Smoky, noirish novel that follows an actress from her childhood in provincial Hungary to the glamour - and strictures - of her career behind the Iron Curtain.
Escape to the West and life in the East through the eyes of a young woman loyal to the GDR: oppression in conflict with idealism. First published in East Germany in 1963.
Irreverent, witty and often barmy novel about how people make sense of war. Begins in 1940 with a young woman running naked down the boulevard du Montparnasse.
AZ conjures lives, relationships, families, political upheavals in just a few paragraphs. This clever, tranquil novella begins with a professor telling his stepdaughter a bedtime story about... read more
A PhD student thinks she's identified the first female British artist, then discovers an error in her research. An Icelandic novella about ambition and untruth.
In a remote Austrian valley during WW1, a woman tries to provide for her family after her husband is drafted into the army. Based on the author's own family history. Powerful, succinct.
The plight of post-Civil War Madrid is told through the voices of over 300 characters. A new NYRB edition of this raucous, fragmentary novel, first published in 1950.
Ada is not one woman but many: from the Ada that gives birth in pre-colonial west-Africa to a young pregnant Ghanaian arriving in C21st Berlin. Translated from the German.
Nevinson, the retired spy whom we met in Berta Isla, becomes entangled in the lives of three women. The last novel by this late and much lamented author is labyrinthine and brilliant...
Another slim, powerful novel from this excellent writer: as in The Order of the Day, he shows the web of overlapping and competing interests amongst politicians, industrialists and financier... read more
The French-Lebanese writer - no stranger to complicated ethnicities or religious groups - has set this novel in a small Albanian community in the mountains of southern Italy. Often comic, so... read more
A snakes-and-ladders novella about the misplaced confidence of a bossy widow, whose aspirations to a life of refinement and social elevation bring about her downfall. Ginzburg, as ever, is l... read more
Another of Ginzburg's lambent, ironic novellas: this time about a spoilt boy who grows into a feckless youth. Both he and his parents are blinded by unrealistic hopes, while his sister (the ... read more
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
First translation of his novel set in Naples in the shadow of WW2, about a railway clerk, thwarted in his artistic ambitions, and his long-suffering family. Published in Italian 20 years ago... read more
Louis XV's astronomer sails the seas to observe the transit of Venus; two and half centuries later his telescope draws a man to a woman. A new novel by the author of other, gently off-beat r... read more
A young farm lad falls asleep in a boat and drifts down the river: a week of liberated, pastoral bliss ensues. First published in 1945, this is the first new translation since the 1950s. By ... read more
Death, divination and a succession of murders, set in the crumbling grandeur of a once great house... Another treat for those who loved The Inugami Curse and others by this master of the gen... read more
The mayor of Barcelona is being blackmailed with a sex tape from her student days and there are several interested parties who would gladly see her resignation. The first in a new series by ... read more