Joseph Delaney used to be an English teacher, before becoming the best-selling author of the Spook's series, which has been published in 30 countries and sold over 4.5 million copies worldwide. The first book, The Spook's Apprentice, was adapted into a major motion picture starring Jeff Bridges and Julianne Moore.

Joseph Delaney

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Paolo Cognetti

Alfredo and Luigi grew up in Valsesia, in northern Italy. Their father planted trees for them when they were born: for Luigi, a larch, which looks towards the sun and waves in the wind; for Alfredo, a fir, which flourishes only in the shade. 
 
Since their father's untimely death, all the two brothers have in common is their heavy drinking and the old family home, high up on the mountain. Luigi would like to buy Alfredo out, move from down in the valley to start a new life up in the heights with Elisabetta and the baby girl they are expecting. But in this remote and wild landscape, one drink too many, one wrong word, can turn dogs into wolves.

Down in the Valley

Thomas McGuane

Place exerts the power of destiny in these ten stories of lives uncannily recognisable and unforgettably strange: a boy makes a surprising discovery skating at night on Lake Michigan; an Irish clan in Massachusetts gathers at the bedside of its dying matriarch; a battered survivor of the glory days of Key West washes up on other shores. 
 
Several of the stories unfold in Big Sky country, McGuane's signature landscape: a father tries to buy his adult son out of virginity; a convict-turned-cowhand finds refuge at a ranch in ruination; a couple makes a fateful drive through the perilous gorge of the title story before parting ways. 
 
McGuane's people are seekers, beguiled by the land's beauty and myth, compelled by the fantasy of what a locale can offer, forced to reconcile dream and truth. 
 
The stories of Gallatin Canyon are alternately comical, dark, and poignant. Rich in the wit, compassion, and matchless language for which McGuane is celebrated, they are the work of a master.

Gallatin Canyon

Kenneth J Harvey

Named in a moment of anger, raised to endure the tragedy of a people and culture coming undone, Blackstrap Hawco is heir to an island dominion subsumed, picked over and set adrift by its adoptive nation. 
 
As the end of the twentieth century nears, the Hawco family's bloodlines have grown tainted and confused. Men fail their families through enforced idleness, and the once-vivid ghosts of their ancestors have slipped into murk, forgotten along with the rest of history. 
 
Blackstrap Hawco is a defiant man born with little more than a body and spirit that refuse to give up, and the menacing strength of pride. For the Hawcos of Newfoundland, was it not ever so? 
 
From the arrivals of the indentured Irish to the Victorian drawing rooms of the English merchants, from the perilous adventures of the seal hunt to the raucous iron ore mines, from a notorious disaster at sea to the relocation of outport communities, the Hawco story might be all the family has left. But as Blackstrap Hawco - a novel that will consume you in its dazzling swirl of voices, legends and beautiful hearsay - testifies, a story this haunting, this powerful, might just be enough.

Blackstrap Hawco

David Lodge

Helen Reed, a novelist in her early forties, still grieving for her husband who died suddenly a year before, is a visiting teacher of creative writing at a university where Ralph Messenger, a cognitive scientist with a special interest in Artificial Intelligence and an incorrigible womaniser, is director of a prestigious research institute. 
 
He is an atheist and a materialist; she is a Catholic who has lost her faith but still yearns for the consolations of religion. Ralph is attracted to Helen and she, in spite of her principles, to him. They argue about the nature of human consciousness, and the different ways it is examined in science and literature, as she resists with weakening resolution Ralph's efforts to seduce her. 
 
David Lodge has distilled the story of his acclaimed novel Thinks... to create a witty and absorbing drama about a moral, emotional and intellectual struggle between two exceptional people.

Secret Thoughts

William Peskett

Survivors is William Peskett's second book in the Secker &amp; Warburg Poets series. At one level, it marks his move 'From Belfast to Suffolk' (the title of one of the poems), but more importantly it shows him coming to terms with the world of nature and the world of man with a new maturity.

Survivors

Paul Durcan

Paul Durcan's twenty-second collection finds Monsieur le Poète on the road in Paris, New York City, Chicago, Brisbane, and Achill Island, meditating upon the sanctuary of home and what it means to feel truly at home. 
 
Regarded by many as the great poet of contemporary Ireland, Durcan is on top form here as he contemplates the fall of the Celtic Tiger, while railing against bankers and 'bonus boys'. There are poems of love lost and won, and poems in memory of friends and relatives who have passed on, but there is also joy to be found in the birth of a grandson, and there is praise, too, for the modest heroism of truckers, air traffic controllers and nurses, those 'slim, sturdy, buxom nourishers' of fallen mankind. If for Sartre 'hell is other people', for Durcan 'heaven is other people, especially women'.

Praise in Which I Live and Move and Have my Being

Urs Faes

Discover this beautiful winter gem of a novella that makes the perfect stocking filler this Christmas. 
 
'I may have been gone a long time, but I'm no stranger...' 
 
Manfred walks alone through a snowy valley, surrounded by his memories, on a pilgrimage of sorts to his childhood home. He's been estranged from his brother Sebastian for decades, ever since their bitter feud over the love of a woman and the inheritance of the family farm. 
 
Twelve Nights transports us to the wintry depths of Europe's Black Forest, through the stillness of the snow-covered hills, the dense woods, the cold and mist, in those dark, wild days between Christmas and Epiphany. These nights are a time of tradition and superstition, of tales told around the local innkeeper's table of marauding spirits, as tangible as the ghosts of Manfred's past. But the twelfth night, Epiphany, promises new beginnings, and a hope of reconciliation at last. 
 
Twelve Nights is a hymn to the winter landscape and the power of storytelling, a beautiful novella of the natural world and our place in it.

Twelve Nights

George Orwell

It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen. 
 
The year is 1984, and life in Oceania is ruled by the Party. Under the gaze of Big Brother, Winston Smith yearns for intimacy and love - "thought crimes" that, if uncovered, would mean imprisonment, or death. But Winston is not alone in his defiance, and an illicit affair will draw him into the mysterious Brotherhood and the realities of resistance. 
 
Nineteen Eighty-Four has been described as chilling, absorbing, satirical, momentous, prophetic and terrifying. It is all these things, and more. 
 
The Authoritative Text. With an introduction by Robert Harris. 
 
*The jacket of this stunning hardback edition features period artwork by Elizabeth Friedlander, one of Europe's pre-eminent 20th-century graphic designers. Look out for complementary editions of Orwell's essential works Animal Farm and Down and Out in Paris and London.*

Nineteen Eighty-Four

WINNER OF THE 2014 IRISH BOOK LIFETIME ACHIEVEMENT AWARD 
 
Cries of an Irish Caveman is Paul Durcan's most inspired and surprising collection of poems. Through four distinct sections, he brings his tender lyricism to bear on the themes of love and loss, life and death. 
 
The first section describes an experience in Australia which provides a starting point for reassessing his past relationships and loves. The second returns to Ireland, its people and places, the celebrated and the unknown. The third section is a meditation on his daughter's marriage, placing within an historical and sacramental context a very personal event. 
 
And finally, in some of his most daring and original writing, Durcan describes his own twentieth-century romance, replete with ecstacies and inevitable agonies, beauty and hope, but also brutality and self-abasement.

Cries Of An Irish Caveman

An Yu

In Five Poems Lake, a small village surrounded by impenetrable deserts, the sun is slowly disappearing overhead. A young woman keeps an apprehensive eye on the sky above as she tends her family’s pharmacy of traditional medicine. She has few customers, and even fewer visitors. Her father was found dead by the lake twelve years ago, in unexplained circumstances. Her elder sister, Dong Ji, works at a wellness parlour across town for those who can afford it – which, during these strange and difficult days, is not many. 
 
The town fell on hard times long before the sun began to shrink, but now, every few days, a new sliver disappears. As the temperature drops and the lake freezes over, the inhabitants of the town realise that there is no way they can survive. But when the Beacons appear – ordinary people with heads replaced by searing, blinding light, like miniature suns – the residents wonder if they may hold the answer to their salvation, or if they are just another sign of impending ruin. Soon, Dong Ji and her sister will uncover a photograph which may offer a clue in the mystery of the Beacons, and finally help them learn what happened to their father. 
 
Sunbirth honours the unique relationship between sisters, their love for each other and their desire to be free. Richly surreal and anchored by searching curiosity and wisdom, it asks how much we can ever know about the deepest mysteries of the world.

Sunbirth

WINNER OF THE LIFETIME ACHIEVEMENT IRISH BOOK AWARD 2014 
 
Paul Durcan never imagined he would be clasped by a woman again, but life is full of surprises! After all, would it surprise you to learn that at the US Ambassador’s Residence in Dublin his libido almost destroyed the Peace Process? There is a new Pope, too, a ‘man of constant surprise’, although in St Peter’s Square Durcan encounters a monk wholly lacking in the Holy Spirit. 
 
Elsewhere he muses upon the ‘pre-crucifixion scenario’ of being prepared for surgery, the gift of a malacca cane, the joy of retail therapy, the horror that is wheel-clamping, the ‘starry mystique’ of the weather forecaster Jean Byrne, suicide, bird-watching, stammering, art, Mayo, New York City, New Zealand, murder in Syria and the commemoration of 1916. Perhaps the greatest surprise is the voice of the late Seamus Heaney coming down his chimney: ‘Are you all right down there, Poet Durcan?’ The Days of Surprise is proof that the great poet of contemporary Ireland is in fine fettle.

The Days of Surprise

WINNER OF THE 2014 IRISH BOOK LIFETIME ACHIEVEMENT AWARD 
 
This was the collection with which Durcan broke through to the huge and appreciative audience he enjoys today. In the first part are poems of great satirical comedy and also of great passion and indignation, and in the second part, poems about the break-up of a marriage so intense they would hurt if they weren't also possessed of the healing gifts of truthfulness and humour. In The Berlin Wall Café Durcan has located that space between the walls and barriers societies and individuals erect - a no-man's-land of the free imagination where we meet as the vulnerable and comical human beings we are. It contains some of his very best work.

The Berlin Wall Cafe

Susanna Tamaro

Marta is raised by her grandmother in her house in Trieste, a safe haven of stories, books and enchantment. She knows that her mother died when she was young, and she believes that her father is a Turkish prince. But, as she grows older and this fairy tale disintegrates, Marta feels only anger towards her grandmother for withholding information about her parents. 
 
When her grandmother dies, Marta is alone in the world. One day, in the dusty attic, she finds a box belonging to her mother which may help to uncover her own past. With clues found in her mother's journal and a worn photograph, Marta decides to track down her father, who she believes may still be alive. Feeling the need to escape her grandmother's house, which is populated by secrets, Marta embarks on a journey to Israel, seeking what is left of her mother's family in an attempt to make sense of where she came from. 
 
Written as a young woman's narrative addressed to the memory of her grandmother, Listen to My Voice is a poignant coming of age story, and a beautifully crafted meditation on the importance of history and belonging.

Listen to My Voice

Carmen Martin Gaite

An impassioned correspondence between two former school friends as they reach crisis in middle age, from the prize-winning Spanish novelist Carmen Martin Gaite 
 
Sofia is a mother of three grown-up children and trapped in a loveless marriage to Eduardo. Mariana is a successful psychiatrist, incapable of forming stable relationships with men. 
 
As their lives reach crises in middle age, these two women, former school friends who had grown apart, reach out to each other through an exchange of impassioned letters in Gaite's effusive epistolary novel. 
 
Mariana, a psychiatrist and TV pundit, flees Madrid for a friend's empty house in a coastal resort, where she obsesses over Raimundo, a suicidal, manic-depressive writer who seems part friend, part patient, part lover. Her old friend, Sofia, walks out on her vain, hypercritical husband, Eduardo, a business executive who talks only about money, and moves in with her three rebellious children, who share a disorderly apartment. 
 
In alternating voices mixing letters with notebook excerpts and invented stories, the two women relentlessly analyze their relationships, erotic fantasies and trips abroad. Strewn with allusions to Kafka, Dali, Bunuel, Tagore and Katherine Mansfield, their outpourings incorporate meditations on memory, love, sex, the treacherous nature of words, chance and the difficulty of confronting one's past without embellishing it.

Variable Cloud

Elaine Feeney

Elaine Feeney brings her poetry to Harvill Secker and Vintage with this powerful, personal, fierce collection about women's lives, bodies, battles and triumphs. 
 
From a searing meditation on the experience and aftershocks of a sexual assault - written as a series of unflinching cantos - to poems of love, place and new beginnings, Feeney's voice is strong and clear, challenging and confessional, rooted in her west coast of Ireland heritage while speaking to and with women everywhere.

All the Good Things You Deserve

Paul Micou

'My first mistake was to be heterosexual.' 
Such is one of several complaints in the first of four conversations between Henry Hart - who is a married father of two young girls - and his long-time friend, Darius Saddler - who is gay and unattached. 
It is just over a year since the two men last met. Crippled and humiliated by debt, Hart - a dealer in antique maps - has managed to ruin his marriage, to commit an undeniable act of theft, and to become a suspect in France for a very serious crime. 
With a lover on the side, a stolen map in his pocket, an ace French detective on his trail, a wife who is unusually cold and in the know, it is time for Hart to enlist the help of his oldest friend. 
Confessions of a Map Dealer relates the attempts of Hart and Saddler to knit their lives together again, and to extricate Hart from the myriad problems he has brought upon himself. 
A mystery, a one-sided love story, a tale of guilt, blackmail and self-delusion, Confessions of a Map Dealer is an intricate comedy of errors from a celebrated practitioner of the genre.

Confessions of a Map Dealer

Mia Couto

Shortlisted for the International Dublin Literary Award 2017 
A finalist for the 2015 Man Booker International Prize 
 
My sister Silência was the most recent victim of the lions, which have been tormenting our village for some weeks now… 
 
When Mariamar Mpepe’s sister is killed by lions, her father imprisons her at home. With only the ghost of her sister for company, she dreams of escape, and of the hunter who abandoned her years before. 
 
I’m the last of the hunters. And this is my last hunt. 
 
Archangel Bullseye, born into a long line of marksmen, is summoned back to Kulumani. But as he tracks the lions in the surrounding wilderness, his suspicions grow – that the darkest threats lie not outside the village, but at its very heart. 
 
What was happening was what always happened: The lions were coming back… 
 
Set in a forgotten corner of East Africa haunted by superstition, tradition and the shades of civil war, this is a struggle that blurs the savagery of nature, and the savagery of man.

Confession of the Lioness

"A reminder - and an affirmation - of Paul Durcan's singular contribution not just to Irish poetic culture but the broader world of contemporary poetry" Irish Times 
 
For fifty years the poet Paul Durcan has explored and questioned a world both real and imagined. 
 
Steeped in the goings-on of Ireland and preoccupied with its concerns, he has delighted, enriched and unsettled his readers. His prodigious output of more than twenty collections bursts with poems that are courageously personal and passionately spiritual – a body of work that contains multitudes. 
 
‘The great enemy of art is the ego’ says Durcan. ‘It keeps getting in the way. One needs the ego to disappear so that I become you; I become the people walking up and down the street.’ 
 
First published in 1967, Durcan remains the most of companionable of poets. His vivacity and ability to surprise has never been clearer than in this new selection of eighty of his finest poems, published in celebration of his 80th birthday. 
 
EDITED BY NIALL MACMONAGLE 
 
WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY COLM TOIBIN

80 at 80

WINNER OF THE 2014 IRISH BOOK LIFETIME ACHIEVEMENT AWARD 
 
Paul Durcan has been at the heart of Irish cultural life for over 40 years and his poetry has acquired a huge international following. Greetings to Our Friends in Brazil is his most challenging and engaging collection yet, one that addresses itself through Ireland and the Irish diaspora to the whole world beyond.

Greetings to Our Friends in Brazil

In The Art of Life Paul Durcan takes us around County Mayo in his "filthy, two-door, bottle-green Opel Astra", stopping off at Westport and Achill Island, where he declares himself to be "globally sad", but "locally glad". Next he travels east to Dublin to hold in his arms his newborn granddaughter and thence to Tuscany, Poland and Japan. Along the way he reflects upon parental pride, the aches and pains of old age, the trim bottoms of snooker players, the wisdom of ex-wives and dogs on Sandymount Strand, while introducing us to a host of colourful characters, including a bishop, a roofer, a milkman, a priest and an unmarried mother. 
 
Is there an art of living or is life a work of art? This magnificent collection - originally published on Paul Durcan's sixtieth birthday - reveals one of Ireland's most successful and popular poets at the height of his powers and continuing to challenge, amuse and delight.

The Art Of Life

Tom Lee

Claustrophobic, intense, troubled, these twelve astonishing stories hold a flare to the strange, elusive corners of our world, past and present; from the United States of the Gold Rush era to the Berlin of today, from Victorian England to the dusty border towns and high cities of modern South America. 
 
A young couple's passionate affair unravels as they wait anxiously in their hotel room for news of a recklessly conceived drug deal. 
 
An academic inherits a set of diaries detailing her great-grandfather's development of a bizarre new field of science; an endeavour which has shocking implications for his young daughter and unfaithful wife. 
 
And in Greenfly, a housebound woman is driven to distraction by the insects infesting her house - putting strain on an already fractured relationship with her partner. 
 
Lee's stories announce the arrival of a writer whose vision is razor sharp, blackly funny and startlingly original.

Greenfly

Kristine Naess

Bea Britt lives alone in her grandmother’s house in west Oslo. Early one morning, she wakes to find a police hunt outside her window and drama unfolding on her TV. Volunteers are scouring the local woods looking for Emilie, a missing schoolgirl. 
 
 Emilie's rucksack is found in Bea Britt's garden. But as her spiralling doubts and suspicions take over, is she a suspect, a witness or a potential second victim? 
 
 The mystery of Emilie’s disappearance and Bea Britt’s story are intricately bound to the lives of two other women: Bea Britt’s grandmother Cecilie, a troubled 1930s housewife whose marriage has broken down, and university student Beate, who is desperate for love but plagued by uncertainty. 
 
 Only Human is a rich, urgent novel about family, enduring oneself and others, and what is needed when life wears thin. It lays bare the hopes, dreams, fears and failures of three infinitely human characters, and is delicately revealing of the choices that shape a human life and our quest for companionship and love.

Only Human

Gonzalo Torné

Joan-Marc’s out of work, he’s alone, he has a heart condition, his mother’s addicted to pills, he can’t stand his sister. Otherwise, life is beautiful. 
 
And there’s a lot that his estranged second wife doesn’t know about him. But in Divorce is in the Air he now sets out to tell her. He begins with the failure of his first marriage, describing a holiday taken in a last-ditch attempt to salvage a once passionate relationship. 
 
Recalling this ill-fated trip triggers a life-story’s worth of flashbacks. From pivotal childhood scenes – his earliest sexual encounters, his father’s suicide – he moves on through the years, hopscotching between Barcelona and Madrid, describing a life of indulgence and of appetites. 
 
The result is an unapologetic, daring, acerbic novel by an electrifying young writer about love and the end of love, and how hard it can be to let go.

Divorce is in the Air

Louis de Bernières

Donald Sammut

Of Love and Desire is a rich collection of love poems from Louis de Bernières, written over a lifetime, and capturing its many forms – from rapture, infatuation, urgency, to sorrow, heartache and disillusion. 
 
Poetry was de Bernières’ first and greatest literary love, a passion evident in the musicality and emotion of his poems, which are full of stories and the truth of lived experience. This, his second collection, bears the mark of many influences, from the classical Persian poets, to Neruda, to Quintus Smyrnaeus, to Brian Patten. 
 
Beautifully illustrated by Donald Sammut, this is an indispensable companion on the lover’s journey.

Of Love and Desire

Volume 4 of The Complete Works of George Orwell 
 
Originally published in 1936, before Orwell achieved fame, Keep the Aspidistra Flying takes Money as its theme. Gordon Comstock gives up a good job in an advertising agency to become a part-time bookshop assistant at a meagre wage, thereby gaining leisure for writing. However, after some modest success in the world of letters he eventually slides into the abyss, to be rescued by the faithful Rosemary. 
 
Ironically, Gordon’s voyage of discovery leads him back to commercial security, marriage, and the unexpected pleasures of domesticity. But above all he learns of the courage of keeping up appearances despite hardships. The symbol of this is the potted aspidistra: the ugly, stubborn, organic emblem of social and biological survival. 
 
This new edition restores most of the material censored on first publication due to fears of action for libel, defamation and obscenity. Of particular interest are the previously suppressed advertising slogans of the 1930s and, in light of the censorship he experienced, Orwell's ironic choice of surname for Gordon: Comstock.

Keep the Aspidistra Flying

Dulce Chacon

Dulce Chacón's book has had an immense success in Spain, no doubt because the novelist speaks with a just and powerful voice, and because she has allowed women - the most anonymous, the most suppressed, the most silenced - to speak out" Le Monde 
 
It is 1939. In the Ventas prison in Madrid a group of women have been incarcerated. Their crime is to have supported or fought on the Republican side in Spain's cruel and devastating Civil War. Chief among them are Hortensia, who fought with the militia and is pregnant by her husband Felipe - a man still at large and fighting against Franco's dictatorship - and who lives with the knowledge that she will be shot after she gives birth; sixteen-year-old Elvira, who tried to leave Spain with her mother, but was arrested by the Falangists while she was boarding their ship; Tomasa, whose husband, four sons and daughter-in-law were thrown off a bridge; and Pepita, Hortensia's sister, who from outside the prison acts as messenger between her and her husband. 
 
Dulce Chacón's deeply moving novel is based on the actual testimonies of a number of women who survived the Spanish Civil War, and suffered imprisonment under the France regime, as well as on accounts of others who died fighting for freedom. A bestseller in Spain, where it was voted 'Book of the year', The Sleeping Voice is remarkable for its combination of dramatic intensity and historical authenticity.

The Sleeping Voice

Enrique Vila-Matas

A man's obsession with literature leads him to see the world through the eyes of fiction 
 
Literature can be contagious; it can also be our only means of salvation. That at least is the experience of Montano, the 'unreliable narrator' of Enrique Vila-Matas' prize-winning novel, a man and a writer who is so obsessed with the books of certain celebrated contemporaries that he is unable to put pen to paper or utter a word without summoning up their work or their lives, and whose malady is that he finds it impossible to distinguish between real life and fictional reality. Part picaresque novel, part intimate diary, part memoir, part philosophical musings, Vila-Matas has created a labyrinth in which writers as various as Cervantes, Sterne, Kafka, Musil, Perec, Bolaño, Coetzee, Sebald and Magris cross endlessly surprising paths, while his protagonist leads the reader on an unsettling journey from European cities such as Nantes, Barcelona, Lisbon, Prague and Budapest to the Azores and the Chilean port of Valparaíso. 
 
Yet for all the author's dazzling literary pyrotechnics, this is a novel that is always witty and accessible.

Montano

As compulsively page-turning as a thriller, Carmen Martin Gaite's drama of broken dreams, lies, and the search for love is an intense meditation on the strange adventure of living 
 
"Ever since the beginning of the world, living and dying have been two sides of one coin, tossed in the air - But for me - to be perfectly honest - living's the strange thing" 
 
The protagonist of this novel, a 35-year-old woman who has lived hard and loved hard, has just lost her mother. Struggling to keep her curiosity about an inexplicable world intact, she finds her precarious equilibrium constantly besieged by resurfacing oddballs from her past and her own tendency to daydream. To force a little structure into her life, she decides to pick up her old, unfinished doctoral dissertation about an extravagant 18th century adventurer. As she wades through old papers in a dusty archive, she is forced to confront her own strange childhood, her parents' strange relationship, and the feelings that bond her to the strange architect she shares a life with.

Living's The Strange Thing

Volume 9 of The Complete Works of George Orwell 
 
‘It was a bright cold day in April and the clocks were striking thirteen.’ This is the opening sentence of the most influential novel of the century, in English or in any of the sixty or more languages which boast a translation. Nineteen Eighty-Four has been described as chilling, absorbing, satirical, momentous, prophetic and terrifying. It is all these things, and more. 
 
Not only does the novel have a ferocious impact, it has also made an irreplaceable contribution to the language – Big Brother, Newspeak, Thought Police, Unperson and Doublethink are just a few words it introduced. 
 
Originally entitled ‘The Last Man in Europe’, Nineteen Eighty-Four also proved to be Orwell’s last book, the physical effort of typing up the final draft leading to his eventual collapse from TB that had dogged him since before the outbreak of the Second World War. He lived long enough to see it become an immediate bestseller on both sides of the Atlantic on publication in June 1949. 
 
For this edition the text had been meticulously edited according to Orwell’s wishes, including the re-instatement of Winston Smith’s controversial acceptance of the equation ‘2+2=5’.

Gabriela Ybarra

LONGLISTED FOR THE 2018 MAN BOOKER INTERNATIONAL PRIZE 
 
The Dinner Guest is Gabriela Ybarra’s prizewinning literary debut: a singular autobiographical novel piecing together the kidnap and murder of her grandfather by terrorists, reflecting on the personal impact of private pain and public tragedy. 
 
The story goes that in my family there’s an extra dinner guest at every meal. He’s invisible, but always there. He has a plate, glass, knife and fork. Every so often he appears, casts his shadow over the table, and erases one of those present. 
 
The first to vanish was my grandfather. 
 
In 1977, three terrorists broke into Gabriela Ybarra’s grandfather’s home, and pointed a gun at him in the shower. 
 
This was the last time his family saw him alive, and his kidnapping played out in the press, culminating in his murder. 
 
 Ybarra first heard the story when she was eight, but it was only after her mother’s death, years later, that she felt the need to go deeper and discover more about her family’s past. 
 
The Dinner Guest is a novel, with the feel of documentary non-fiction. It connects two life-changing events – the very public death of Ybarra’s grandfather, and the more private pain as her mother dies from cancer and Gabriela cares for her. Devastating yet luminous, the book is an investigation, marking the arrival of a talented new voice in international fiction.

The Dinner Guest

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