Badenheim 1939
Badenheim 1939
'A masterpiece ... the greatest novel of the Holocaust' The Guardian

Badenheim, a resort town near the forests of Vienna, is preparing for the arts festival of the summer season. The hotel workers and local tradespeople rush to prepare the small town for the influx of vacationers. But just as the season is getting into full swing, a small note appears on a municipal notice board: the Sanitation Department is announcing an increase in its jurisdiction. No one knows what the Sanitation Department is, but no matter – the festival carries on.

Soon inspectors are spread all over town, bringing estrangement, suspicion and mistrust wherever they go. Meanwhile, the guests carry on pursuing their pleasures and the townspeople attend to their troubles. Then another announcement appears: all Jews must register with the Sanitation Department.

An allegory, satire and fable all in one, Badenheim 1939 is a story of denial and normalisation, masterfully creating an atmosphere of impending dread and horror. Gripping and unforgettable, this is one of most intriguing and eerie books ever written about the Holocaust.
Katerina
Katerina
The teenage Katerina flees her abusive home in a poor, Christian village in the 1880s, finding work and shelter in the home of a Jewish family, and in the warmth of their family life and beauty of their Jewish rituals she begins to know safety for the first time. Their life is brutally disrupted when a pogrom is wrought upon the family, and Katerina finds herself alone again. Decades later, having suffered and retaliated for that suffering, she looks out of the window of her prison cell and sees the trains carrying Jews across Europe.

Released from prison into the chaos following the end of World War II, a now elderly Katerina is devastated to find a world that has been emptied of its Jews and that is not at all sorry to see them gone. Ever the outsider, Katerina realizes that she has survived only to bear witness to the fact that they had ever existed at all.

A rare glimpse into Jewish and gentile life in Eastern Europe in the nineteenth century, Katerina explores the long origins of the Holocaust, alongside darkness and light, cruelty and mercy.
Return to My Native Land
Return to My Native Land
'We shall speak. We shall sing. We shall shout.' This blazing autobiographical poem by the founder of the négritude movement became a rallying cry for decolonisation when it appeared in 1939. Following one man's return from Europe to his homeland of Martinique, it is a reckoning with the trauma of slavery and exploitation, and a triumphant anthem for Black identity, one which reclaims and remakes language itself.

'Nothing less than the greatest lyrical monument of this time' André Breton
'A Césaire poem explodes and whirls about itself like a rocket, suns burst forth whirling and exploding' Jean-Paul Sartre
'The most influential Francophone Caribbean writer of his generation' Independent
The Story of a Life
The Story of a Life
Aharon Appelfeld was the beloved only child of middle-class Jewish parents living in what is now Ukraine at the outbreak of World War Two. Their peaceful life is upended when soldiers invade their town. His mother is shot dead in her own garden. The then-seven-year-old Aharon does not witness her murder, but he does hear her scream.

Aharon and his father are sent to a concentration camp and separated. Memory and trauma combine to create a patchwork of reminiscences. Aharon is ten years old when he escapes from the camp into the forests of Ukraine, and is overwhelmed by the sight of an apple tree laden with fruit.

Living off the land for two years before making the long journey south to Italy and eventually Israel and freedom, Appelfeld finally found a home in which he could make a life for himself, eventually becoming one of Israel’s most acclaimed writers. This is the extraordinary and painful memoir of his childhood and youth and a compelling account of a boy coming of age in a hostile world.
Death in Midsummer
Death in Midsummer
Bringing together Yukio Mishima's finest stories, this selection shows his extraordinary ability to depict a wide variety of human beings in moments of significance. A moonlit journey to fulfil a wish; a mother lost in mourning; a night of infidelity; and a young lieutenant who ends his life. Filled with rich description and luxurious beauty, these hauntingly beautiful short stories from one of Japan's greatest writers show the pull between duty and desire, ecstasy and death.

In the title story, 'Death in Midsummer', which is set at a beach resort, a triple tragedy becomes a cloud of doom that requires exorcising. In another, 'Patriotism', a young army officer and his wife choose a way of vindicating their belief in ancient values that is as violent as it is traditional; it prefigured his own death by seppuku in November 1970. There is a story in which the sad truth of the relationship between a businessman and his former mistress is revealed through a suggestion of the unknown, and another in which a working-class couple, touching in their simple love for each other, pursue financial security by rather shocking means.
Golden Age
Golden Age
'Life is but a slow, drawn-out process of getting your balls crushed.'

Twenty-one-year-old Wang Er, stationed in a remote mountain commune, spends his days herding oxen, napping and dreaming of losing his virginity. His dreams come true in the shape of the beautiful doctor Cheng Qinyang. So begins the riotously funny story of their illicit love affair, the Party officials who enjoy their forced confessions a little too much, and Wang's life under the Communist regime: his misadventures as a biology lecturer in a Beijing university, and his entanglements with family, friends and lovers. Golden Age is an explosive, subversive, wild and hilarious satire, featuring one of literature's great protagonists, a sensation when it was published in the 1990s and beloved today.
Pleasure of Thinking
Pleasure of Thinking
Wang Xiaobo made his name as a novelist but his essays, too, have become ongoing bestsellers in China since their publication in the 1990s. Bringing together his thoughts on reading and talking and silence in the Cultural Revolution, about the irrepressible spirit of one beloved pig he met while an 'educated youth', and about being operated on via a textbook, these essays give a rare glimpse into a world rarely seen and discussed with such honesty.

Written with a light touch and with a wry sense of humour, these are also the essays of a great literary talent, grappling with sociology, sexuality and feminism, with the cultural clash of living in the USA, and with Chinese sci-fi, the internet, and beloved European writers like Bertrand Russell and Italo Calvino. Electrifying, containing a razor-sharp wit and intellect, this collection reveals the voice of a generation to English-speaking readers for the very first time.
Brideshead Revisited
Brideshead Revisited
The most nostalgic and reflective of Evelyn Waugh's novels, Brideshead Revisited looks back to the golden age before the Second World War. It tells the story of Charles Ryder's infatuation with the Marchmains and the rapidly-disappearing world of privilege they inhabit. Enchanted first by Sebastian at Oxford, then by his doomed Catholic family, in particular his remote sister, Julia, Charles comes finally to recognize only his spiritual and social distance from them.
Decline and Fall
Decline and Fall
Sent down from Oxford for indecent behaviour, Paul Pennyfeather is oddly unsurprised to find himself qualifying for the position of schoolmaster at Llanabba Castle. His colleagues are an assortment of misfits, rascals and fools, including Prendy (plagued by doubts) and Captain Grimes, who is always in the soup (or just plain drunk). Then Sports Day arrives, and with it the delectable Margot Beste-Chetwynde, floating on a scented breeze. As the farce unfolds and the young run riot, no one is safe, least of all Paul.
Vile Bodies
Vile Bodies
The Bright Young Things of 1920s Mayfair, with their paradoxical mix of innocence and sophistication, exercise their inventive minds and vile bodies in every kind of capricious escapade, whether it is promiscuity, dancing, cocktail parties or sports cars. A vivid assortment of characters, among them the struggling writer Adam Fenwick-Symes and the glamorous, aristocratic Nina Blount, hunt fast and furiously for ever greater sensations and the hedonistic fulfilment of their desires.

Evelyn Waugh's acidly funny and experimental satire shows a new generation emerging in the years after the First World War, revealing the darkness and vulnerability beneath the glittering surface of the high life.
Baron Bagge
Baron Bagge
Baron Bagge, a cavalry officer stationed in Eastern Europe during the First World War, receives orders to ride into a platoon of Russian machine guns. But instead of meeting certain death, he and his brigade pass, unscathed, into a bizarrely peaceful land where festivities are in full swing. There he meets Charlotte Szent-Kiraly, and finds himself falling in a strange, enchanted love - a love harrowed at its edges by the threat of the enemy, and the peculiar fragility of this country's otherworldly peace . . .
Count Luna
Count Luna
Alexander Jessiersky, Austrian aristocrat and shipping magnate, finds the Nazis distasteful - but in war and in business, distaste can lead to negligence. When Jessiersky's board of directors sends his mysterious neighbour Count Luna to a concentration camp on trumped-up charges in order to seize his land, Jessiersky can't shake the feeling that Count Luna blames him - and, after the war ends, that Count Luna will have his revenge. So begins a wild, weird and witty cat-and-mouse chase through windswept moors, shadow-filled houses and, eventually, the catacombs of Rome, as an increasingly paranoid Jessiersky asks himself: who is Count Luna? Where is he hiding? And will he stop at nothing - not even the edges of the plausible and canny - to exact his bloody venegance?
Love's Work
Love's Work
Gillian Rose was a star academic, acclaimed as one of the most dazzling and original thinkers of her time. Told that she had incurable cancer, she found a new way to explore the world and herself. Tender, heartbreakingly honest and written with moments of surprising humour, Love's Work is the exhilarating result.

In this short, unforgettable memoir, Rose looks back on her childhood, from the young dyslexic girl, torn between father and stepfather, to the adolescent confronting her Jewish inheritance. As an adult, Gillian Rose proves herself a passionate friend, a searcher for truth, a woman in love and, finally, an exacting but generous patient.

Intertwining the personal and the philosophical, Rose meditates on faith, conflict and injustice; the fallibility and endurance of love; our yearning for independence and for connection to others. With droll self-knowledge ('I am highly qualified in unhappy love affairs,' Rose writes) and with unsettling wisdom ('To live, to love, is to be failed'), Love's Work asks the unanswerable question: how is a life best lived?
Bound to Violence
Bound to Violence
Envisioned as a criticism of and insider's guide to African history, this dark, pugancious epic, spanning the thirteenth to the twentieth centuries, recounts the fate of the imaginary empire of Nakem. With its acerbic pen portraits of the dynasty of devious, asp-wielding Saïfs who reign in Nakem; visiting white exploiters and saviours; and persecuted citizens - especially the tragicomic, Paris-educated hero Raymond-Spartacus Kassoumi - Bound to Violence is a biting satire of unusual and alarming power.

In this new edition, professor and award-winning documentary filmmaker Chérif Keïta provides invaluable context for the novel, whose publication in the West was mired by accusations of plagiarism fraught with racist undertones. What emerges is a thrillingly excessive, defiant novel that paints a universally relevant portrait of sex, violence and power in human relationships.
Poems: 1968-2020
Poems: 1968-2020
Nikki Giovanni's poetry has dazzled and inspired readers for more than sixty years. When she first emerged from the Black Arts Movement in the late 1960s, she immediately became one of the most celebrated and controversial poets of the era. Now considered a living legend, this is the first new selection since the late 1990s and offers readers a chance to be introduced to and to celebrate her incredible lifetime's work.

Giovanni’s poetry has always been a powerful expression of her ideas about love, race, politics and gender, but part of that power has also been the sensitive and intimate way Giovanni is able to bring to light the heart and soul of herself and her readers. Giovanni's poetry speaks from and to the Black experience, with Black love, Black struggle and Black joy at the centre. Arranged chronologically and spanning the entirety of her career, this selection charts not only the development of a great poet but also of sixty years of American life, bringing together motherhood and revolution, political dreams and great loves, men, women, children and community, and shows Giovanni at her essential, profound best.
Beware of Pity
Beware of Pity
'I can't take any more of your revolting merciful kindness!'

Who would have thought that the great military hero Captain Hofmiller - that living monument to his own courage - would have anything burdening his soul? But when he reveals his story, it is not one of bravery but tragedy: a simple blunder at a dance from which disaster grows, ruining lives with his weak, foolish pity...

Beware of Pity is Stefan Zweig's greatest novel, fiercely capturing human emotions in all their subtleties and extremes - while Hofmiller, his unforgettable, naïve creation, misunderstands everything, resulting in his downfall.

Translated by Jonathan Katz.

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