Abie Longstaff is the eldest of six children and grew up in Australia, Hong Kong and France. She knows all about squabbling, chaos and bossing younger sisters around. So she logically began her career as a barrister. She started writing when her children were born. Her favourite childhood books were Hating Alison Ashley, A Little Princess, Maura's Angel and The Black Stallion and she sneakily reads them again sometimes. Abie lives in Hove with her family.

Abie Longstaff

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Ada Moncrieff

The perfect festive murder mystery for 2024 from 'modern rival to Agatha Christie' Ada Moncrieff 
 
It's Christmas 1937 and an eclectic list of guests and staff have gathered for the grand re-opening of Maybridge castle, a newly renovated yet still crumbling hotel deep in the Cumbrian countryside. They are: 
 
The ex-socialite owner 
The Doctor and his new wife 
The stylish journalist 
The know-all housekeepers 
The still-grieving widower and his son 
The tarot readers 
The passionate academic 
The persistent investigative reporter 
The elder amateur sleuth, and her cat 
 
An innocent game of murder-in-the-dark will turn into a real game of life and death. And by the time the first sherries have been drunk, one of these people will be dead - and one of them the killer. Someone has changed the rules, but who?

Murder at Maybridge Castle

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

Andrej Longo

The Mafia and the Ten Commandments meet in these interlinked short stories about the undebelly of Naples. Ten uncovers the raw heart of a city, telling the stories of ordinary people forced to make extraordinary compromises in a place permeated by crime. 
 
We encounter a son who finds that he is capable of a terrible act when faced with his mother’s suffering 'because someone had to do it'; a girl whose only outlet for the horrors of an adult’s abuse is to confide in a stuffed toy; an ancient nightclub singer whose ambition has led him to become a drug tester for a Mafia boss; and Ray-Ban who, during a night of mayhem with his friends, manages to steal the wrong car and pays dearly for it. 
 
Each comes to life with painful precision in the hands of Andrej Longo – their fears, regrets, energy and grace. In direct and sometimes brutally raw prose, he conjures a searing new vision of Naples. With the lightest of brush strokes, Longo builds a vivid portrait of a city, its people, and their dreams of escape.

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

K-Ming Chang

An erotic, surreal novella about the ecstasies of intense friendships and obsessive love 
 
Seven, who works as a cleaner at a chiropractor’s office, re-encounters Cecilia, a woman who has obsessed her since their school days. 
 
As the two of them board the same bus – each dubiously claiming not to be following the other – their chance meeting spurs a series of intensely vivid and corporeal memories. As past and present bleed together, Seven can feel her desire begin to unmoor her from the flow of time. 
 
Smart, subversive and gripping, Cecilia is a winding, misty road trip through bodily transformation, inextricable histories of violence and love, and the ghosts of girlhood friendship.

Cecilia

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

Nadezhda Mandelstam

Hope Against Hope recounted the last four years in the life of the great Russian poet, Osip Mandelstam, and gave a hair-raising account of Stalin's terror. Hope Abandoned complements that earlier masterpiece, and in it Nadezhda Mandelstam describes their life together from 1919, and her own after Mandelstam's death in a labour camp in 1938. She also sets out his system of values and beliefs, and provides striking portraits of many of their contemporaries including Boris Pasternak and their champion till his own downfall, Nikolai Bukharin, as well as an astonishingly candid picture of Anna Akhmatova.

Hope Abandoned

Louis de Bernières

Emma Chichester Clark

A heartwarming tale about a very special dog. Beautifully illustrated, it is the perfect Christmas gift. 
 
One day, in the days when all the trains were driven by steam, a railway guard found something abandoned on a train... 
 
Mr Ginger Leghorn is used to collecting up umbrellas and other lost property but he's never found a puppy on his train before. He has no intention of keeping it but his five children - Alfie, Arthur, Beryl, Sissy and Albert - have other ideas and Jim is soon a much-loved, but often disruptive, member of the family. 
 
Whether it's his feud with the cat, getting stuck in rabbit-holes, accidentally going to sea, accompanying the children to school or carol singing at Christmas, Jim has a knack of making himself the centre of attention. This little black and tan puppy with his small bright eyes and very waggy rump becomes something of a hero in his town, and even catches the eye of the King himself. 
 
Station Jim is full of Christmas cheer for children and adults alike, and especially dog-lovers. It includes delightful pictures by celebrated illustrator Emma Chichester Clark, the creator of Plumdog.

Station Jim

A perfect heartwarming gift for children and adults

A perfect heartwarming Christmas gift for children and adults

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

Sherman Alexie

Flight follows this troubled foster teenager - a boy who is not a 'legal' Indian because he was never claimed by his father - as he learns that violence is not the answer. 
 
The journey for Flight's young hero begins as he's about to commit a massive act of violence. At the moment of the decision, he finds himself shot back through time to resurface in the body of an FBI agent during the civil rights era, where he sees why 'Hell is Red River, Idaho, in the 1970s'. Red River is only the first stop in an eye-opening trip through moments in American history. He will continue travelling back to inhabit the body of an Indian child during the battle at Little Bighorn and then ride with an Indian tracker in the nineteenth century before materialising as an airline pilot jetting through the skies today. During these travels through time, his refrain grows: 'Who's to judge?' 
 
This novel seeks nothing less than an understanding of why human beings hate. Flight is irrepressible and fearless - Sherman Alexie at his most brilliant.

Flight

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

Nicci Cloke

'Unique, punchy and super-smart, Her Many Faces is itself so multifaceted, so rich - a courtroom drama, a character study, a social commentary - but it wears each guise with real heart and style' ABIGAIL DEAN 
 
'Beautifully written, experimental, and fast-paced. I’m addicted' GIlLIAN McALLISTER 
 
Daughter. Friend. Lover. Victim. Murderer. Who is the real Katie Cole? 
 
When four wealthy and influential members of London’s most exclusive private club are poisoned, a young waitress is charged with their murder. As the trial grips the nation, five men begin to question how well they really knew her. 
 
There's her father, who remembers the sweet girl growing up in Devon; her childhood friend, who is swept up in her fascination with conspiracy theories; her lover, who wants to distance himself from a young woman with an obsession; her barrister, who knows she's hiding something; and the journalist investigating the case, who is convinced he knows exactly what she is: a cold-blooded killer. 
 
Five men. Five stories. But are they ready to hear hers? 
 
'An ingenious, indignant, beautifully wrought psychological thriller. Nicci Cloke had me fooled repeatedly and I absolutely loved it' ERIN KELLY 
 
'Stunning: so clever, so gripping, so timely. This deserves to be huge' LUCY FOLEY

Her Many Faces

Elaine Feeney

'A superb, multi-generational story told in stunning, poetic prose. Elaine Feeney is one of Irish literature's most gifted and persuasive storytellers.' SINÉAD GLEESON 
 
Claire O’Connor’s life has been on hold since she broke up with Tom Morton and moved from cosmopolitan London back home to the rugged West of Ireland to care for her dying father. But snatches of her old life are sure to follow her, when Tom unexpectedly moves nearby for work. As Claire is thrown back into a love she thought she’d left behind, she questions if Tom has come for her or for himself. 
 
Living in her childhood home brings its own challenges. While Claire tries to maintain a normal life – obsessing over the internet, going to work and minding her own business – Tom’s return stirs up haunting memories trapped within the walls of the old family house. 
 
Let Me Go Mad in My Own Way is a story of love and resilience, rich with history and drama, and the legacies of violence and redemption. As the secrets of the past are revealed, Claire must confront whether she can escape her history to make her own future – and whether finding herself means facing herself too.

Let Me Go Mad in My Own Way

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

Philip Gray

A master forger. A hidden fortune. A dangerous game of cat and mouse... 
 
In post-war Flanders, Adelais de Wolf's family is slowly, inexplicably, falling apart: her mother evermore lost to religious devotion, her father to alcohol. But with the death of a beloved uncle, Adelais finds herself in receipt of an unexpected legacy: a shuttered house in a rundown district and its contents – contents that hold the promise of independence and wealth. All that is required is application, nerve, and a willingness to break the law. 
 
Adelais stifles her doubts and her fortunes are transformed. But with her rise comes complications: her victimless crimes may not be as victimless as she supposed. Nor has she counted on the singular fanaticism of Major de Smet of the Federal Gendarmerie, a brutal detective who never forgives and never forgets. 
 
Embroiled in a game that has gone on too long, will Adelais find the cost of her fortunes too high?

The House with Nine Locks

Jessica Gross

By the time we’d said ‘I love you’ and kissed goodnight and turned out the light, thoughts of whether to resist had left my mind. 
 
I had climbed inside his body, and now he was stirring. 
 
Olive is desperate to get close to Theo – really, really close. 
 
Despite being a radio host, she’s always struggled to connect with people. And now she’s in her thirties, single, and so flustered by relationships that she secretly records her conversations, hoping to decipher social clues and find a way to be less alone. 
 
Then Theo turns up for a shift at the food pantry where she volunteers. He’s a surgeon fascinated by human organs, a former football player, and possibly as weird as Olive. For the first time, someone seems to crave and understand her. 
 
Every recording Olive makes of Theo is a balm – which just makes her more afraid of losing him. The only solution seems to be to bind him to her forever. Luckily, the gap between Theo’s front teeth is just wide enough for something – or someone – to slip inside. 
 
Arresting and immersive, Open Wide explores the boundaries of love and the body, as universal human impulses bleed into the surreal.

Open Wide

Paul Durcan

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

Rachel Louise Driscoll

‘Brilliant… I loved it.’ Santa Montefiore 
 
SISTER. RIVAL. PROTECTOR. 
 
Victorian Egyptologist Clemmie’s dark talents have torn her family apart. Now she has one chance to atone for the past. 
 
Quiet and reserved, Clemmie is happy in the background. Although her parents may overlook her talents, her ability to read hieroglyphs makes her invaluable at the Egyptian relic parties which have made her father the toast of Victorian society. 
 
But at one such party, the words Clemmie interprets from an unusual amulet strike fear into her heart. The beautiful and dangerous glyphs she holds in her hands will change her life forever. 
 
Five years later, Clemmie arrives in Egypt on a mission to save what remains of her family. The childhood game she used to play about the immortal sisters, Isis and Nephthys, has taken on a devastating resonance and it is only by following Nephthys' story that she can undo the mistakes of the past. 
 
*Reveal the secret symbol of Nephthys when you take off the book jacket.* 
 
‘An irresistible page-turner’ Susan Stokes-Chapman, author Pandora 
‘An intoxicating tale of adventure and obsession’ Emilia Hart, author of Weyward 
‘A joy of a book’ Fiza Saeed McLynn, author of The Midnight Carousel 
 
Readers ADORE Nephthys: 
 
‘A total page-turner! ... Wow! What darkness this book holds!’ 
‘Unique and gripping.... this tale of Egypt and England was full of twists and turns.’ 
‘A captivating blend of Victorian society, ancient Egypt, and dark secrets.’

Nephthys

Rachel Aspden

In 2003, Rachel Aspden arrived in Egypt as a 23-year-old trainee journalist. She found a country on the brink of change. Of Egypt's 80 million citizens, two-thirds were under 30. The new generation were stifled, broken and frustrated – caught between a dictatorship with nothing to offer them and autocratic parents still clinging to tradition and obedience after a lifetime of fear. 
 
In January 2011, the young people’s patience ran out. They thought the revolution that followed would change everything for them. But as violence escalated, the economy collapsed and as the united front against Mubarak shattered into sectarianism, many found themselves wavering, hesitant to discard the old ways. 
 
What happens when a revolution unravels? 
 
Why is a generation raised on Hollywood movies and global brand names turning to religion? 
 
How do you choose between sex and tradition, consumerism and faith? 
 
Why would people who once chanted for freedom support a military state? 
 
And where will the next generation take the Middle East? 
 
Following the stories of four young Egyptians – Amr the atheist software engineer, Amal the village girl who defied her family and her entire community, Ayman the one-time religious extremist and Ruqayah the would-be teenage martyr – Generation Revolution unravels the complex forces shaping the lives of young people caught between tradition and modernity, and what their stories mean for the future of the Middle East.

Generation Revolution

On the Front Line Between Tradition and Change in the Middle East

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

Juli Zeh

Jola is a beautiful and privileged soap star who wants very much to be taken seriously; her partner Theo is a middle-aged author with writers’ block. In an attempt to further her career, Jola is determined to land the lead role in a new film about underwater photographer and model Lotte Hass. 
 
To improve her chances, the couple travel to Lanzarote and hire diving instructor Sven, paying him a large sum for exclusive tuition. Sven is meticulously planning his most ambitious expedition yet – to an untouched wreck 100 metres down on the ocean floor. Diving calls for a cool head and, as a sinister love triangle develops, events rapidly get out of hand. But whose story do we trust - Sven's or Jola's? 
 
Deliciously claustrophobic, smart, and unrelentingly intense, this psychological thriller with shades of Patricia Highsmith will leave readers gasping for air.

Decompression

Cédric Sapin-Defour

Having a dog as company makes nothing feel excessive – not time or space. It's not even about passing time, but being of it. 
 
A tiny ad in a local newspaper catches Cédric Sapin-Defour’s eye: a litter of Bernese Mountain Dog puppies need homes. A lonely, single, sports teacher and mountain climber in the French Alps, Cédric visits the dogs and immediately falls for the puppy with a blue collar. 
 
Named Ubac, French for the north side of the mountain – the rainy, cloudy slope – the puppy quickly upends Cédric’s life. They go on hikes together, taking to the hills and exploring, forging a bond that brings joy and a sense of fulfillment and adventure. They brave the world together, hate to be apart, crave the mountains and the natural world; they protect each other. 
 
Over the course of thirteen years, their pack expands to include Mathilde, Cédric’s wife, and more dogs. Ubac and Me is an intimate meditation on a joyous life lived too fast, the aching pain of separation, and the transformative effect of unconditional love. A dog named for the rainy side of the mountain is an inspiring lesson in how walking the rocky, cloudy hills together can bring the greatest light, the sunniest joys, even if the shared journey is unbearably short. 
 
 
‘Not just a tribute to the love humans feel for their pets but also a means of voicing the deep grief that can be felt after a dog’s death, when all that is left is a collar and hairs, and the house seems too big without them.’ Guardian 
 
Ubac and Me has been a surprise bestseller and word-of-mouth sensation in France, championed by indie booksellers, selling 400,000 copies. 
 
Translated by Adriana Hunter.

Ubac and Me

A Life of Love and Adventure With a French Mountain Dog

Michelle Orange

'Rich and moving' New York Times 
 
'A book that expands and breaks your heart' Adelle Waldman, author of The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P. 
 
A revelatory enquiry into selfhood, freedom, mortality, storytelling, and what it means to be a mother's daughter 
 
During one of the texting sessions that became our habit over the period I now think of as both late and early in our relationship, my mother revealed the existence of someone named Janis Jerome. 
 
So begins Michelle Orange's extraordinary inquiry into the meaning of maternal legacy - in her own family and across a century of seismic change. Jerome, she learns, is one of her mother's many alter egos: the name used in a case study, eventually sold to the Harvard Business Review, about her midlife choice to leave her husband and children to pursue career opportunities in a bigger city. 
 
A flashpoint in the lives of both mother and daughter, the decision forms the heart of a broader exploration of the impact of feminism on what Adrienne Rich called 'the great unwritten story': that of the mother-daughter bond. 
 
Through a blend of memoir, social history, and cultural criticism, Pure Flame pursues a chain of personal, intellectual, and collective inheritance, tracing the forces that helped transform the world and what a woman might expect from it.

Pure Flame

On Mothers and Daughters

Peter Matthiessen

Peter Mattiessen has long been known for his travels to some of the remotest lands on earth, most notably recorded in The Snow Leopard. The Cloud Forest brings to vivid life a South American journey that took him from the Sargasso Sea to the jungles of Amazonia, from the Inca city of Machu Picchu high in the Andes to the bleak rocks of Tierra del Fuego and the winds and vast skies of Patagonia. 
 
The result is an incisive and marvellously well-observed journal by a born writer and naturalist, a voyage of exploration among the people, places and fading wildlife of this most exotic and mysterious of continents.

The Cloud Forest

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

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

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

Layla Martinez

The house breathes. 
 
The house contains bodies and secrets. 
 
‘A house of women and shadows built from poetry and revenge’ Mariana Enriquez 
 
The house is visited by ghosts, by angels that line the roof like insects, and by saints that burn the bedsheets with their haloes. 
 
It was built by a small-time hustler as a means of controlling his wife, and even after so many years, their daughter and her granddaughter can’t leave. 
 
They may be witches or they may just be angry, but when the mysterious disappearance of a young boy draws unwanted attention, the two isolated women, already subjects of public scorn, combine forces with the spirits that haunt them in pursuit of something that resembles justice. 
 
Layla Martínez’s eerie debut novel Woodworm is class-conscious horror that drags generations of monsters into the sun. 
 
Translated by Sophie Hughes and Annie McDermott

Woodworm

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

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

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