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Gabriela Cabezón Cámara

WINNER OF THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FOR TRANSLATED LITERATURE 
 
From deep in the wilds of the New World, Antonio de Erauso writes a letter to his aunt, the prioress of the convent he escaped as a young girl. Since leaving his past behind, he’s become Antonio, conquistador. Now, hiding in the jungle and hounded by the army he deserted, Antonio is caring for two Guaraní girls he rescued from enslavement. But the New World has one more metamorphosis in store, which might save them all from extinction. 
 
Tender and surreal, We Are Green and Trembling conveys glimmers of hope for the future within the brutal colonial history of Latin America, finding in the rainforest a magical space for transformation.

We Are Green and Trembling

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

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

Beatriz Serrano

Life can’t go on like this – can it? This book is for everyone who has ever wanted more: more time, more meaning, more connection. 
 
On the surface, Marisa’s life looks enviable. She lives in a nice apartment in the heart of Madrid, her friendly neighbour and lover Pablo lives downstairs, and she’s risen quickly through the ranks at a successful advertising agency. 
 
And yet Marisa hates her job and everything about it. Over one hot summer, she spends her working hours locked in her office, bingeing on YouTube videos and getting high on tranquilizers, wondering if everyone cries when their alarm goes off in the morning. When she can, she escapes to the air-conditioned basement of the Prado Museum. 
 
But Marisa’s façade of success is in danger of being exposed as she’s forced to deliver a talk on creativity at her company’s horrendous annual team-building retreat. Surrounded by psychopathic bosses, annoyingly overzealous colleagues, flirty facilitators, and an excess of drugs, Marisa is pushed to the brink of a complete spiral. 
 
Told with acid humour to explosive consequences, Discontent is a dazzling tale of modern angst and finally acting on our wilder impulses to reclaim our lives from work.

Discontent

Kotaro Isaka

'Fascinating and thought provoking with some genuine surprises and incredibly clever ideas that kept me thinking about it long after I finished it… a Japanese Black Mirror!' Ajay Chowdhury, author of The Waiter 
 
Some mother-in-laws are hard. This one might be murder. 
 
Miyako suspects her mother-in-law is a murderer. It’s not just a case of them rubbing each other up the wrong way – there is definitely something suspicious going on. But Miyako isn’t exactly what she seems either. Her husband has no idea about her past life as a secret agent. When she decides to use her professional skills to investigate her mother-in-law, the delicate equilibrium of their lives is thrown wildly out of balance. 
 
Many decades later, in a future world where electronic communication has been irrevocably compromised, confidential messages must be delivered by trusted couriers like Mito. But one delivery pulls Mito into a conspiracy beyond his wildest imaginings, and forces him into a race against time to defeat a world-changing technological threat. 
 
Seesaw Monster contains two sharp, thrilling linked novellas - SEESAW MONSTER and SPIN MONSTER - from the bestselling and multi-award-winning writer Kotaro Isaka, internationally celebrated for his offbeat humour and inventive talent for twists. 
 
PRAISE FOR KOTARO ISAKA: 
 
‘Unlike anything you're likely to have read before . . . white-hot with double-crosses’ Financial Times 
 
‘Entertaining . . . high-speed . . . with lots of twists and turns’ The Times 
 
‘Thoroughly enjoyable’ Guardian

Seesaw Monster

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

Michel Laub

*Selected as one of the Best Books 2017 in the Financial Times* 
'One of Brazil’s finest authors offers a meditation on betrayal, guilt, survival and the many ways in which personal and collective histories collide' - Ángel Gurría-Quintana 
 
Is it better to burn out than to fade away? An entrancing novel of loss and regret, from the prizewinning Brazilian novelist Michel Laub. 
 
In this sinuous meditation on passion, youth and guilt, a man looks back over twenty years to his relationship with his first love, Valeria, and its tragic climax.. 
 
They both had tickets to Nirvana in 1993, the only gig the band ever played in Brazil. But he was on military service and failed to join her. She was there with his best friend instead. Consumed by insecurities and tricks of memory, he continues to feel, two decades later, that one fateful night has defined his entire adult life. 
 
Entwining this most personal story with seminal events of the 1990s, A Poison Apple circles around and back to some of the biggest questions: what is a life worth? What does it mean to really commit to living? And can we ever break free of the past? 
 
Successor to his prizewinning Diary of the Fall, this is a beautiful and haunting novel that shows Michel Laub at his mesmeric best.

A Poison Apple

"A Proustian journey into the interior, a dazzling psychodrama and, arguably, one of the best novels out of Spain in recent decades" Kirkus Reviews 
 
On the day he is released from prison in Madrid, Leonardo learns of his parents' death in a car crash. He returns to their empty town house, a rich young man now, but with a life to reconstruct out of fragments. At first all he wants is to be atone to took over books, diaries, and old photographs, the mute witnesses to his own childhood and his parents' wretched marriage. But in time he concentrates on the Quinta Blanca, the white house by the cuff edge where his grandmother used to nourish him on stories, especially Hans Christian Andersen's "The Snow Queen". 
 
When Leonardo revisits this childhood home at Christmas as the guest of its new owner, Casilda, he, too, has the sliver of ice removed from his heart by the one woman capable of doing so, and his own redemption is at hand. 
 
The Farewell Angel is about storytelling, about the determining power of stories to harm and to heat. Centered around a lighthouse and the sea-washed rocks beneath it, this haunting novel is a triumph of subtle narrative by the prize-winning author of Variable Cloud.

The Farewell Angel

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

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

Urs Faes

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

Twelve Nights

Dulce Chacon

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

The Sleeping Voice

Kristine Naess

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

Only Human

Paolo Sorrentino

‘I’m going back to what I was twenty years ago. I’m riding across a terrain of buried curiosity, the adrenaline is starting to flow again, and the old obsessions are coming back: I want to start doing cocaine every day, I want to run after every female who passes, I want to smell the smells of Italy again, I want my old life back. It’s a bit late for all that, I know, but who gives a fuck? I want to die stark naked, drowned in a well of Ballantine’s, surrounded by whores. All this I want, suddenly, I want it very much indeed. But I hide it well.’ 
 
 
This is the story of Tony Pagoda, a hero of our time, a man of incredible energies and appetites with a dark secret in his past and a unique perspective on the world. 
 
1980s Italy is Tony’s oyster. A charismatic singer, he is talented and successful, up to his neck in money, drugs and women, enjoying an extravagant lifestyle in Naples and Capri. But when life gets complicated, Tony decides it’s time for a change. While on tour, he disappears to Brazil and an existence free from excess, where all he has to worry about are the herculean cockroaches. But after eighteen years of humid Amazonian exile, somebody is willing to sign a giant cheque to bring Tony back to Italy. How will he face the temptations of his old habits and the new century? 
 
A huge bestseller in Italy, Everybody's Right is an extraordinary debut novel from the award-winning film director Paolo Sorrentino. It is a book about Italy and a book about the modern world; a book about Tony and a book about all of us. Through Tony’s irresistible voice Sorrentino illustrates his imaginative power and his incredible gifts for drama and satire.

Everybody's Right

Emi Yagi

Rika Horauchi’s new part-time job is to converse with a statue of Venus – in Latin – every Monday, when the museum is closed. 
 
Initially reluctant, Rika starts to enjoy her strange new job. Recommended by her old university professor for her exemplary language skills, Rika leads an otherwise unassuming life, working the rest of the week in a frozen-food warehouse. As Venus comes to life in the quiet of the museum, they talk about everything. Venus opens up new worlds for Rika, both intellectually and emotionally. They soon fall in love. But when the museum’s curator, Hashibami, makes it clear he wants to keep Venus for himself, what will Rika do? 
 
When the Museum is Closed is by turns charming, funny and surprising, a surreal take on our most real emotions and concerns: love, loneliness, freedom, perceptions of beauty and how women are seen in society. A joyful queer love story, this fresh and original new novel confirms Emi Yagi as one of the most exciting Japanese writers published in English today.

When the Museum is Closed

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

Per Petterson

Per Petterson masters the art of writing simply about big subjects, and this is the heartwarming debut that brought the author of the highly acclaimed Out Stealing Horses to prominence 
 
Arvid Jansen is a young boy who lives on the outskirts of Oslo. It’s the early sixties, his father works in a shoe factory and his Danish mother works as a cleaner. Arvid wets his bed at night and has nightmares about crocodiles, but slowly he is beginning to piece the world together. 
 
Per Petterson’s debut, in which he introduces Arvid Jansen to the world, is a delicate portrait of childhood in all its complexity, its wonders and confusions that will delight fans of Out Stealing Horses and new readers alike.

Ashes in My Mouth, Sand in My Shoes

Gabriela Ybarra

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

The Dinner Guest

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

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

Juli Zeh

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

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