Restless Books

I miss my home; if only I could shrink him with a magic spell and carry him with me! Or what if he was big and strong enough to protect us on our long journey? 

After meeting many children forced to flee their homes during Russia's invasion of Ukraine, Constantin Satüpo wrote this book to tell their stories. All at once, everything they knew was lost: going to school, meeting with friends, taking music classes, playing sports, and staying with their families in the homes they love. 

When wars, climate disasters, poverty, and persecution force people around the world to leave their houses behind, here is a reminder that we carry within us the wisdom and strength to build new homes and new lives—and to help others do the same.

Exuberant, playful, and evergreen, The Game at the End of the World revels in the grass-stained highlights of a sport without borders or boundaries.

Soccer (née football) fans will rejoice at this all-new volume of crackling essays from the author of God Is Round. Here, Juan Villoro explores the sport through the elements that make it the world's favorite pastime, from its ancient origins, near-mythic players, exhilarating matches, endemic rivalries, and the unlikely moments in which football has changed history.

As a prolific writer and chronicler of World Cup games around the world, Villoro draws on a rich cultural mosaic to inspire readers, players, and fans long after the final whistle blows. With a journalist's ear and a philosopher's outlook, he has produced a collection for curious newcomers and lifelong football buffs alike.

Winner of the 2024 Restless Books Prize for New Immigrant Writing, People Who Live Alone Talk Too Much pulls at the threads of daily life, unwinding the ordinary into scenes of humor, introspection, and surprising connection.

Bursting with wit and unexpected warmth, Sofi Stambo's debut welcomes readers in the the vibrant immigrant enclaves of New York, a city of many faces: Little Italy, Little Odessa, Little Sofia. . . Here, transplants dance and laugh their way out of absurd situations and into even messier ones. As they pass through diners, offices, and painter’s workshops, they cast about for new words to match their new realities, reshaping the English language with fresh purpose and greeting chaos with a grin.

Nimble and daring, Stambo's stories lean into curiosity, family, and the old-world bonds that draw her motley characters together.

A landmark collection of the philosophers and firebrands who sparked a country's journey through divinity—praising, challenging, and redefining the sacred.

Spanning more than 400 years of spiritual transformation and imagination, A Nation Wrestles With God collects diverse writers—poets, novelist, theologians, scientist, musicians, politicians, comedians, artists, mavericks, naturalist, futurists, and more—whose daring texts incited change and continue to influence a growing nation. In this anthology, you will find the stories, letters, speeches, sermons, and essays, as well as song lyrics, comic strips, newspaper columns, and blog posts, that awoke new generations to free religious thought, from the pre-colonial to the present day. 

A global chorus from the archives of World Literature Today, this landmark collection of fiction, essays, and poetry commemorates a century of exploration through pen and ink.

The Night Closes, the Sky Opens is a bold, global anthology of stories that cross borders and essays that reshape worlds, reimagining what international writing can be. From Nobel laureates to dissident poets, iconic novelists to fresh contemporary voices, this collection brings together powerful essays, visionary lectures, and urgent reflections that speak to the heart of literature’s role in a rapidly changing world.

Spanning four dynamic sections—from foundational manifestos to groundbreaking critical takes, from national literatures to transnational identities—this anthology offers readers a vibrant map of how stories cross borders, bridge histories, and shape futures. Alongside works by Octavio Paz, Elie Wiesel, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, Toni Morrison, Dubravka Ugrešić, and many others. Ultimately, this collection bridges genre, time, and location, and asks us: What can literature do in a time of crisis?

What begins as a scary almost-accident turns into a road-trip adventure, and then a lasting friendship between a truck driver and the moose who joins him for a ride.

Moose has never left his home in the Maine woods, but when he meets Rus, a long-haul trucker on his way to Florida, the two team up and hit the road together. Moose helps Rus navigate, eats his first slice of pizza, and settles into a bunk bed in the truck’s cab after each day's work. What new discoveries await these unlikely friends?

Who will rule the Holy Land, and at what cost?

In a near-future Jerusalem, harrowing omens plague the city: a desecrated altar, an unbearable stench, a rampant famine. Shaken but devout, Jonathan, the royal family’s third son, continues to hold services and offer animal sacrifices at the prophesied Third Temple, built to consecrate the founding of the new Kingdom of Judah. His father, Israel’s self-appointed king, has abolished the Supreme Court. The Torah is the law of the land, and only people of the Jewish faith are allowed in. When war breaks out and an angel of God begins to torment Jonathan, warning him of his father’s sacrilege, the foundations of the young priest’s faith—and then his world—begin to give way.

Winner of the prestigious Bernstein Prize, The Third Temple plunges readers into a tempest of fanaticism, betrayal, and destruction. Where does the power of man end and the power of God begin? With chilling resonance, this vivid novel from one of Israel’s leading authors sounds an unforgettable warning amidst rising extremism.

Electric, defiant, and singing with melancholia, Alejandra Banca's devastating debut throws its arms around a displaced generation of young Venezuelan migrants, reveling in the clamor and beauty of their day-by-day survival.

Below the rooftops of Barcelona's historic avenues, in the shadow of the Sagrada Família and its fleet of construction cranes, thrums a vital pulse: meal-delivery bikers, sex workers, strung out artists, anti-capitalist squatters, undocumented shopgirls, fledgeling drug dealers, and a thousand more lives that cross and knit together at the lowest level of Spain's urban tumult. The young expats of these stories careen through crowded streets, night clubs, and dating apps with a devil-may-care abandon that belies their precarious circumstances. Tragedy will erupt and then ebb in an instant, receding in the rearview like a roadside collision and haunting those that push on. Running on fumes and paltry tips, Banca's beleaguered characters race along a knife's edge and find unexpected solace in moments of shared vulnerability; a knowing thread that unites these strangers in a strange land.

In this English PEN Award-winning translation by Katie Brown, From Savagery announces Alejandra Banca as a resplendent and masterful new voice in Latin American literature—one that will take readers by storm.

Can killing be an act of love? Hypnotic, gruesome, and exultant, Joy Sorman’s macabre ballet whirls from industrial slaughterhouses to the boutique butcher shops of Paris.

Pim is a delicate youth—stringy, solemn, and prone to bouts of unexplained weeping. When he enrolls in trade school as an apprentice butcher, his mentors have low expectations, but his lanky body conceals a peculiar flame: a passionate devotion to animals. In an industry that strives to distance the chopping block from the dinner plate, his ardor might seem like a handicap, but Pim rises through the knife-wielding ranks with a barely-tethered zeal. He scours blood from floor mats and stacks carcasses in the cold room by day. By night he tries to slake his appetites: at the table, over boudin sausage and steak tartare, and in bed, with women whose flanks, ribs, and haunches he maps as they undress each other.

Pim’s professional successes mount but his cravings gnaw. In the library he teases out histories, like the blood-drinking forerunners to vampirism or the Medieval trial of a killer pig, sentenced to death by hanging. Meat crowds his waking thoughts. Even as he carves ripe flesh from exquisite bone, he labors to close the gap between man and beast—to be seen, understood, even loved, by a primordial mind. Will this ravenous obsession yield to madness, or to ecstasy?

With shades of Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle, Joy Sorman’s Tenderloin is an ethical foray, fever dream, and paean to an ageless hunger. Vegetarians and carnivores alike are invited to feast at this sumptuous literary table. After all, we are what we eat.

FINALIST, National Book Award for Translated Literature, 2024

A perilous and fantastical satire of banned books, secret archives, and the looming eye of an all-powerful government.

The new book censor hasn’t slept soundly in weeks. By day he combs through manuscripts at a government office, looking for anything that would make a book unfit to publish—allusions to queerness, unapproved religions, any mention of life before the Revolution. By night the characters of literary classics crowd his dreams, and pilfered novels pile up in the house he shares with his wife and daughter. As the siren song of forbidden reading continues to beckon, he descends into a netherworld of resistance fighters, undercover booksellers, and outlaw librarians trying to save their history and culture.

Reckoning with the global threat to free speech and the bleak future it all but guarantees, Bothayna Al-Essa marries the steely dystopia of Orwell’s 1984 with the madcap absurdity of Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland. The Book Censor’s Library is a warning call and a love letter to stories and the delicious act of losing oneself in them.

A 2024 Mildred L. Batchelder Award Honoree

A 2024 USBBY Outstanding International Book

One of Kirkus Reviews’ 10 Essential Middle-Grade Books for Fall 2023 — Starred Review

One of Kirkus Reviews’ Best Middle-Grade Family Stories of 2023

A 2023 Cybils Awards Finalist for Speculative Middle Grade Fiction

From the author and translator of the Batchelder Award-winning novel Temple Alley Summer comes the moving story of three generations of women adapting to their new home, and its mythical inhabitants, in the tragic aftermath of the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake disaster.

In the wake of a devastating earthquake and tsunami, Yui, fleeing her violent husband, and Hiyori, a young orphan, are taken in by a strange but kind old lady named Kiwa in the small town of Kitsunezaki​​. The newly formed family finds refuge in a mayoiga, a lost house, perched atop a beautiful cape overlooking the sea. While helping to rebuild Kitsunezaki, the three adapt to their new lives and supernatural new home, slowly healing from their troubled pasts. Kiwa regales Yui and Hiyori with local legends—from the shapeshifting fox-woman who used to roam the mountains, to the demon Agamé and a sea snake who once terrorized the townspeople, preying upon their grief and fears until they trapped the snake and the demon’s claws in an underwater cave.

But when mysterious and sinister events start happening around town, the three fear the worst. Did the earthquake release Agamé and the sea snake into the world again? Kiwa, Yui, and Hiyori join forces with a merry band of kappa river spirits, a bold zashiki warashi house spirit, and flying Jizō guardian statues to save their new family and home and banish Agamé and the snake once and for all. Now a hit anime film, The House of the Lost on the Cape is a heartwarming tale about the strength of family and friendship in the face of natural and mythical forces.

After the death of her husband, Akbar Ahmad, Mona finds herself settling ambivalently into a new life. But the calm rhythm of her days—gardening, cooking, spending time with her neighbors and family in Karachi—is upset by the appearance of Salamat Ali, the new tenant in her friend Mrs. Baig’s house. Vivacious, friendly, and, at times, impertinent, Salamat Ali is both a breath of fresh air and a disconcerting new presence in Mona’s life. When Salamat Ali, encouraged by Mrs. Baig, presents Mona with a marriage proposal, she is forced to reconsider her past with Akbar Ahmad, and envision the future she wishes to make with her new suitor. As Mona negotiates the complex web of tradition-bound in-laws and gossiping, interfering relatives, she finds Salamat Ali waking her to the pleasures of life that thirty years with her dour first husband all but smothered. But if Salamat Ali helps her discover something so new and essential, he also exposes her to the danger of transgressing old traditions.

The Story of a Widow is a beautifully observant novel that pays careful attention to the delicate movements of the heart in romantic and family life. But it is equally concerned with the mores of a society whose conventions constrain men and, particularly, women. Gently humorous, profoundly perceptive, and exceedingly clever in its cultural critique, The Story of a Widow is Musharraf Ali Farooqi’s modern answer to the Victorian novel.

On June 23rd, 1914, the legendary División del Norte, commanded by General Francisco “Pancho” Villa, defeated the forces of then-president Victoriano Huerta and took the city of Zacatecas. After the decisive battle, the federales were unable to recover. The path to Mexico City—and ultimate victory—was clear for Villa and the revolutionaries.

In this remarkable graphic novel, Paco Ignacio Taibo II (a.k.a. PIT)—the prolific historian, biographer of Che Guevara and Pancho Villa, as well as the founder of Mexican neopolicial fiction—brings his tremendous storytelling skills to bear, united with stunning illustrations by the artist Eko that evoke traditional Day of the Dead imagery. An unforgettable window onto the Mexican Revolution and portrait of one of the country’s most beloved heroes, Pancho Villa Takes Zacatecas will fascinate history buffs, avid readers, and graphic novel enthusiasts alike.

A year spent at the precipice of severe climate change in oceanfront Spain.

The Last House Before the Sea is the magnificent result of a year lived on the island of Buda, contemplating the passing of the seasons, the marshes, the seabirds, and a relentless horizon. In its pages, Gabi Martínez stitches scenes of the natural world alongside the day-to-day lives of this unique island's residents, many of whom have called it home for generations. But something disrupts the slow rhythms of eel fishing, rice farming, and the Ebro River's flow to the coast. Something is shifting.

As climate change tilts the scales of a fragile coexistence, and rising sea levels threaten to swallow their homes, the island's locals must reconcile their past and future—both beholden to a region that grows more endangered with each passing day.

Acclaimed novelist and playwright Yasmina Reza masterfully portrays the messiness of family, where affection and resentment intertwine and the weight of a shared past looms large.

When adult siblings Serge, Jean, and Nana embark on an unexpected road trip, they take along one daughter and more than enough tangled family history. As Jean watches his older brother fall apart, he tries to hold the center, and what might have been a solemn pilgrimage into the past quickly devolves into a tragicomedy of mutual fixations, private grievances, and the limits of kept company. As reflective as it is incitement, Serge is a testament to Reza’s gift for finding light in the abyss.

with movements from us

from the mortal

to the already crossed

they who sing our songs

they who remember our lives

In 186 verses, Mats Söderlund catalogues the natural phenomena of Sweden's primeval northern woodlands. The poem leads its reader down overgrown paths, beyond the flickering of leaves and lichen, to meet "the dead": a troop of scattered fates that populate the Nordic landscape in the forms of a speaking fog, a tinkling drizzle, a faltering wind. It is this swarm of spectral destinies that the poem sets out to praise, and to mourn.

Shining of rain and gnawing of sorrow, cast from metal, snow, charcoal dust, surgical nails, and ice cold waters, Söderlund's poetry is the fragile tether to a world and past that threatens to slip through our fingers, and which no generation who seeks to survive can disclaim.

El escritor disidente, fotógrafo, y pionero entre los blogueros cubanos Orlando Luis Pardo Lazo nos presenta una colección de textos surreales e irónicos sobre su ciudad natal. Este “diario de la distopía” –fusión inesperada de palabra e imagen– nos acerca a desmoronantes fachadas con andamios, muelles desvencijados, y desbordantes cuerpos humanos. En este libro, tan bello y baldío como La Habana misma, Pardo Lazo nos guía a través de las reliquias y fábulas de una Revolución exhausta en los penúltimos días de la Cuba de Castro.

"Kashiwaba's novel is indeed transporting. . . . Pick up this book and be spirited away." — Gregory Maguire, The New York Times

From the bestselling, Batchelder Award-winning author and translator of Temple Alley Summer and The House of the Lost on the Cape comes the fantastic adventure that first inspired Hayao Miyazaki’s beloved film, Spirited Away.

Lina’s father had suggested she go "someplace different" for the summer, and she's beginning to wish she hadn’t listened. She could be at her grandma’s house in Nagano now, instead of trudging through a forest in search of a town that might not even exist. But when a gust of wind carries off her umbrella, it leads Lina down a secret path between the trees to a strange and incredible world. In the hidden village of Misty Valley, centaurs roam the cobblestone streets and gnomes visit shops stuffed with spellbooks and enchanted desserts. All magic has a dark side, though, and sometimes even sorcerers need a human’s helping hand.

Now, fifty years after its debut and decades of blockbuster success in Japan, Sachiko Kashiwaba’s acclaimed novel is available in English and certain to delight readers of all ages.

Wake up, Mommy and Daddy! The sun is rising, the stars are shining, and friends all over the universe are jumping out of bed to greet the day.

Snoring aliens, parties on rocket ships, and interstellar bath time—it's a brand-new day in outer space! When Sweetie peeks through a toilet paper tube at the early morning sky, a spectacular world appears through the makeshift telescope—many worlds, in fact. With abundant humor, interactive cutouts, and plenty of Easter eggs for those with a curious eye, Good Morning, Space is a delightful new story from Linda Bondestam, creator of My Life at the Bottom: The Story of a Lonesome Axolotl.

Exquisitely written and deeply absorbing, this debut from Caine Prize–winning author Olufemi Terry captures the heady abandon of early adulthood in a country still reeling from the lasting effects of racial partition and colonialism.

When his father suggests that he take some time off to visit his cousin, Emil—a young surgeon-in-training—doesn’t ask many questions. For reasons he doesn’t yet understand, he sets aside his studies and moves into his aunt’s house in Stadmutter, a remote multiracial African city. There, he is disquieted by days of unaccustomed aimlessness and by encounters with Bolling, a wealthy foreigner who woos him intellectually and sexually, and Tamsin, a psychology student working to define herself against the fading privilege of her background.

Beneath a veneer of indolence, Stadmutter seethes. Bolling is covertly working with Braeem Shaka, an advocate for reparations, to foment racial tension that imperils the country’s fragile progress. As Shaka becomes a wanted man, Emil and Tamsin grow entangled in his future and that of a country they are both eager to escape.

American Book Award-winning poet Jimmy Santiago Baca endured decades in the penal system before becoming a renowned poet and a father. In these collections of strikingly expressive verse, Baca celebrates parenthood and presents, with brutal honesty, the daily complexities of adult life in the age of 9/11 and the Iraq War. This ex-convict, an essential voice in world poetry, chronicles the changes that envelop him upon the arrival of two of his children, Lucia and Esai. After “twenty-five years in the system, brutal, corrupt, hate-filled, and frenzied with violence . . . beatings, shock-therapy, abandonment, terror, death threats, stabbings,” he refuses to give in to evil and despair.

Recalling the works of other poets who passed through the horrors of extreme experience—Nazim Hikmet, Paul Celan, Joseph Brodsky, Alexander Wat, Otto René Castillo, and a host of others—The Lucia Poems and The Esai Poems give poignant acknowledgement to one generation’s failings and pass on humane advice to the next. Taken together as Breaking Bread with the Darkness, these two collections offer a poetic primer for paternity, and a model for teaching the young history, politics, spirituality, and survival.

Seven award-winning plays by rising stars of contemporary theater herald a profound shift in what it means to be an American, an immigrant, and an artist on today’s stage.

Shayok Misha Chowdhury | Public Obscenities, shortlisted for the 2024 Pulitzer Prize

Hansol Jung, 2018 Whiting Award–winner | Wolf Play

Martyna Majok, 2018 Pulitzer Prize–winner | Sanctuary City

Mona Mansour, 2020 Kesselring Prize–winner | The Hour of Feeling

Charlie Oh | Coleman ’72, 2021 Paul Stephen Lim Award–winner

Mfoniso Udofia, 2021 Horton Foote Award–winner | Sojourners

Jesús I. Valles, 2023 Yale Drama Series Prize–winner | a river, its mouths

This groundbreaking collection of works by first- and second-generation immigrants unites seven exhilarating new voices of Lebanese, Nigerian, Korean, Bengali, Polish, and Mexican descent. Echoing beyond the stage, their stories draw on common experiences of displacement, alienation, and the sense of living in suspension; sometimes torn between two worlds, sometimes plummeting into the spaces between them. Amid tangled relationships, vengeful landscapes, and buried family mysteries, something universal flickers; the search for safety and the promise of home. Both haunting and galvanizing, What This Place Makes Me will be a vital touchstone for years to come.

2025 Mildred L. Batchelder Award Winner

2025 USBBY Outstanding International Book

2022 Bologna Children's Book Fair Illustrators Exhibition Winner

2021 The White Ravens Catalog

2021 Tartu Prize for Children’s Literature

Everyone deserves a quiet, restful retirement. But for John, a newly retired classroom skeleton, life is just beginning. When John is adopted by Grams and Gramps and leaves the classroom to live on their farm, every day is an exciting new adventure: John rides in the car for the first time, makes a snow angel, scares away crooks, and becomes a source of comfort for Grams, Gramps, and their grandkids. With delightful illustrations and a charming cast of characters, John the Skeleton is a quirky, touching, and unforgettable book. Triinu Laan thoughtfully weaves aging and death into the fabric of life, crafting a tender portrait of what it means to care for one another, grow old together, and appreciate the little things.

From award-winning author, editor, and translator Ilan Stavans comes a one-of-a-kind retelling of a legendary Aztec ruler's timeless verses.

A king, a warrior, and a poet, Nezahualcóyotl was a revolutionary ahead of his time. Born in 1402, the ruler—whose name means ‘hungry coyote’ in the Uto-Aztecan language of Nahuatl—led the city-state of Texcoco through its age of enlightenment. His four-decade reign was among the most transformative and prosperous eras of the Aztec Empire. Today he is a hero in Mexico, seen as a mysterious, powerful, anti-colonial figure.

Brimming with longing, this epic collection of songs and poems was composed by Nezahualcóyotl with members of his illustrious court. Six centuries later, in a powerful translation by Ilan Stavans and with new illustrations by Cuauhtémoc Wetzka, twenty-two poems bring to life a young warrior's journey from exile to historical legend. Anguished and unforgettable, Lamentations of Nezahualcóyotl will thrill readers of Latin American literature for years to come.

Winner of the 2022 Restless Books Prize for New Immigrant Writing, Praveen Herat’s gripping international thriller is a breathtaking exploration of power, identity, unconditional love, and the question of how far we’ll go to uncover the truth.

British war photographer Joseph Nightingale, known to his colleagues as Fearless, is haunted by a brutal past and a present that has grown unrecognizable. Besieged by grief over the loss of his partner and unborn child, he travels to Cambodia, where a reunion with an old friend leads him to a young woman named Song. Imprisoned by circumstance, she, too, is longing for a past she can’t reconcile and grappling with the disappearance of her twin sister. Soon after their paths cross, Song vanishes, leaving behind only a mysterious videotape, and Fearless finds himself entangled in a web of transnational sex traffickers, corrupt power brokers, and ruthless arms dealers, where nothing and no one are what they seem.

In a place where human life is cheap and violence is just a means to an end, Fearless and Song must go to new lengths to confront their separate demons. Pulse-pounding and poignant, Between this World and the Next balances devastating cruelty with unexpected redemption. In this arresting page-turner, Praveen Herat blurs the boundaries between good and evil, asking us to reexamine complicity and the consequences of looking the other way.

With At the End of Sleep, an anthology selected from the past decade of Israeli poet Tal Nitzán’s work, one of Hebrew poetry’s most powerful and acclaimed contemporary voices is finally given her English-language due. Reaching beyond lyricism for its own sake with her lucid, sharp, and occasionally ferocious verse, Nitzán illuminates sexuality and struggle, protests the abuse of power, and plumbs the depths of the Israeli condition.

A 2024 USBBY Outstanding International Book

From beloved Finland-based children’s author Anna Anisimova comes a heartwarming, beautifully illustrated chapter book about a blind girl who joyfully explores her environment using her senses and vivid imagination, inviting young readers to understand their surroundings in entirely new ways.

For the young, blind heroine of The Invisible Elephant, the world is a thrilling place full of sounds, smells, and sensations. Although she doesn’t see the world outside with her eyes, nothing stops her from encountering her surroundings with joy and an impressively creative imagination. In four charming stories, we go with her to the zoo, the museum, and art class, and get a peek into her wonderfully magical mind where her grandfather's walking stick can transform into a horse and a sled can become a whale. When the time comes for her to learn braille, we watch how her family and friends cheer her on as she discovers how to navigate the world in her own way.

With gorgeous, inventive illustrations by Yulia Sidneva and artfully translated by Ruth Ahmedzai Kemp, The Invisible Elephant is a truly special book that helps kids to value all the different ways of seeing the world.

Winner of the 2020 Mauricio Achar Award

Does evil lurk in the shadows of the forest or within the human heart? Eduardo Sangarcía’s tale of one woman’s trial opens the door to deeper horrors.

Anna Thalberg is a villager shunned for her red hair and provocative beauty, so when she is dragged from her home and accused of witchcraft, her neighbors do not intervene. Only Klaus, her husband, and Father Friedrich, a priest experiencing a crisis of faith, set out to Würzburg to prove her innocence. There, locked in a prison tower, Anna faces isolation and torture while anxiety builds over strange happenings within the city walls. Can the two men convince the Church inquisitors to release Anna, or will she burn at the stake?

The Trial of Anna Thalberg is a tale of religious persecution, superstition, and suffering during the Protestant Reformation. While mapping the medieval fear of occultism and demons, it delves into enduring human concerns: the oppression of women, the inhumanity of institutions, and the question of God’s existence. Frantic in pace and experimental in form, this is an unforgettable debut from Mexican author Eduardo Sangarcía.

A rediscovered classic, and the only known novel by Black abolitionist and political exile Louis Timagène Houat, The Maroons is a fervid account of slavery and escape on nineteenth-century Réunion Island.

Frême is a young African man forced into slavery on Réunion, an island east of Madagascar in the Indian Ocean. Plagued by memories of his childhood sweetheart, a white woman named Marie, Frême seeks her out—but when they are persecuted for their love, the two flee into the forest. There they meet other “maroons”: formerly enslaved people and courageous rebels who have chosen freedom at the risk of their lives.

Now available in English for the first time, The Maroons highlights slavery’s abject conditions under the French empire, and attests to the widespread phenomenon of enslaved people escaping captivity to forge a new life beyond the reach of so-called “civilization.” Banned by colonial authorities at the time of its publication in 1844, the book fell into obscurity for over a century before its rediscovery in the 1970s. Since its first reissue, the novel has been recognized for its extraordinary historical significance and literary quality.

Presented here in a sensitive translation by Aqiil Gopee with Jeffrey Diteman, and with a keen introduction by journalist and author Shenaz Patel, The Maroons is a vital resource for rethinking the nineteenth-century canon, and a fascinating read on the struggle for freedom and social justice.

In a searching and powerful debut memoir, award-winning poet and literary translator Ani Gjika tells a different kind of origin story by writing about the ways a woman listens to her own body, intuition, and desire.

Ani Gjika was born in Albania and came of age just after the fall of Communism, a time when everyone had a secret to keep and young women were afraid to walk down the street alone. When her family immigrates to America, Gjika finds herself far from the grandmother who helped raise her, grappling with a new language, and isolated from aging parents who are trying in their own ways to survive. When she meets a young man whose mind leans toward writing, as hers does, Ani falls in love—at least, she thinks it’s love.

Set across Albania, Thailand, India, and the U.S., An Unruled Body is a young woman’s journey to selfhood through the lenses of language, sexuality, and identity, and how she learns to find freedom of expression on her own terms.

In the utterly original, genre-defying, English-language debut of Finnish author Juhani Karila, a young woman’s annual pilgrimage to her home in Lapland to catch an elusive pike in three days is complicated by a host of mythical creatures, a murder detective hot on her trail, and a deadly curse hanging over her head.

When Elina makes her annual summer pilgrimage to her remote family farm in Lapland, she has three days to catch the pike in a local pond or she and the love of her life will both die. This year her task is made more difficult by the intervention of a host of deadly supernatural creatures and a murder detective on her tail.

Can Elina catch the pike and put to rest the curse that has been hanging over her head since a youthful love affair turned sour? Can Sergeant Janatuinen make it back to civilization in one piece? And just why is Lapland in summer so weird?

Fishing for the Little Pike is an audacious, genre-defying blend of fantasy, folk tale, and nature writing.

Restless Classics presents Bram Stoker’s gothic masterpiece of horror, gorgeously illustrated by Kaitlin Chan and with a new introduction and foreword by award-winning authors Silvia Moreno-Garcia and Alexander Chee.

Since its original publication in 1897, Dracula has spoken aloud some of our deepest cultural anxieties: fear of sexuality, xenophobia, homophobia, and distrust of The Other. One of the most recognizable and pervasive characters ever written, Stoker’s Count Dracula is much more terrifying than the caped and fanged representation that has grown so familiar. The Count’s menace lies not solely in his deadly bloodlust, but also in his harrowing ability to hide his malfeasance behind power and privilege.

When Jonathan Harker unearths Count Dracula’s (un)deadly secret, he unwittingly starts a war between good and evil with disastrous repercussions. The innocent Lucy Westenra falls prey to the vampire’s curse, Mina Harker narrowly escapes a vicious transformation, and the indefatigable Abraham Van Helsing risks life and afterlife to defeat his archnemesis. As Silvia Moreno-Garcia explores in her new introduction, this outbreak of an ancient threat in a modern world introduced a radical new element to vampire folklore, one which has only gained significance in the twenty-first century: vampires as disease-bearing victims of the same chaos that they spread.

In his new foreword, Alexander Chee grounds the novel in the potential queerness of Stoker’s literary circle, and delves into our growing fascination with, and affection for, both the horror genre and its monsters. Dracula is both a resonant contemplation of the unknown and a cautionary reminder that evil doesn’t always announce itself with bats and coffins; it lurks within the normal and the mundane, just waiting to be invited in.

Israeli novelist and activist Shulamith Hareven's masterpiece, Thirst: The Desert Trilogy, contains three of her greatest works: The Miracle Hater, Prophet, and After Childhood. In these beautifully written novellas, Hareven recasts the biblical journey from exodus to the Land of Israel in a terrifically imagined contemporary voice. Hareven’s spare and spacious prose howls with the grandeur of the desert wilderness and the mythic beginnings of her nation and her people. Enlarging one of the world’s most dramatic and beloved stories, Hareven shifts our focus from the typical heroes—the great and powerful men of history—to the margins: a disillusioned shepherd who loses faith in his leaders; a would-be prophet from a distant city whose fate becomes entwined with the Israelites; an unhappy couple living at the very edge of civilization.

Hareven, whom the French weekly L'Express listed among the "100 women who move the world,” was the author of nineteen books and was the first (and for twelve years, the only) female member of the Academy of the Hebrew Language. As a journalist, she covered two wars and wrote seminal articles on the plight of Palestinians. She became a prominent spokesperson for Israel’s Peace Now movement. Shimon Peres, former president of Israel, called Thirst "both timeless and timely." Now available for the first time as an eBook, Thirst explores with subtlety and depth how individuals learn to relate to nature, to society, and especially to the divine.

From award-winning Nordic author and illustrator Linda Bondestam comes a new kind of climate change story, narrated by an adorable axolotl who is—possibly—the last of its kind.

In a forest of seaweed there was ME, a rare and beautiful little axolotl, going for my first-ever swim.

So graceful, and yet so lonesome—out of 987 eggs, mine was the only one that hatched.

Who knows, maybe I was the last axolotl in these waters?

At the bottom of a lake in Mexico City, our axolotl narrator goes to underwater school, collects treasures tossed away by the big lugs on land, and has dance parties with tiger salamander friends. Life is good!

But as the world gets hotter and hotter, the water gets murkier. Friends become harder to find, and the lonesome axolotl grows even lonelier. Until one day when, out of the blue, a colossal wave carries the axolotl into a surprising new future….

Bittersweet, droll, existential, and hopeful, My Life at the Bottom is a tale from the climate crisis unlike any other. Combining her irresistible visual wit with exquisite aquatic art and rare empathy, Linda Bondestam brings us a story of catastrophe that bursts with life.

From best-selling Brazilian novelist Patrícia Melo comes a genre-defying tale of women in the Amazon and their reckoning with brutal oppression—by turns poetic, humorous, dark, and inspiring.

The Simple Art of Killing a Woman vividly conjures the epidemic of femicide in Brazil, the power women can hold in the face of overwhelming male violence, the resilience of community despite state-sponsored degradation, and the potential of the jungle to save us all.

To escape her newly aggressive lover, a young lawyer accepts an assignment in the Amazonian border town of Cruzeiro do Sul. There, she meets Carla, a local prosecutor, and Marcos, the son of an indigenous woman, and learns about the rampant attacks on the region’s women, which have grown so commonplace that the cases quickly fill her large notebook. What she finds in the jungle is not only persistent racism, patriarchy, and deforestation, but a deep longing for answers to her enigmatic past. Through the ritual use of ayahuasca, she meets a chorus of Icamiabas, warrior women bent on vengeance—and gradually, she recovers the details of her own mother’s early death.

The Simple Art of Killing a Woman resists categorization: it is a series of prose poems lamenting the real-life women murdered by so many men in Brazil; a personal search for history, truth, and belonging; and a modern, exacting, and sometimes fantastical take on very old problems that, despite our better selves, dog us the world over.

The Spines of Love collects work from Víctor Terán’s poetic oeuvre for the first time in a trilingual edition: in their original Isthmus Zapotec (an endangered indigenous Mexican language) and in David Shook’s Spanish and English translations. Sensual and intricately wrought, these poems take readers on an emotional journey through love and loss with a searing lyricism entirely Terán’s own. His lover’s body is a city where the poet can “give perfect directions,” her name slips over his tongue “like a fish between the hands / of a fisherman,” and when she leaves him it’s with memories like “an ocean of incessant fish.”

The Spines of Love stands for a simple but bracing truth: Yes, love can hurt, but even after it departs, it strengthens us.

The long-awaited capstone to the landmark trilogy that began with A Legend of the Future and The Year 200 by Agustín de Rojas, “one of Cuba’s greatest science fiction writers” —SF Signal

The winner of Cuba’s prestigious Premio David in 1980, Spiral is another magisterial space opera from the late great science fiction author Agustín de Rojas. Deeply committed to the Revolution, Rojas presents a stunning critique of the Cuban regime under Fidel Castro by inviting the comparison of Spiral’s fictional moral universe, one in which Che Guevara’s principles of socialism are followed to the letter, with the brutal realities of everyday Cuba.

Decades after the devastating Catastrophe, Earth has become a radioactive wasteland sparsely populated by bands of genetically modified humans struggling to survive on limited resources. An expedition of ten explorers from the Aurora planet returns to this desolate landscape to investigate the mysterious causes of its destruction. But when an unexpected guest breaks into their base, the team needs to wield all of its brain power not only to make sense of the helpless planet but also to stay together as a community.

Spiral is a compelling novel concerned with the ethics of scientific exploration and the human relationships caught up in it. Weaving biology, ecology and sociology into this sci-fi narrative, Agustín de Rojas manages to paint a devastating picture of a planet torn apart by two irreconcilable economic powers that so closely resemble the Cold War context in which the story was published.

The novel is very meticulous in its exploration of the professional dilemmas of this crew of scientists and explorers who need to stay true to the utopian values that made the journey possible. Yet it is their emotional responses as human beings that elevate the plot and make Spiral a captivating tale of endurance and curiosity for contemporary readers.

With new illustrations and a brilliant original introduction by New Yorker writer and author of My Life in Middlemarch Rebecca Mead, the Restless Classics edition of Middlemarch presents George Eliot’s masterpiece of Victorian fiction in an appealing new light.

Long regarded as one of the greatest of the great English-language novels, Middlemarch by George Eliot has endured as the archetypal Victorian novel and an eternally resonant exploration of society and the individual. Centuries removed from the world of the landed gentry in 1830s England, the characters of Middlemarch remain as exquisitely drawn and deeply alive as any in literature: the pedantic, obsessive Reverend Casaubon, the idealistic Dr. Lydgate, and the spirited, striving Dorothea Brooke.

A novel of marriage, Eliot’s “study of Provincial Life” is also a strikingly fresh commentary on scientific and technological change, cultural and class divides, and the upheavals of a rural community experiencing global transformation. In her insightful introduction, Rebecca Mead, New Yorker writer and author of My Year in Middlemarch, explores Eliot’s “meliorism”—her belief that individuals can improve society in small, everyday ways. Dorothea’s successes and failures not only in love but as an ardent social reformer will resonate with all of us who look at the world today and ask, as Dorothea did in her time, “What could she do, what ought she to do?” With bold illustrations by artist Keren Katz, the Restless Classics edition of Middlemarch is a thoroughly modern edition of one of the most important novels ever written.

Praise for Middlemarch

“Middlemarch is so careful to correct any habit to side with one person rather than another that the narrator even corrects herself.”
—John Mullan, author of What Matters in Jane Austen?

“A novel without weaknesses, it renews itself for every generation.”
—Martin Amis, author of Inside Story

“Middlemarch, the magnificent book which with all its imperfections, is one of the few English novels written for grown-up people.”
—Virginia Woolf

“Middlemarch shows us the contours and indeed the very language of the characters’ inner lives.”
—Michael Gorra, author of Portrait of a Novel: Henry James and the Making of an American Masterpiece

While best remembered for her revolutionary work, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), renowned feminist, author, and thinker Mary Wollstonecraft’s most popular book during her lifetime was a remarkable travel narrative, Letters Written in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark.

The impetus behind Wollstonecraft’s journey couldn’t be more dramatic: Her relationship with her lover on rocky ground, Wollstonecraft sets out for Scandinavia in order to retrieve a stolen treasure ship for him. As she travels across the dramatic landscape, she writes vividly of the people she encounters, events she witnesses, and the sublime natural landscape. Yet the letters also reflect her anguish as she comes to realize that her love affair is fated to end.

In its day, Letters Written in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark inspired hordes of readers to travel to Scandinavia. Now, with a new introduction by acclaimed travel author and novelist Joanna Kavenna, Mary Wollstonecraft's remarkable Letters will enchant a new generation of readers and world travelers.

Nest of Worlds is the first novel to appear in English from contemporary Polish science fiction master Marek S. Huberath. This metafictional adventure, owing as much to Borges, Saramago, and even Thomas More as it does to Stanislaw Lem, describes a world where every thirty-five years, all residents must move to a new “Land,” each a rigid caste society based on hair color, and each person bears a Significant Name that foretells the manner of their deaths. As new arrivals in the land of Davabel, Gavein Throzz, now a high-ranking "black" and Ra Mahleiné, a lowly “white,” defy the authorities who try to separate them as they struggle to build their new lives.

Soon, Gavein finds himself at the center of an epidemic of deaths, though he himself remains suspiciously unharmed. He discovers a book titled Nest of Worlds, populated by characters busy reading their own versions of Nest of Worlds—and the key to solving the mysterious epidemic may lie within this even more mysterious novel. Nest of Worlds is a riveting and mind-bending tour through the nature of narrative, reality, love, and the darkest aspects of human nature.

With delicacy and precision, the major Chinese poet Xiao Hai conjures shadows to explore philosophical questions of illusion and reality, history and time, art and language. Composed of several hundred interconnected poems, Xiao’s collection is, in his words, “a dynamic, creative, and open system of experience.” Deftly translated by Zhu Yu, Song of Shadows brings Wordsworth and Whitman into artful conversation with classical Chinese culture.

Available as a bilingual eBook with text in Mandarin and English, this edition is a must-read for lovers of international literature, Chinese speakers learning English, and English speakers learning Mandarin.

From the savanna to the city to outer space, celebrated Nordic children’s book illustrator Linda Bondestam offers a charming peek at the many ways we settle in for sleep, with gorgeous, dreamlike illustrations full of offbeat humor.

Discover the bedtime routines of animals all over the world through the eyes of an alien family on a faraway planet. Little monkey needs his mama to play at least seventy-three songs on the ukulele to fall asleep. A meerkat family enjoys some stretches together as the sun goes down, while baby sloth is a bedtime expert—she’s already snoozing soundly in the trees. Die-cut pages invite little ones to help new animal friends get cozy under the covers.

With unconventional illustrations full of wit and tenderness, Good Night, Earth is a sweetly silly exploration of how all kinds of creatures find peaceful and playful ways to end the day.

"Brimming with intolerable rapture, I almost killed myself many, many times. I wasn’t trying to; my love for life just kept spilling me over boundaries into places from which some people don’t come back. Hardly restricted by social convention, I hurt myself by being so rambunctious and romantic."

How much of our past does our face betray? What future fortune can you read in the lines and skin? What trace is left by other lips and fingers and fists? In this beautiful, boisterous account, by turns soul-searching and erotic, acclaimed Chicano and Native American poet Jimmy Santiago Baca reveals the story of his life as told through his face. An orphan, a runaway, and an inmate in a maximum-security prison before he became a world-renowned writer, Baca’s life has been touched with rapture and despair, passion and purgatory. “In my eagerness to thrust forth and excel in life,” Baca writes, “I found fame in all the wrong places.”

Presented by Restless Books as part of an ongoing series of succinct essays featuring some of the world’s most distinctive voices, this installment of The Face is Baca’s meditation on the different faces we show the world, and the ways in which the world marks us with its joys and sorrows. With echoes of Walt Whitman and Pablo Neruda, Baca speaks for a people alienated by history, in search of their own recognizable faces. The Face is the record of a lasting quest for self-recognition by one of our most distinguished poets.

A vivid, varied account of a globally-minded woman’s intriguing adventures and evolving worldview, Santha Rama Rau’s “informal” autobiography covers a life defined by almost perpetual motion—from her birth in India to an upbringing in England and South Africa, from her education at Wellesley College in the United States to far-flung travel to China, Japan, Indonesia, Russia, Afghanistan, Kenya, Spain, and beyond.

Part memoir, part journalism, Gifts of Passage is at once intimate and expansive. Supplementing the narrative of a wayfarer’s return to her roots and portraits of Indian family life, the book provides firsthand accounts of pivotal historical happenings: repression in South Africa, the trial of Jomo Kenyatta, and the early stirrings of Indian democracy.

“There could scarcely be a more opportune moment for the appearance in English of the late Cuban science fiction master Agustín de Rojas’s epic novel The Year 200…. De Rojas’s lucid fictional world intersects with many of our contemporary technological obsessions but charges them with remarkably distinct political valences..... A riveting narrative of espionage and geopolitical turmoil.” —Los Angeles Review of Books

Centuries have passed since the Communist Federation defeated the capitalist Empire, but humanity is still divided. A vast artificial-intelligence network, a psychiatric bureaucracy, and a tiny egalitarian council oversee civil affairs and quash “abnormal” attitudes such as romantic love. Disillusioned civilians renounce the new society and either forego technology to live as “primitives” or enhance their brains with cybernetic implants to become “cybos.” When the Empire returns and takes over the minds of unsuspecting citizens in a scenario that terrifyingly recalls Invasion of the Body Snatchers, the world’s fate falls into the hands of two brave women.

Drawing as much from the realms of the adventure novel, spy thriller, and political satire as from hard science fiction, horror, and fantasy, The Year 200 has been proven prophetic in its consideration of cryogenic freezing, artificial intelligence, and state surveillance, while its advanced weapons and robot assassins exist in an all-too-imaginable future. Originally published in 1990, just after the fall of the Berlin Wall and before the onset of Cuba's devastating Special Period, Agustín de Rojas’s magnum opus brings contemporary trajectories to their logical extremes and boldly asks, “What does ‘the greatest good for the greatest number’ really mean?”

With At the End of Sleep, an anthology selected from the past decade of Israeli poet Tal Nitzán’s work, one of Hebrew poetry’s most powerful and acclaimed contemporary voices is finally given her English-language due. Reaching beyond lyricism for its own sake with her lucid, sharp, and occasionally ferocious verse, Nitzán illuminates sexuality and struggle, protests the abuse of power, and plumbs the depths of the Israeli condition.

A trailblazer among American women at the turn of the century, Edith Wharton set out in the newly invented “motor-car” to explore the cities and countryside of France. As the Whartons embark on three separate journeys through the country in 1906 and 1907, accompanied first by Edith’s brother, Harry Jones, and then by Henry James, Edith is enamored by the freedom that this new form of transport has given her. With a keen eye for architecture and art, and the engrossing style that would later earn her a Pulitzer Prize in fiction, Wharton writes about places that she previously “yearned for from the windows of the train.”

Including photographs reproduced directly from the 1908 first edition, and newly introduced by acclaimed travel writer Lavinia Spalding, the Restless Books edition of A Motor-Flight Through France will inspire current and future generations of readers and adventurers.

In a lush, sun-dappled forest, animal friends discover the advantages of living slowly, in this soothing picture book from beloved South Korean author and illustrator Yeorim Yoon and Jian Kim.

Little Bird is all aflutter—too many things to do. Elephant cries with frustration when a shoelace breaks. Rabbit tries so hard and loses the race anyway. But what about Slow Lizard?

Just like my name, I live a slow, relaxed life.

And because I live a slow life,

I see many things,

I hear many things,

and I have lots of time to help my friends.

Meandering through a sunny forest, Slow Lizard’s friends learn how wonderful it is to slow down together. Filled with blooming trees and fluffy flower beds, It’s OK, Slow Lizard glows with the beauty of a hidden magic world, where we take the time to help each other enjoy life—even when the rain comes.

One of the world’s oldest and best-loved tales, now retold and illustrated in thrilling detail for readers of all ages.

Rama pulled the splendid arrow out of his quiver. It had been given to him long ago by the sage Agastya who had told him that he could use it only once and only for a great enemy. The incomparable arrow held the wind in its feathers, the sun and the moon in its shining tip, the earth in its shaft and the power of the doomsday fire in its flight.

Ramayana—an unforgettable tale of love, adventure, flying monkeys and god acting in the world of humans—has been treasured by readers around the world for thousands of years. Now in an authoritative, gripping retelling by the renowned Ramayana scholar Arshia Sattar, readers have a new chance to explore this classic’s riches.

Rama is a brave young prince who is forced into exile. His brother Lakshmana and his wife, the beautiful princess Sita, loyally follow him into the depths of the mysterious forest, where they encounter strange and dangerous creatures. None is as terrifying as Ravana, the ten-headed demon king who kidnaps Sita and takes her to a fortified city in the middle of the ocean. To rescue her, Rama enlists the help of hundreds of thousands of magical monkeys and bears to fight the demon army and win her back. Even the gods gather to witness the harrowing battle. Will Rama and his friends prevail, and will Sita return to him? Only these captivating pages will tell…

Winner of the 2022 Mildred L. Batchelder Award

A July/August 2021 Kids' Indie Next Pick

A Junior Library Guild Gold Standard Selection

Winner of a 2022 SCBWI Crystal Kite AwardFrom renowned Japanese children’s author Sachiko Kashiwaba, Temple Alley Summer is a fantastical and mysterious adventure filled with the living dead, a magical pearl, and a suspiciously nosy black cat named Kiriko featuring beautiful illustrations from Miho Satake.

Kazu knows something odd is going on when he sees a girl in a white kimono sneak out of his house in the middle of the night—was he dreaming? Did he see a ghost? Things get even stranger when he shows up to school the next day to see the very same figure sitting in his classroom. No one else thinks it’s weird, and, even though Kazu doesn’t remember ever seeing her before, they all seem convinced that the ghost-girl Akari has been their friend for years!

When Kazu’s summer project to learn about Kimyo Temple draws the meddling attention of his mysterious neighbor Ms. Minakami and his secretive new classmate Akari, Kazu soon learns that not everything is as it seems in his hometown. Kazu discovers that Kimyo Temple is linked to a long forgotten legend about bringing the dead to life, which could explain Akari’s sudden appearance—is she a zombie or a ghost? Kazu and Akari join forces to find and protect the source of the temple's power. An unfinished story in a magazine from Akari’s youth might just hold the key to keeping Akari in the world of the living, and it’s up to them to find the story’s ending and solve the mystery as the adults around them conspire to stop them from finding the truth.

A USBBY 2025 Outstanding International Book

Melia is spellbound by the stuffed wildcat in her family’s living room—her cousin swears that it comes to life and roams the streets at night. When she finds a signed note from the animal with secret instructions, a thrilling and dangerous adventure begins.

For Melia and her sister Myrto, summer means a break from Grandfather’s history lessons and weeks of running free at the seaside with their ragtag group of friends. Best of all, cousin Nikos will visit and tell his fabulous stories about the taxidermied wildcat, which opens its blue glass eye when it wants to do good deeds and its black one when it makes trouble. The black eye must be open lately because all the adults have been acting strangely, arguing about politics and fearful of the police. Soon even the children are divided—who can Melia trust? And can the wildcat help keep her family safe?

Set in Greece during the 1930s, when the nation was torn apart by fascism, The Wildcat Behind Glass is an unforgettable tale of family, humanity, and what it means to be free. From its 1963 release to the dozens of international editions and honors that followed including a Mildred L. Batchelder Award, the novel has enchanted generations of young readers. Now, a fresh English translation—the first in over 50 years—breathes new life into the timeless story.

“Rivka Galchen delivers joy and cleverness reminiscent of The Phantom Tollbooth, Alice in Wonderland, and Hayao Miyazaki movies” (NPR, Best Books of 2019) in Rat Rule 79, a brain-twisting adventure story about friendship, growing up, and peanut-butter-pickle sandwiches.

Fred and her math-teacher mom are always on the move, and Fred is getting sick of it. She’s about to have yet another birthday in a new place without friends. On the eve of turning thirteen, Fred sees something strange in the living room: her mother, dressed for a party, standing in front of an enormous paper lantern—which she steps into and disappears.

Fred follows her and finds herself in the Land of Impossibility—a loopily illogical place where time has been outlawed by a mad Rat Queen, along with birthday parties and, most cruelly, peanut butter. Fred meets Downer, a downcast white elephant, and Gogo, a pugnacious mongoose mother of seventeen, who help her in her quest to find her mom. Together they must brave dungeons, Insult Fish, a Know-It-Owl, Fearsome Ferlings, and ultimately the Rat Queen herself—and solve an ageless riddle to escape certain doom.

Gorgeously illustrated and reminiscent of The Phantom Tollbooth and The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, Rivka Galchen’s Rat Rule 79 is an instant classic for curious readers of all ages.

From one of Mexico’s foremost authors comes a wondrous adventure story of a boy who goes to live with his kooky, book-obsessed uncle in a library where books have supernatural powers.

“We walked toward the part of the library where the air smelled as if it had been interred for years….. Finally, we got to the hallway where the wooden floor was the creakiest, and we sensed a strange whiff of excitement and fear. It smelled like a creature from a bygone time. It smelled like a dragon.”

Thirteen-year-old Juan’s summer is off to a terrible start. First, his parents separate. Then, almost as bad, Juan is sent away to his strange Uncle Tito’s house for the entire break! Who wants to live with an oddball recluse who has zigzag eyebrows, drinks fifteen cups of smoky tea a day, and lives inside a huge, mysterious library?

As Juan adjusts to his new life among teetering, dusty shelves, he notices something odd: the books move on their own! He rushes to tell Uncle Tito, who lets his nephew in on a secret: Juan is a Princeps Reader, which means books respond magically to him, and he’s the only one who can find the elusive, never-before-read Wild Book. But will Juan and his new friend Catalina get to The Wild Book before the wicked, story-stealing Pirate Book does?

An unforgettable adventure story about books, libraries, and the power of reading, The Wild Book is the young readers’ debut by beloved, prize-winning Mexican author Juan Villoro. It has sold over one million copies in Spanish.

A 2019 Batchelder Honor Book

2021 Global Literature in Libraries Translated YA Book Prize Shortlist

From one of Italy’s favorite authors of young adult literature comes a gripping, true-to-life thriller of a Sicilian boy’s fight to survive after his family is torn apart by the Mafia.


A talented young runner, Santino lives in Palermo, Sicily—a beautiful region of Italy that’s dominated by the Mafia. With Santino’s first communion approaching, his father and grandfather carry out a theft to pay for the party—but they steal from the wrong people. A young, cocky Mafioso summons them to a meeting, and they bring the boy. As Santino wanders off into the old abandoned neighborhood, he hears shots and runs back to see two armed men and his father and grandfather slumped over in the car. The boy barely escapes with his life. Now, he’s left with a choice: cooperate with police and be a “rat,” or maintain Omertà: the code of silence.

Twelve-year-old Lucio lives in the northern Italian city of Livorno and dreams of sailing when not taking care of his his young sister, Ilaria, and his sick mother, who is convinced that a witch has cursed her. One day, Lucio’s mother goes missing and he receives a mysterious text: “Come to Palermo. Mamma is dying.” Panicked, Lucio grabs Ilaria and rushes to Sicily, where Lucio’s and Santino’s stories converge with explosive results.

Inspired by a real-life Mafia episode, Silvana Gandolfi’s Run for Your Life is a powerful survival story of young people finding the courage to do the right thing when faced with the cruel realities of the adult world.

The Mermaid in the Bathtub is a charming, gorgeously retro retelling of Hans Christian Andersen’s classic story “The Little Mermaid,” by beloved Israeli author and illustrator duo Nurit Zarchi and Rutu Modan.

One day, a resolutely ordinary young man named Mr. Whatwilltheysay returns home to find Grain-of-Sand, a mermaid, waiting for him in his favorite armchair. Despite his objections, the two embark on a series of very watery adventures as he tries to get rid of her. But ultimately the thought of being seen with half a fish is simply too much for Mr. Whatwilltheysay to bear—what would people say? So broken-hearted Grain-of-Sand returns to the sea in his bathtub, leaving Mr. Whatwilltheysay to resume his pedestrian existence. Mr. Whatwilltheysay soon finds that his beloved landlubber life, however, lacks the splash and shimmer (and bathtub) of his good times with Grain-of-Sand—and acting against all his instincts, he sets off to sea to find her.

A one-of-a-kind, uplifting picture book about an Israeli boy and a Palestinian boy who bond on the soccer field—translated into English, Hebrew, and Arabic.

Daniel and Ismail, one Israeli and the other Palestinian, don’t know each other yet, but they have more in common than they know. They live in the same city and have the same birthday, and this year they get the same presents: a traditional scarf—for Daniel a tallit and for Ismail a keffiyeh—and a soccer ball. Taking their gifts out for a spin, they meet by chance on a soccer field, and they soon begin to play together and show off the tricks they can do.

They get so absorbed in the fun that they lose track of time and mix up their gifts: Daniel picks up Ismail's keffiyeh and Ismail takes Daniel's tallit. When they get home and discover their mistake, their parents are shocked and angry, asking the boys if they realize who wears those things. That night, Daniel and Ismail have nightmares about what they have seen on the news and heard from adults about the other group. But the next day, they find each other in the park and get back to what really matters: having fun and playing the game they both love.

Daniel and Ismail is a remarkable multilingual picture book that confronts the very adult conflicts that kids around the world face, and shows us that different cultures, religions, societies, and languages can all share the same page.

From French author-illustrator duo Richard Marnier and Aude Maurel comes a captivating picture book about creativity, diversity, and self-expression.

This is my town,
simple and typical.

Each house has a door,
two windows, a red roof
—all so predictable

But then one night… someone leaves on their light!
And in the morning, what a shock!
The shutters are sealed tight!

Who is that who lives next door?
We’ve never seen anything like this before!

In a town where everyone follows the rules, one neighbor’s decision to leave the light on at night completely disrupts the neighborhood, sparking a creative revolution. Vibrant, poetic, and fun, Who Left the Light On? playfully teaches the powerful lesson that diversity, creativity, and individuality should be celebrated.

A 2021 USBBY Outstanding International Book

From the dung-beetle to the blue whale, no creature is too humble or huge for Finnish author and illustrator duo Laura Merz and Aino Järvinen in 1,001 Creatures, a gorgeously illustrated, interactive exploration of the natural world.

Under the sun, the moon, and the stars
all the creatures of the world, big and small,
carry out their own tasks
as part of nature’s great balance.

Have you ever wondered how a crocodile keeps its teeth clean? Or why herons like to sit on the backs of water buffalo? What exactly does a giant blue whale eat to get so big? In 1,001 Creatures, Aino Järvinen and Laura Merz playfully investigate the complex and awe-inspiring world of twenty-six fascinating insects, reptiles, and mammals.

With fun facts and captivating illustrations, 1,001 Creatures explores the diversity of the animal world and its ecosystems. Interactive questions allow readers to take their curiosity and imagination off the page and into the real world with prompts to create their own artwork, imitate a camel’s unique walk, and discover the ways in which all creatures are connected in the world. Järvinen’s humorous style and Merz’s unique watercolor illustrations painted from memory using non-traditional materials, enhance the central message that we’re all in this together—human, squid, and penguin alike.

A touching and profound tale of friendship, differences, and acceptance from renowned Estonian children’s author and illustrator Piret Raud.

On the sandy shore of a big sea lived a bird named Ellie who had no voice.

“Everything else has a voice,” Ellie thought sadly. “The trees rustle. The waves crash. Even the rain sings when it falls.”

“I’m the only one who can’t make a sound.”

Ellie felt tears well up in her eyes—that’s how sad she was to be voiceless.

Ellie’s life is turned upside down when she finds a curious instrument on the shore that makes the most amazing sound when she blows into it: Trööömmmpffff! Creatures come from near and far to hear Ellie’s magnificent new voice. But when Ellie learns that the horn actually belongs to Duke Junior who is desperately unhappy without it, she goes on an adventure to return the horn to its rightful owner. After days and nights of searching, she finds Duke Junior on an island in the middle of the water. To her surprise and delight, Duke Junior doesn’t just toot Tröömmmpfff on the horn… he plays the most beautiful music! Ellie is so happy that Duke Junior has his horn back and can produce such lovely sounds that she’s content listening to his tunes and being herself.

An entrancing adventure for today’s troubled planet, The Casket of Time is a fantastical tale of time travel and environmental calamity from celebrated Icelandic author Andri Snær Magnason.

Teenage Sigrun is sick of all the apocalyptic news about the “situation” and, worse, her parents’ obsession with it. Sigrun’s family—along with everyone else—decides to hibernate in their TimeBoxes®, hoping for someone else to fix the world’s problems . But when Sigrun’s TimeBox® opens too early, she discovers an abandoned city overrun by wilderness and joins a band of kids who are helping a researcher named Grace solve the “situation.”

The world, according to Grace, is under an ancient curse. There once was a princess named Obsidiana, who was trapped in time by the greedy king of Pangea. To protect Obsidiana from dark and gloomy days, the king put her in a crystal casket made of spider silk woven so tightly that time itself couldn’t penetrate. The king’s greed for power doomed his kingdom and the trapped princess. Sigrun sees eerie parallels between the tale of Obsidiana and the present-day crisis, and realizes it’s up to her and her friends to break the ancient curse and fix the world.

Introducido por el amado autor cubano de ciencia ficción, Yoss, como una de las novelas fundacionales del género, el clásico de los años 1960 de Miguel Collazo El Viaje es una parábola de apertura mental del progreso social, profetas y masas reacias, y el viaje metafísico de la humanidad interior.

En el planeta Ambar, hace mucho tiempo colonizado por científicos que llegaron por nave espacial, los habitantes ya no viven en ciudades. Generación tras generación, los amilarios deambulan por el desierto, el valle y las ruinas mientras los misteriosos “símbolos” se ciernen en el cielo. Una vez que una nueva generación desarrolla la capacidad de transmitir imágenes, sentimientos y recuerdos a los demás, comienza a esperar y esperan una transformación que cambia la vida: El Viaje.

Lleno de intrincados árboles genealógicos, enormes flores de desierto y autómatas inteligentes, el mundo evocador de Miguel Collazo traza la creación de un civilización que se ha perdido y se reconstruye gradualmente en un paisaje desolado. Esta saga multigeneracional destaca lo que nos une como comunidad y las partes que la memoria, el afecto y la esperanza juegan en nuestra historia.

Uno de lo que Daína Chaviano, el gran autor cubano de ciencia ficción, llama el “hexágono de los libros cubanos de género de primer nivel, casi inimitables,” The Journey es una lectura esencial para cualquier persona interesada en las raíces de la literatura cubana y la ciencia ficción.

Named one of “the best Russian novels of the 21st Century,” The Underground is the unforgettable story of an abandoned mixed-race boy navigating the wondrous and terrifying city of Moscow before the Soviet Union’s collapse.

“I am Moscow’s underground son, the result of one too many nights on the town.” So begins the story of Mbobo, the precocious 12-year-old narrator of this captivating novel by exiled Uzbek author and BBC journalist Hamid Ismailov. Born to a Siberian woman and an African athlete who came to compete in the 1980 Moscow Olympics, Mbobo must navigate the complexities of being a fatherless, mixed-raced boy in the shaky terrain of the Soviet Union before its collapse.

With echoes of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man and Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground, Ismailov’s novel tackles head-on the problems of race and the relationship between the individual and society in a thoroughly modern context. While paying homage to great Russian authors of the past—Dostoevsky, Turgenev, Gorky, Nabokov, and Pushkin—Ismailov emerges as a master of a new kind of Russian writing that revels in the sordid reality and diversity of the country today. Named one of “the best Russian novels of the 21st Century" (Continent Magazine), The Underground is a dizzying and moving tour of the Soviet capital, on the surface and beneath, before its colossal fall.

The narrators of Paco Ignacio Taibo II's wonderfully inventive novel, Four Hands, are Greg Simon and Julio Fernandez: investigative journalists uncovering an elaborate plot by an obscure American government agency to vilify the Sandinista leadership in Nicaragua. The story they discover and type out together weaves truth with lies, wild humor with tragedy, and reality with fantasy–a stranger-than-fiction tale of imperial excess where delusion makes perfect sense.

Joining such historical figures as Harry Houdini, Leon Trotsky, Pancho Villa, and Stan Laurel is a sprawling cast of characters that includes Alex, a spymaster with a knack for the absurd; Rolando, a depraved Mexican drug trafficker; and Stoyan Vasilev, a geriatric Bulgarian counterspy.

A “documentary novel” and a passionate satire about the means and ends of politics, Paco Taibo's Four Hands has been compared to the fiction of Marquéz, Dos Passos, Doctorow, and Heller.

Dissident Cuban writer, photographer, and pioneering blogger Orlando Luis Pardo Lazo presents a collection of surreal, irony-laden photos and texts from his native city. His “diary of dystopia”—an unexpected fusion of images and words—brings us closer to Havana’s scaffolded and crumbling facades, ramshackle waterfronts, and teeming human bodies. In this book, as beautiful and bleak as Havana itself, Pardo guides us through the relics and fables of an exhausted Revolution in the waning days of Castro’s Cuba.

Winner of the 2017 Eugène Dabit Prize
Winner of the 2019 French Voices Grand Prize

From award-winning Tahitian author Titaua Peu comes Pina, a devastating novel about a family torn apart by secrets and the legacy of colonialism, held together by nine-year-old Pina, a girl shouldering the immeasurable weight of her family’s traumas.

Far from Tahiti’s postcard-perfect beaches, Ma and Auguste and five of their nine children live a hand-to-mouth life in destitute, run-down Tenaho. Nine-year-old Pina, abused and neglected in equal measure, is the keeper of her family’s secrets, though the weight of this knowledge soon proves to be a burden no child could ever bear.

A victim of her father’s alcoholic rages and the object of her mother’s anger and indifference, Pina protects her younger sister, Moïra, as best she can, but a tragic accident upsets the precarious equilibrium of the family, setting them on a path to destruction. The fault lines of her family, descendants of Mā’ohi warriors who once fended off European settlers, begin to shift and crack open, laying bare how the past shapes and haunts the present: her brother Pauro falls in love with a Frenchman, her sister Rosa sinks into sexual exploitation as a futile means of escape, her eldest brother August Junior’s addictions and temper may lead him into ruin, and Hannah, the oldest daughter who had escaped to France, is beckoned back home, fearing the worst.

Elegantly translated from the French by Jeffrey Zuckerman, Pina introduces a bold and profoundly humane anticolonial writer. It’s a gut punch of a novel that traces the history of a family, an island, and a people, reaching back to a time before colonial rule and stretching into an imagined, hopeful future of independence and autonomy, offering the promise of redemption.

Based on the true, still-unfolding story of the expelled Chagossians’ fight for their homeland, Silence of the Chagos is a powerful exploration of cultural identity, the concept of home, and above all the neverending desire for justice.

Every afternoon a woman in a red headscarf walks to the end of the quay and looks out over the water, fixing her gaze “back there”—to Diego Garcia, one of the small islands forming the Chagos archipelago in the Indian Ocean. With no explanation, no forewarning, and only an hour to pack their belongings, the entire population of Diego Garcia was forced on a boat headed to Mauritius. Government officials told Charlesia that the island was “closed;” there was no going back for any of them.

Charlesia longs for life on Diego Garcia, where she spent her days harvesting coconuts and her nights dancing to sega music. As she struggles to come to terms with the injustice of her new reality, Charlesia crosses paths with Désiré, a young man born on the one-way journey to Mauritius. Désiré has never set foot on Diego Garcia, but as Charlesia unfolds the dramatic story of their people, he learns of the home he never knew and of the life he might have had.

With the Chagos’ sovereignty currently being adjudicated by the United Nations Silence of the Chagos is an important and humanizing exploration of the rights of individuals and a reckoning with displacement on a global scale

In 1832, three years before Alexis de Tocqueville published Democracy in America, the English novelist Frances Trollope released Domestic Manners of the Americans, an eye-opening record of her travels in the young republic. Expecting a utopia of “justice and liberty for all,” she is shocked to discover the contradictions at the heart of the American character. Funny and fearless, Trollope’s biting critique became an international sensation. Yet, as Mark Twain remarked, "She was merely telling the truth and this indignant nation knew it.”

Today, Domestic Manners of the Americans remains a prophetic diagnosis of America and a masterpiece of nineteenth-century travel writing. Now published as an eBook with an introduction by acclaimed travel author Sara Wheeler, this classic work offers modern American readers a fascinating reintroduction to themselves.

Two acclaimed photographers examine Harlem's paradox of place: the tension between the everyday reality of its streets—often contentious, always complex—and the cultural brand it has established in our collective imagination. Photographs, videos, and essays explore one of America's great "main streets" during a time of profound transition. 125th: Time in Harlem captures a defining moment in Harlem's history, as the neighborhood confronts urban flux, gentrification, the loss of cultural memory, and the preservation of community.

Award-winning journalist Javier Sinay investigates a series of murders from the nineteenth century, unearthing the complex history and legacy of Moisés Ville, the “Jerusalem of South America,” and his personal connection to a defining period of Jewish history in Argentina.When Argentine journalist Javier Sinay discovers an article from 1947 by his great-grandfather detailing twenty-two murders that had occurred in Moisés Ville at the end of the nineteenth century, he launches into his own investigation that soon turns into something deeper: an exploration of the history of Moisés Ville, one of the first Jewish agricultural communities in Argentina, and Sinay’s own connection to this historically thriving Jewish epicenter.

Seeking refuge from the pogroms of Czarist Russia, a group of Jewish immigrants founded Moisés Ville in the late 1880s. Like their town’s prophetic namesake, these immigrants fled one form of persecution only to encounter a different set of hardships: exploitative land prices, starvation, illness, language barriers, and a series of murders perpetrated by roving gauchos who preyed upon their vulnerability. Sinay, though a descendant of these immigrants, is unfamiliar with this turbulent history, and his research into the spate of violence plunges him into his family’s past and their link to Moisés Ville. He combs through libraries and archives in search of documents about the murders and hires a book detective to track down issues of Der Viderkol, the first Yiddish newspaper in Argentina started by his great-grandfather. He even enrolls in Yiddish classes so he can read the newspaper and other contemporaneous records for himself. Through interviews with his family members, current residents of Moisés Ville, historians, and archivists, Sinay compiles moving portraits of the victims of these heinous murders and reveals the fascinating and complex history of the town once known as the “Jerusalem of South America.”

“Sinay acknowledges the impossibility of fully separating legends from facts. . . but his diligence has produced as definitive an account as possible of what actually happened during this bloody period. This nuanced search for truth should have broad appeal.”
—Publishers Weekly, starred review

"I greatly admire Javier Sinay's enlightening and humane account of his sleuthing—the disinterment of a violent episode of buried history—now no longer forgotten. Its implications resonate far beyond the borders of Argentina."
—Paul Theroux, author of The Mosquito Coast and Under the Wave at Waimea

"Part detective story, part family history, The Murders of Moisés Ville: The Rise and Fall of the Jerusalem of South America — by Buenos Aires journalist Javier Sinay— offers a compelling path to learn more."

—Howard Freedman, Jewish News of Northern California

“In the pursuit to understand his own past, while unraveling the mysteries surrounding Moisés Ville, Javier Sinay has created an unflinching portrait of the first Jewish community in Argentina, who, despite enormous challenges, life-threatening privations, and demeaning persecution, endured to pave the way for others seeking a new life in Argentina…Sinay has demonstrated once again, that history must be preserved no matter the cost – for ourselves, as well as for future generations.”

—Stephen Newton, Litro Magazine

“ What begins as an exercise in historical sleuthing evolves into a more ambitious exploration of Argentine Jewish history and identity…Sinay doesn’t need to create a direct connection to this tragic present. It is more than enough that he refuses to flatten the Moisés Ville murders to fit a totalizing narrative of antisemitic violence in Argentina. In so doing, he not only rejects facile conceptions of Jewish victimhood, but also defies the Zionist idea that, by virtue of having suffered in one country, Jews are automatically entitled to land in another.”

—Lily Meyer, Jewish Currents

WINNER OF THE 2023 RESTLESS BOOKS PRIZE FOR NEW IMMIGRANT WRITING

In imaginative prose that interrogates the past with a poet’s curiosity and a scientist’s pen, Unexploded Ordnance seeks to answer how we are shaped by the stories we inherit.

After moving from Germany to the United States to work as a professor of biology, Catharina Coenen takes up residence in a second language to voice the questions she could not ask at home: what exactly did her family live through during World War II, and to what extent are they implicated? What terrors did her grandmother, mother, and aunt endure, and why are women’s wartime stories so hard to find? How much of the self is shaped by the traumas and passions that come to us through our DNA? Balancing literature with historical research, old letters with new conversations, Coenen peels back generational silences to walk alongside her grandmother as she comes of age during Hitler’s rise to power, watches her friends disappear one by one, and flees bombing raids with her tiny daughters, escaping from city to town, rented room to orphanage, parish house to hospital, trying to survive. Weaving reflections on language, biology, queerness, art, and memory, Coenen moves between the personal and the universal with stunning honesty and elegance.

Introduced by beloved Cuban science fiction author Yoss as one of the foundational novels of the genre, Miguel Collazo’s 1960s classic The Journey is a mind-opening parable of social progress, prophets and reluctant masses, and humanity’s metaphysical voyage inward.

On planet Ambar, long ago colonized by scientists who arrived by spaceship, inhabitants no longer live in cities. Generation after generation, Ambarians wander through the desert, the valley, and the ruins as the mysterious “symbols” loom in the sky. Once a new generation develops the ability to broadcast images, feelings and memories to others, they start to hope and wait for a life-changing transformation: The Journey.

Filled with intricate family trees, huge desert flowers, and intelligent automatons, Miguel Collazo’s evocative world traces the makings of a civilization that has lost its way and gradually rebuilds itself in a desolate landscape. This multi-generational saga highlights what binds us together as a community and the roles that memory, affection, and hope play in our history.

One of what Cuban science fiction great Daína Chaviano calls the “hexagon of top-notch, almost inimitable Cuban books of the genre,” The Journey is essential reading for anyone interested in the roots of Cuban literature and science fiction.

Winner of the Premio Planeta—the Spanish-speaking world’s richest literary prize

“The spirit of Stieg Larsson visits Mexico City" (Kirkus): Milena, or The Most Beautiful Femur in the World is a pulse-pounding international political thriller about sex, power, and information—and the extreme lengths people go to get them.

When Milena’s lover and protector, the chief of Mexico’s most important newspaper, dies in her arms, she knows it’s only a matter of time before the ruthless thugs behind the human-trafficking ring that kidnapped her from her Croatian village catch her and force her back into sex slavery.

Soon, three comrades bound together by childhood friendships, romantic entanglements, and a restless desire for justice are after her as well—but for different reasons. The new chief of the newspaper, columnist Tomás Arizmendi, must retrieve Milena’s mysterious black book before the media empire he has inherited is torn asunder, while dubious intelligence expert Jaime Lemus wants to use the sensitive information the book contains about the crimes of the world’s power elite to further his political puppeteering. Lastly, the noblest of the trio, rising politician Amelia Navarro has made it her mission to protect women and children from the abuses of men in power.

Told at a heartracing pace and full of the journalistic detail and sly humor that Mexican master Jorge Zepeda Patterson has become renowned for, Milena, or The Most Beautiful Femur in the World is a romp across Europe and the Americas that traces the vast networks of capital, data, crime, and coerced labor that bind together today’s globalized world. Yet, in the beautiful and tenacious Milena, we are reminded that the survivors of the darker facets of modernity are not mere statistics, but living, breathing, individuals.

Winner of the Polityka Passport Award

Winner of the Kościelski Award

A revelatory oral history of the people who suffered, rebelled, and survived under the secretive dictatorship of Enver Hoxha in Albania, one of the twentieth century’s most brutal and Kafkaesque regimes, from award-winning Polish journalist Margo Rejmer.

For nearly half a century Albania was held captive by one man. A cruel dictator with a deep paranoid streak, Enver Hoxha sealed the country’s borders, severed alliances, and enacted a totalitarian regime of gulags and purges. Many thousands suffered and died in silence, a silence that lingers today: thirty years after the end of Hoxha’s regime, its victims are still waiting for justice.

In Mud Sweeter than Honey, Albanians break the silence. Margo Rejmer spent years in Albania gathering interviews that shed light on the four decades of Hoxha’s rule and virtually every walk of life: teachers and children, imprisoned and exiled writers, nuns and factory workers. She arranges the voices of her interlocutors into a chorus that bears witness to how ordinary people lived and died. We are immersed in desperate border crossings, prison revolts, and everyday struggles to make a living. We meet a writer who finds secret freedom in a tiny village library of banned books, overlooked by censors. We meet a man who still only speaks in a whisper, afraid of being overheard.

While Albanians endured surveillance, imprisonment, and torture under Hoxha, they also read books and fell in love, raised families and found ways to survive. In the tradition of Svetlana Alexievich, Mud Sweeter than Honey is our most vivid, intimate portrait available in English of this little-understood corner of Europe.

Mapping the fault lines between mother and child (humanity's first and supposedly strongest bond), and with a poet's homeric vision of her native Trinidad, Camille U. Adams weaves the Caribbean island's history of colonial violence with her own family's legacy of abandonment.

For generations, the women of Camille U. Adams' family have left their daughters. Some follow the siren call of rum, the centuries-old vice which alighted on Trinidad's shores from European ships. Others flee the behind-closed-doors beatings of husbands, fathers, and brothers, rushing into any arms that offer refuge. Some simply disappear, their passage marked by unkept promises and open wounds.

As a young girl, Adams finds solace in Trinidad's whispering fever grass, sweet ixora flowers, and the cradling branches of the rose mango tree—all of their roots connecting her to the land's long memory. But where flora gives way to the rank pavement of Covigne Road, gunshots echo and men amass in the doorways of derelict garages, their mouths and hands promising violation. Home offers no safety: just an explosive father, cowed sisters, and a mother whose only reprieve is control. Cloying, suffocating, the maternal embrace threatens to blot out all else. Is it better to be choked, or not to be held at all?

Tormented by her mother's presence and haunted by her absence, Camille U. Adams' dazzling debut is a breathtaking account of survival and self-determination, reimagining the meaning of escape, its cost, and what comes after.

The magnum opus from Alejandro Jodorowsky—director of The Holy Mountain, star of Jodorowsky’s Dune, spiritual guru behind Psychomagic and The Way of Tarot, innovator behind classic comics The Incal and Metabarons, and legend of Latin American literature.

There has never been an artist like the polymathic Chilean director, author, and mystic Alejandro Jodorowsky. For eight decades, he has blazed new trails across a dazzling variety of creative fields. While his psychedelic, visionary films have been celebrated by the likes of John Lennon, Marina Abramovic, and Kanye West, his novels—praised throughout Latin America in the same breath as those of Gabriel García Márquez—have remained largely unknown in the English-speaking world. Until now.

Where the Bird Sings Best tells the fantastic story of the Jodorowskys’ emigration from Ukraine to Chile amidst the political and cultural upheavals of the 19th and 20th centuries. Like One Hundred Years of Solitude, Jodorowsky’s book transforms family history into heroic legend: incestuous beekeepers hide their crime with a living cloak of bees, a czar fakes his own death to live as a hermit amongst the animals, a devout grandfather confides only in the ghost of a wise rabbi, a transgender ballerina with a voracious sexual appetite holds a would-be saint in thrall. Kaleidoscopic, exhilarating, and erotic, Where the Bird Sings Best expands the classic immigration story to mythic proportions.

Winner of the 2020 European Union Prize for Literature, Lana Bastašić’s powerful debut novel Catch the Rabbit is an emotionally rich excavation of the complicated friendship between two women in a fractured, post-war Bosnia as they venture into the treacherous terrain of the Balkan wonderlands and their own history.

It’s been twelve years since inseparable childhood friends Lejla and Sara have spoken, but an unexpected phone call thrusts Sara back into a world she left behind, a language she’s buried, and painful memories that rise unbidden to the surface. Lejla’s magnetic pull hasn’t lessened despite the distance between Dublin and Bosnia or the years of silence imposed by a youthful misunderstanding, and Sara finds herself returning home, driven by curiosity and guilt. Embarking on a road trip from Bosnia to Vienna in search of Lejla’s exiled brother Armin, the two travel down the rabbit hole of their shared past and question how they’ve arrived at their present, disparate realities.

As their journey takes them further from their homeland, Sara realizes that she can never truly escape her past or Lejla—the two are intrinsically linked, but perpetually on opposite sides of the looking glass. As they approach their final destination, Sara contends with the chaos of their relationship. Lejla’s conflicting memories of their past, further complicated by the divisions brought on by the dissolution of Yugoslavia during their childhoods, forces Sara to reckon with her own perceived reality. Like Elena Ferrante’s My Brilliant Friend, Catch the Rabbit lays bare the intricacies of female friendship and all the ways in which two people can hurt, love, disappoint, and misunderstand one another.

The Israeli Republic "suggests how the Iranian and Israeli leaders who feel such intense mutual hostility today actually mirror one another in certain ways, particularly in their foundational attitudes toward religious authority, political and economic populism and the West. That a writer such as Al-e Ahmad, guru to the ayatollahs, liked Israel now seems touching. What he liked about Israel seems cautionary." —Bernard Avishai, Foreign Affairs

Written by a preeminent Iranian writer who helped lay the popular groundwork for the Iranian Revolution, The Israeli Republic should be required reading for anyone interested in the history and current political landscape of the Middle East. Documenting Jalal Al-e Ahmad’s two-week-long trip to Israel in February of 1963, his account “Journey to the Land of Israel” caused a firestorm when it was published in Iran, upsetting the very revolutionary clerics whose anti-Western sentiments Al-e Ahmad himself had fueled. Yet, in the thriving Jewish State, Jalal Al-e Ahmad saw a model for a possible future Iran.

Based on his controversial travelogue, supplemented with letters between the author and his wife, Simin Daneshvar (the first major Iranian woman novelist), and translated into English for the first time, The Israeli Republic is a record of Al-e Ahmad’s idealism, insight, and ultimate disillusionment toward Israel. Vibrantly modern in its sensibility and fearlessly polemical, this book will change the way you think about the Middle East.

From Alejandro Jodorowsky—the legendary director of The Holy Mountain, spiritual guru behind Psychomagic and The Way of Tarot, and author of Where the Bird Sings Best—comes another autobiographical tour-de-force: a mythopoetic portrait of the artist as a young man in Chile in the tumultuous 1930s.

In Where the Bird Sings Best, Alejandro Jodorowsky’s visionary autobiographical novel that NPR compared to One Hundred Years of Solitude and called “a genius’s surreal vision brought to life,” we followed Jodorowsky’s predecessors as they fled to Chile amid a fantastical array of circuses, Tarot, Catholic and Jewish mysticism, sexual extravagance, political violence, and the ghost of a wise rabbi serving as advisor. Now, in The Son of Black Thursday, Jodorowsky himself takes the stage as we’re introduced to the unforgettable cast of his early years in Chile in the 1930s.

We follow his father, Jaime, who’s obsessed with assassinating the dictator he ends up serving; his mother, Sarah, a giantess who never speaks but communicates through operatic singing; his grandparents, Ukrainian Jewish exiles fleeing persecution in the Ukraine; his twin sister, who is made to suckle a mannequin until she is ten in order to silence her delirious speeches; among other creatures of every description as they struggle against the misery and oppression of the copper mines of the Chilean desert.

As he’s done across media from film to comics to mystic philosophy to fiction, Jodorowsky once again demonstrates his boundless capacity for creating a universe of wonder, horror, humor, magic, and cosmic truth beyond our wildest imaginings. The Son of Black Thursday is a gripping novel from one of our most treasured masters.

Banned in China for its taboo allusions to the Tiananmen Square massacre, Sheng Keyi’s Death Fugue is a lyrical and explosive dystopian satire that imagines a world of manufactured existence, the erasure of personal freedom, and the perils of governmental control.
One morning a nine-story tower of excrement of unknown origin appears in the center of Dayang’s capital, Beiping. The government swiftly scrubs the scene of all evidence and hands down its final word: Do not ask questions; dissent will be punished. But the crowd gathered in Round Square to witness the Tower Incident for themselves only grows and soon explodes in unrest. Poet Mengliu and his girlfriend Qizi join the uprising, but thousands disappear in the brutal crackdown that follows, including Qizi, the newly appointed protest leader. Mengliu abandons poetry and revolution but never gives up hope that Qizi may still be alive.

Years later, on his annual journey in search of Qizi, Mengliu washes ashore in the idyllic country of Swan Valley, a world of dreamlike beauty, perfection, and youth. But the dream becomes a nightmare as he slowly begins to unravel the secrets of Swan Valley, discovering that the perfect society exists at a deep, inhumane cost.

Boldly absurdist yet eerily prescient, award-winning author Sheng Keyi’s Death Fugue barrels out of the void left by generations of state-imposed silence in modern-day China, where it remains banned from publication. It is a rogue artist’s answer to a profound question of our times: What is the role of art after atrocity?

“Cristina-Sánchez-Andrade is, simply, one of the best writers in Spain. Her language is vastly rich. A memorable narration. A flawless and unusual novel.” —El Correo Gallego

Galicia, Spain’s northwest region, in the 1950s. After a childhood in exile, two sisters return to their grandfather’s cottage for the first time since his shocking murder during the civil war. “The Winterlings” try to keep their dark secrets buried and carve out a peaceful existence in Tierra de Chá, an idyllic village host to a cast of grotesque but charming characters: a powerful psychic, a madman who believes he is a bus, a woman who refuses to die and the obese priest who heaves up a steep hill each day to give her last rites, a cross-dressing dentist who plants the teeth of the deceased in his patients’ mouths.

Tension mounts when the sisters, once united by their passion for Hollywood cinema, compete for the chance to stand in for Ava Gardner in the nearby filming of Pandora and the Flying Dutchman. Meanwhile, a mutual suspicion develops between the mysterious sisters and the eccentric villagers: Why have the women returned, and what are they hiding? What perverse business arrangement did the townspeople make with their grandfather, and why won’t they speak of his death?

Enchanting as a spell, The Winterlings blends Spanish oral tradition, Latin American magic realism, and the American gothic fiction of Flannery O’Connor and Shirley Jackson into an intoxicating story of romance, violent history, and the mysterious forces that move us.

In a word-drunk romp through an alternate, pre-apocalyptic United States, Ana Simo’s fiction debut, Heartland, is the uproarious story of a thwarted writer’s elaborate revenge on the woman who stole her lover, blending elements of telenovela, pulp noir, and dystopian satire.

There’s only one solution for a nasty case of writer’s block, and that’s murder. Specifically, that of one Mercy McCabe, a cunning SoHo art dealer who was once our Latina narrator’s rival for the scrumptious Bebe. When she discovers that McCabe has squandered Bebe’s affections after stealing her away, revenge is not enough: she must admit her guilt, sentence herself, and beg for her own execution, Soviet-style.

In the all-too-terrifyingly-familiar America of Heartland, the inconceivable has become ordinary: corruption and greed at the top have led to mass starvation in the heartland; hordes of refugees have escaped from resettlement camps and attack the cities; a puritanical Caliphate has toppled Constantinople, with America in its sights. Meanwhile, escaping her New York life in disguise, our heroine lures McCabe to her home turf: a hilltop house in the Great Plains where her parents worked as domestic servants. Her nemesis, though, is slippery, and McCabe disappears, threatening to ruin a homicidal masterplan so detailed as to be akin to love.

Heartland is a hilarious, genre-defying debut that confronts taboos of race, assimilation, and sex through a high-voltage tale of love, language, and revenge.

In this rich, eye-opening, and uplifting anthology, dozens of esteemed writers, poets, artists, and translators from more than thirty countries send literary dispatches from life during the pandemic. A portion of proceeds benefit booksellers in need.

As our world is transformed by the coronavirus pandemic, writers offer a powerful antidote to the fearful confines of isolation: a window onto lives and corners of the world beyond our own. In Mauritius, a journalist contends with denialism and mourns the last days of summer, lost to the lockdown. In Paris, a writer struggles to protect his young son from fear. In Chile, protesters who prevailed against tear gas and rubber bullets are now halted by a virus. In Queens, after thirteen-hour shifts in the ER, a doctor dons running shoes and makes the long jog home.

And We Came Outside and Saw the Stars Again takes its title from the last line of Dante’s Inferno, when the poet and his guide emerge from hell to once again behold the beauty of the heavens. In that spirit, the stories, essays, poems, and artwork in this collection—from beloved authors including Jhumpa Lahiri, Mario Vargas Llosa, Eavan Boland, Daniel Alarcón, Jon Lee Anderson, Claire Messud, Ariel Dorfman, and many more—detail the harrowing experiences of life in the pandemic, while pointing toward a less isolated future. Together they comprise a profound global portrait of the defining moment of our time, and send a clarion call for solidarity across borders.

Our literary culture depends on bookstores—and those irreplaceable sources of conversation and community, of inspiration and solace, have been decimated by the lockdown. Net proceeds from And We Came Outside and Saw the Stars Again will go to the Book Industry Charitable Foundation, which helps the passionate booksellers we readers depend upon.

"Guest workers of the United Arab Emirates embody multiple worlds and identities and long for home in a fantastical debut work of fiction, winner of the inaugural Restless Books Prize for New Immigrant Writing.… An enchanting, unparalleled anthem of displacement and repatriation." —Kirkus Reviews

In the United Arab Emirates, foreign nationals constitute over 80 percent of the population. Brought in to construct the towering monuments to wealth that punctuate the skylines of Abu Dhabi and Dubai, this labor force works without the rights of citizenship, endures miserable living conditions, and is ultimately forced to leave the country. Until now, the humanitarian crisis of the so-called “guest workers” of the Gulf has barely been addressed in fiction. With his stunning, mind-altering debut novel Temporary People, Deepak Unnikrishnan delves into their histories, myths, struggles, and triumphs.

Combining the irrepressible linguistic invention of Salman Rushdie and the satirical vision of George Saunders, Unnikrishnan presents twenty-eight linked stories that careen from construction workers who shapeshift into luggage and escape a labor camp, to a woman who stitches back together the bodies of those who’ve fallen from buildings in progress, to a man who grows ideal workers designed to live twelve years and then perish—until they don’t, and found a rebel community in the desert. With this polyphony, Unnikrishnan brilliantly maps a new, unruly global English. Giving substance and identity to the anonymous workers of the Gulf, he highlights the disturbing ways in which “progress” on a global scale is bound up with dehumanization.

From prize-winning Korean author Kim Hye-jin comes the contemplative, superbly-crafted story of a woman scapegoated by sudden tragedy, and the unexpected paths she must wander in search of redemption.

Haesoo is a successful therapist and regular guest on a popular TV program. But when she makes a scripted negative comment about a public figure who later commits suicide, she finds herself ostracized by friends, fired from her job, and her marriage begins to unravel. These details come to the reader gradually, in meditative prose, through bits and pieces of letters that Haesoo writes and finally abandons as she walks alone through her city.

One day she has an unexpected encounter with Sei, a 10-year-old girl attempting to feed an orange cat. Stray cats seem to be everywhere; they have the concern of one other neighborhood woman and the ire of everyone else. Like Haesoo and Sei, the cats endure various insults and recover slowly. Haesoo, who would not otherwise care about animals or form relationships with children, now finds herself pulled back by degrees into the larger world.

From “one of Iran's most important living fiction writers” (The Guardian) comes a fantastically imaginative story of love and war narrated by two angel scribes perched on the shoulders of a shell-shocked Iranian soldier who’s searching for the mysterious woman haunting his dreams.

Before he enlisted as a soldier in the Iran–Iraq war and disappeared, Amir Yamini was a carefree playboy whose only concerns were seducing women and riling his religious family. Five years later, his mother and sister Reyhaneh find him in a mental hospital for shell-shocked soldiers, his left arm and most of his memory lost. Amir is haunted by the vision of a mysterious woman whose face he cannot see—the crescent moon on her forehead shines too brightly. He names her Moon Brow.

Back home in Tehran, the prodigal son is both hailed as a living martyr to the cause of Ayatollah Khomeini’s Revolution and confined as a dangerous madman. His sense of humor, if not his sanity, intact, Amir cajoles Reyhaneh into helping him escape the garden walls to search for Moon Brow. Piecing together the puzzle of his past, Amir decides there’s only one solution: he must return to the battlefield and find the remains of his severed arm—and discover its secret.

All the while, to angels sit on our hero’s shoulders and inscribe the story in enthrallingly distinctive prose. Wildly inventive and radically empathetic, steeped in Persian folklore and contemporary Middle East history, Moon Brow is the great Iranian novelist Shahriar Mandanipour’s unforgettable epic of love, war, morality, faith, and family.

“No other writer in the Spanish-speaking world is as fiercely independent and thoroughly irreverent as Gabriela Wiener. Constantly testing the limits of genre and gender, Wiener’s work … has bravely unveiled truths some may prefer remain concealed about a range of topics, from the daily life of polymorphous desire to the tiring labor of maternity.”

—Cristina Rivera Garza, author of The Iliac Crest

In fierce and sumptuous first-person accounts, renowned Peruvian journalist Gabriela Wiener records infiltrating the most dangerous Peruvian prison, participating in sexual exchanges in swingers clubs, traveling the dark paths of the Bois de Boulogne in Paris in the company of transvestites and prostitutes, undergoing a complicated process of egg donation, and participating in a ritual of ayahuasca ingestion in the Amazon jungle—all while taking us on inward journeys that explore immigration, maternity, fear of death, ugliness, and threesomes. Fortunately, our eagle-eyed voyeur emerges from her narrative forays unscathed and ready to take on the kinks, obsessions, and messiness of our lives. Sexographies is an eye-opening, kamikaze journey across the contours of the human body and mind.

“Oddný Eir is an authentic author, philosopher and mystic. She weaves together diaries and fiction. She is the writer I feel can best express the female psyche of now and has bridged the gap between rural Iceland and Western philosophy. A true pioneer!!!!!!!!” —Björk

The winner of the EU Prize for Literature, Land of Love and Ruins introduces a daring new voice in international fiction: Oddný Eir. In the wake of Iceland’s financial crisis, a young author, recently separated and feeling out the uncertain terrain of a new relationship, finds herself questioning the foundations of our love and family lives, our bonds to country and the earth. Stirred by a dream about an old Viking woman on a pilgrimage, she sets out on a quest to the the ruins of the homes of her ancestors, where they tried to live in harmony with nature and each other. Her guiding questions are as essential as their answers are elusive: How do we create a home for love? How can we nourish personal space while sustaining intimacy and desire with a partner? How can we go, not back, but forward to nature?

Drawn both to her archaeologist brother and her ornithologist lover, she explores alternate forms that those relationships might take. Her search brings her all over Iceland and abroad to Paris, Strasbourg, Basel, and the Lake District home of famous Romantic siblings Dorothy and William Wordsworth. Written in the form of a diary that pans from small details to big questions and weaves elements of philosophy, history, archaeology, ecology, eroticism, and literature into a beautifully patterned whole, Oddný Eir invents a new, intimate language between writer and reader in this enchanting book about being human in the modern world.

The second installment of Argentine literary giant Ricardo Piglia’s acclaimed bibliophilic trilogy follows his alter ego, Emilio Renzi, as his literary career begins to take off in the tumultuous years 1968-1975—running a magazine, working as a publisher, and encountering the literary stars among whom he would soon take his place: Borges, Puig, Roa Bastos, Piñera.

“One writes,” Ricardo Piglia asserts, only “in order to know literature.” Spanning the years 1968 to 1975, The Diaries of Emilio Renzi: The Happy Years is a testament to Piglia’s intimate, lifelong love affair with the written word. This second installment of the Argentinian master’s diaries opens a window into a luminous literary community fertile with genius and ever-traipsing from bar to bar—as well as into a convulsing Argentina racked by the death of Perón, guerilla warfare, and a bloody military coup—and establishes itself as the definitive backbone of Piglia’s monumental career.

Kirkus Reviews Best Fiction of 2016

Barnes and Noble Best Science Fiction & Fantasy of 2016

“Intergalactic space travel meets outrageous, biting satire in Super Extra Grande…. Its author [Yoss] is one of the most celebrated—and controversial—Cuban writers of science fiction…. Reminiscent of Douglas Adams—but even more so, the satire of Rabelais and Swift.” —The Washington Post

With the playfulness and ingenuity of Douglas Adams, the Cuban science-fiction master Yoss delivers a space opera of intergalactic proportions with Super Extra Grande, the winner of the twentieth annual UPC Science Fiction Award in 2011.

In a distant future in which Latin Americans have pioneered faster-than-light space travel, Dr. Jan Amos Sangan Dongo has a job with large and unusual responsibilities: he’s a veterinarian who specializes in treating enormous alien animals. Mountain-sized amoebas, multisex species with bizarre reproductive processes, razor-nailed, carnivorous humanoid hunters: Dr. Sangan has seen it all. When a colonial conflict threatens the fragile peace between the galaxy’s seven intelligent species, he must embark on a daring mission through the insides of a gigantic creature and find two swallowed ambassadors—who also happen to be his competing love interests.

Funny, witty, raunchy, and irrepressibly vivacious, Super Extra Grande is a rare specimen in the richly parodic tradition of Cuban science fiction, and could only have been written by a Cuban heavy-metal rock star with a biology degree: the inimitable Yoss.

Una leyenda del futuro, de Agustín de Rojas, es un admirable estudio sobre la sofocación social que se lleva a cabo en una misión fallida a Titán, una de las lunas de Saturno. El viaje de regreso a tierra fuerza a los tripulantes a confrontar sus miedos más profundos mientras coexisten unos con otros en pleno estado de desesperación. Esta novela extraordinaria, que recuerda 2001: Odisea del espacio de Arthur C. Clarke, es un roman à clef de ciencia ficción sobre las presiones intensas—económicas, ideológicas, psicológicas—de la Cuba comunista.

Winner of Asymptote Journal’s 2016 Close Approximations Translation Contest and Shortlisted for the Ryszard Kapuscinski Prize, History of a Disappearance is the fascinating true story of a small mining town in the southwest of Poland that, after seven centuries of history, disappeared.

Lying at the crucible of Central Europe, the Silesian village of Kupferberg suffered the violence of the Thirty Years War, the Napoleonic Wars, and World War I. After Stalin’s post-World War II redrawing of Poland’s borders, Kupferberg became Miedzianka, a town settled by displaced people from all over Poland and a new center of the Eastern Bloc’s uranium-mining industry. Decades of neglect and environmental degradation led to the town being declared uninhabitable, and the population was evacuated. Today, it exists only in ruins, with barely a hundred people living on the unstable ground above its collapsing mines.

In this work of unsparing and insightful reportage, renowned journalist, photographer, and architecture critic Filip Springer rediscovers this small town’s fascinating history. Digging beyond the village’s mythic foundations and the great wars and world leaders that shaped it, Springer catalogs the lost human elements: the long-departed tailor and deceased shopkeeper; the parties, now silenced, that used to fill the streets with shouts and laughter; and the once-beautiful cemetery, with gravestones upended by tractors and human bones scattered by dogs. In Miedzianka, Springer sees a microcosm of European history, and a powerful narrative of how the ghosts of the past continue to haunt us in the present.

“A Planet for Rent is the English-language debut of Yoss, one of Cuba's most lauded writers of science fiction. Translated by David Frye, these linked stories craft a picture of a dystopian future: Aliens called xenoids have invaded planet Earth, and people are looking to flee the economically and socially bankrupt remains of human civilization. Yoss' smart and entertaining novel tackles themes like prostitution, immigration and political corruption. Ultimately, it serves as an empathetic yet impassioned metaphor for modern-day Cuba, where the struggle for power has complicated every facet of society” —NPR, Best Books of 2015

Out of the modern-day dystopia of Cuba comes an instant classic from the island’s most celebrated science fiction author: a raucous tale of a future in which a failing Earth is at the mercy of powerful capitalist alien colonizers.

In A Planet for Rent, Yoss critiques life under Castro in the ‘90s by drawing parallels with a possible Earth of the not-so-distant future. Wracked by economic and environmental problems, the desperate planet is rescued, for better or worse, by alien colonizers, who remake the planet as a tourist destination. Ruled over by a brutal interstellar bureaucracy, dispossessed humans seek better lives via the few routes available—working for the colonial police; eking out a living as black marketeers, drug dealers, or artists; prostituting themselves to exploitative extraterrestrial visitors—or they face the cold void of space in rickety illegal ships.

This inventive book marks the English-language debut of an astonishingly brave and imaginative Latin American voice.

YOSS (José Miguel Sánchez Gómez) es sin duda el autor más renombrado y controversial de la ciencia ficción cubana. En su best-seller Se alquila un planeta, nos ofrece la visión desgarradora de un porvenir en la Tierra que le sirve de espejo para reflexionar sobre la Cuba de los años noventa bajo el régimen de Fidel Castro. En este futuro mordaz, nuestro planeta es rescatado de sus problemas económicos y ambientales por la invasión de extraterrestres que lo transforman en un resort turístico interestelar. Consignados a una burocracia interestelar brutal, los desposeídos de la Tierra se empeñan en mejorar sus vidas a través de las pocas vías disponibles que tienen a su alcance, como son el trabajar para la policía colonial, ganarse la vida en el mercado negro, invertir en el narcotráfico, gozar del mundo galáctico del arte y la prostitución, y extraviarse en vacío en naves espaciales de fabricación casera en busca de una vida mejor. Yoss es conocido tanto por su estética de rockero impenitente como por sus retratos mordaces de la actualidad cubana. Este libro ingenioso y fascinante marca el debut en inglés de una de las voces literarias latinoamericana más intrépidas e imaginativas.

“Beware, reader, in these pages you will experience vertigo, anxiety and joy. You will become a ghostly presence in a Borgesian world, a camera obscura, where mathematics is a secret weapon, and memory the object of an archaeological pursuit. Loosely inspired by the eventful life of the French mathematician Alexander Grothendieck, Fonseca has created a gorgeous opera prima.” —Valerie Miles, The New York Times Book Review

Holed away in a cabin in the Pyrenees, the world-famous and enigmatic mathematician Alexander Grothendieck is working furiously on a final project. But what exactly is this monumental, mysterious undertaking? Why did this man, one of the greatest geniuses of the century, a politically militant man himself, suddenly decide to abandon politics and society altogether? As the reader pursues the answer to these questions, two layered narratives emerge. One is a series of unforgettable characters that have transfixed the mathematician’s imagination: Chana Abramov, a woman obsessed with painting the same Mexican volcano a thousand times, Vladimir Vostokov, an anarchist in battle with technological modernity, and Maximiliano Cienfuegos, a simple man who will nonetheless become the symbol for the Colonel’s as well as Europe’s restless political conscience. The other is the protagonist’s life story: a picaresque journey that traverses the 20th century: from the Russia of the October Revolution to the Mexico of the anarchic 1920s, from the Spanish Civil War to Vietnam, all the way back to France and from there to the Caribbean islands. Out of this Borgesian web emerges a tragicomic allegory for the political arch of the past century, one that began addicted to political action and ended up hooked on big data.

Loosely based on the fascinating life story of the eccentric mathematician Alexander Grothendieck, Colonel Lágrimas is a world-spanning tour de force of history, politics, literature, mathematics, and philosophy that wears its learning lightly, forming an appealingly human story of the forces that have created the modern world.