A story handed down through generations of women becomes a tale within tales, accumulating myths and family histories. Translated from the Romanian. The author has won the EU Prize for Liter... read more
A dizzying tale of social collapse, generational impasse and mid-life crisis; a Bonfire of the Vanities set in London. Brilliantly observed, lean, slick, clever and gripping.
A quiet and thoughtful novel about a girl growing up on an island off the Welsh coast before WW2, whose horizons are altered by the arrival of two ethnographers.
We will be very sorry to see Handheld Press go - this, their penultimate publication, celebrates Nesbit's eye for the domestic uncanny in Edwardian England.
Powerful debut novel set in a coastal Irish town, where women must navigate their emotional lives among hard, manipulative men. Fine characterisation and atmosphere.
A novel (Tatting, 1957) in which a just-married young couple go to Cornwall where the inhabitants are definitely odd, and a group of short stories about the complexities of love and sex (Man... read more
A spin on Huckleberry Finn, this harrowing (and characteristically witty) account of his adventures is narrated by James, a runaway slave. It's a scary reflection on racism today.
The passage of time and unseen overlaps echo back and forth in the lives of two couples living at different times in one Parisian flat. By the author of Flaneuse: Women Walk the City.
Breaking free of conformity, a woman leaves her husband, flat and career for a new, queer life: first part of an autofictional trilogy; the prequel in fact to last year's Love Me Tender.
Not all are hidden by luxuriant, pointy moustaches... The painter's only novel is a baroque and decadent tale set in the 1930s, first published in 1944.
A slim, charming and witty riff on Proustian themes - the shallowness of society, the impossibility of love, the enduring power of art... Life-affirming!
A deliciously-written debut novel, in which a harried civil servant is assigned to help a Victorian time-traveller adjust to the C21st. By turns a romance, a thriller and an acid critique of... read more
A Japanese man tries to form a relationship with his half-French child, who has grown up on the other side of the world. The other side of the story told in A Single Rose, this nevertheless ... read more
It has been raining - constantly - for years; in a city that is largely submerged, three sisters contend with a sinister legacy. Tender, spooky, apocalyptic.
As six astronauts orbit the earth in a space station, collecting scientific data, their attention is tugged t by distant human events and relationships. Beautifully written, this is an affec... read more
A production of Hamlet in Palestine and the complexities of home-coming: inevitably theatre is political and there are consequences. By the British-Palestinian author of The Parisian.
The US edition of How to Make a Bomb (which didn't get past the legal team across the pond...). It’s a heady, swirling novel about a writer's psychic collapse which begins in Norway and t... read more
The murder of a teenager in a seaside town on the eve of the Brexit vote is painstakingly researched by a journalist: a mirror-ball of voyeurism, manipulation and hypocrisy.
A love affair and its aftermath, set in the closing years of the GDR. The girl is young, the man significantly older; the alteration in their love finds a parallel in the oppression of the r... read more
A mother and her daughter navigate their betrayal by a ruthlessly self-regarding poet. Enright is superb at unpicking complex relationships and laying out their strands: we watch, spellbound... read more
Reminiscent of Süskind's Perfume or Andrew Miller's Ingenious Pain, this is set in C18th France and involves a physical prodigy. In this case, it is his ability to eat... By the author of T... read more
This glorious tapestry of a novel returns to Taylor's accustomed stomping ground - the university campus - with whisper-close third-person narration and minute observation worthy of his reve... read more
An Irish engineer living alone in Bilbao is the pivot for this meditation on memory, loss and the routines by which we try to hold on to them. Duncan's sparing prose captures minute details ... read more
An exuberant romp of a thriller: career-driven journalist Rika finds that the best way to secure an interview with a maybe-serial-killer is through her stomach, trying out the rich recipes t... read more
Smuggled out of the Soviet Union in 1982, this novel first appeared in English in 1987 and soon disappeared, to be resurrected thanks to Susan Sontag's enthusiasm for a 'scruffy-looking' cop... read more
A day with Monet - and his wife, children and grand-children - from before dawn to sundown - in the house and garden at Giverny. Figes' achievement in this novella is her delicate layering o... read more
A dark, funny reimagining of Shakespeare's Henriad. Hal is twenty-two, often drunk, drifting between parties, mass and his difficult family, until a shooting accident throws him into the pat... read more
A gloriously comic short novel from 1975, in which a journalist saves a hare and walks away from a wearisome life into a series of adventures with the hare as companion. Like our protagonist... read more
A handful of stories about five women whose recent experiences of difficult or painful events are leavened by life-enhancing - even life-altering - moments.
This powerful story is set in 1851 in the Arctic: a Lutheran minister's Sami convert has a son who inconveniently has a love affair with the minister's daughter.