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Diogo Mainardi

'The Fall is a moving portrait of a relationship with a child and a place. It is a rare book: by turns heartbreaking, angry and lyrical' – Edmund de Waal, author of The Hare With Amber Eyes. 
 
Step 1: Tito has cerebral palsy. 
 
Step 2: I blame Tito’s cerebral palsy on Pietro Lombardo. 
 
Join Diogo Mainardi and his son Tito in a journey of 424 steps, starting with Tito’s disastrous birth in Venice, in Lombardo’s Renaissance hospital. 
 
It’s a journey full of joy and reflection, and an honest exploration of fatherhood. It’s a journey that follows the arc of Western culture, from Dante Alighieri, Rembrandt van Rijn and Claude Monet to Marcel Proust, Neil Young and Assassin’s Creed, to show how one boy’s fate has been shaped by history. 
 
Above all, it’s a celebration of love and courage, and of the hope and faith we place in our children.

The Fall

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

Paul Durcan

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

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

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

George Orwell

An enlightening anthology of George Orwell's journalism and non-fiction writing, showing his genius across a wide variety of genres. Selected by leading expert Peter Davison. 
 
Famous for his novels and essays, Orwell remains one of our very best journalists and commentators. Confronting social, political and moral dilemmas head-on, he was fearless in his writing: a champion of free speech, a defender against social injustice and a sharp-eyed chronicler of the age. But his work is also timeless, as pieces on immigration, Scottish independence and a Royal Commission on the Press attest. 
 
 Seeing Things As They Are, compiled by renowned Orwell scholar Peter Davison, brings together in one volume many of Orwell’s articles and essays for journals and newspapers, his broadcasts for the BBC, and his book, theatre and film reviews. Little escaped Orwell’s attention: he writes about the Spanish Civil War, public schools and poltergeists, and reviews books from Brave New World to Mein Kampf. Almost half of his popular ‘As I Please’ weekly columns, written while literary editor of the Tribune during the 1940s, are collected here, ranging over topics as diverse as the purchase of rose bushes from Woolworth’s to the Warsaw Uprising. 
 
 Whether political, poetic, polemic or personal, this is surprising, witty and intelligent writing to delight in. A mix of well-known and intriguing, less familiar pieces, this engaging collection illuminates our understanding of Orwell’s work as a whole.

Seeing Things as They Are

Selected Journalism and Other Writings

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

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

Nineteen Eighty-Four

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

The Art Of Life

Haruki Murakami

Fully illustrated and beautifully designed, this is a unique and wonderfully creepy tale that is sure to delight Murakami fans. 
 
 'All I did was go to the library to borrow some books'. 
 
 On his way home from school, the young narrator of The Strange Library finds himself wondering how taxes were collected in the Ottoman Empire. He pops into the local library to see if it has a book on the subject. This is his first mistake. 
 
 Led to a special 'reading room' in a maze under the library by a strange old man, he finds himself imprisoned with only a sheep man, who makes excellent donuts, and a girl, who can talk with her hands, for company. His mother will be worrying why he hasn't returned in time for dinner and the old man seems to have an appetite for eating small boy's brains. How will he escape? 
 
'The best novelist on the planet' Observer

The Strange Library

Lawrence Osborne

‘I am taking a few months off to travel and wander, drinking my way across the Islamic world to see whether I can dry myself out, cure myself of a bout of alcoholic excess. It is a personal crisis, a private curiosity… I am curious to see how non-drinkers live. Perhaps they have something to teach me.’ 
 
Booze is mankind's premier drug of choice, the most popular mind-altering substance ever devised, and it plays a furtive, celebrated and subversive role in nearly every culture on earth. In The Wet and the Dry, Lawrence Osborne explores the culture of permission, particularly in the West, and the opposing culture of prohibition, notably in the Islamic East. 
 
Osborne’s globe-trotting odyssey takes him from the luxurious bars of Milan to the vineyards of Lebanon, threatened by Hezbollah; from Swedish vodka to Pakistani strawberry gin; from the Nellie Dean pub in Soho to the dangerous brothels and drinking dens on the Malaysian border; from the boutique scotch produced on Islay to the liquor destroying Native American reservations; and from the only brewery in the dry country of Pakistan to the search for a bottle of New Year’s champagne in Oman. All the while, Osborne’s own Irish family history of terrifying alcoholism fails to deter him from seeking out a drink wherever he can.

The Wet And The Dry

A Drinker's Journey

A selection of George Orwell's prescient, clear-eyed and stimulating writing on the subjects of truth and lies. With an introduction by Alan Johnson. 
 
'Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two equals four. If that is granted, all else follows.' 
 
This selection of George Orwell’s writing, from both his novels and non-fiction, gathers together his thoughts on the subject of truth. It ranges from discussion of personal honesty and morality, to freedom of speech and political propaganda. Orwell’s unique clarity of thought and illuminating scepticism provide the perfect defence against our post-truth world of fake news and confusion. 
 
'The further a society drifts from the truth, the more it will hate those that speak it.' 
 
Includes an introduction by Alan Johnson and passages from Burmese Days, The Road to Wigan Pier, Coming Up for Air, The Lion and the Unicorn, Animal Farm, Nineteen Eighty-Four, Orwell’s letters, war-time diary, criticism and essays including ‘Fascism and Democracy’, ‘Culture and Democracy’, ‘Looking Back on the Spanish War’, ‘As I Please’, ‘Notes on Nationalism’, ‘The Prevention of Literature’, ‘Politics and the English Language’ and ‘Why I Write’.

Orwell on Truth

Volume 8 of The Complete Works of George Orwell 
 
Rejected by such eminent figures as Victor Gollancz and T.S. Eliot (for Faber &amp; Faber), and by Jonathan Cape (influenced by ‘an important official at the Ministry of Information’), Animal Farm was published to great acclaim by Martin Secker &amp; Warburg on 17 August 1945 in an edition of 4,500 copies. Orwell’s immortal satire – ‘contre Stalin’ as himself wrote to his French translator – is as vivid and pungent today as it was on its first publication, and can be read on many levels. Orwell subtitled the book ‘A Fairy Story’, a genre in which he was keenly interested. It combines the poster-paint clarity of fable with the dark and mordant tones of a bitter political allegory. 
 
Animal Farm is indisputably a masterpiece, and places Orwell firmly in the great satirical tradition of Swift and Defoe. This edition incorporates all Orwell’s changes and reproduces his introduction, ‘The Freedom of the press’, which in the event he withdrew, and the preface to the Ukrainian edition, in its complete form, written at the request of the Ukrainian Displaced Persons Organisation in Munich. Also published here for the first time is Orwell’s dramatisation of Animal Farm for BBC Radio (1947).

Animal Farm

José Eduardo Agualusa

While swimming in the clear blue waters of the Rainbow Hotel, Daniel Benchimol finds a waterproof camera, floating seemingly lost in the sea. He goes on to discover that the camera belongs to Moira, a Mozambican artist famous for a series of photos depicting her own dreams. On seeing the images, Daniel realises that Moira is also the mysterious woman whom he has been dreaming about repeatedly. The two meet, and Daniel becomes involved in a unusual dream experiment with a Brazilian neuroscientist, who's working with Moira on a machine to film and photograph people’s dreams. 
 
Meanwhile, Daniel’s daughter Karinguiri, one of Angola’s young dreamers, is arrested along with six friends for staging a protest during a presidential press conference in Luanda. The group go on hunger strike, attracting worldwide press attention, showing the power of young people when they raise their voices against the regime. 
 
The Society of Reluctant Dreamers is a surreal, vivid novel about the slipperiness of truth and reality, art versus dictatorship, courage versus fear, change and the old order, amidst the politics of Angola's tumultuous past, present and future.

The Society of Reluctant Dreamers

Donald Sammut

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

Of Love and Desire

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

Greetings to Our Friends in Brazil

Carmen Martin Gaite

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

Living's The Strange Thing

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

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

Harry Dodge

‘Where can the human animal seek its energy in this era of lockdowns and social distancing? Dodge may help us to find out’ Guardian 
 
‘If you’re a fan of Maggie Nelson’s work, you’ll like this book. It’s truly beautiful’ Dazed 
 
Is love a force akin to gravity? A kind of invisible fabric which enables communications through space and time? Artist Harry Dodge finds himself contemplating such questions as his father declines from dementia and he rekindles a bewildering but powerful relationship with his birth mother. A meteorite Dodge orders on eBay becomes a mysterious catalyst for a reckoning with the vital forces of matter, the nature of consciousness, and the bafflements of belonging. 
 
 Structured around a series of formative, formidable coincidences in Dodge’s life, My Meteorite journeys with stylistic bravura from Barthes to Blade Runner, from punk to Pale Fire. It is a wild, incandescent book that creates a literary universe of its own. Blending the personal and the philosophical, the raw and the surreal, the transgressive and the heartbreaking, Harry Dodge revitalizes our world, illuminating the magic just under the surface of daily life. 
 
'Holds you in its thrall like a brilliant friend. Dodge is a masterful writer' Miranda July

My Meteorite

Or, Without The Random There Can Be No New Thing

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

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

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

Maria Gainza

At a hotel in Buenos Aires, a woman checks in under a pseudonym. She wears a black fur shawl and has no luggage. She is alone. 
 
Over the coming days and nights, she tells a story, which begins with a secret shared in a local bath house, revealing art forgery and fraud on a dazzling scale. At its heart is an enigmatic genius who for years forged portraits of the city's elite, before disappearing without trace. It is a story of influence and intrigue, in which nothing is as it seems. We're not to expect 'names, numbers or dates', she cautions, but a more subtle kind of reckoning... 
 
Told in a mordant, irresistible voice and full of sharp surprises, Portrait of an Unknown Lady is a captivating enquiry into what we mean by 'authenticity', in life as in art. At once poised and capricious, elegant and bold, it is a thrilling exploration of the relationships between what is lived, what is told, what is remembered, and what is real.

Portrait of an Unknown Lady

Gonzalo Torné

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

Divorce is in the Air

George Orwell was an inveterate keeper of diaries. Eleven diaries are presented here, and we know there may be two more from his time in Spain hidden away in the NKVD Archives in Moscow. Covering the period 1931-1949, this volume follows Orwell from his early years as a writer up to his last literary notebook. 
 
His Hop-Picking Diary covers some of Orwell's time spent down and out; a wonderful entry from 1931 tells of a communal shave in the Trafalgar Square fountains. The notes from his travels through industrial England, which formed the basis of The Road to Wigan Pier, show the development of the gifted young novelist and impassioned social commentator. 'Frightful landscape of slag-heaps and belching chimneys.[...] Beards of ice on lock gates.' This same acute power of observation is evident in his diaries from Morocco, where he also encountered extreme poverty. We catch a glimpse of a different Orwell at home. His domestic diaries chart the progress of his garden and animals with a keen eye, from the succinct, 'Pig active again.' to the more poetic, 'One of the plants that carries the snow most beautifully is lavender.' 
 
The wartime diaries make fascinating reading, from descriptions of events overseas, to the daily violence closer to home and his astute perspective on the politics of both. Orwell offers a different take on the typical view of the home front. 'War is simply a reversal of civilised life, its motto is "Evil be thou my good", and so much of the good of modern life is actually evil that it is questionable whether on balance war does harm.' 
 
The diaries provide a new and entirely refreshing insight into Orwell's character and help towards an understanding of his great works.

Diaries

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

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.

Laurent Quintreau

Eleven executives are seated round a meeting room table. Their voices make up this novel. The president harangues them about cost cutting, restructuring, redundancy. As they feign attention the reader is privy to their most intimate thoughts. 
 
There's the self-destructive violence of the former chief executive, the depraved cynicism of the man on the make, the gruelling daily routine of a working mother, the glacial despair of the HR director, the libidinous fantasies of the career bureaucrat. All have one thing in common: each of them, from the depths of their frustration, is at war with all the others. 
 
At the centre of this Divine Comedy, like Lucifer with a business school sheen, reigns Rorty, the president, a blue-eyed corporate assassin. Gross Margin is a savage and hilarious novel about contemporary office life.

Gross Margin

Amil

We had always been rare and mysterious creatures. We’d been taught this ever since we were children. 
 
With strong roots in feminist science fiction and fantasy, Roadkill’s exhilarating stories transport us to strange new worlds. 
 
In a near future where women are an endangered minority, two young friends try to break free from a facility designed for those few who can still give birth. Every year in a secluded seaside village, a maiden is sacrificed to a divine sea serpent. Elsewhere, the last female shaman of an indigenous tribe tells her stories to a visiting research team. And in South Korea’s Alps Grand Park, the residents exist in an exclusive world dominated by giant air purifier towers as others are left to live in the shade. 
 
The women in these stories find themselves trapped – by circumstance, society or tradition – as they fight for a means of escape. This sweeping and subversive collection celebrates their strength and their courage, their desire for independence and self-expression. 
 
Translated by Archana Madhavan

Roadkill

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