The fragmented recollections of a handful of survivors of the earthquake that struck the northern Friuli in 1976. Their tiny village high in the Julian Alps, beneath the immense karstic mass... read more
Vicenzo Fontano, the elderly owner of a bookshop, looks back over their conjoined lives on the eve of its closure for redevelopment by greedy speculators. Political and cultural dissidents, ... read more
A vivid novel about Edith Somerville, co-author of the Irish R.M., set against the backdrop of burnings, politics and lawlessness of Ireland in the early 1920s.
A merry retelling of Mitford's The Pursuit of Love set in contemporary Norfolk. Of course it is sacrilege to tamper with Mitford's original, but Knight of all people might just pull it off. ... read more
The murderer from The Book of Evidence is released from prison and enters the troubled world of the Godleys, whom we met in Infinities. Tricksy (of course) and brilliant.
A novel about the harrowing life of the great Russian poetess. She was involved with both Pasternak and Rilke; her daughter died in the Moscow famine; her husband was executed; and she herse... read more
A powerful novel spanning forty years of friendship between two women. Events in Karachi in 1988 look rather different when seen from present day London, when each has power and an altered a... read more
Reymont was a Polish novelist who won the Nobel prize in 1924; this is his magnum opus, an epic of nearly 1000 pages set in the C19th, about a small Polish village. At its centre are a weal... read more
The life of the black Georgian composer and abolitionist (1729-1780), thrillingly imagined. Born on a slave ship, his owner gave him, as a two-year-old, to three sisters living in Greenwich.... read more
Flemish collaboration in WW2, by the author of War and Turpentine, who bought an old house in Ghent only to discover, after twenty years, that a previous occupant was an SS officer. Hertmans... read more
A long novel in which an artist watches versions of himself slip away into alcohol and loneliness. (Previously published as three separate paperbacks).
A deft and powerful retelling of the myth of Medusa - the only mortal born to a family of gods, whose life was upended by Athene's revenge on Poseidon. Haynes' work is always exciting.
Two families tangled in a story of forbidden love, from the Georgian author (who writes in German) of the bestselling The Eighth Life. This is considerably shorter than that first, excellent... read more