Fiction

An indelible portrait of girls, the women they become, and that moment in life when everything can go horribly wrong this stunning first novel is perfect for readers of Jeffrey Eugenides sThe Virgin Suicides and Jennifer Egan s A Visit from the Goon Squad. NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY THE WASHINGTON POST AND NPR Northern California, during the violent end of the 1960s. At the start

Elizabeth Strout animates the ordinary with an astonishing force, wrote The New Yorker on the publication of her Pulitzer Prizewinning Olive Kitteridge. The San Francisco Chronicle praised Strouts magnificent gift for humanizing characters. Now the acclaimed author returns with a stunning novel as powerful and moving as any work in contemporary literature. Haunted by the freak acciden

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER - An unforgettable cast of small-town characters copes with love and loss in this new work of fiction by #1 bestselling author and Pulitzer Prize winner Elizabeth Strout.

Friendship, deceit, fear, and persecution at an elite boarding school for young women in Rwanda, fifteen years before the 1994 genocide of the Tutsi . . . “Mukasonga´s masterpiece” (Julian Lucas, NYRB)   Scholastique Mukasonga drops us into an elite Catholic boarding school for young women perched on the edge of the Nile. Parents send their daughters to Our Lady of the Nile to be molded i

“Drawing on historical events, including King Olaf´s reign in Norway and the burning of Chartres Cathedral, Laxness revises and renews the bloody sagas of Icelandic tradition, producing not just a spectacular historical novel but one of coal-dark humor and psychological depth.”  – Publishers Weekly First published in 1952, Halldór Laxness´s Wayward Heroes offers an unlikely re

As the collection's title suggests, time's passage is the fil rouge of these stories.  All of Tabucchi's characters struggle to find routes of escape from a present that is hard to bear, and from places in which political events have had deeply personal ramifications for their own lives.   Each of the nine stories in Time Ages in a Hurry is an imaginative inquiry into something hidden o

A book of stories, or "narrations," by the finest Catalan writer of his generation. In this beautiful work, translated into English for the first time, Pla transcribes his witnessings of basic truths: the waves of the sea, the hardness of rolled tobacco. The reader feels tangibly the pleasure with which Pla puts the sensual and real on paper.

The first volume of this three-part autobiographical series begins in 1938 with the expulsion of the Kovacic family from their home of Switzerland, eventually leading to their settlement in the father's home country of Slovenia. Narrated by Kovacic as a ten-year-old boy, he describes his family's journey with uncanny naiveté. Before leaving their home, he imagines his father's home country

Private Life holds up a mirror to the moral corruption in the interstices of the Barcelona high society Sagarra was born into. Boudoirs of demimonde tramps, card games dilapidating the fortunes of milquetoast aristocrats - and how they scheme to conceal them - fading manors of selfish scions, and back rooms provided by social-climbing seamstresses are portrayed in vivid, sordid, and literary detai

A man lives in total solitude in an abandoned mountain village. But each night, at the same hour, a mysterious distant light appears on the far side of the valley and disturbs his isolation. What is it? Someone in another deserted village? A forgotten street lamp? An alien being? Finally the man is driven to discover its source. He finds a young boy who also lives alone, in a house in the middle o

Haderlap is an accomplished poet, and that lyricism leaves clear traces on this ravishing debut, which won the prestigious Bachmann Prize in 2011. The descriptions are sensual, and the unusual similes and metaphors occasionally change perspective unexpectedly. Angel of Oblivion deals with harrowing subjects - murder, torture, persecution and discrimination of an ethnic minority - in intricate and

Dance on the Volcano tells the story of two sisters growing up during the Haitian Revolution in a culture that swings heavily between decadence and poverty, sensuality and depravity. One sister, because of her singing ability, is able to enter into the white colonial society otherwise generally off limits to people of color. Closely examining a society sagging under the white supremacy of the Fren

After twenty years of marriage, Rami discovers that her husband has been living a double--or rather, a quintuple--life. Tony, a senior police officer in Maputo, has apparently been supporting four other families for many years. Rami remains calm in the face of her husband's duplicity and plots to make an honest man out of him. After Tony is forced to marry the four other women--as well as an addit

The Exploded View, from the masterful South African novelist Ivan Vladislavić, tells the story of four lives intertwined through the sprawling infrastructure on the margins of Johhanesburg: a stastician taking the national census, an engineer out on the town with city officials, an artist interested in genocide, and a contractor who puts up billboards on construction sites. Arcing across dist

Published in 1986, three years before the fall of the Berlin Wall, Wolf Hunt was the first novel to portray the human cost of Communist policies on Bulgarian villagers, forced by the government to abandon their land and traditional way of life. Darkly comic and tragic, the novel centers on an ill-fated winter hunting expedition of six neighbors whose history together is long and interwoven. The en

Through a collage of poems, essays, fiction, conversations, and visual art, Imagine Africa: Volume Three brings together some of the most essential writers, artists, and thinkers of contemporary Africa. Including powerful photographs in color by Zanele Muholi, stills from the films of Jean-Pierre Bekolo, and works of fiction and poetry from nine languages, Imagine Africa: Volume Three

Philosophically engaged and darkly moving, the twenty stories in Nest in the Bones span three decades from Antonio di Benedetto's wildly various career. From his youth in Argentina to his exile in Spain after enduring imprisonment and torture under the military dictatorship during the so-called "dirty war" to his return in the 1980s, Benedetto's kinetic stories move effortlessly between genres, ex

A feckless, comical narrator struggles against all odds to tell a story for which he is responsible, but which he neither controls nor understands. His characters multiply, repeat, and go astray; his employer pays no attention, asleep in a drunken stupor. The increasingly desperate narrator clambers over rooftops and through underground passages, watching helplessly as his characters reappear in d