Category Archives: Accessories
Hotel Silence
`Olafsdottir`s specialty is the small journeys we take to save ourselves and the ones we care for. She is the heart`s finest map-maker` SjonWinner of the Icelandic Literature Prize
The Bear and the Paving Stone
Winner of the prestigious Akutagawa Prize, three dream-like tales of memory and warVisiting a friend in the French countryside, a man finds himself cast into the quandaries of historical whim, religious identity, and seeing without sight; a walk along the seashore, upon the anniversary of a death, becomes a reverie on building sandcastles; and an
The Passenger
BERLIN, NOVEMBER 1938. With storm troopers battering against his door, Otto Silbermann must flee out the back of his own home. He emerges onto streets thrumming with violence: it is Kristallnacht, and synagogues are being burnt, Jews rounded up and their businesses destroyed.Turned away from establishments he had long patronised, betrayed by friends and colleagues,
A Life
`If you have never read Svevo, do as soon as you can. He is beautiful and important` New Statesman`A master` New YorkerAlfonso Nitti, tormented by the demands of his bank job, longs to be a poet. He also seems to be falling in love with Annetta, the vain and arrogant daughter of his boss. In
An Evening with Claire
Two old friends meet nightly in Paris, after a separation of ten years. Trading conversational barbs and manoeuvring around submerged feelings, Claire and Kolya resume what fate interrupted. When their long-imagined romance at last becomes reality, Kolya is engulfed by memories of Russia, from a tragic and solitary childhood to the disorienting ordeal of civil
How to be a Fascist: A Manual
Democracy is difficult, flawed and unstable. It involves barely distinguishable political parties taking part in lengthy, overcomplicated and expensive decision-making processes. Trying to engage so many people with political issues seems to lead only to complexity and disagreement. So why bother? Doesn`t fascism guarantee a more effective and efficient management of the state?In this short,
The Captain`s Daughter: Essential Stories
As complex as they are gripping, Pushkin`s stories are some of the greatest and most influential ever written. Foundational to the development of Russian prose, they retain stunning freshness and clarity, more than ever in Anthony Briggs`s finely nuanced translations.These are stories that upend expectations at every turn: in The Captain`s Daughter, Pushkin`s masterful novella
The Wolf Age: The Vikings, the Anglo-Saxons and the Battle for the North Sea Empire
In the eleventh century, the rulers of the lands surrounding the North Sea are all hungry for power. To get power they need soldiers, to get soldiers they need silver, and to get silver there is no better way than war and plunder. This vicious cycle draws all the lands of the north into a
The Last and the First
On a crisp September morning, trouble comes to the Gorbatovs` farm. Having fled revolution and civil war in Russia, the family has worked tirelessly to establish themselves as crop farmers in Provence, their hopes of returning home a distant dream. While young Ilya Stepanovich is committed to this new way of life, his step-brother Vasya
I Would Prefer Not To: Essential Stories
In these stories of the surreal mundanity of office life and obscure tensions at sea, Melville`s darkly modern sensibility plunges us into a world of irony and mystery, where nothing is as it first appears.A lawyer hires a new copyist, only to be met with stubborn, confounding resistance. A cynical lightning rod salesman plies his
The Bird in a Cage
It felt like the slipknot on a rope round my chest was being tightened without pity Trouble is the last thing Albert needs. Travelling back to his childhood home on Christmas Eve to mourn his mother`s death, he finds the loneliness and nostalgia of his Parisian quartier unbearable…Until, that evening, he encounters a beautiful, seemingly
The Royal Game: A Chess Story
Chess world champion Mirko Czentovic is travelling on an ocean liner to Buenos Aires. Dull-witted in all but chess, he entertains himself on board by allowing others to challenge him in the game, before beating each of them and taking their money. But there is another passenger with a passion for chess: Dr B, previously
1917: Stories and Poems from the Russian Revolution
100 years since the Russian Revolution: the 20th century`s greatest Russian writers respond `This is the last of you, old world – soon we`ll smash you to bits.` The passionate voices of radicals, dreamers, workers, aristocrats, satirists and romantics fill these electrifying poems and prose pieces, written between 1917 and 1919 in the full tumult
Mirror, Shoulder, Signal
Sonja`s over forty, and she`s trying to move in the right direction. She`s learning to drive. She`s joined a meditation group. And she`s attempting to reconnect with her sister.But Sonja would rather eat cake than meditate.Her driving instructor won`t let her change gear.And her sister won`t return her calls.Sonja`s mind keeps wandering back to the
Suspicion
INSPECTOR BARLACH HAS A YEAR TO LIVE, BUT HE`S NOT GOING QUIETLYWhen Inspector Barlach notices that a successful Swiss surgeon bears a striking resemblance to an infamous Nazi war criminal, a suspicion begins to gnaw away at him – could they be one and the same person? Determined to expose the monster behind the surgeon`s
The Judge and His Hangman
A genre-bending mystery recalling the work of Alain Robbe-Grillet and anticipating the postmodern fictions of Paul Auster and other contemporary neo-noir novelists. Inspector Barlach forgoes the arrest of a murderer in order to manipulate him into killing another, more elusive criminal. This is a thriller that brings existential philosophy and the detective genre into dazzling
States of Passion
A hapless Aleppo bureaucrat is stranded in the middle of the deserted countryside as a violent storm sets in. When he seeks refuge in an isolated old mansion, inhabited by an aged gentleman and his sinister servant, he begins to uncover a captivating tale of family secrets, lost passions, and shady dealings.He is transported by
Things Look Different in the Light & Other Stories
Among these wonderful, blackly comic tales from the Spanish master of the short story, an office queen falls from her throne, a tartan shirt holds the threads of a man`s life, a simple dictation test results in glimpsed mortality, and a case of mistaken identity finally pays off. Taking in love, family, war, food and
The Girl Who Saved Christmas
WHAT DOES IT TAKE TO BELIEVE IN MAGIC?It is Christmas Eve and all is not well. Amelia Wishart is trapped in Mr Creeper`s workhouse and Christmas is in jeopardy. Magic is fading. If Christmas is to happen, Father Christmas knows he must find her.With the help of some elves, eight reindeer, the Queen and a
Red Cavalry
War`s mess and muddle, the brutality and the inanity of fighting-few have better captured this than Isaac Babel, who was a journalist with the Soviet First Cavalry Army. His unflinching portrayal of the murderous havoc of battle is offset by an unexpected and wry humour: having seen the fighting up close, Babel is able to
