2012 Man Booker Prize shortlisted. As he arrives with his family at the villa, Joe sees a body in the swimming pool. But the girl is alive. She is Kitty Finch: a self-proclaimed botanist with green-painted fingernails, walking naked into the heart of their holiday. Why is she there? And why does Joe's enigmatic wife allow her to remain?
Border Districts, purportedly the Australian master Gerald Murnane's final work of fiction, is a hypnotic, precise, self-lacerating `report' on a life led as an avid reader, fumbling lover, `student of mental imagery', and devout believer in the luminescence of memory and of literature.
A novel of incredible beauty and truth, filled with tenderness and grief, love and loneliness, Ti Amo explores the emotional world of a woman losing her new husband to cancer. Clear-eyed and unafraid of taboo, it asks how and for whom we can live, when the one we love best is about to die.
A bewitching debut novel, at once a family saga and a tale of the London underworld.
A divorce leads a man to Buenos Aires. In a trendy cafe he witnesses a minor accident involving Enrique, the owner of his guest house; this accident reunites Enrique with a childhood friend, with whom he had miraculously escaped from a raging fire in a miniature replica of a boarding school. So starts a true master-yarn from Booker finalist Aira.
A generational portrait of Latin America in its post-revolutionary come-down, through the eyes of a recovering heroin addict and artist.
A queer countercultural icon opens up about all things artistic, radical and romantic. Winner of the PEN American Center essay prize.
On a dark, stormy night, an unnamed narrator is visited by two women: one a former lover, the other a stranger. They ruthlessly question their host and claim to know his greatest secret: that he is, in fact, a woman. A fascinating study of perception and identity, this surreal novel enfolds an exploration of gender in taut, atmospheric mystery.
Everything that can be done to fend off the boredom of retirement and old age, while still holding a beer.
Mr and Mrs Malgas are going about their lives when a mysterious squatter appears and convinces Mr Malgas to help him build an imaginary home next door. With its story of the seductive illusions of language, The Folly was initially read as an allegory of the rise and fall of apartheid, but is also sure to resonate with contemporary readers.
A girl who repeatedly halves her boyfriend; a chip-shop waitress who turns into Elvis; a family of conceptual artists who truly live their art. Every story packs its share of explosive material, often with a side of magic. If Angela Carter is Readman's fairy godmother, does that make Patti Smith her wicked stepsister? Don't say you weren't warned.
Hardly War, Don Mee Choi's UK debut, defies categorisation. Using artefacts from Choi's father, a professional photographer during the Korean and Vietnam wars, she combines memoir, image, and opera to explore her paternal relationship and heritage. Here poetry and geopolitics are inseparable twin sisters, conjoined to the belly of a warring empire.
Winner of the 2024 National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry (USA) Kim Hyesoon here shapeshifts into birds as she explores trauma, grief and parting. Kim mixes folklore and mythology with contemporary psychodramatic realities as she taps into a cremation ceremony, Rimbaud, Agnès Varda, Francis Bacon's portrait of Pope Innocent X, cyclones and more.
In 1853, a man named Benito Juárez disembarks at the fetid port of New Orleans. Later, in 1858, he is to become the first indigenous president of Mexico, but now he is anonymous. He falls in love with the music and food, but unavoidable, too, is the trade in human beings. A magnificent work of speculative history and a love letter to New Orleans.
A year has passed since the premature death of the narrator's husband. She falls in love again. M is fifteen years younger than her, but the connection between them is intense. Then, as his vulnerability starts showing, so does his troubling rage. In this novel, Hanne ÿrstavik returns to her theme of love, asking: How do you recognize love?
A lone white man lives beside the river on the edge of the Penobscot reservation in Maine. Charles spends his days doing odd jobs, looking after his depressive mother, and staring across the water to the house in which his half-Native daughter Elizabeth has grown up, unaware of his existence, her paternity hidden to protect her tribal status. Yet the cracks in the foundations of ElizabethâEUR(TM)s life are beginning to show, and Charles can see Elizabeth is struggling, much like his own mother does. He firmly believes the truth will set them all free âEUR" but the price of it may be the destruction of them all. A deeply layered story of family and blood ties, full of quiet, beautiful, and dignified sentences, Fire Exit shows us kinship from all angles, and its capacity to break down, re-form, fade, or strengthen, while always remaining a part of us. 'Utterly consuming âEUR¿ spellbinding and quietly devastating âEUR¿ a sober reckoning with what love can and cannot do, what healing is and is not possible in our families. The novel absolutely smoulders.' Tommy Orange
Widely viewed as one of the most inventive bodies of work from 20th-century Latin America, Mario Levrero's writing is distinguished by its bounteous imagination. In none other of the author's books is this imagination so clearly on display as in The Thinking-About-Gladys Machine, his 1970 debut collection of stories. It gathers a variety of Levrero's earliest and most formally inventive publications, ranging from dazzling single paragraph micro-fictions à la Donald Barthelme to adventurous Lewis Carroll-esque tales of forty pages' length. From the shocking surreal twists of 'Beggar Street' to the Escher-like grammatical maze of 'The Boarding House', via the pseudo-fairy tale classic 'The Basement', this book explores uncanny domestic spaces, using the structures of the stories themselves as tools for re-inventing narrative possibility.
Published in Australia in 2009, Barley Patch was Murnane's first book in fourteen years, written after a period in which he had thought he would never write fiction again. The book begins with the question, "Must I write?" What follows is both a chronicle of the images that have endured in the author's mind and an exploration of their nature. The clarity of the images is extraordinary, as is their range, from Mandrake the Magician to the bachelor uncle kicked in the "stones" as a child, from a cousin's doll's house to the mysterious woman who lets her hair down, from the soldier beetle who winks messages from God to the racehorses that run forever in the author's mind.The narrator lays bare the acts of writing and imagining, finally giving us a glimpse of the mythical place where the characters of fiction dwell before they come into existence in books. With something of the spirit of Italo Calvino and Georges Perec, this is a cornerstone of Murnane's unclassifiable project, for which he is a deserving Nobel Prize candidate.
Alaa, a young Palestinian, is haunted by his grandmother's memories of being displaced from Jaffa and becoming a refugee in her homeland. Ariel, AlaaâEUR(TM)s neighbour and friend, is a liberal Zionist, critical of the military occupation of the West Bank and Gaza yet faithful to the project of Israel. When he wakes up one morning to find that all Palestinians have suddenly vanished, Alaa included, Ariel begins searching for clues to the secret of the collective disappearance; that search, and his reaction to it, intimately reveal the fissures at the heart of the Palestinian question. Between the stories of Alaa and Ariel are the people of Jaffa and Tel Aviv âEUR" cafÃ(c) patrons, radio commentators, flower-cutters âEUR" against whose ordinary lives these fissures and questions play out. Critically acclaimed in Arabic, spare yet evocative, intensely intelligent in its interplay of perspectives, The Book of Disappearance is an unforgettable glimpse into contemporary Palestine as it grapples with both the memory of loss and the loss of memory. 'Unquestionably powerful.' Words Without Borders
The followup novel to International Booker-shortlisted Boulder is a story of queer motherhood and survival deep in the countrysideMammoth's protagonist is a disenchanted young lesbian. She's inexperienced, irritated by life, eager to gestate, and determined to strip everything else down to essentials. She seduces men at random, swaps her urban habitat for an isolated farmhouse, befriends a shepherd, nurses lambs, battles stray cats, waits tables, cleans house, and dabbles in sex work--all in pursuit of life in the raw. This small bomb of a novel, not remotely pastoral, builds to a howling crescendo of social despair, leaving us at the mercy of Eva Baltasar's wild voice.
"A group of friends journey to a remote part of West Khasi Hills, in northeast India, to witness the performance of an ancient Lyngngam funeral ceremony that lasts six days. Concluding with the cremation of a beloved elder, a woman whose body has been preserved in a tree house for nine whole months, this may well be the last time Ka Phor SOrat, the feast of the dead, is performed. By mistake, however, the group arrives too early. So they wait, stuck in the jungle, spending their nights around a fire in the middle of a spacious hut built for them especially, sharing stories in what proves an unexpected journey of discovery."--Publisier description.
"The stories in Purity take the reader through cities and suburbs, apartments and streets, to find characters struggling to survive in modern society: a man has an outburst on a bus; a fugitive finds insight in a colour wheel; a social realist kills his friend with a hammer; a thief finds himself in books. And cleaners reluctantly go on cleaning."--
"Elya is the lad with the vision, and Elya has the map. Ziv and Kiva aren't so sure. The water may run out before they find the Village of Lakes. The food may run out before the flaky crescent pastries of Prune Town. They may never reach the Village of Girls (how disappointing); they may well stumble into Russian Town, rumoured to be a dangerous place for Jews (it is). As three young boys set off from Mezritsh with a case of bristle brushes to sell in the great market town of Lublin, wearing shoes of uneven quality and possessed of decidedly unequal enthusiasms, they quickly find that nothing, not Elya's jokes nor Kiva's prayers nor Ziv's sublime irritatingness, can prepare them for the future as it comes barrelling down to meet them. Absurd, riveting, alarming, hilarious, the dialogue devastatingly sharp and the pacing extraordinary, Lublin is a journey to nowhere that changes everything it touches."--
In a small Aboriginal town dominated by a haze cloud, which heralds both an ecological catastrophe and a gathering of the ancestors, a crazed visionary seeks out a solution to the global climate crisis. Praiseworthy is a novel that pushes allegory and language to its limits, and is both a sharp satire and a thoughtful fable for the end of days.
Longlisted for the 2018 Scotiabank Giller PrizeWinner of the 2019 Indigenous Voices AwardAn Inuk girl grows up in the Artic in the 1970s. In this acclaimed debut novel - haunting, exhilarating, and tender all at once - Tagaq explores a gritty small town and the electrifying proximity of the worlds of animals and of myth.
On its original publication in 2000, Pitch & Glint was widely hailed as a landmark in German poetry. Rooted in Seiler's childhood home, an East German village brutally undermined by Soviet Russian uranium extraction, these propulsive poems are highly personal, porous, twisting, cadenced, cryptic and earthy, traversing the rural sidelines of European history with undeniable evocative force. The frailty of bodies, a nearness to materials and manual work, the unknowability of our parents' suffering, and ultimately the loss of childhood innocence, all loom large in poems where sound comes first. As Seiler says in an essay, "You recognise the song by its sound. The sound forms in the instrument we ourselves have become over time. Before every poem comes the story that we have lived. The poem catches the sound of it. Rather than narrating the story, it narrates its sound."
In Case of Loss gathers the best of Lutz Seiler's non-fiction from the last twenty-five years, revealing essays that are different to, but on a par with, his fiction and poetry. Seiler's anecdotal and associative pieces throw fascinating light on literature and his background, not least the environmental and human catastrophe of the Soviet-era mining in the community he grew up in, 'the tired villages . . . beneath which lay the ore, uranium'. Other essays focus on poetry, including his awakening to it while waiting in an army truck on his military service, and there are pieces on German poets such as Ernst Meister, Jürgen Becker and Peter Huchel. The title essay describes the poet Huchel's notebook, a kind of dictionary of images organised by mood and location.Providing a perfect entry to Seiler's work, In Case of Loss sees one of Europe's most original writers speak with openness and insight in essays full of a poet's attention to the importance of often overlooked objects and lives.
November 1989. The Berlin Wall has just fallen when the East German couple Inge und Walter set out for life in the West. Their son Carl heads to Berlin where he discovers anarchy, love and poetry. Musical and incantatory, Seiler's novel Star 111 tells of the search for authentic existence and also of a family which must find its way back together.
"At the tail end of the 1960s, thirteen-year-old Michelino spends his summers at his grandparents' modest estate in Nasca, near Lake Maggiore, losing himself in the tales of horror, adventure, and mystery shelved in his grandfather's library. The greatest mystery he's ever encountered, however, doesn't come from a book--it's the groundskeeper, Felice, a sometimes frightening, sometimes gentle, always colorful man of uncertain age who speaks an enchanting dialect and whose memory gets worse with each passing day. When Michelino volunteers to help the old man by providing him with clever mnemonic devices to keep his memory alive, the boy soon finds himself obsessed with piecing together the eerie hodgepodge of Felice's biography . . . a quest that leads to the uncovering of skeletons in Nazi uniforms in the attic, to Felice's admission that he can hear the voices of the dead, and to a new perspective on Felice's endless war against the insatiable local slugs, who are by no means merely a horticultural threat. And yet nothing could be more fascinating to Michelino than Felice's own secret origins. Where did he come from? Is he the victim or the villain of his story? Is he a noble hero, a holy fool, or perhaps the very thing that Michelino most wants and fears: a real-life monster."--Publisher marketing.
When Iman Mersal stumbles upon a great - yet forgotten - novel written by a young woman who killed herself shortly after her book was rejected by publishers, Mersal begins to research the writer. From archives, Enayat's writing and Mersal's own interviews and observations, a remarkable portrait emerges of a woman attempting to live independently.
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