three parts—“The Follower,” “The Lover,” and “The Guardian”—one of which was selected for a National Magazine Award and another for the O. Henry Prize.

An author visiting Jerusalem is pulled into a stranger’s mysterious death in this gripping, moving novel by one of Colombia’s major literary voices.

Winner of the La Otra Orilla Literary Award

Upon recovering from a prolonged illness, an author is invited to a literary gathering in Jerusalem that turns out to be a most unusual affair. In the conference rooms of a luxury hotel, as war rages outside, he listens to a series of extraordinary life stories: the saga of a chess-playing duo, the tale of an Italian porn star with a socialist agenda, the drama of a Colombian industrialist who has been waging a longstanding battle with local paramilitaries, and many more. But it is José Maturana—evangelical pastor, recovering drug addict, ex-con—with his story of redemption at the hands of a charismatic tattooed messiah from Miami, Florida, who fascinates the author more than any other. Maturana’s language is potent and vital, and his story captivating.
Hours after his stirring presentation to a rapt audience, however, Maturana is found dead in his hotel room. At first it seems likely that he has taken his own life. But there are a few loose ends that don’t support the suicide hypothesis, and the author is moved by Maturana’s life story to discover the truth about his death, in a literary mystery from “one of the most interesting Latin American writers . . . his most ambitious novel yet” (La Nación).

“A modern Decameron.”—La Liberté

“The satisfying conclusion to Gardam’s Old Filth trilogy offers exquisite prose, wry humor, and keen insights into aging and death” (The New Yorker).

While Old Filth introduced readers to Sir Edward Feathers, his dreadful childhood, and his decades-long marriage, The Man in the Wooden Hat was his wife Betty’s story. Last Friends is Terence Veneering’s turn. His beginnings were not those of the usual establishment grandee. Filth’s hated rival in court and in love is the son of a Russian acrobat marooned in the English midlands and a local girl. He escapes the war and later emerges in the Far East as a man of panache and fame. The Bar treats his success with suspicion: where did this handsome, brilliant Slav come from? This exquisite story of Veneering, Filth, and their circle tells a bittersweet tale of friendship and grace and of the disappointments and consolations of age. They are all, finally, each other’s last friend as this magnificent series ends with the deep and abiding satisfaction that only great literature provides.

“[Gardam’s] prose sparkles with wit, compassion and humor. She keeps us entertained, and she keeps us guessing. Be thankful for her books. Be thankful for this trilogy, which is ultimately an elegy, created with deep affection.”—The Washington Post

“Restores us to an era rich in spectacle and bristling with insinuation and intrigue. Vivid, spacious, superbly witty, and refreshingly brisk . . . the story (and the author) will endure.”—The Boston Globe

“All three Gardam books are beautifully written but it’s a pleasure to note that Last Friends is the most enjoyable, the funniest and the most touching.”—National Post

“Pure delight . . . One perfect story after another” from the Whitbread Award–winning author of the Old Filth trilogy (The Sunday Telegraph).

From the inimitable Jane Gardam, whose Old Filth trilogy cemented her status as one of England’s greatest living novelists, comes a collection of short stories that showcase her subversive wit, gentle humor, and insight into the human condition. Gardam’s versatility is on full display, while her sublime grasp of language and powers of observation remain as provocative as ever.

“A formidable collection that is at once outlandish and entirely convincing . . . It is Gardam’s gift for the ecstatic, for showing us what a place of wonders is the world and the hearts that dwell in it, that endows this collection with a dangerous and formidable energy, richer and more concentrated than any novel. She gives us miracle heaped upon miracle, and insists that they should each one be handled with care.”—The Guardian

“Unexpected appearance of figures from the past drive many of these sly, bighearted tales.”—The New York Times

“Readers will feel lucky to have so much good writing in one place.”—Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“Gardam’s preference for short stories shows in this extraordinary collection of great writing.”—NewPages Book Reviews

“A rich haul from a well of talent.”—Kirkus Reviews

This story of Jesus’s childhood best friend is “a thrilling meta-novel” and one of Kirkus Reviews’ Best Books of the Year (Maria Semple, author of Where’d You Go, Bernadette).

Like most successful men in their early thirties, Lazarus has plans that don’t involve dying. He is busy organizing his sisters, his business, and his women. Life is mostly good until far away in Galilee, without warning, his childhood best friend, Jesus, turns water into wine. Immediately, Lazarus falls ill. And with each subsequent miracle his health deteriorates: a nasty cough develops into an alarming array of afflictions unresponsive to the usual remedies.
His sisters think Jesus can help, but the two men haven’t spoken for years. Lazarus is willing to try anything to make himself well, anything, that is, except ask Jesus for help. Lazarus dies. Jesus weeps. Lazarus rises. This part we all know. But Lazarus is about to discover that returning from the dead isn’t easy at all . . .
An ingeniously funny and moving novel disguised as biography, Lazarus Is Dead recounts the story of a great friendship lost and regained that unabashedly turns convention on its head. Richard Beard draws on biblical sources, historical detail, art, and contemporary literature to cast a spell that remains unbroken until the final pages of this story about second chances.

“Beard’s take on Lazarus is nothing less than astonishing—and he respects the reader by taking religion and religious questions seriously.”—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

“Thoroughly entertaining . . . a brilliant, genre-bending retelling and subversion of one of the oldest, most sensational stories in the western canon.”—Sunday Business Post (Ireland)

“Clever and original . . . keeps the reader guessing until the death—and beyond.”—The Financial Times

“In this enjoyable series debut,” four colorful old timers meet regularly a small-town bar in Tuscany, where they gossip, play cards, and solve murders (Publishers Weekly).

At Bar Lume, in a small resort village on the Tuscan coast, between shots of espresso and hands of cards, four old-timers and Massimo the barman wile away the time chatting, arguing, and theorizing about the murder of a young woman in their town.
The girl’s body was found in a dumpster bin on the edge of town. The gossip circulating about the victim’s lifestyle suggests her murder was connected to the seedy world of drug trafficking and dangerous sex. The prime suspects in the case are two of the girl’s nightlife associates. But for want of something to do, the group of pensioners at Bar Lume begin to pull the case to pieces, forcing the barman Massimo into the role of amateur sleuth.
The four old-timers analyze the crime and the suspects, putting a comic spin on their often narrow-minded neighbors. From this “investigation,” in Marco Malvaldi’s lively and colorful prose, emerges a fascinating picture of life in a small Italian town.

The acclaimed author of Broken Glass Park brings her “warmth, humor and sharp observational eye” to a disfigured teenager’s coming of age in Berlin (Kirkus Reviews).

Once a handsome teenager, seventeen-year-old Marek is left badly disfigured after a Rottweiler attack. Now his mother sends him to a support group for young people with physical disabilities—what he calls “the cripple group”—led by an eccentric older man only known as “the guru”. Angry at the world and dismissive of the group, Marek sees no connection between their misfortunes and his own. Then a family crisis forces Marek to face his demons, and he finds himself in dire need of support. But the distance he has put between himself and the guru’s misshapen acolytes may well be too great to bridge.
Just Call Me Superhero cements Alina Bronsky’s reputation as one of Germany’s most compelling and stylish young authors. An atmospheric evocation of modern Berlin, a vivid portrait of youth under pressure, and a moving story about learning to love, this new novel from the author of Broken Glass Park and Hottest Dishes of the Tartar Cuisine is an irreverent look at the sometimes-difficult work of self-acceptance.

#1 BEST BOOK OF THE CENTURY - NEW YORK TIMES

Now an HBO series: the first volume in the New York Times–bestselling “enduring masterpiece” about a lifelong friendship between two women from Naples (The Atlantic).

Beginning in the 1950s in a poor but vibrant neighborhood on the outskirts of Naples, Elena Ferrante’s four-volume story spans almost sixty years, as its main characters, the fiery and unforgettable Lila and the bookish narrator, Elena, become women, wives, mothers, and leaders, all the while maintaining a complex and at times conflicted friendship. This first novel in the series follows Lila and Elena from their fateful meeting as ten-year-olds through their school years and adolescence.

Through the lives of these two women, Ferrante tells the story of a neighborhood, a city, and a country as it is transformed in ways that, in turn, also transform the relationship between two women.

“An intoxicatingly furious portrait of enmeshed friends.”—Entertainment Weekly

“Spectacular.”—Maureen Corrigan, NPR’s Fresh Air

“Captivating.”—The New Yorker

One of The Guardian’s Best Books of the Year: Personal writings by the anonymous author who became a literary phenomenon with My Brilliant Friend.

The writer known as Elena Ferrante has taken pains to hide her identity in the hope that readers would focus on her body of work. But in this volume, she invites us into Elena Ferrante’s workshop and offers a glimpse into the drawers of her writing desk—those drawers from which emerged her three early standalone novels and the four installments of the Neapolitan Novels, the New York Times–bestselling “enduring masterpiece” (The Atlantic).

Consisting of over twenty years of letters, essays, reflections, and interviews, it is a unique depiction of an author who embodies a consummate passion for writing. In these pages, Ferrante answers many of her readers’ questions. She addresses her choice to stand aside and let her books live autonomous lives. She discusses her thoughts and concerns as her novels are being adapted into films. She talks about the challenge of finding concise answers to interview questions. She explains the joys and the struggles of writing, the anguish of composing a story only to discover that that story isn’t good enough. She contemplates her relationship with psychoanalysis, with the cities she has lived in, with motherhood, with feminism, and with her childhood as a storehouse for memories, impressions, and fantasies. The result is a vibrant and intimate self-portrait of a writer at work.

“Everyone should read anything with Ferrante’s name on it.” —The Boston Globe

“As a study of fiction, femininity and family it is bursting with intelligence and fire”—from the award-winning author of Death of a She Devil (The Telegraph).

Your writer, in conjuring this tale of murder, adultery, incest, ghosts, redemption, and remorse, takes you first to a daffodil-filled garden in Highgate, North London, where, just outside the kitchen window, something startling shimmers on the very edges of perception. Fluttering and chattering, these are our kehua—a whole multiplying flock of Maori spirits (all will be explained) goaded into wakefulness by the conversation within. Scarlet—a long-legged, skinny young woman of the new world order—has announced to Beverley, her aged grandmother, that she intends to leave home and husband for the glamorous actor, Jackson Wright, he of the vampire films. Beverley may be well on her way to her ninth decade, but she’s not beyond using this intelligence to stir up a little trouble. How the kehua became attached to a three-year-old white girl is the origin of your writer’s tale. Suffice to say that murder is at the root of it all, that Beverley and her female bloodline carry a weighty spiritual burden and that this is the story of how they learn to live with their ghosts, or maybe how their ghosts learn to live with them.

“A haunting book . . . The novel is a spirited triumph: adroit, affecting and bung-full of genuine humour and ideas.”—The Guardian

“Weldon crafts this traffic between spirit worlds with characteristic wit, and without sacrificing the intricacies of a family’s struggle to accept its past.”—Financial Times

"Wonderfully wicked, highly readable.”—Independent

“So searing it will burn forever into your memory. McIlvanney is the original Scottish criminal mastermind.”—Christopher Brookmyre, international bestselling author

The Laidlaw novels, a groundbreaking series that changed the face of Scottish fiction, are credited with being the founding books of the Tartan Noir movement that includes authors like Val McDermid, Denise Mina, and Ian Rankin. Says McDermid of William McIlvanney: “Patricia Highsmith had taken us inside the head of killers; Ruth Rendell tentatively explored sexuality; with No Mean City, Alexander McArthur had exposed Glasgow to the world; Raymond Chandler had dressed the darkness in clever words. But nobody had ever smashed those elements together into so accomplished a synthesis.”

In Laidlaw, the series’ progatonist Jack Laidlaw—a hard-drinking philosopher-detective whose tough exterior cloaks a rich humanity and keen intelligence—investigates the murder of a young woman, coming into conflict with Glasgow’s hard men, its gangland villains, and the moneyed thugs who control the city. As the gangsters running Glasgow race Laidlaw for the discovery of the young woman’s killer, a sense of dangerous betrayal infests the city that only Laidlaw can erase.

PI Marco “the Alligator” Buratti returns in a “raucous, delicious ride” from the celebrated Italian crime writer and author of Bandit Love(Cedar Rapids Gazette).

Padua, Italy. An unremarkable man, a husband and father, disappears without a trace. After a few months of searching, the police send his file to the cold cases department to be thrown in with the files of other missing persons. One woman knows the truth about his disappearance, but, being the daughter of a prominent and wealthy Swiss industrialist, she fears coming forward with what she knows: that she was his lover and that there is more to his disappearance than another bored suburban husband running out on his wife. Stricken by guilt, she finally confides in a lawyer who advises her to turn to Marco Buratti, a.k.a. the Alligator, for help.Buratti agrees to assist the woman.
Initially, the case of the woman’s missing lover seems like a lost cause, but a clue puts the Alligator and his trusted associates, Max the Memory and Beniamino Rossini, on the trail of the unscrupulous and brilliant criminal, Giorgio Pellegrini, protagonist of The Goodbye Kiss and At the End of a Dull Day.The deadly game of chicken in which the good guys and the bad guys are often hard to tell apart is Carlotto’s specialty. But good or bad, these men are survivors in a world where the once ironclad criminal codes of conduct are disappearing and new criminal syndicates do vicious battle with old.

“A shaded caper and an earnest investigation into the nature of evil that reads like a runaway train, and confirms Carlotto as equal to any of the English-writing czars of noir.”—LoveReading

“Gang of Lovers is Italian ‘hard boiled’ noir but with the shell left on.”—Crime Scraps Review

“Rufin offers his readers a return . . . to a time when the wildest dreamer could be a wealthy merchant—Jacques Coeur, the treasurer poet” (Les Echos).

After a brilliant career as a trader, Jacques Coeur was summoned to the court of Charles VII and appointed Master of the Mint in 1436. He rose to become the King of France’s visionary First Banker who, with his tours of the Far East, his opposition to the crusades, and his efforts to develop trade, brought France out of the darkness toward the Renaissance and modernity. At the height of his success, his ill-considered infatuation with Agnès Sorel, King Charles VII’s favorite mistress, precipitated Coeur’s fall from grace.In Rufin’s delectable prose this true story becomes a gripping tale of adventure, a novel of ideas, and a moving love story.

“The Dream Maker blends with skill and efficiency politics, business, travel and love. All of this written in a classic, elegant prose, of which Jean-Christophe Rufin has long had a command.”—Le JDD

“Rufin bestows such immediacy to this artist of finance, such vitality that we hear the sound of Coeur’s own voice telling us his life.”—Télérama

“Rufin has re-established his eloquence and spirit, that of the great novelist of the people. . . . His new novel is both a chivalric odyssey and a brilliant reflection on power.”—Lire

“The vivid portraits of Charles VII and Agnès Sorel give readers an intimate glimpse into court intrigue in 15th-century France.”—Washington Independent Review of Books

“A fascinating novel.”—Historical Novel Society

A French food critic faces his mortality in an “entertaining [and] witty” novel by the New York Times–bestselling author of The Elegance of the Hedgehog (Newsday).

In the heart of Paris, in the same posh building made famous in The Elegance of the Hedgehog, Pierre Arthens, the greatest food critic in the world, is dying. Revered by some and reviled by many, Monsieur Arthens has been lording it over the world’s most esteemed chefs for years, passing judgment on their creations, deciding their fates with a stroke of his pen, destroying and building reputations on a whim. But now, during his final hours, his mind has turned to simpler things. He is desperately searching for that singular flavor, that sublime something once sampled, never forgotten, the flavor par excellence. Indeed, this flamboyant and self-absorbed man desires only one thing before he dies: one last taste.Thus begins a charming voyage that traces the career of Monsieur Arthens from childhood to maturity across a celebration of all manner of culinary delights. Alternating with the voice of the supercilious Arthens is a chorus belonging to his acquaintances and familiars—relatives, lovers, a would-be protégé, even a cat. Each will have his or her say about M. Arthens, a man who has inspired only extreme emotions in people. Here, as in The Elegance of the Hedgehog, Muriel Barbery’s story celebrates life’s simple pleasures and sublime moments while condemning the arrogance and vulgarity of power.

“Lush and satisfying prose.”—Publishers Weekly

“Powerful . . . The vivid descriptions of the Sardinian landscape are a fitting complement to the heroine’s conflicted heart” (Kirkus Reviews, starred review).

As this compelling novel opens, a young unnamed woman reflects on the life of her bewitching, eccentric, and fiercely emotional grandmother, whose abiding search for love spans much of the twentieth century. In 1943, as American bombs fall on the city of Cagliari, she is thirty and considered an old maid, still living at home with her parents. But when the bombing ceases, and despite her protests, her father forces her to marry the first man to propose, an older widower she doesn’t love.
After suffering several miscarriages, she is sent for treatment at a spa on the mainland, where she falls in love with an injured Italian army veteran. Back home, she gives birth to a son. She never reveals the affair to her husband—but decades later, she returns to the mainland and travels to her former lover’s hometown of Milan. Dressed in her finest coat and shoes, she wanders the streets in search of the elusive veteran . . .Set against a backdrop of rugged mountains and Italian villages lost in time, this international bestselling novel is a multigenerational family saga about love, lust, and country.

“Agus’s descriptions of the everyday are as beautiful and haunting as her portrayal of life’s most dramatic episodes. Add an unexpected ending and the result is a graceful, powerful book.”—Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“A wild rumpus of a book . . . an exuberant American tale of brothers wrestling demons and each other on opposite poles of their grab bag of a family” (PANK Magazine).

Lewis Chopik has just graduated from Columbia University. Having been dumped by his girlfriend and in flight from the pressures exerted by his ambitious professor father, Lewis returns to Wichita in search of respite at the home of his New-Ager mother, Abby. But when Abby picks Lewis up from the airport, she reveals that she’s starting a storm-chasing business and indulging a polyamorous lifestyle. Another unexpected arrival is Seth, Lewis’s bipolar younger brother, who shows off a new tattoo on his chest: In Loving Memory of Seth Chopik. Things begin to resemble the land of Oz more than Wichita when Lewis, while minding Seth, joins Abby in the Flint Hills on a storm-chase with her first client.

“[An] honest and raw look at brotherhood and what it means to rediscover your family.”—O, The Oprah Magazine

“The world of Wichita is rich, subtle, and funny, . . . This is a truly striking novel.”—Sam Lipsyte, New York Times–bestselling author

“Wichita is a novel about expectations and outcomes, about what is open and what is veiled. Its emotional terrain is touching and vast.”—The New York Times Book Review

“Ziolkowski’s humor and trenchant observations make for startlingly gorgeous (and often hilarious) prose even in the midst of emergencies.”—Interview Magazine

“[A] sparkling debut . . . There’s never a dull moment in a novel which fires us up with snappy and often very funny dialogue.”—Kirkus Reviews

“Evocative . . . A paean to the life, cities and food of the Mediterranean . . . His essays . . . reveal a man of deep feeling and humanity” (The Guardian).

A short sublime book on the three things dearest to Jean-Claude Izzo’s heart: his native Marseilles, the sea in all its splendor, and Mediterranean noir—the literary genre his books helped to found. This collection of writings shows Izzo, author of the acclaimed Marseilles trilogy, at his most contemplative and insightful. His native city, with its food, its flavors, its passionate inhabitants, and its long, long history of commerce and conviviality, constitute the lifeblood that runs through all of Izzo’s work.
Reminiscent of Henry Miller’s The Colossus of Maroussi and the lyrical essays of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry and Albert Camus, as uplifting and touching as Daniel Klein’s Travels with Epicurus, this slender volume will appeal equally to gourmets who delight in the strong flavors of Mediterranean cuisine, to those travelling on the Riviera (or arm-chair travelers who wish they could), and, naturally, to aficionados of noir fiction.
Praise for Jean-Claude Izzo

“Mr. Izzo was a marvelous food writer . . . His books are filled with winning descriptions of Provencal meals run through with the flavors of north Africa, Italy, Greece.”—The New York Times

“Just as Raymond Chandler and James Ellroy made Los Angeles their very own, so Mr. Izzo has made Marseilles so much more than just another geographical setting.”—The Economist

“In Izzo’s books . . . Marseilles is a ‘ville selon nos coeur,’ a city in tune with our heart . . . A cosmopolitan, maritime city, greedy, sensual and warm.”—Slow Food

This tale of innocence and corruption in Pakistan is “a beautiful, often painful, journey of a young man’s doomed yearning for love” (The Guardian).

During a village wedding in Pakistan, a boy risks speaking to the beautiful daughter of a powerful local politician. As night falls, the two meet in his father’s orchard, inadvertently falling asleep as they wait for the light of dawn to reveal the orchard’s beauty, naive to the dangers posed by their innocent mistake. As first light approaches, and the girl’s father realizes the young couple’s mutual attraction, he has the boy sent to prison without explanation or the benefit of a trial. Fifteen years later, the boy—now a man—is released without a word. Bereft of family and weakened from years of abuse, he collapses on the side of the road and is taken in by a kindly scholar. As time passes, the man recovers enough to take daily walks to his father’s now abandoned orchard, where he last saw his young beloved among the trees, beneath soaring, fluttering swallows . . . In clear, crystalline prose, this novel reveals the ability of the human spirit to conquer the random cruelties of life, and how the power of love and hope, once known, can never truly be extinguished.

“Hobbs’ prose is spare, clean, and lyrical, giving In the Orchard, the Swallows a timeless feeling; however, the markers of the Afghan war and the changes in the landscape remind the reader that this story is very contemporary.”—Booklist

“A perfectly cut jewel of a book.”—The Financial Times

“With echoes of Kafka and Conrad,” the acclaimed Israeli author of Castle in Spain offers “a provocative, spare, slow-to-unfold mystery of character” (Kirkus Reviews).

On the day of his forty-first birthday, Israeli secret agent Alexander Abramov encounters a beautiful young redhead on a city bus. He immediately recognizes her as the woman he has been searching for all his life, the one he has loved forever. Though they have never met, he is certain this young woman named Thea is an essential part of his life’s destiny.
Using all the tricks of his trade and communicating through anonymous letters, Abramov takes control of Thea’s life without ever revealing his identity. Soon, Abramov’s desperate, dangerous love for a woman half his age consumes everything in its path: time, distance, and rival suitors. And for Thea, keeping her lover safe from the amorous “Mr. Anonymous” becomes an obsession of her own. Only Abramov’s own story, of a life conditioned by isolation, distrust, violence, and murder, can explain his devastating manipulation of the woman he professes to love.
Hailed by Graham Greene as “the best novel of the year” upon its initial release in 1981, Minotaur is a highly inventive literary thriller.

“[This] beautifully restrained novel, a meditation on aging, marriage and loss, fictionalizes a well-known period in Thomas Hardy’s life” (The New York Times).

A November morning in the 1920s finds an elderly man walking the grounds of his Dorchester home, pondering his past and future with deep despondence. That man is the revered novelist and poet Thomas Hardy, and this is a fictionalized account of his final years from the celebrated author of The Elephant Keeper.
The novel focuses on true events surrounding the London theater dramatization of Hardy’s acclaimed novel Tess of the D’Urbervilles, including Hardy’s hand-picked casting of the young, alluring Gertrude Bugler to play Tess. As plans for the play solidify, Hardy’s interest in Gertie becomes a voyeuristic infatuation, causing him to write some of the best poems of his career. However, when Hardy’s reclusive, neglected wife, Florence, catches wind of Hardy’s desire for Gertie to take the London stage, a tangled web of jealousy and missed opportunity ensnares all three characters—with devastating results.

Told from the perspectives of Hardy, Gertie, and Florence, Winter is “a meditation on love, regret, and an elusive yearning for happiness” (Kirkus Reviews, starred review).

“A book for grown-ups, one that finds the acme of human happiness in a young mother looking out at a starry winter’s night, while she holds her baby in her arms.”—The Washington Post

“Winter is quietly intelligent and compassionate, but what stands out most is that it is gorgeously, gorgeously written in prose so elegantly crafted that it becomes, paradoxically, almost invisible. It never shouts, never startles, just moves lithely along with an almost miraculous sense of rightness.”—Minneapolis Star-Tribune

A Mapuche woman in Buenos Aires tries to solve a friend’s murder in this Prix Landerneau–winning crime novel by the acclaimed French author of Zulu.

Twenty-eight-year-old Jana is a Mapuche, one of those indigenous “people of the earth” who were dispossessed when the Argentinean constitution turned them into outlaws overnight. A survivor of the Dirty War, Jana is now sculptor of a rare talent. But to make ends meet, she must also prostitute herself down at the docks. Her best friend, Miguel, a.k.a. Paula, is a transvestite who also works the docks. Jana and Miguel are connected, as if by a blood bond—so when Miguel disappears, it shatters Jana’s fragile world. Then the body of a transvestite is found emasculated at an abandoned port, La Boca. Jana turns to private investigator Rubén Calderón for help and protection. After serving time following the coup d’état of March 24, 1976, Calderón has been searching for any trace of los desaparecidos—the disappeared—and their odious tormentors.
Together, Jana and Rubén will plunge into the corrupt heart of the Argentinean political system on a hunt for a vicious murderer.

A Top 10 Book of the 21st Century —Paul Tremblay, The New York Times

“Truly insane...One of the most fun reading experiences I can remember.” Emily Temple, LitHub

A recent college graduate with a history of hapless jobs reads Robert Louis Stevenson’s novel Treasure Island and is dumbstruck by the timid design of her life. Convinced that Stevenson’s book is cosmically intended for her, she redesigns her life according to its Core Values: boldness, resolution, independence, and horn-blowing. The result is “a total hoot. Outrageous!!! Delightful!!!” (Nancy Pearl, NPR) and one of Literary Hub’s “50 Best Contemporary Novels under 200 Pages.”

A father follows his runaway daughter into a world of crime and espionage in this thriller by “one of the more sophisticated writers in his field” (Kirkus Reviews).

Amy Boxer, the precocious, frustrated daughter of kidnap consultant Charles Boxer and DI Mercy Danquah, has decided on drastic action: she’s leaving home. But Amy can’t just walk out. First she goads her parents with a challenge: YOU WILL NEVER FIND ME.
Amy’s destination: Madrid. Here, in the strobe lights of bars and crowded dance clubs, she’s anonymous and untraceable. Except to a volatile, unpredictable leader in the city’s drug trade, the man known only as El Osito.
Boxer will use his very specific set of skills to retrace Amy’s quickly vanishing steps. Meanwhile, Detective Inspector Danquah has her own missing person case in London: the young son of a retired Russian secret service agent who’s trying to learn who poisoned his colleague, Alexander Tereshchenko. As the detective begins her search, a body is found in Madrid. And Amy’s father may be the next target . . .

The Gold Dagger Award–winning author of A Small Death in Lisbon “demonstrates, as Graham Greene did long ago, that thrillers are the liveliest, most gripping, most thought-provoking literary enterprises going today” (Los Angeles Times Book Review).

“Few writers—in any genre—can match Wilson’s depth of character and plot or his evocation of place.”—The Boston Globe

A woman goes home to Naples after her mother’s mysterious death in a “tour de force” by the New York Times–bestselling author of My Brilliant Friend (Seattle Times).

Following her mother’s untimely and unexplained drowning, which was preceded by a series of strange phone calls, forty-five-year-old Delia leaves Rome and embarks on a voyage of discovery through the beguiling yet often hostile streets of her native Naples. She is searching for the truth about her family and the men in her mother’s life, past and present, including an abusive husband. What she discovers will be more unsettling than she imagines, but will also reveal truths about herself, in this psychological mystery marked by “tactile, beautifully restrained prose” (Publishers Weekly) about mothers and daughters and the complicated knot of lies and emotions that binds them.

“Ferrante’s polished language belies the rawness of her imagery.” —The New Yorker

“With the quick-paced mystery guiding the story, Delia explores her relationship with her mother, unraveling memories and secrets repressed since childhood and coming to terms with an upbringing filled with jealousy and violence . . . Troubling Love is vivid and powerful.” —Library Journal

“Portraits of a group of mostly young Muscovites . . . Some of [Panyushkin’s] sketches are political fables of inspiring selflessness and courage” (Star Tribune).

In Twelve Who Don’t Agree, journalist Valery Panyushkin profiles twelve Russians from across the country’s social spectrum, including: a politician, a journalist, an army officer, an author, a bank manager, a laborer, and a university student. Despite varied backgrounds, they all have one thing in common: participation in 2007’s historic March of the Dissidents. Though each of these men and women had personal reasons for joining the demonstration, they shared a belief that the government of Vladimir Putin was betraying the promise of Russia’s future.
Risking the threats and violent retaliation inflicted upon Russian journalists who dare to question the powers that be, Panyushkin boldly illuminates the lives and convictions of these twelve men and women. Their stories reveal how a growing commitment to human rights, equality, the principals of decency and fairness can transform one into a dissident in the eyes of a ruling class that does not value those same principles. And in today’s Russia the dissidents’ journey is one from which there is often no return.

“Panyushkin reveals a great deal about post-Soviet Russia and the kinds of constraints on freedom that most citizens still live with and try to work around. . . . [He] writes in vivid tableaux.”—Los Angeles Times

“His compassionate yet candid outlook lends poignancy to individual portraits, with inflections of wisdom and occasional humor. Remaining defiant in the face of oppression, it is a testament to Panyushkin’s talent that the plight of those involved is what ultimately resonates.”—Publishers Weekly

This Orange Prize Finalist novel is both a meditation on time and memory and “a deeply moving portrait of domestic and family life” in Ireland (The Sunday Telegraph).

Ireland, 2006. The economic miracle known as the Celtic Tiger has swept the country into a euphoria of wealth and transformation. But for forty-seven-year-old Dubliner Fintan Buckley, the race toward progress is also a troubling purge of the past. His young daughter, Lucy, and teenage son, Niall, are growing up in an Ireland that is changing as fast as they are.
More and more, Fintan feels the rush of time “like a kind of unholy wind”—so much so that he begins to experience strange, dreamlike visions. Is that his own face he sees on another man? Is that his sister staring back at him from a late-Victorian photograph?
A resonant portrait of a middle-class family in pre-crash Ireland, Deirdre Madden’s latest novel “is a reminder that we’d do best . . . to savor what we can of those passing moments Eliot called the ‘still point of the turning world’” (The New York Times Sunday Book Review).

“An outstanding book.” —Irish Independent

Commissario Ricciardi, “one of the most interesting and well-drawn detectives in fiction,” returns in this historical mystery by the author of By My Hand (The Daily Beast).

It is one week before Easter, Naples, 1932. At the high-class brothel in the center of town known as Paradiso, Viper, the most famous prostitute of all, is found dead. Suffocated with a pillow. Her last client swears that when he left her she was alive and well. But when her next client arrived, he found her dead. Who killed her and why? Ricciardi has to untangle a complex knot of greed, frustration, jealousy, and rancor in order to solve the riddle of Viper’s death. As he does so, he will discover no end of conflicting emotions just beneath the surface of a city that lives on passion.
De Giovanni’s mysteries unfold with such sinuous ease that they seem to write themselves. They enchant, surprise; they hold readers enthralled. Commissario Ricciardi, whose dubious gift of being able to see and hear the last seconds in the lives of those who have suffered a violent death, is one of the most fascinating investigators to make his appearance in the world of international crime fiction in recent years. And in Viper, the lustful and boisterous city of Naples has never been more seductive.

“Engaging . . . melancholy Ricciardi, Brigadier Raffaele Maione, and other characters are compellingly drawn. New readers and returning fans should savor this novel like a Neapolitan pastiera.”—Publishers Weekly

“De Giovanni is a fantastic discovery and I’m looking forward to reading the series from the start as there’s plenty here to enthrall the reader.”—Crimepieces

A novel of a father and son in search of each other on the Australian frontier of the 1870s: “Brutal, brilliant, beautiful” (Minneapolis Star-Tribune).

It is the summer of 1874. Launceston, a colonial outpost on the southern Australian island of Tasmania, hovers on the brink of anarchy, teeming with revolutionaries, convicts, drunks, crooked cops, and poor strugglers looking for a break. Outlaw Thomas Toosey races to this dangerous bedlam to find his motherless twelve-year-old son before the city swallows the child whole, but he is pursued by more than just the law. Hindering his progress at every turn is a man to whom he owes a terrible debt: the vengeful Irishman Fitheal Flynn, whose hooded companion hides a grotesque secret . . .
Based on real events, this prize-winning novel of vengeance and redemption, set against the sweeping, merciless grandeur of the frontier, “brings to mind the prose of Cormac McCarthy, Joseph Conrad and William Faulkner [and] catapults us into the vicious, impoverished world of a colonial town in Tasmania” (Minneapolis Star-Tribune).

“Readers who admired the propulsive plotting, atmospheric sense of place, and fierce family loyalty in Patrick DeWitt’s The Sisters Brothers and Cormac McCarthy’s The Road should be equally taken with Wilson’s superb novel. Highly recommended.”—Library Journal (starred review)

Winner of the Victorian Premier’s Literary Award and the Adelaide Festival Award for Best Novel

“Two Americans have life-altering experiences in Africa a century apart in this environmentalist adventure novel” by the author of Theory of Bastards (Kirkus Reviews).

In 1899, Jeremy, a young engineer, leaves a small town in Maine to oversee the construction of a railroad across British East Africa. In charge of hundreds of Indian laborers, he becomes the reluctant hunter of two lions that are killing his men in nightly attacks. Plagued by fear and alienated by a secret he can tell no one, Jeremy takes increasing solace in the company of his African scout.
In 2000, Max, an American ethnobotanist, travels to Rwanda where she searches for an obscure vine that could become a lifesaving pharmaceutical. Stationed in the mountains, she shadows a family of gorillas—the last of their group to survive the local poachers. But their precarious freedom is threatened as a violent rebel group from the nearby Congo draws close.
Told in alternating perspectives that interweave the two characters and their fates, Audrey Schulman’s novel deftly confronts the struggle between progress and preservation, idiosyncrasy and acceptance.

A blind woman leads her Naples police colleagues through the darkness in this distinctive crime thriller.

A report has landed on Commissario Martusciello’s desk. The lifeless body of the singer Jerry Vialdi—aka Gennaro Mangiavento—has been found at the Naples football stadium; another corpse, this one a Jane Doe, has been discovered in the Bentegodi Stadium in Verona, hundreds of miles away.
The bodies were left in a fetal position and there are no signs of physical violence: the method and the madness behind it appear to hide some unutterable secret. Conclusion: a daring challenge left by a psychopath for the police—who are stabbing in the dark with no idea where to begin. All except for superintendent Blanca Occhiuzzi: beautiful, blind from birth, forced by the dark that envelops her to perceive the world through only four senses, she feels the fear in people; she feels their guilt and their innocence. It is she who takes Martusciello by the hand, guiding him into the mind of a murderer . . .

The sequel to The Thoughts and Happenings of Wilfred Price Purveyor of Superior Funerals: “It was a pleasant delight to be invited back into this world” (The Bookbag).

Set in 1926, two years after the end of The Thoughts and Happenings of Wilfred Price Purveyor of Superior Funerals, Wendy Jones’s The World Is a Wedding finds Wilfred Price married to Flora Myffanwy and trying to be the perfect husband. His efforts only intensify when he learns that Flora is expecting. But something doesn’t feel right to Flora: she doesn’t feel at home.
Meanwhile, Grace (to whom Wilfred was very briefly married before he met Flora) has fled Narberth for London, trying to escape what has happened to her and the secret she carries because of it. But secrets are not so easily escaped—and Grace’s will affect Wilfred and Flora, too.
A sophisticated comedy of manners, The World Is a Wedding captures life in a small town in Wales and explores the complexities of marriage, motherhood, and masculinity and femininity with equal wit and insight.

“Sometimes it’s just really nice to find a book that is well-written, straightforward and tells a relatively simple story . . . There are touches of Dylan Thomas in the villagers’ characters, with their whispered gossip and nightly drunkenness, but they’re not a bad lot. Naturally, there’s some tragedy and some joy, and good things that come out of bad situations. Thoroughly enjoyable.”—The Irish Times

“The book is humorous throughout, often hilariously funny.”—Star Tribune

The Strega Award–winning Italian author’s “scalding and incisive” novel of marriage and family bonds that come undone in the wake of an affair (Library Journal, starred review).

A New York Times Notable Book of the Year

A Sunday Times and Kirkus Reviews Best Book of the Year

Winner of the 2015 Bridge Prize for Best Novel

Italy, 1970s. Like many marriages, Vanda and Aldo’s has been subject to strain, attrition, and the burden of routine. Yet it has survived intact. Or so things appear. The rupture in their marriage lies years in the past, but if one looks closely enough, the fissures and fault lines are evident. It is a cracked vase that may shatter at the slightest touch. Or perhaps it has already shattered, and nobody is willing to acknowledge the fact.
Domenico Starnone’s thirteenth work of fiction is a powerful short novel about relationships, family, love, and the ineluctable consequences of one’s actions. Known as a consummate stylist and beloved as a talented storyteller, Domenico Starnone is the winner of Italy’s most prestigious literary award, the Strega.

“The leanest, most understated and emotionally powerful novel by Domenico Starnone.”—The New York Times

When a Japanese scientist dies in a Tuscan resort town, four old card players and their favorite bartender investigate in this comic Italian mystery.

In the Italian resort town of Pineta, along the Tuscan coast, one might find the sleepy Bar Lume inhabited by its owner Massimo and its elderly regulars engaged in a game of cards. But this is merely a cover for the true activities of this senile squad. In truth, they are at work analyzing, postulating, gossiping, and chronicling every event that occurs in their small Tuscan town, using the most colorful language and Tuscan slang possible. When a chemistry conference at a local hotel is interrupted by the suspicious death of a Japanese scientist, Massimo is obliged to investigate on behalf of his all-too-curious clientele. The old-timers provide running commentary, demonstrating a cunning for sniffing out lies that can only be honed through decades of playing three-card monte.
The second book in Marco Malvaldi’s beloved Bar Lume series, Three-Card Monte is a comedy, a beguiling mystery, and a vivacious portrayal of small-town Italy.

A young woman enters a fantastically strange family in this “luminous and alarming lesson on desire” by the international-bestselling author (La Stampa, Italy).

A young woman is promised to the scion of a noble family. While her betrothed is away traveling, she is sent to the family’s villa to make her marriage preparations. There, the woman discovers that her future in-laws fear the coming of night, each and every night, and seem to never sleep. As the days pass, the atmosphere turns increasingly surreal, and the young bride’s interactions with the family turn increasingly erotic.
In this “virtuoso literary performance,” Alessandro Baricco portrays a cast of mysterious characters who exist outside of the normal rules of causation.
The Young Bride is an adult fable about fate, otherness, and the author’s own act of creation (European Literature Network).

“Baricco spins it all together into a work of elegance, eroticism and playful make-believe.”—The Wall Street Journal

A nineteenth century Spanish seamstress flees her village for Morocco in a novel with “a magical realist aspect . . . An epic sweep and a richness of characterization” (The Independent).

They say Frasquita is a healer with occult powers; that perhaps she is even a sorceress. Indeed, she has a remarkable gift, one that has been passed down to the women in her family for generations. From mere rags, she can create gowns and other garments so magnificent, so alive, that they mask any defect or deformity. They bestow a blinding beauty on whoever wears them. But Frasquita’s gift makes others in her small Andalusian village jealous. And when her gambling husband brings misfortune on their family, Frasquita travels across southern Spain and into Africa with her five children in tow. Her exile becomes a quest for a better life, and a way to free her daughters from the fate of her family of sorcerers.

“Like the beautiful frescoes of García Márquez, this novel is a marvelous and lyrical fairytale bursting with colorful characters”—La Revue Littéraire Des Copines

Three friends meet weekly to commiserate over romantic disasters in “a marvelous novel—light, funny and genuine, while still being quite emotional” (Kirkus Reviews).

Every Thursday night at seven o’clock, three men meet in Paris. Each man’s life, story, and situation is as different from the others’ as can be. What unites them is heartache. Trouble, that is, with women. The meetings are held in a spirit of openness and tolerance. In an almost religious silence each man confesses while the others listen. Philippe is a philosopher of repute. Since the woman he considered to be his perfect mate left him, he’s been dating one of the world’s most famous models in an effort to forget. Denis has been working as a waiter for years. Women have lost interest in him entirely and he is in a deep funk because of it. But one day a mysterious woman with a suitcase appears on his doorstep and moves into his living room without explanation, throwing his life into turmoil. Yves is a husband who, after having discovered his wife’s betrayal, refuses to honor any and all forms of faithfulness. He is spending a lifetime’s worth of savings in search of pleasure.
In The Thursday Night Men, Tonino Benacquista gives readers a variety of unexpected and amusing perspectives on romance, the relationship between the sexes, and male friendships.

Part of the bestselling saga about childhood friends following different paths by “one of the great novelists of our time” (The New York Times).

In the third book in the New York Times–bestselling Neapolitan quartet that inspired the HBO series My Brilliant Friend, Elena and Lila have grown into womanhood. Lila married at sixteen and has a young son; she has left her husband and the comforts her marriage brought and now works as a common laborer. Elena has left the neighborhood, earned her college degree, and published a successful novel, all of which has opened the doors to a world of learned interlocutors and richly furnished salons. Both women are pushing against the walls of a prison that would have seen them living a life of misery, ignorance, and submission. They are afloat on the great sea of opportunities that opened up for women during the 1970s. And yet, they are still very much bound to each other in a book that “shows off Ferrante’s strong storytelling ability and will leave readers eager for the final volume of the series” (Library Journal).

“One of modern fiction’s richest portraits of a friendship.” —NPR

“Set against the backdrop of Obama’s ascendancy to the presidency . . . A complex and imaginative literary tapestry about family and identity” (Kirkus Reviews, starred review).

At once immediate and epic, funny and devastating, this new novel by the author of Shadowbahn is a transcendent dispatch from the intersection of art and politics, passion and memory.
One November night in a canyon outside Los Angeles, Zan Nordhoc—a failed novelist turned pirate radio DJ—sits before the television with his small, adopted black daughter, watching the election of his country’s first black president, Barack Obama. In the nova of this historic moment, with an economic recession threatening their home, Zan, his wife, and their son set out to solve the enigma of the little girl’s life. When they find themselves scattered and strewn across two continents, a mysterious stranger with a secret appears, who sends the story spiraling forty years into the past.
Sweeping from 1960s London and ’70s Berlin to twenty-first-century California, and the beginning-of-civilization Ethiopia, These Dreams of You chronicles not only a family struggling to salvage its bonds but a twelve-year-old boy readying himself for what the years to come hold.

“Truly electrifying. In its gorgeous, vivid prose and its acutely sensitive soul, These Dreams of You shows us just what a novel can still do in our own crazy times.”—The Boston Globe

“Drama filled with exuberance.”—The Washington Post

“The four Nordhocs who provide the messy, vibrant heart of These Dreams of You make up a representative tableau for the new millennium: the American family as mash-up.”—The New York Times Book Review

A child psychologist struggles to come to grips with her own dark childhood memories, in this “mesmerizing, unsettling novel” (The New York Times).

When eight-year-old Julia was asked to be a bridesmaid at her cousin’s wedding, she was thrilled. Nothing, not even her mother’s resentment of the expensive, inconvenient traveling, could dull her excitement. But when the day finally arrived and she took her cousin’s baby on a secret stroll around the block in his pram, her entire world shifted. She couldn’t possibly know the impact the fateful trip would have on her future.
A lifetime later, Julia is a child psychologist working with young girls at risk. In her sessions, Julia has a knack for determining which of her young patients are truly troubled, and which are simply at the mercy of the oppressive adults around them. In this quietly powerful story of the relationship between past and current reality, Julia’s own troubled childhood begins to invade her present, and she is forced to confront the events of that day—and discover whether the truth about her past, and her guilt, is as devastating as she has always feared.

“The book it most reminded me of was Julian Barnes’s The Sense of an Ending. There is the same sense of psychological detective story, of piecing together the fragments of an unresolved past.”—The Guardian

“A gripping read.”—The Observer

A novel in the bestselling quartet about two very different women and their complex friendship: “Everyone should read anything with Ferrante’s name on it” (The Boston Globe).

The follow-up to My Brilliant Friend, The Story of a New Name continues the epic New York Times–bestselling literary quartet that has inspired an HBO series, and returns us to the world of Lila and Elena, who grew up together in post-WWII Naples, Italy.

In The Story of a New Name, Lila has recently married and made her entrée into the family business; Elena, meanwhile, continues her studies and her exploration of the world beyond the neighborhood that she so often finds stifling. Marriage appears to have imprisoned Lila, and the pressure to excel is at times too much for Elena. Yet the two young women share a complex and evolving bond that is central to their emotional lives and a source of strength in the face of life’s challenges. In these Neapolitan Novels, Elena Ferrante, “one of the great novelists of our time” (The New York Times), gives us a poignant and universal story about friendship and belonging, a meditation on love and jealousy, freedom and commitment—at once a masterfully plotted page-turner and an intense, generous-hearted family saga.

“Imagine if Jane Austen got angry and you’ll have some idea of how explosive these works are.”—The Australian

“Brilliant . . . captivating and insightful . . . the richness of her storytelling is likely to please fans of Sara Gruen and Silvia Avallone.”—Booklist (starred review)

A BEST BOOK OF THE CENTURY - NEW YORK TIMES

The “stunning conclusion” to the bestselling saga of the fierce lifelong bond between two women, from a gritty Naples childhood through old age (Publishers Weekly, starred review).

The Story of the Lost Child concludes the dazzling saga of two women, the brilliant, bookish Elena and the fiery, uncontainable Lila, who first met amid the shambles of postwar Italy. In this book, life’s great discoveries have been made; its vagaries and losses have been suffered. Through it all, the women’s friendship remains the gravitational center of their lives.

Both women once fought to escape the neighborhood in which they grew up. Elena married, moved to Florence, started a family, and published several well-received books. But now, she has returned to Naples to be with the man she has always loved. Lila, on the other hand, never succeeded in freeing herself from Naples. She has become a successful entrepreneur, but her success draws her into closer proximity with the nepotism, chauvinism, and criminal violence that infect her neighborhood. Yet, somehow, this proximity to a world she has always rejected only brings her role as unacknowledged leader of that world into relief.

“Lila is a magnificent character.”—The Atlantic

“Everyone should read anything with Ferrante’s name on it.” —The Boston Globe

“A novelist whose concern with how we should live and what we can believe puts him in the tradition of Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus” (The Scotsman).

Overpopulation, nuclear war, fascism, contemporary capitalism, and climate crisis all play roles in this epistolary novel in which a young philosopher grapples with the life of Werner Heisenberg, the Nobel Prize–winning German physicist.
As he examines the dark historical events of the early twentieth century alongside the luminous elegance of Heisenberg’s theoretical work, the narrator provides an intimate account of his own youthful struggles and desperate attempts to make sense of a fractured, globalized world. How could a man with such a beautiful mind have participated in such atrocities? Jérôme Ferrari offers a compelling, unflinching vision of the failings of European culture, a hypnotic glimpse into the mysteries of the physical world, and a deeply personal historical interrogation.

A historical fiction debut. “An old-fashioned story exploring first love, loyalty and loss—this diverting novel is pure pleasure” (The New York Times Book Review).

Under the heady influence of a springtime picnic and vague notions of obligation, young undertaker Wilfred Price blurts out a marriage proposal to a woman he barely knows. Much to his consternation, she says yes. As Wilfred attempts to extricate himself from the situation, his betrothed’s overbearing father presents further complications. And when Wilfred meets another woman he does wish to marry, a comedy of manners ensues. Set in rural Wales during the 1920s, Wendy Jones’s charming first novel is a deceptive, subtly humorous entrance to the mores and social conventions of a world gone by.

“A life-embracing novel.” —The Boston Globe

“A skillfully drawn comedy of manners.” —The New Yorker

“[Jones’] characters are delightfully drawn, lovingly described, and infused with life that transcends the printed page.” —World Literature Today

“Wilfred’s sentimental education is wrought so delightfully and affectionately.” —Sunday Times

“Light, compassionate drama about a small, very tightly bound, ancient corner of the world.” —The Guardian

“This is a spryly told tale whose heart is an ample match for its more knowing qualities.” —Daily Mail

“A comedy of errors in rural Wales evolves into a dark tale of family secrets in this very accomplished debut.” —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

The “provocative” novel about hard-living teenagers in poverty-stricken postwar Rome, by the renowned Italian filmmaker (The New York Times).

Set during the post–World War II years in the Rome of the borgate—outlying neighborhoods beset by poverty and deprivation—The Street Kids tells the story of a group of adolescents belonging to the urban underclass. Living hand-to-mouth, Riccetto and his friends eke out an existence doing odd jobs, committing petty crimes, and prostituting themselves. Rooted in the neorealist movement of the 1950s, The Street Kids is a tender, heart-rending tribute to an entire social class in danger of being forgotten.
Heavily censored and criticized, lambasted by much of the general public upon its publication, The Street Kids nevertheless had a force and vitality that eventually led to its being considered a masterpiece. This new translation comes from Ann Goldstein, the acclaimed translator of Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan novels.

“A beautifully memorable and unusual story about war and what it does to us” from the bestselling author and founder of Doctors Without Borders (The Independent).

In 1919, in a small town in the province of Berry, France, under the crushing heat of summer, a war hero is being held prisoner in an abandoned barracks. In front of the door to his prison, a mangy dog barks night and day. Miles from where he is being held, in the French countryside, a young extraordinarily intelligent woman works the land, waiting and hoping. A judge whose principles have been sorely shaken by the war is traveling to an unknown location to sort out certain affairs of which it is better not to speak.
Three characters. In their midst, a dog who holds the key both to their destinies and to this intriguing plot.
Full of poetry and life, The Red Collar is at once a delightfully simple narrative about the human spirit and a profound work about loyalty and love.

“A superbly crafted little gem that does everything a novel can do in less than 150 pages . . . It’s a lucky reader who gets to experience the power of The Red Collar.”—Shelf Awareness

“A graceful, unpretentious little miracle, a morality play of immense skill.”—The Irish Times

“In The Red Collar, a delicate and poetic novel, Rufin examines that which makes us human.”—L’express (France)

“Without special effects, with simplicity and the pure pleasure of telling a story, Jean-Christophe Rufin explores the meaning of faithfulness, loyalty, and honor.”—Le Figaro (France)

A third-generation Greek American visits his ancestral homeland, and discovers a century of family secrets, in this “hauntingly poignant” novel (World Literature Today).

From the burning quay at Smyrna to present-day Manhattan, the Argyriou family has been pursued by disaster. In the 1922 Greco-Turkish War, little Frosso and her sister Erasmia flee as Turkish soldiers descend on their village. Orphaned and destitute, the two girls have only each other to rely on as they scrape together a life in the immigrant slums around Athens.
Eighteen years later, Europe is stewing and Erasmia is offered a chance for a new life in America by her fiancé. Compelled to leave by the impending war, Erasmia boards the ship New Greece with a heavy heart, but before the ship reaches harbor her grief takes hold and Erasmia throws herself into the ocean—leading her fiancé to marry her surviving sister instead.Now Erasmia’s great-nephew, who has never seen Greece, will journey to the crisis-ridden country in the twenty-first century to uncover the shadowy past of the Argyriou family—in this atmospheric and psychologically complex novel that explores the blurred line between history and memory.

“A searingly vivid portrayal of the depths of human emotions—from the first glow of young love to the deeper strength of middle-aged commitment” (Kirkus Reviews).

In the “exquisitely written” The Pathless Sky, Chaitali Sen conjures a world in which a nation’s political turmoil, its secret history, and growing social unrest turn life into a fragile and capricious thing and love into a necessary refuge to be defended at all costs (The Rumpus). A world not unlike the one we live in.
Though they fell in love in college, life has conspired to keep John and Mariam apart for years. But a day comes when, across a great distance, both realize they have always loved each other. During the intervening years, however, the troubles in their country have reached a critical impasse. Government crimes have been white-washed, personal liberty is deeply compromised, a resistance movement has emerged from the underground to take the fight for freedom to the streets, and the government militia employs increasingly draconian measures in an attempt to maintain control. When Mariam is implicated in the latest spell of anti-government actions and arrested without appeal, the consequences of her and John’s love will prove potentially dire for both.

“The Pathless Sky centers on a couple, John and Mariam, and the subtle ways history and status complicate their relationship. Just as couples in the US might be discovering new tensions from their disparate reactions to whatever’s happening next in the White House, John and Mariam struggle with how their reaction to their country affects their experience of each other.”—BuzzFeed News, “10 Books That Challenge Our Political Landscape by Inventing New Ones”

“Gillot’s novel about soccer is also a delicate character study of a solitary man slowly rejoining the world” (Publishers Weekly).

Vincent once had a shot at becoming a professional soccer player, but a career-ruining injury put an end to his dreams. A tough kid from a poor family, he has become an emotionally cut-off man with frustrated hopes and limited options. He finds himself coaching an under-sixteen soccer club in an attempt to keep alive his only passion.
The team he coaches is little more than a roster of hotheaded boys, none of whom understands the on-field chemistry needed to win. Simply put, they aren’t of a championship caliber. Then Vincent’s unemployed sister, a single mother, suddenly dumps her thirteen-year-old son on him. With no clue how to take care of a teenager, Vincent panics. He decides to bring his nephew to practice, and eventually throws him into the scrimmage.It’s then that Vincent notices there’s something strange about Léonard. He has a preternatural ability for anticipating each striker’s intentions, making him a remarkably talented goalkeeper, but he seems detached, absent, lost. It becomes clear that Léonard has undiagnosed Asperger’s syndrome—and also that, with Léonard’s abilities as a goalie, Vincent’s ragtag team has a chance to reach the finals. The team will need to rally behind this strange kid from Paris in order to get there, and for that to happen, Vincent will have to let down his guard and open his heart for the first time ever.

“No love of sport is required to feel the genuine emotion pulsing from this story about making connections.” —Shelf Awareness

The award-winning author of the Inspector Montalbano series explores the political intrigue of seventeenth-century Sicily in this novel based on true events.

Sicily, 1677. Just before his death, the viceroy of Spanish-controlled Sicily names his wife Doña Eleonora as his successor. The Holy Royal Council is scandalized by the thought of a woman running the government, and its corrupt councilors will do everything in their power to make her a viceroy in name only. But Eleanora has other plans—and proves herself to be far more cunning and capable than her many adversaries.
In a land afflicted with poverty and misery, Eleonora successfully lowers the price of bread, reduces taxes for large families, reopens women’s care facilities, and establishes stipends for young couples wishing to marry—measures considered to be seditious by the city fathers and the Church. But while she outmaneuvers the powerful men in her path time and time again, Eleonora’s rule would last only twenty-seven days—one cycle of the moon.
Based on a true story, author Andrea Camilleri’s gripping and richly imagined novel tells the story of a woman whose courage and political vision is tested at every step by a corrupt and ruthless patriarchy.

“Engrossing stories of hilarity and heartbreak” from the Whitbread Award–winning author of the Old Filth trilogy (The Seattle Times).

A collection of stories from a writer at the height of her powers—a celebrated stylist admired for her caustic humor, freewheeling imagination, love of humanity, and wicked powers of observation. This is a delightful grouping of stories, witty and wise, that includes the return of Sir Edward Feathers, “Old Filth” himself.

“[Gardam’s] stories, like delicate tapestries, are alight with colors.” —The Times (London)

“When Gardam hits her mark, like other exemplary short-story writers such as William Trevor, Sylvia Townsend Warner and Elizabeth Taylor, she can be dazzling.”—The Guardian

“Gardam’s brisk narration and fearless temperament make for serious fun.”—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

“Wry, economical and perpetually surprising, these 14 stories from English novelist Gardam follow the last of the intrepid, stiff upper lip WWII generation of British ladies and gentlemen. . . . Gardam vividly evokes an age of iron wills.”—Publishers Weekly

“Gardam displays the consummate skill of the short-story-teller, which is that of the caricaturist, the ability to capture a personality in a few brief strokes. . . . Privilege Hill is a collection of gentle stories that you could read to your grandmother, with the kind of sharp wit that would no doubt give her a secret smile. But they’re deeper than they look . . . so don’t read them all at once.”—The Bookbag

This “gentle, humorous novel” follows a young Japanese woman as she yearns for the love of a reluctant coworker (The Wall Street Journal).

The objects for sale at the Nakano Thrift Shop appear as commonplace as the staff and customers who handle them. But like those staff and customers, they hold many secrets. If examined carefully, they show the signs of innumerable extravagances, of immeasurable pleasure and pain, and of the deep mysteries of the human heart.Hitomi, the inexperienced young woman who works the register, has fallen for her coworker, the oddly reserved Takeo. Unsure of how to attract his attention, she seeks advice from her employer’s sister, Masayo, whose sentimental entanglements make her a somewhat unconventional guide. But thanks in part to Masayo, Hitomi will come to realize that love, desire, and intimacy require acceptance not only of idiosyncrasies but also of the delicate waltz between open and hidden secrets, in this novel from the author of Strange Weather in Tokyo that “captures an untranslatable Japanese mood” (The New York Times).

“Uses a series of vignettes to chronicle a girl’s time working at Mr. Nakano’s secondhand store in Tokyo . . . Pleasant, leisurely prose.”—Publishers Weekly

“Hiromi Kawakami’s charming novel illuminates moments of kindness, love and friendship that pop up like the unexpected treasures amid the shop’s dusty collection of pretty mismatched bowls and plates, castoff eyeglasses, task lamps and old electric fans.”—Minneapolis Star-Tribune

A crooked cop behind bars makes a dangerous deal in this twist-filled noir thriller set in Italy.

Inspector Biagio Mazzeo is the head of a special unit composed of cops trained in the investigation of organized crime. He is a kind of father figure to these hard men, and often leads them well beyond the confines of what’s legal. But now they’ve been found out. To save his men from being ensnared in a corruption scandal, Mazzeo sacrifices himself and is tried and sentenced to jail time.
His sacrifice, however, isn’t enough to get his men out of trouble. His unit has stolen a shipment of drugs and its owners want it back. This time, Mazzeo’s boys have messed around with the wrong drug cartel, for these are no ordinary criminals. This is the ’Ndrangheta, the infamous Calabrian mafia that is known to stop at nothing to get what’s theirs. From behind bars, Mazzeo has only one way of helping his men: a deal with a young female police officer who promises he will be released and all charges will be dropped if Mazzeo embarks on a suicide mission to put an end to an underworld war.

In a gripping crescendo of violence, vendettas, and corruption, Biagio Mazzeo has to choose sides—because this time it’s not just his badge that’s on the line, but his life.

“Pulixi has an amazing talent for plot development and an ability to throw readers off the scent by working in breathtaking twists.”—Thriller Magazine

“Dangerous, edgy noir crime fiction at its absolute finest and certain to be one of my books of the year” featuring PI Marco “The Alligator” Burrati (reviewingtheevidence.com).

A woman has gone missing. Her husband, too ashamed to admit to the police that he and his wife were part of a ring of sexual adventurers that organized sadomasochistic orgies, turns instead to the Alligator. Marco Burrati enters a depraved demiworld where ferocious deviates prey upon lonely victims. But the savagery of this world is only the first surprise this investigation holds in store for the Alligator. Encountering such violence and desperation triggers memories of his own time in prison. And while the unwritten rule of ex-cons is that you must never talk about your experiences behind bars, the Alligator and his two longtime associates, Max the Memory and Beniamino Rossini, are forced to confront demons they thought long buried.
In The Master of Knots, “the reigning king of Mediterranean noir,” Massimo Carlotto, gives his readers a work of hardboiled noir fiction that is darker than ever before as he digs into the shadowy corners of human experience (The Boston Phoenix). This stunning novel sets a new high-water mark in the literary history of the Mediterranean Noir novel.

“Brooding, sexual, and connected to Italy’s socio-political climate . . . Carlotto’s tight prose makes for a quick and satisfying journey into a world absent of clear-cut morality.”—Publishers Weekly

“The author shows a sure grasp of the double lives of BDSM devotees for whom unmasking would mean calamity.”—Kirkus Reviews

Jack Laidlaw returns in the groundbreaking series. “The Laidlaw books are like fine malt whiskey—the pure distilled essence of Scottish crime writing” (Peter May, international bestselling author).

In this second book in his monumental Laidlaw series, McIlvanney tells the tale of Eck Adamson, an alcoholic vagrant who summons Jack Laidlaw to his deathbed. Probably the only policeman in Glasgow who would bother to respond, Laidlaw sees in Eck’s cryptic last message a clue to the murder of a gangland thug and the disappearance of a student. With stubborn integrity, Laidlaw tracks down a seam of corruption that runs through all levels of Glaswegian society.

★ “Excellent... McIlvanney, the undisputed grandfather of tartan noir, gives reader a complex, existential hero struggling to right myriad wrongs.”—Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“The good news is that Laidlaw is back.”—The Observer

Winner of the Italian PEN Prize: a tale of illicit love and a girl forced into a convent in the early nineteenth century.

1839, Messina, Italy: Agata is the daughter of an aristocrat, albeit an impoverished one, and she has fallen in love with wealthy Giacomo Lepre. Their families, however, view their romance as unacceptable and tawdry—and when Agata’s father dies, her mother decides to ferry her daughter far away, to Naples, where she hopes to garner a stipend from the king.
The only boat leaving Messina that day is captained by young Englishman James Garson. Following a tempestuous passage to Naples, during which Agata confesses her troubles to James, Agata and her mother find themselves rebuffed by the king, and Agata is forced to join a convent. The Benedictine monastery of San Giorgio Stilita is rife with rancor and jealousy, illicit passions and ancient feuds. But Agata remains aloof, devoting herself to the cultivation of medicinal herbs, calmed by the steady rhythms of monastic life. She reads all the books James sends her and follows the news of the various factions struggling to bring unity to Italy.
She has accepted her life as a nun, but she is divided between her yearnings for purity and religiosity and her desire to be part of the world. And she is increasingly torn when she realizes that her feelings for James, though he is only a distant presence in her life, have eclipsed those for Lepre . . .

“Hornby enriches her story with sensuous details of food, fashion, furnishings, and the rules of an extravagant society, savoring local color and personality quirks.”—Publishers Weekly

“An historical novel, a coming-of-age novel, a perfect portrait of family dynamics, The Nun also gives us, in Agata, an unforgettable heroine.”—Gazzetta di Mantova

From the author of The Rage: “A ripping crime tale, impressive in scope and crackling with energy . . . a fascinating portrait of contemporary Ireland” (Kirkus Reviews, starred review).

The Midnight Choir teems with moral dilemmas, and Dublin emerges as a city of ambiguity: a newly-scrubbed face hiding a criminal culture of terrible variety. Small-time criminals have become millionaire businessmen, the poor are still struggling to survive, and the police face a world where the old rules no longer apply. “Believe me, you want The Midnight Choir with you on holiday,” says the Sunday Business Post. “This is the kind of book you pass on to someone you like, and say ‘read this.’”

“The author does everything well. He conveys beautifully the ritual of cops and their quarry, while evoking the feel of a city where new yuppie influence rubs up against the remnants of a seedy, savage past.”—New York Magazine

“The lethal precision of his closing punches leaves quite a lasting mark.”—Entertainment Weekly

“It’s Kerrigan’s firm control of the procedural genre and the breathtaking twist he gives his plot that show him to be a master of the form.”—Publishers Weekly

“An absorbing, beautifully written tale.”—The Times (London)

“Kerrigan’s moody, unsettling tale explores the criminal underside of Dublin and, by extension, the dark, hidden face of twenty-first-century Ireland . . . Gripping crime fiction in which the setting is unequivocally the protagonist.”—Booklist

“Good news for readers who can appreciate the moral complexities of this flawed hero.”—The New York Times

“An intricately plotted novel that can safely be mentioned in the same breath as those by Rankin.”—Library Journal (starred review)

One PI. Ten crimes. “Stylistically reminiscent of Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction or Kill Bill. An exciting and original debut” (The Hoopla Literary Society).

A literary detective story ingeniously told in ten cases. John Dorn is a classic gumshoe. His woman has left him, he lives in his office, and he drinks too much. His one friend, a lawyer named Demetri, hands Dorn an infinite supply of hopeless cases and lost causes, to which Dorn, ever the champion of the underdog and the oppressed, is drawn to “as a sledgehammer is to a kneecap.” A superlative work of hardboiled literary detective fiction, The Midnight Promise wonderfully evokes the underbelly of contemporary Melbourne, its battlers, its hard men, its victims, and its ill-fated heroes.

“[A] powerful hard-boiled debut . . . The cases get progressively more disturbing, both in terms of their subject matter, which include gruesome torture, and their impact on Dorn, a classic world-weary narrator.”—Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“Lovitt has a neat way with a yarn. . . . And just when you think he is going to stay close to a kind of downbeat realism, there is a slide into something a little thrillerish and action-packed.”—The Sydney Morning Herald

“[An] artful, Down Under nod to the hard-boiled private eyes of Chandler and Hammett.”—The Christian Science Monitor, “10 Excellent International Thrillers”

“Lovitt is sure-handed in sketching characters, and he laces Dorn’s cases with sardonic humor and prodigious bits of human frailty. . . . Fans of international crime fiction will enjoy Dorn and his milieu.”—Booklist

NOW A MOTION PICTURE NOMINATED FOR THREE OSCARS—Best Actress, Best Supporting Actress, Best Adapted Screenplay—Directed by Maggie Gyllenhaal and starring Olivia Colman, Jesse Buckley, Paul Mescal, and Dakota Johnson

Another penetrating Neapolitan story from New York Times best-selling author of My Brilliant Friend and The Lying Life of Adults

Leda, a middle-aged divorcée, is alone for the first time in years after her two adult daughters leave home to live with their father in Toronto. Enjoying an unexpected sense of liberty, she heads to the Ionian coast for a vacation. But she soon finds herself intrigued by Nina, a young mother on the beach, eventually striking up a conversation with her. After Nina confides a dark secret, one seemingly trivial occurrence leads to events that could destroy Nina’s family in this “arresting” novel by the author of the New York Times–bestselling Neapolitan Novels, which have sold millions of copies and been adapted into an HBO series (Publishers Weekly).

“Although much of the drama takes place in [Leda’s] head, Ferrante’s gift for psychological horror renders it immediate and visceral.”—The New Yorker

“Ferrante’s prose is stunningly candid, direct and unforgettable. From simple elements, she builds a powerful tale of hope and regret.”—Publishers Weekly

The international bestselling story collection. “Truth and beauty are here brought together with all the visual beauty and power of a major literary work” (Lire Magazine, France).

A cast of extravagant and 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, his first to be published in English, 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 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 be frequently blind to it, happiness is often right in front of our eyes.

A “fierce literary thriller” about an exiled woman confronting her past as a prisoner of a repressive theocracy (Kirkus Reviews).

She was known as “Bait 455,” the most famous prisoner in a ruthless theological republic. He was one of the colonels closest to the supreme commander. When they meet, years later, far from their country of birth, a strange, equivocal relationship develops between them. Both their shared past of suffering and old romantic passions come rushing back—accompanied by recollections of the perverse logic of violence that dominated the dictatorship under which they lived. French Iranian author Fariba Hachtroudi’s prize-winning, “tightly plotted” novel “packs complex emotions in a small space, tackling difficult and essential questions about power and our responsibilities to one another” (Kirkus Reviews).

“The story leaves us chilled by the tyrannical culture that created this macabre bond. But at the end, it’s just as much a tale of the capacity of love.”—Minneapolis Star-Tribune

“Timeless in its meditations on totalitarianism and the toll it takes on even those who physically escape its clutches.”—Shelf Awareness (starred review)

An American foreign correspondent finds herself in love, and in danger, in this novel that “presents startlingly vivid images of life in Hitler’s Europe” (The New York Times).

Rose Manon grew up in the mountains of Nevada, and is now working as a journalist in New York. In 1935, she is awarded her dream job: foreign correspondent. Posted to Paris, she is soon entangled in romance, an unsolved murder, and the desperation of a looming war.Assigned to the Berlin desk, Manon is forced to grapple with her hidden identity as a Jew, the mistrust of her lover, and an unwelcome visitor on the eve of Kristallnacht. And on the day before World War II is declared, she must choose who will join her on the last train to Paris . . .This carefully researched historical novel reads like a suspense thriller, and interweaves real-life figures into the story, offering “a poignant glimpse into the tensions and anxieties of prewar Europe” (Kirkus Reviews).

“WWII enthusiasts may appreciate this quieter evocative look at a much-examined era.” —Publishers Weekly

Second in the Old Filth trilogy. “An astute, subtle depiction of marriage . . . absolutely wonderful” (The Washington Post).

Acclaimed as Jane Gardam’s masterpiece, Old Filth is a lyrical novel that recalls the fully lived life of Sir Edward Feathers. The Man in the Wooden Hat is the history of his marriage told from the perspective of his wife, Betty, a character as vivid and enchanting as Filth himself.
They met in Hong Kong after the war. Betty had spent the duration in a Japanese internment camp. Filth was already a successful barrister, handsome, fast becoming rich, in need of a wife but unaccustomed to romance. A perfect English couple of the late 1940s.
As a portrait of a marriage, with all the bittersweet secrets and surprising fulfillment of the fifty-year union of two remarkable people, The Man in the Wooden Hat is a triumph. Fiction of a very high order from a great novelist working at the pinnacle of her considerable power, it will be read and loved and recommended by all the many thousands of readers who found its predecessor, Old Filth, so compelling and thoroughly satisfying.

“Funny and affecting . . . It’s remarkable.”—The New York Times Book Review

“The latest occasion to celebrate Gardam . . . [a] superb novel.”—Maureen Corrigan, NPR

“Told with quintessentially British humor . . . Gardam’s prose is witty and precise.”—Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“It’s magnificent. . . . Funny, intelligent and immensely moving.”—Kirkus Reviews

“In this acidly funny novel” of life in Soviet Russia, “a cruel comic romp ends as a surprisingly winning story of hardship and resilience” (The New Yorker).

A Publishers Weekly Best Book of the Year

A German Book Award Finalist

A Huffington Post and Wall Street Journal Favorite Read of the Year

When Rosa Achmetowna discovers that her seventeen-year-old daughter, Sulfia, is pregnant, she tries every bizarre home remedy there is to thwart the pregnancy. But despite her best efforts, the baby girl Aminat is born—and immediately wins Rosa’s heart. The dark-eyed Aminat is a Tartar through and through, just like Rosa, and the devious grandmother wastes no time in plotting to steal her away from the woefully inept Sulfia.
When Aminat, now a wild and 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 a passage out of the Soviet Union. But as soon as they are settled in the West, the dysfunctional ties that bind mother, daughter, and grandmother begin to fray.

A nineteenth century Spanish princess is determined to publish her tell-all memoir in this “fresh, fast-moving historical fiction from a master storyteller” (Kirkus Reviews, starred review).

After her cloistered childhood at the Spanish court, her youth spent in exile, and a loveless marriage, the Bourbon infanta Eulalia gladly departs Europe for the New World. In the company of Thomas Aragon, a small-town bookseller and the son of her childhood wet nurse, she travels first to a Cuba bubbling with revolutionary fervor, and then to the 1893 Chicago World Fair. As far as the public is concerned, she is there as an emissary of the Bourbon dynasty. But secretly, she is in America to find a publisher for her scandalous autobiography, a book that might well turn the old world order on its head.
Latino International Book Award winner Chantel Acevedo brings Bourbon Spain, Revolutionary Cuba, and fin de siècle America vividly to life in her new novel based on a true story.
The Living Infinite is a timeless tale of love, adventure, power and the quest to take control of one’s destiny.

From the author of The Whole Wide Beauty: “Transcendent. What unfolds is a story not just of young love but of how to cope when it is lost and shattered” (Financial Times).

United Kingdom circa the 1980s—Ursula and Jerry find themselves surrounded by hip hairdos and dominating parents. The future looks bleak if they do not change their lives dramatically. Both are itching to escape their current lives and engage with the wider world.Ursula’s work as a teacher takes her far away to India to instruct disabled children, while Jerry accepts a scholarship to Magdalen College—but only to “highlight the absurdity of privilege.”
Their written exchanges are deep, political, and full of irony. All the while, Jerry stays committed to Ursula in mind but not in body, questioning their relationship and the nature of their love.

“Woof . . . succeeds in conveying ‘the infinity of moments’ that make up a lifetime.”—The New Yorker

“An unusual but convincing love story that charts the often-distant lives of her two distinctive and appealing characters, written with wit and a lyrical flourish.”—The Daily Mail

“Engaging . . . In precise, lyrical prose, Woof creates empathy for her characters’ struggles and desires.”—Kirkus Reviews

“Woof is a storyteller and you can tell this from the first few pages.”—The Times (London)

“Woof finds humor and poignancy in the gulf between how things are and how they ought to be.”—The Observer

“[A] quixotic, forceful voice . . . [An] indubitable talent.”—The Guardian

“Successfully grafts a classic hard-boiled detective plot line onto the complexities and dangers of life in modern Israel” (Publishers Weekly).

Levin has been living in Jerusalem for most of his adult life. Retired from the security services, he lives alone a few streets away from his ex-wife, continents away from his children. Adrift, Levin accepts a request to follow the wife of an acquaintance and discover her secret lover. Unlike the chaotic, incomprehensible suicide bombings he’s used to dealing with, at least this assignment seems like one that could possibly be solved.
As Levin watches the woman, Deborah, he begins to assess her as a potential lover might. And when the man her husband believes to be her paramour is murdered—and Deborah, in desperation, turns to Levin with her own unexpected request—his own moral universe becomes as conflicted as the struggle between Arab and Jew for the fate of the fabled city.
From the Pulitzer Prize–nominated author of A Town Called Jericho, this is both a twisting thriller and a “spare, pensive but never brooding study of obsessive love” (Kirkus Reviews).

“The Jerusalem File is styled as a neo-noir mystery story set in contemporary Jerusalem. From the first page, however, the book throws off reflections of its far deeper facets. Joel Stone uses his short and elegantly crafted thriller as the occasion for something much more ambitious—a meditation on the politics of the modern Middle East and, at the same time, the more intimate politics of the human heart . . . A page-turner.”—Los Angeles Times