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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

Henry Green

Old Mr Rock, a widower, lives in a cottage with his granddaughter Elizabeth; his household includes Daisy the pig, Ted the goose and Alice the cat, but an additional member threatens in the person of Sebastian Birt, the schoolteacher whom Elizabeth wants to marry. Birt teaches in the state institution for girls run by two authoritarian spinsters, the inseparable Misses Edge and Baker. 
 
One sunny summer's morning, the morning of the Founders' Day Ball, as Mr Rock goes up to the school to fetch his pig-swill for Daisy, it is discovered that two of the girls have gone missing in the night. As he pursues the unfolding events of this crowded day and eavesdrops on the conversations up at the school and down at the cottage, Henry Green subtly teases out all the hidden ambitions and lusts, the suspicions and jealousies that are rife just beneath the placid surface of the institution. With an unmatched ear for dialogue and an absolute mastery in the depiction of character, he imbues this apparently routine school day with a powerful charge of drama and superb comic effect.

Concluding

Peter Matthiessen

During the 1970s and 1980s, Peter Matthiessen took part in a number of expeditions to Africa, witnessing first-hand the continent’s many and diverse peoples and wildlife. The fruits of these journeys are three of the most impressive essays on the natural world of the late twentieth century. 
 
The Tree where Man Was Born documents wild landscapes, peoples and animals, observed in a series of journeys in East Africa, from the Sudan, south through Uganda, Kenya and Tanzania, exploring the Serengeti, the Maasai Mara, the Ngorongoro crater and the archaeological sites of the Rift Valley. 
 
African Silences recounts two expeditions made to West and Central Africa, including Zaire (as it then was), Gabon and the Central African Republic. 
 
Sand Rivers describes the Selous game reserve in Southern Tanzania, one of the largest, but least-known refuges for animals left on earth, and provides an unforgettable portrait of this area and the fierce, lonely men who created it. 
 
These three classic works represent Matthiessen the naturalist at his finest; written an all-encompassing curiosity and knowledge that brings alive the people, places and wildlife he encounters, and updated with a new introduction by the author.

An African Trilogy

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

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

Manuel Rivas

A glorious cast of animals and birds, as well as humans, relate the magical stories that form the plot of Manuel Rivas's extraordinary novel. An old lady, Misia, tells how the 300 ravens of Xallas are the warrior-poets of the last King of Galicia. A priest, Don Xil, explains to a peasant girl, Rosa, that the beautifully carved women in the local church are not saints, but represent the seven deadly sins. A mouse, Matac-ns, a poacher in his previous life, is chased by a cat, the bagpiper and anarchist, Arturo of Lousame. A bat, Gaspar, relates his own death to a lizard. In a nearby cellar, half the parish are found to have transmigrated into spiders, snails, toads-Manuel Rivas's story emerges like spirals of smoke, in a series of memorably poetic images. His characters have their roots deep in the traditions, legends and history of his beloved Galicia. Few contemporary storytellers share his power of vision and sense of cultural identity, or can narrate their tales with such tenderness and humour.

In The Wilderness

Yashar Kemal

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

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

Slobodan Selenic

A touching story of cultural difference and tested loyalties. Set in Belgrade before WWII, Fathers and Forefathers tells the story of the marriage between a Steven, a Serb, and Elizabeth, an Englishwoman.  After meeting at an English university they marry and leave England to build their life together.  Steven's narrative and Elizabeth's letters home reveal two very different personal accounts of the difficulties this involves.  Raised in Serbia their son, Mihajlo, is ashamed of his mixed parentage and rebels against his non-Serbian ancestry.  On the eve of the war, Steven's loyalties are challenged when his counsel is sought by both the Serbian king and the opposition.  He resolves to keep his distance from the conflict, but Mihajlo's more radical response forces him to become involved, and tragedy engulfs the family.

Fathers and Forefathers

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

Daniel Pennac

Pathetic, contrite and hapless, Benjamin is nonetheless the scapegoat at The Store: there is nothing for which he cannot be blamed. While his blunders remain minor, most of his unwitting victims can find it in their hearts to forgive him, but when violent explosions begin to follow him around, he inevitably becomes the prime suspect. With his girlfriend Julie by his side, Benjamin thrusts himself into uncovering the mystery, delving deep into underground Paris and pursuing the truth through a maze of bizarre criminality and oppressive shadows.

Scapegoat

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

C. K. Stead

"Will appeal to lovers of the wayward novel game as it is played by Lawrence Sterne or Italo Calvino" - Jackie Wullschläger, Financial Times 
 
Professor Harry Butler is obsessed with the Mind/Body problem. Unfortunately, this is not the least of his problems. Harry's wife has turned his study into a sufi shrine where she sits cross-legged and chants for hours on end: "I am not this body..." And Harry doesn't know it yet but the Drug Squad have taken up residence in his kitchen so as to observe the movements of his neighbours and their visitors. Among these visitors, photographed by the drug squad, is one of his oldest friends. And living next door is a woman Harry may have had an encounter with in Singapore. 
 
The University is no escape from these complications on the domestic front: Harry's relationship with a student is causing concern among the Philosophy Department Women's Collective. Some of his colleagues also suspect him of going astray academically. 
 
The story takes place in Auckland, New Zealand. But who is telling the story? Why is he in Europe? Why does he keep moving from one city to another, and why does he seem to require the presence of a certain Uta Haverstrom in order to write it? 
 
The Death of the Body is a delightful blend of wit, intelligence and excitement.

Death Of The Body

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

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

Octavio Paz

In 1951 Octavio Paz travelled to India to serve as an attaché in the Mexican Embassy. Eleven years later he returned as Mexico's ambassador. In Light of India is Paz's celebration of that country and his most personal work of prose to date. As in all of his essays, he brings poetic insight and voluminous knowledge to bear on the subject, and the result is a series of fascinating discourses on India's landscape, culture and history. 
 
'The Antipodes of Coming and Going' is a lyrical remembrance of Paz's days in India, evoking with astonishing clarity the sights, sounds, smells and denizens of the subcontinent. 'Religions, Castes, Languages' gives a survey of Indian history and its astonishing polyglot society. 'A Project of Nationhood' is an examinatino of modern Indian politics, comparing the respective Islamic, Hindu and Western civilizations through the course of history. 'The Full and the Empty' is an exploration of what Paz calls the soul of India, its art, literature, music and philosophy. It is also an uncompromising indictment of the self-centred materialism of Western society.

In Light of India

Set in the town of Travnik, Bosnian Chronicle presents the struggle for supremacy in a region that stubbornly refuses to submit to any outsider. The time is Napoleonic and the novel, both in its historical scope and psychological subtlety, is Tolstoyan. Inevitably, in its portrayal of conflict and fierce ethnic loyalties, the story is eerily relevant to readers today. 
 
Ottoman viziers, French consuls, and Austrian plenipotentiaries are consumed by a ceaseless game of diplomacy and double-dealing: expansive and courtly face-to-face, brooding and scheming behind closed doors. As they have for centuries, the Bosnians themselves observe and endure the machinations of greater powers that vie, futilely, to absorb them. Ivo Andric’s masterwork is imbued with the richness and complexity of a region that has brought much tragedy to our century and known so little peace.

Bosnian Chronicle

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

Almudena Solana

This is the story of Aurora Ortiz, who lives in Madrid, and who, at the age of only thirty, has been widowed and needs to find a job. Although she is in no position to choose, she would ideally like to work as a caretaker in a quiet block of flats where she would just watch life pass by. Aurora's aspirations are simple and few, and with the help of her neighbour and friend Fany, who lends her a computer, she composes what she considers a suitable curriculum vitae and proceeds to tramp the streets of the city in search of work. With her vitality and freshness, her innocence, her unconventional intelligence and her relative lack of commercial ambition, Aurora Ortiz is a new type of heroine, one whose ethos and view of the world run contrary to most contemporary trends, she is a character who might have emerged from one of Pedro Almod-var's films.  The means by which she comes to terms with the burden and pressures of modern life will strike chords with many of her own European generation.

The Curriculum Vitae of Aurora Ortiz

Paul Durcan

Since the publication of his first book in 1967, Paul Durcan has made satirical, celebratory and extraordinarily moving poetry out of his country's fortunes and misfortunes. His readings are legendary and each new collection, from his collaboration with Brain Lynch, Endsville (1967) to Daddy, Daddy (winner of the 1990 Whitbread Poetry Award), Crazy about Women (1991) and Greetings to Our Friends in Brazil (1999) has borne out the truth of Ezra Pound's dictum that "literature is news that stays news". 
 
This book contains Durcan's own selection from his work. It is a literary milestone that has set the seal on his reputation as a poet of international standing.

Snail In My Prime

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

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

After his expulsion from Russia in 1974 for undermining the Communist regime, Solzhenitsyn wrote a secret record, while it was still fresh in his mind, of the courageous efforts of people who hid his writings and smuggled them to the West. Before the fall of Communism he could not have published Invisible Allies in conjunction with his memoir The Oak and the Calf without putting those friends in jeopardy. Now the facts may be revealed in this intimate account of the network of individuals who risked life and liberty to ensure that his works were concealed, circulated in "samizdat", and exported via illicit channels. 
 
These conspirators, often unknown to one another, shared a devotion to the dissident writer's work and a hatred of an oppressive regime of censorship and denunciation. The circle was varied enough to include scholars and fellow writers, and also elderly babushkas who acted as couriers. With tenderness, respect and humour, Solzhenitsyn speaks of these partners in conspiracy: the women who typed copies of his works under the noses of prying neighbours; the journalists and diplomats who covertly carried microfilms across borders; the friends who hid various drafts of his works from the vigilance of the secret police.

Invisible Allies

Benjamin Malaussène, the Belleville scapegoat, and his family of half sisters and brothers are once again the target for a series of increasingly catastrophic mishaps which culminate in his imprisonment on 21 counts of murder.  Meanwhile, the real serial killer remains at large. In this sprawling novel, which brings the Belleville Quintet to a close, Pennac has allowed his unique imagination to run riot.  The result is an increasingly huge cast of unforgettable characters and a series of inter-related plot lines which curl around one another before finally unravelling.  From the art of the tattoo to cinema history, and the intricacies of cutting-edge surgery to the wonders of the wines of Jura, there is something for everyone in this extraordinary tale.

Monsieur Malaussene

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

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

Edgardo Cozarinsky

Set in Buenos Aires, Lisbon, Vienna, Budapest and Odessa, both before and after the Second World War, Edgardo Cozarinsky's stories belong to the spirit of Borges and to a great Argentine cosmopolitan tradition: that of the uprooted exile, the plaything of History, who, set down in a strange but proud land, looks back nostalgically to the Europe of his ancestral memories. 
 
Cozarinsky's characters are writers, lovers, scholars, artists and dreamers. An ambitious young Jew, about to marry and embark for a new life in Argentina is accosted by an unknown woman who departs with him to Buenos Aires; a pianist in a Buenos Aires nightclub finds himself drawn back to Germany in 1937; an Argentine-American Jew travels to Lisbon to unravel the threads of his grandparents' wartime affair... 
 
They are all travellers of a kind, characters who inhabit a secret land, without frontiers.

The Bride From Odessa

Bernardo Atxaga

Irene is 37 years old and just out of prison after serving time for terrorist activities. Deciding to return home to Bilbao, she takes a bus journey across Spain, striking up conversations with the passengers who include two plainclothes policemen. As the journey progresses, so the tension builds.

The Lone Woman

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

In this magnificent novel, which is the conclusion to the celebrated Watson trilogy, E.J. Watson tells his own story, through his turbulent life, to his death at the hands of vigilantes. From his destitute childhood in South Carolina, and the terrible events which haunt him for the rest of his days, the narrative shifts to the wilds of the Florida Everglades. Here, Watson establishes himself as a successful sugar-cane farmer, trying in vain to escape his past, and the uncontrollable, vicious side of his nature which is ultimately his downfall. 
 
Intelligent, a devoted husband and a lover, a stern father and a man capable of cruelty and cold-blooded murder, Watson is a character staggeringly real in his complexity. Bone by Bone confronts not only the racism, brutality and entrepreneurial greed of the American South at the turn of the century but also the paradox at the heart of human nature: our capacity for fierce love, compassion and unspeakable violence.

Bone by Bone

Jan Wiese

The collapse in 1989 of the newly-built church at Perugia, killing the congregation of notables gathered for its consecration, just as they have discovered in themselves the ability to sing in perfect Latin, must surely be ascribed to the miraculous (or devilish) properties of the Madonna and Child altarpiece specially donated by the Vatican. And the quiet, unassuming archivist, whose researches had led to the rediscovery of the old Tuscan painting after so many centuries in the dark, is the very man to sift through the bundle of uncatalogued documents in the Vatican and bring to light a whole chain of dire events connected with the fourteenth-century painter, his model, and his drinking companion the village storyteller who recorded the events for posterity. Not even the archivist himself, living five hundred years later, is able to escape the dramatic influence of the picture - a portrait that at once enriches and destroys every life it touches

The Naked Madonna

Peter Rabbit Tales

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