Petterson has not been kind to his protagonist, removing from him by traumatic means his wife, three daughters, parents and brothers. It is no surprise that he is pole-axed by grief; will Pe... read more
Soon after her husband leaves her, Pru goes to a friend's funeral - but it's the wrong one. She has such fun that she buys a black dress and starts attending strangers' funerals quite delibe... read more
A powerful exploration of illicit desire, in which a 17-year-old girl has a crush on a friend of her parents that turns on some dark events of 24 years previously.
Friends are hard to find for Jon Swift, an aging journalist whose career is on the ropes. A chance encounter with an old friend from Tiananmen Square days leads to power games in China, with... read more
An artist joins an island community of impoverished like-minded souls. When the island's owner pushes up the rent, a conflict ensues in which the dispossessed protest against gentrification.
A new edition of this magnificent, subtle novel of unlikely courage, frailty, love and betrayal in Lisbon, under Salazar's dictatorship. As Diana Athill wrote, reading it is an experience by... read more
A wonderful novel moving between the Shah's Iran, Bahrain and England, in which the murky origins of an English family's wealth emerge following the disappearance of a Cambridge student in E... read more
Tabucchi's paean to old Lisbon and to Fernando Pessoa is comic, elegiac, very clever, slightly surreal and hugely enjoyable. One of three new editions of his work.
The author is Faroese-Danish; her novel is about a return to the Faroes by someone who has never been there but "is" Faroese. Considers the idea of home, exile, belonging... We include it be... read more
Another in this terrific series that has already included anthologies from Japan and Italy. Stories from the C19th to the present chosen by the greatest living translator of Spanish literatu... read more
A dizzying and quietly surreal novel of South London life narrated through an interlinked series of episodic character studies. Ridgway's neo-Beckettian prose is never less than needle sharp... read more
Jergovic is a prominent Croatian novelist, poet and journalist. Here he explores his family's history through the C20th, using odd bits and pieces of family paraphernalia as spy-glasses to p... read more
A dazzling Gothic tale set in the Salpetriere asylum in 1885 and its annual ball, under the controlling and sinister hand of Dr Charcot. A startling insight into the treatment of women in th... read more