Category Archives: Travel Guides
The Story of a Goat
A farmer in India is watching the sun set over his village one quiet evening when a mysterious stranger, a giant man who seems more than human, appears on the horizon. He offers the farmer a black goat kid who is the runt of the litter, surely too frail to survive. The farmer and his
Crossing
A GUARDIAN BEST FICTION BOOK OF 2019`Devastating… the brutal beauty of Crossing comes from its almost cellular understanding of belonging and exclusion, love and cruelty` Guardian`Fierce, dazzling and heartbreaking` NoViolet BulawayoFrom the author of My Cat YugoslaviaBujar`s world is collapsing. His father is dying and his homeland, Albania, bristles with hunger and unrest. When his
A Stranger in My Grave
A classic psychological thriller”The master of the surprise ending” IndependentA nightmare is haunting Daisy Harker. Night after night she walks a strange cemetery in her dreams, until she comes to a grave that stops her in her tracks. It`s Daisy`s own, and according to the dates on the gravestone she`s been dead for four years.What
A Nail, A Rose
`Madeleine Bourdouxhe is one of the more remarkable literary discoveries of the last few years` Jonathan Coe These are stories of longing and dissatisfaction, of daily life ruptured by strange currents of feeling. A woman, wandering alone and heartbroken, is first attacked and then romantically pursued by a stranger. A maid wears her mistress`s expensive
And the Earth Will Sit on the Moon: Essential Stories
Fresh, stylish new translations of Gogol`s greatest short stories collected in a beautiful editionAdmired by writers from Nabokov to Bulgakov to George Saunders, Gogol is considered one of the more enigmatic of the Russian greats. He only wrote one novel, `Dead Souls`, and destroyed much of his later work, so his stories constitute his major
Memories of Low Tide
Can a daughter ever really understand her mother?Chantal Thomas grew up in a seaside town on the Atlantic coast of France, inheriting from her mother an obsession with the sea, and for swimming. In this tender and eloquent memoir she seeks to understand her quixotic, often inscrutable mother – a woman who was luminous in
The Old Man in the Corner: The Teahouse Detective
Mysteries! There is no such thing as a mystery in connection with any crime, provided intelligence is brought to bear upon its investigation.So says a rather down-at-heel elderly gentleman to young Polly Burton of the Evening Observer, in the corner of the ABC teashop on Norfolk Street one afternoon. Once she has forgiven him for
Mazel Tov: The Story of My Extraordinary Friendship with an Orthodox Jewish Family
When 20-year-old student J. S. Margot took a tutoring job in 1987, little did she know it would open up an entire world. In the family`s Orthodox Jewish household she would encounter endless rules – `never come on a Friday, never shake hands with a man` – and quirks she had not seen before: tiny
The Marquise of O-
In a Northern Italian town during the Napoleonic Wars, Julietta, a young widow and mother of impeccable reputation, finds herself unexpectedly pregnant. This follows an attack on the town`s citadel, in which several Russian soldiers tried to assault her before she was rescued by Count F-, at which point she fell unconscious. Thrown out of
Lives and Deaths: Essential Stories
Although best known for his monumental novels, Tolstoy also wrote tightly compressed works of equal power. This new collection gathers perhaps his greatest novella, `The Death of Ivan Ilyich`, together with shorter masterpieces `Three Deaths`, `Pace-setter` and the fable-like story `Alyosha the Pot`.Whether writing from the perspective of an aged horse or plotting the travails
Mary Queen of Scotts
From the moment of her birth to her death on the scaffold, Mary Stuart spent her life embroiled in power struggles that shook the foundations of Renaissance Europe. Revered by some as the rightful Queen of England, reviled by others as a murderous adultress, her long and fascinating rivalry with her cousin Elizabeth I led
On the End of the World
In January 1933, on the very day Hitler seized power in Germany, Joseph Roth fled to Paris. There, in what he called the `hour before the end of the world`, he wrote a series of articles. The end he foresaw would soon come to pass in the full horror of Hitler`s barbarism, the Second World
Isolde
“No, I`m no queen,” she repeated. “In fact, I`m very modern. Why do you look at me like that?” Left to her own devices in Biarritz, fourteen-year-old Russian Liza meets an older English boy, Cromwell, on a beach. He thinks he has found a magical, romantic beauty and insists upon calling her Isolde; she is
Vanish in an Instant
`One of the most original and vital voices in all of American crime fiction` Laura Lippman, author of SunburnVirginia Barkeley is a nice, well brought-up girl. So what is she doing wandering through a snow storm in the middle of the night, blind drunk and covered in someone else`s blood?When Claude Margolis` body is found
Days in the Caucasus
`A romantic and gloriously comic account of a heady and turbulent youth spent on the shores of the Caspian` Bryan Karetnyk, SpectatorWe all know families that are poor but `respectable`. Mine, in contrast, was extremely rich but not `respectable` at all…This is the unforgettable memoir of a childhood spent in Azerbaijan in the turbulent early
The Forging of a Rebel
The Forging of a Rebel is an unsurpassed account of Spanish history and society from early in the twentieth century through the cataclysmic events of the Spanish Civil War.Arturo Barea`s masterpiece charts the author`s coming-of-age in a bruised and starkly unequal Spain. These three volumes recount in lively detail Barea`s daily experience of his country
The New Sorrows of Young W.
`I was just a regular idiot, a nutcase, a show-off and all that. Nothing to cry about. Seriously`Edgar W., teenage dropout, unrequited lover, unrecognized genius – and dead – tells the story of his brief, spectacular life.It is the story of how he rebels against the petty rules of communist East Germany to live in
Arturo`s Island
In this little-known classic of Italian literature, young Arturo grows up in near-isolation on the island of Procida in the Bay of Naples. His mother died in childbirth and his wayward father, who left him as a child in the care of a servant on the island, returns only sporadically. Cut off from the island
The Queen`s Necklace
`A sparkling slice of eighteenth-century life` Paul Bailey, IndependentIn August 1785 Paris buzzed with scandal. An eminent churchman, a notorious charlatan, a female fraudster, a part-time prostitute and the hated Queen herself were all involved. At its heart was the most expensive diamond necklace ever assembled – and the web of fraud, folly and self-delusion
The Art of the City: Rome, Florence, Venice
Georg Simmel was a brilliant, groundbreaking thinker, whose wide-ranging lectures held audiences spellbound in turn-of-the-century Berlin and throughout Europe. The theories of this maverick `wandering-priest`, left their mark on a whole generation of philosophers, poets and sociologists including Benjamin, Heidegger and Rilke.The quartet of essays contained in this book includes dazzling portraits of Italy`s iconic
