Meik Wiking founded the world's first Happiness Research Institute in 2013, in Copenhagen, Denmark and is a New York Times and Sunday Times Bestselling author. Meik has been called The Indiana Jones of Smiles and probably the World's Happiest Man by The Times. He is the author of four globally bestselling books which have sold over 2 million copies worldwide: The Little Book of Hygge, The Little Book of Lykke, The Art of Making Memories and My Hygge Home.

Meik Wiking

Sue Meikle has always been obsessed with picture books, and after working as an Early Years Specialist for over 25 years, she has read stories to children from Stockport to South Africa. In schools, in early years centres, while on forest school adventures... Sue has even read stories on a travelling play bus! So, perhaps it was always in the stars for Sue to not just read books, but write them, too! When she's not reading or writing stories, Sue can be found walking her dog or chauffeuring her teenagers around the Greater Manchester area (because that’s where they live… in a home that they made from a derelict barn!)

Sue Meikle

David Meikle is a TV scriptwriter and Sunday Times bestselling author. He has written and co-written seven books, including the autobiographies of Charlie Richardson and Bobby Cummines.

David Meikle

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Jaan Kross

When these stories were written the Estonians were not masters of their own house: the Soviets had been the occupying Power since 1940, apart from the three years 1941-44 when the Nazis were in occupation. Young Estonians, conscripted into the armies of both belligerents, found themselves compelled to fight each other. This is the background of these six stories featuring Peeter Mirk, a young law student who is more often in than out of prison and labour camp during these years - like his creator Jaan Kross. Forever carrying a charge of guilt that he has only contributed to his friends' misfortunes, he describes two thwarted attempts at escape ("The Wound", "Lead Piping"), his own dilemma when he can save his life only by sacrificing a friend's ("The Stahl Grammar"), his hand in a practical joke perpetrated by prisoners on one of their number in Tallinn Central Jail, which goes badly wrong ("The Conspiracy"). The last two stories (" The Ashtray", "The Day Eyes Were Opened") involve train journeys, chance encounters, and the unavoidable necessity of giving Fate a run for its money. 
 
If the tone is necessarily sombre as Kross recalls the years when Hitler and Stalin determined his countrymen's destiny, a wry humour keeps slipping through at every turn, which will suggest to the reader that Peeter Mirk must be cousin to the Good Soldier Schweik.

The Conspiracy & Other Stories

Yashar Kemal

The fitting and devastating finale of the acclaimed The Wind from the Plain trilogy 
 
Turkey’s greatest novelist, Yashar Kemal was an unsurpassed storyteller who brought to life a world of staggering violence and hallucinatory beauty. Kemal’s books delve deeply into the entrenched social and historical conflicts that scar the Middle East. The Wind from the Plain trilogy is widely seen as his masterpiece, alongside the legendary Memed My Hawk. 
 
Three men are caught in a triangle of politics. Memidik, a young hunter, is obsessed by an urge to kill the tyrannous headman, Sefer, who has caused him so much pain and humiliation. Yet, each time he treis, he is overcome by fear. Then the accidental death of another man in the community fires him with renewed determination. Sefer, meanwhile, is sentenced to solitude and the local champion, Tashbash, is invested with mythical powers. 
 
The web of fantasy and intrigue spun around the villagers enmeshes them in plots of bravery and illusion in this extraordinary story of survival.

The Undying Grass

Tom Lowenstein

On a tiny peninsula, the Inuit of Tikigaq worshipped the whales they killed, evolving an elaborate system of myths and rituals to accompany the hunt. Lowenstein began to explore these in 1973 and recorded the complex tales of the elders, providing a classic text on the vanishing culture of the North Alaskan wilderness.

Ancient Land: Sacred Whale

There is an ancient Turkish tradition which promises a place in paradise to anyone who sets a small bird free. Three boys start up a bird-catching business to enable people to free them in order to secure their place in heaven, but the city-dwellers have become sceptical, and tragedy lies in wait for the boys.

The Birds Have Also Gone

Michel Crespy

"Your career profile could be of interest to us. Would you please get in touch?" 
 
Jérôme Carceville finds it impossible to resist such an e-mail, especially when the invitation comes from De Wavre International, one of the top headhunting organizations in the world. He responds, and after undergoing a variety of searching interviews and psychometric tests, he is eventually selected for a decisive final examination. 
 
The fifteen talented and driven finalists arrive at a hotel on an island in the middle of an Alpine lake. Only two of them have a realistic chance of being offered the job, and when Del Rieco, the "games-master", informs them that the nature of the contest is stimulated economic warfare, that their only weapons will be a computer and some strategic information, and that their competitors must be eliminated, it becomes clear that this is no ordinary recruitment drive... What seems to start as a simple team-building exercise soon becomes a horrifying and bloody battle for supremacy.

Head Hunters

Vincent Cronin

Matteo Ricci, an early recruit of the Jesuit order, was sent to China as a missionary in 1582. If he approached the Emperor with a Bible in one hand, in the other he carried much of the accumulated technological and philosophical wisdom of the late Renaissance Europe, and thus found favour among the Mandarins, the men of learning who enjoyed high status at the Imperial Court. He learned Chinese the better to discuss with them the problems in science and technology, as also questions of religion and the hereafter. But his progress was not unopposed, for the Wise Man from the West came to be seen as an unsettling element in a too-settled society. Ricci died in 1610, disappointed in his ambition to convert the Emperor, and with him the whole of China, to Christianity. But the seed was sown and the crop, even after almost a century of atheistic communism, continues to grow in present-day China. 
 
This story of the first fully documented contact between West and East offers a fascinating insight into the history of ideas during one of the most fertile eras in European and Chinese history. Vincent Cronin has built up a reputation with his scholarly, elegantly written works of history and biography, as one of the finest popular historians of his generation. This early book proves his gift as an acutely observant and sensitive historian.

Wise Man Of The West

Mayra Montero

Enrico, the world's most highly paid tenor, lands in Havana in 1920, carrying with him the death threat of the Sicilian Black Hand. But when a bomb explodes during a performance, and he runs terrified into the arms of a Chinese widow, he is not running from his destiny but towards it.

The Messenger

Elias Canetti

Auto Da Fé is the story of Peter Kien, a distinguished, reclusive sinologist living in Germany between the wars. With masterly precision, Canetti reveals Kien's character, displaying the flawed personal relationships which ultimately lead to his destruction. 
 
Manipulated by his illiterate and grasping housekeeper, Therese, who has tricked him into marriage, and Benedikt Pfaff, a brutish concierge, Kien is forced out of his apartment - which houses his great library and one true passion - and into the underworld of the city. In this purgatory he is guided by a chess-playing dwarf of evil propensities, until he is eventually restored to his home. But on his return he is visited by his brother, an eminent psychiatrist who, by an error of diagnosis, precipitates the final crisis... 
 
Auto Da Fé was first published in Germany in 1935 as Die Blendung (The Blinding or Bedazzlement) and later in Britain in 1947, where the publisher noted Canetti as a 'writer of strongly individual genius, which may prove influential', an observation borne out when the author was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1981. Auto Da Fé still towers as one of the greatest novels of the twentieth century, and Canetti's incisive vision of an insular man battling agianst the outside world is as fresh and rewarding today as when first it appeared in print.

Auto Da Fé

Thomas Glavinic

In Vienna, in the winter of 1910, the world of chess is aghast and the city abuzz. The unthinkable has happened: in the fifth round of the World Championship the renowned defending champion, Emanuel Lasker, has made an elementary error and lost a match. The little-known Austrian challenger, Carl Haffner, stands in the limelight, the title within his grasp. 
 
Haffner is a shy and fragile man, brought up in extreme poverty, from which his only escape is his exceptional gift for chess. His is a game shaped by the harsh experiences he has undergone. He has an obsessive fear of defeat, and his tactics and overall strategy are based on the sheer artistry of defence. But this confrontation with Lasker is not merely a clash between rook and knight; it is a collision between two men with vastly differing attitudes to life: the wealthy, worldly, self-confident champion on the one hand, the lonely, idealistic and penniless Haffner on the other. 
 
Carl Haffner is modelled on the Austrian grandmaster Karl Schlechter, and in his brilliant first novel Thomas Glavinic brings to life both the events surrounding the ten-match world championship and the atmosphere of the cafés and chess clubs of Vienna and Berlin in the years before the First World War. With mature insight, he analyses the reasons for Haffner's view of the world, a world that is thrown into further confusion by the appearance of the fascinating and beautiful Anna.

Carl Haffner’s Love of the Draw

Paul Durcan

Peter Robb

For most of us Christmas is the season of huge helpings of good food, good drink, and with luck, good cheer, as the rituals of cracker-pulling, present-giving and happy or sulphurous family reunions fizzle and bang through the long afternoon. 
 
For anyone who has ever had too much of it, or felt out of it, or wanted to be out of it, or even succeeded in being out of it then been unexpectedly rescued by a good friend, this book-length poem contains a lifeline of humour and sanity in a world run seasonally mad. 
 
It is a funny, subversive, melancholy, self-mocking conversation between two men - Paul and Frank - in the top storey flat of a Dublin apartment block; a Stations of Christmas under the influence of "woman-hunger". Once read, Christmas Day itself will never be the same again. 
 
The volume also contains a second new work, "A Goose in the Frost", a tribute to Seamus Heaney on winning the Nobel Prize for Literature.

Christmas Day

Connie Palmen

Ara and Kit, two girls in the village school, seem to have nothing in common. Ara, the elder, is large, earthy and illiterate; Kit is lean, brainy and interested in abstractions like philosophy. After they leave school Ara cannot let Kit alone - she is drawn to her as a moth to a candle flame.

The Friendship

A staggering, shattering novel from Turkey's greatest novelist 
 
Since Halil was shot dead in his own home by his wife Esmé's former suitor, the village has pointed the finger of guilt at the dead man's beautiful widow: she must have arranged the murder. The task of vengeance falls on Esmé's little son, Hassan: year after year he is groomed for it, his devotion to his mother sapped with talk of the unavenged ghost of Halil and his father, doomed to roam the countryisde as a translucent red snake, an insect, a bird. Hassan hears tales against his mother. How long will her innocence protect her? 
 
The stark tale of cruelty and vendetta is told in a narrative of relentless tension, reminiscent of Greek tragedy. it is one of Yashar Kemal's most beautiful and haunting novels.

To Crush The Serpent

A tale of greed, hatred and decay from Turkey's legendary novelist Yashar Kemal 
 
Yashar Kemal was an unsurpassed storyteller who brings to life a world of staggering violence and hallucinatory beauty. Kemal’s books delve deeply into the entrenched social and historical conflicts that scar the Middle East. At the same time scents and sounds, vistas of mountain and stream and field, rise up from the pages of his books with primitive force. 
 
In a sudden, chance encounter in a coffee-house in a fishing village near Istanbul, Zeynel Celik shoots a local gangster. Only one man intervenes – the village outcast Fisher Selim – and in doing so inadvertently transfers the blame for the murder onto himself. From this one simple act, Zeynel becomes a legendary outlaw in the minds of the people, whereas Fisher Selim, passionate about the sea and haunted by a lost love, is cast as an eccentric oddball. Each is pursued by his own paranoia, memories of the past and hopes for the future, until their paths cross once again on Selim’s boat, and their obsessions come to a resolution. Reflective and lyrical, the novel offers insight into the Turkish mentality while drawing universally valid conclusions, and manages to be both brutally savage and deeply humane.

The Sea-Crossed Fisherman

Andrey Platonov

"Reading Platonov, one gets a sense of the relentless, implacable absurdity built into the language and with each...utterance, that absurdity deepens" - Joseph Brodsky 
 
People are on the move in all ten stories in this collection, coming home as in "The Return", leaving home as in "Rubbish Wind", travelling far away from their country as in "The Locks of Epiphan", trying to improve their lives and those of others, running away, searching, fleeing. Their journeys are accompanied by two motives which characterize the writing of Andrey Platonov: optimism and faith in the goodness of humanity, and abject despair at the cruelty, randomness, and apparent senselessness of our existence. The protagonists are torn between these poles and sometimes a synthesis shines through the mists of the apparent naivety of faith and the blackness of despair: the hope against hope that a better life is still possible. 
 
Though Russian readers and critics have come to look on Platonov as among their greatest prose writers of this century, he has yet to enjoy a parallel international reputation - mainly because much of his best writing was suppressed for more than 60 years. Combining a realism inspired by his work as an engineer with poetic vision and the deceptively simple language of folk tales, Platonov sets his stories alight by using language in a way that renders it unfamiliar, makes the ordinary seem unusual and the extraordinary logical. This translation is the first to present the full range of Platonov's gift as a short story writer to an English-language readership, showing why it is that Joseph Brodsky regarded Platonov as the equal of Joyce, Kafka and Proust. 
 
"...strange, almost abrupt, a hallucinatory, nightmarish parable of hysterical laughter and terrifying silences" - Eileen Battersby, Irish Times - in reference to The Foundation Pit

The Return and Other Stories

Turkey’s greatest novelist, Yashar Kemal was an unsurpassed storyteller who brought to life a world of staggering violence and hallucinatory beauty. Kemal’s books delve deeply into the entrenched social and historical conflicts that scar the Middle East. At the same time scents and sounds, vistas of mountain and stream and field, rise up from the pages of his books with primitive force. 
 
It was during the anarchic days when Russian invaders had put the Turkish army to flight and filled the roads of eastern Turkey with a horde of desperate refugees that the Kurdish Ismail Agha, fleeing with his family from his village on the shores of Lake Van, picked up a child left to die by the roadside with maggot-infested wounds. 
 
Thus did Salman become the adopted son of Ismail Agha who, after many reversals of fortune, achieved wealth in his new home. Salman grew up to worship the very ground on which his "father" trod, and to stand armed guard at his gate in all weathers. Change came with the eventual birth of a son, Mustafa, to Ismail Agha, who had come to despair of ever having an heir of his own flesh from his yet too young wife. 
 
Now the green-eyed serpent, Jealousy, entered the household: Mustafa grew up to be terrified of his adoptive brother, a man of unpredictable mood-swings - and impeccable marksmanship. But Jealousy chose a different and quite unexpected target when finally the knives came into play.

Salman The Solitary

Lars Gustafsson

Caldwell lives by the lakeside at Austin, Texas, with his wife of thirty years, his two children having long ago flown the nest. He is a judge in the Federal Bankruptcy Court. And the dog? A mongrel that kept upsetting his dustbins as it rooted about in them, until the judge went after it and secretly beat its brains out with the edge-trimmers. 
 
But this is not a crime story – for all that Caldwell’s lifelong mentor, the Dutchman van de Rouwers, Philosophy guru and idol of the American campuses, was fished out dead from the lake about the time his Murky Past caught up with him. No, this is a Philosophical Tale: weaving through the judge’s humdrum life between the Bench, the campus bookstore, the cocktail party circuit and his own kitchen, Great Metaphysical Questions are asked, about the reality of Good and Evil, ontological proofs of the existence of God, and the theoretical existence of the Most Intelligent Man in America. 
 
Lars Gustafsson taps a rich vein of comedy in the series of contrasts here engendered between the mundane and the highflown as reported in the judge’s maybe fanciful narrative. The Tale of a Dog has marked affinity with his last novel, translated into English as A Tiler’s Afternoon, in the clearsighted dissection of small people trying to cope with an all too complex modern world.

The Tale of A Dog

From the Diaries and Letters of a Texan Bankruptcy Judge

Part One in the acclaimed The Wind from the Plain trilogy 
 
Turkey’s greatest novelist, Yashar Kemal was an unsurpassed storyteller who brought to life a world of staggering violence and hallucinatory beauty. Kemal’s books delve deeply into the entrenched social and historical conflicts that scar the Middle East. At the same time scents and sounds, vistas of mountain and stream and field, rise up from the pages of his books with primitive force. The Wind from the Plains trilogy is widely seen as his masterpiece, alongside the legendary Memed My Hawk. 
 
Each year the wind brings the news to old Halil's keen senses that the cotton is ripe for picking in the plain, and at his word the entire population of his remote village in the Taurus Mountains set out on the arduous trek. 
 
 
But this year old Halil finds himself too old to go on foot; so does Long Ali's aging mother, Meryemdje, and both clamour for a place on the back of Long Ali's broken-down nag, scarcely capable of bearing either of the two old people. Halil's determination to stay on and Meryemdje's to get him off lead to a war of words and cunning which lights with delicious comedy the sombre drama of the march. But when the decrepit animal finally dies, and the group falls behind the rest of the villagers, it is the unfortunate Ali who has to show piety towards his mother and compassion to old Halil, while pressing on with dogged resolution to reach the cotton fields before they are picked bare. 
 
The power of The Wind from the Plain, the first volume of The Wind from the Plain trilogy, lies in its simplicity, which in turn lies in the handful of unforgettable characters whose story it tells - the timeless one of survival.

The Wind From The Plain

Daniel Del Giudice

Take-off: almost a ton of inert matter transformed by the pilot as it lifts off the runway into a thing of spirit and beauty. 
 
Take-off: lifting one's shadow off the earth, entering a new element where movement is the very condition for existence, for, as the author observes, "in life, to choose the wrong wife or the wrong lift is conventionally viewed as being matters of varying gravity, but in piloting an aircraft an act of petty oversight, due to the obvious but decisive fact that in flight there can be no stopping, could be fatal." 
 
Whether he is reliving his first solo flight or a frightening experience as he pilots a light aircraft through storm clouds, his training and his instincts constantly at odds, or the mysterious loss of an airliner on an internal flight, or the brief, adrenaline-charged lives of Italian torpedo-bombers in World War Two, Del Giudice focuses on the edge of experience in which a person learns to take nothing, but nothing, for granted. 
 
While Take-off has much of the charm, humour and poetry to be found in the best of Saint-Exupéry (whose last flight is evoked in the final chapter), it will also remind the reader of Robert Pirsig's classic Zen and the Art of Motor Cycle Maintenance by its close focus on the question of how the mind approaches problem-solving. 
 
Winner of the Bagutta, Campiello and International Flaiano Prizes.

Take-Off

Jean Giono

Of Sailor's twin sons, the elder is dead and the younger is missing.A simple woodsman, Sailor resolves to find the boy, fearing the worst.Soon after he and his friend Antonio set off, they stumble across a blind girl giving birth. This strange circumstance proves typical of their journey into the heart of the forest. Sailor and Antonio discover that, though the lost Twin is alive, he is the target of a manhunt. As Sailor and Antonio attempt to rescue Twin, the adventures unravel at a breathtaking speed. The net tightens around the three men until one of them is trapped and killed. And only then does the real action of this remarkable picaresque novel begin. In Giono's universe, no murder shall go unavenged. 
 
This tale of primitive love and vendetta is cast in a timeless landscape of river, mountain and forest. With its taut, fast-paced story and pastoral setting, The Song of the World is another triumph from the celebrated author of The Man Who Planted Trees.

The Song Of The World

Jorge Amado

The sleepy Brazilian beach resort of Periperi needs a hero. As if in answer to their calll, Captain Vasco Moscosco de Aragao (newly retired) arrives and soon has the townspeople enthralled with his tales of ocean-going daring and romance. 
 
Only his rival, Chico Pacheco, delves into the captain's past and discovers that he has never in his life sailed beyond the harbour bar. But just as Vasco is about to be unmaksked the Ita limps into port with her flag at half mast and her captain dead at the wheel. Pressed into service, Vasco goes to meet his destiny and so begins an adventure in love and seamanship that surpasses even his wildest fantasies.

Home Is The Sailor

Christine Jordis

Relying on atmosphere and sensation over fact and statistic, Christine Jordis has written a deeply personal, vividly impressionistic account of several journeys to the Indonesian islands of Bali and Java. Dazzled, wide-eyed, but always astute, Jordis describes famous monuments, native dances, encounters with locals. She conjures up the various literary and artistic figures who sought refuge and inspiration in Indonesia - Arthur Rimbaud, Herman Melville, Joseph Conrad - and brings ancient legends to life. From the heart of the lush tropical forests, Jordis guides her readers through the technicolor paradise that makes Paris seem grey in comparison. Ultimately, it is these very colours that infuse her life - and her readers' lives - with new meaning.

Bali, Java in My Dreams

Translated by Eric Dickens 
 
Treading Air follows the life of Ullo Paerand through 30 years of violent political upheaval. Abandoned by his father as a child, he grows up to become an electoral assistant to the parliamentary office in Tallinn and it is in this position that Ullo witnesses first the Soviet and then the German occupation of Estonia. Forced out of his honest profession Ullo becomes involved with the Resistance but, when many Estonians flee the country, he chooses to remain. An interlude of a decade shows much has changed since the end of the War; Soviet influence is marked in the style of government and the manner of the people. The narrative unfolds in stories imparted to an unknown "author" by a 70-year-old Ullo. Just before the end, however, Kross introduces a teasing ambiguity: Ullo dies before he is able to answer the last question about his life.

Treading Air

Ivo Andric

In the small Bosnian town of Visegrad the stone bridge of the novel's title, built in the sixteenth century on the instruction of a grand vezir, bears witness to three centuries of conflict. Visegrad has long been a bone of contention between the Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian Empires, but the bridge survives unscathed until 1914, when the collision of forces in the Balkans triggers the outbreak of World War I. 
 
The bridge spans generations, nationalities and creeds, silent testament to the lives played out on it. Radisav, a workman, tries to hinder its construction and is impaled alive on its highest point; beautiful Fata leaps from its parapet to escape an arranged marriage; Milan, inveterate gamble, risks all in one last game on it. With humour and compassion, Andric chronicles the lives of Catholics, Muslims and Orthodox Christians unable to reconcile their disparate loyalties.

The Bridge Over the Drina

George Szirtes

Published to coincide with the Hungarian Year of Culture (2003-4), this new volume in Harvill's celebrated Leopard series of anthologies comprises a selection of Hungarian prose and poetry from the second half of the twentieth century. Hungarian literature can be characterised as the literature of anxiety. Throughout the 1900s, as Europe's political and social fortunes changed, Hungary's writers reflected on those changes, absorbing and distilling them in work of documentary, poetic or comically grotesque power. This anthology of fiction and poetry begins by setting out some of the major landmarks from the end of the Second World War, then concentrates on the period before, during and after the key date of 1989, when Central Europe was transformed once again. The volume traces that history of change from Marai's wartime diaries, into the Stalinist period with the one-minute novels of Istvan Orkeny, past the paradoxical post-modernist humanism of Peter Esterhazy, and through the haunted waste-tracts of Laszlo Krasznahorkai. On the way, it gathers together the monumental, the mystical, the garrulous and the inward-driven poetries of Janos Pilinszky, Sando Weores, Agnes Nemes Nagy, Gyorgy Petri, Otto Orban and Zsuzsa Rakovszky and many younger writers. This extraordinary journey takes us up to Hungary's return to the European fold, as it moves from the psycho-geographic East towards the longed-for, lost, centre. It celebrates the anxiety, agitation, crying and whispering of the Hungarian literary imagination, posing the question that hangs above the door of the European Community: What is Europe? How do we live in it? And how do we respond to its darkness and its light?

Leopard V: An Island of Sound

Hungarian Poetry and Fiction before and beyond the Iron Curtain

Torgny Lindgren

No doubt about it, Lindgren has joined the ranks of the greatest writers" Michel Crepu, La Croix 
 
The woman had come from a city in the south to lecture in a small village amid the snowbound forests of northern Sweden. She was a writer. After the lecture in the village hall an old man who had been sleeping at the back introduced himself, as she was to be his guest for the night. So it was that she moved in with Hadar, a man who lived on his own and was in the last stages of cancer. Not another house in sight, save for one just a field away; there lived Hadar's brother Olof, also on his own, and dying of heart disease. Neither brother would consent to die, the woman discovered, for that would give the other the satisfaction of outliving him. 
 
Cut off by a snow blizzard, the woman settles into Hadar's attic, leaving only to pick her way across to Olof's, and in the days that follows she acts as both nurse and confessor to each of them. She learns of the woman they shared and the son of disputed paternity, uncovering the tissue of lies and self-deceptions that keeps the ailing brothers alive in a bond of mutual loathing. Ultimately to her roles of nurse and confessor she adds a third: the hand of Providence . . . 
 
The author of The Way of a Serpent and Light is one of Sweden's outstanding practitioners of black humour. In Sweetness he has achieved a work of brilliant comic invention.

Sweetness

Henry Green

Edited by the author's grandson, the novelist Matthew Yorke, and with an Introduction by John Updike, this book is an excellent selection of Henry Green's uncollected writings. It includes a number of outstanding stories never previously published, written during the '20s and '30s ("Bees", "Saturday", "Excursion", and the remarkable "Mood" among them). It contains a highly entertaining account of Green's service in the London Fire Brigade during the War; a short play written in the 1950s; and a selection of his journalism, including revelatory articles about the craft of writing, a marvellous evocation of Venice, a description of falling in love, reviews which illuminate his literary enthusiasm and the entertaining interview with Terry Southern for the Paris Review. It is rounded off with a biographical memoir by Green's son, Sebastian Yorke. Fascinating and invaluable as an introduction to Green, Surviving casts new light on his work and illustrates the many facets of this exceptional writer, one of the two most important English novelists of his time.

Surviving

Peter Matthiessen

In 1969 Peter Matthiessen set out with the expedition led by Peter Gimbel, whose aim was to find and film underwater for the first time the most dangerous of all sea creatures - the great white shark. Acting as the expedition's chronicler and spare hand (both on the surface and below), Matthiessen accompanied the crew from the Carribean to the whaling grounds off the Durban coast, to various islands in the Indian Ocean, to Ceylon, and finally to success off the bleak south coast of Australia. 
 
Blue Meridian records the awesome experience of swimming in open water among hundreds of sharks, the beauties of strange seas and landscapes and the camaraderie, humour and tension of people who live in close proximity and risk their lives day by day.

Blue Meridian

L Jorge

The setting of this extraordinary novel is an old farmhouse in Portugal - a house far enough from the Atlantic not to hear the breaking waves during a storm but near enough for the walls to be corroded by the salt in the air. 
 
With most members of her large family having left the hardship of life in this landscape of sand and stone for jobs in faraway places, a young woman struggles to piece together her past from the many and differing stories she is told. Left behind by a free-spirited, feckless father, a seducer with a talent for drawing, she is raised by her uncle who has married her mother. The only memories of her father's one brief visit are the echoes of his footsteps on the stairs leading to her room. The only signs of him are letters from the widest reaches of the world- letters accompanied by brilliantly coloured drawings of exotic birds: the cuckoo from India, the ibis from Mozambique, the goose from Labrador, the hummingbird from the West Indies. The daughter longs for her father and, as she grows up, she is determined to find him and uncover the truth. 
 
Beautifully written and imagined, this strikingly lyrical novel evokes the atmosphere of a rural community in a changing world and explores the timeless themes of family, independence, and the often painful experience of emigration.

The Migrant Painter of Birds

In the beginning of the winter thaw, Lars Lennart Westin has learned that he will not live through the spring. Told through the journals of this schoolteacher turned apiarist, The Death of a Beekeeper is his gentle, courageous, and sometimes comic meditation on living with pain. 
 
Westin has refused to surrender the time left to him to the impersonality of a hospital, preferring to take his fate upon himself, to continue his solitary, reflective life in the Swedish countryside. While he watches his inner landscape reforming, the relentlessly intimate burning in his gut provides a point of psychological detachment. 'We begin again,' he insists, 'we never give up.'

The Death Of A Beekeeper

The second volume in the acclaimed The Wind from the Plain trilogy 
 
Turkey’s greatest novelist, Yashar Kemal was an unsurpassed storyteller who brought to life a world of staggering violence and hallucinatory beauty. Kemal’s books delve deeply into the entrenched social and historical conflicts that scar the Middle East. The Wind from the Plains trilogy is widely seen as his masterpiece, alongside the legendary Memed My Hawk. 
 
After a particularly bad season, a group of poor cotton-pickers are unable to pay their creditor, shopkeeper Adil Effendi. Overwhelmed with shame and guilt, they wait in terror for Adil to come and demand retribution. But when he inexplicably fails to appear, Adil begins to represent an irrational and tyrannical force, growing in their minds until they become sick with apprehension and obsessed with the terrible disaster that is sure to come upon them. 
 
In their despair they turn to Tashbash, a brave, decent and loyal man, investing him with virtue, grace and miraculous power. But the cotton-pickers have no idea of the effect of their idolatry on Tashbash, with his innocent doubts and mental torment, until his fate finally befalls him and the novel draws to its apposite close. Written with deep compassion and lyrical beauty, this is a novel alive with the acute observation of human nature.

Iron Earth, Copper Sky

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