Drawing on the author's own experiences of WW2, the novel's protagonist rebels against the pressures of family and politics in Fascist Italy. First published in 1949. By the author of Forbid... read more
Somerset Maugham appears as one of two narrators in this atmospheric novel of love, truth, secrecy and betrayal in 1920s' colonial Penang. Eng's airy storytelling is a rare gift: he gives hi... read more
A Chicago detective thinks he's found a piece of paradise in the west of Ireland... but all that glisters is not gold. Some of it is coldly gleaming revenge.
An excellent Catalan novel from the 1970s, about flight and return, in which the Civil War still looms over the tail-end of Franco's era and modernity blooms. A marvellous evocation of Barce... read more
The story of the inimitable Maria Callas - conflicted, disappointed, ambitious and supremely gifted - and of her love affair with Aristotle Onassis - by the author of The Fortune Hunter, My ... read more
A slim, charming and witty riff on Proustian themes - the shallowness of society, the impossibility of love, the enduring power of art... Life-affirming!
In the wake of the success of Baron Bagge in 2022, here's another tight novella by the Austrian mid-C20th novelist, this time about the fear of revenge after WW2.
The latest in Penguin's handsome and imaginative anthologies of national literatures: a hundred years of stories from the colonial period to the present.
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.
Acute, sensitive novel about a writer's psychic collapse. (The US edition has a different title - Dartmouth Park, which is far more Jane Austen than the contents.)
In this debut novel by a fine poet, a young woman's table-waiting, mould-spraying life of urban precariousness is disrupted by a glamorous stranger with a shared enemy.
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.
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 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.
Short stories and excerpts by Seth, Turgenev, Woolf, Mansfield, Nabokov, Angelou and many others. A new addition to the Everyman anthologies in stripey jackets.
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 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