A story of the transcendent power of love in wartime, A Constellation of Vital Phenomena is a work of sweeping breadth, profound compassion, and lasting significance.Two doctors risk everything to save the life of a hunted child in this majestic debut about love, loss, and the unexpected ties that bind us together. “On the morning after the Feds burned down her house and took her father, Havaa woke from dreams of sea anemones.” Havaa, eight years old, hides in the woods and watches the blaze until her neighbor, Akhmed, discovers her sitting in the snow. Akhmed knows getting involved means risking his life, and there is no safe place to hide a child in a village where informers will do anything for a loaf of bread, but for reasons of his own, he sneaks her through the forest to the one place he thinks she might be safe: an abandoned hospital where the sole remaining doctor, Sonja Rabina, treats the wounded.Though Sonja protests that her hospital is not an orphanage, Akhmed convinces her to keep Havaa for a trial, and over the course of five extraordinary days, Sonja’s world will shift on its axis and reveal the intricate pattern of connections that weaves together the pasts of these three unlikely companions and unexpectedly decides their fate.

From the best-selling author of Longbourn, a stunning new novel that follows an unnamed writer-Samuel Beckett-whose life and extraordinary literary gift are permanently shaped in the forge of war.When war breaks out in Europe in 1939, a young, unknown writer journeys from his home in neutral Ireland to conflict-ridden Paris and is drawn into the maelstrom. With him we experience the hardships yet stubborn vibrancy at the heart of Europe during the Nazis' rise to power; his friendships with James Joyce and other luminaries; his quietly passionate devotion to the Frenchwoman who will become his lifelong companion; his secret work for the French Resistance and narrow escapes from the Gestapo; his flight from occupied Paris to the countryside; and the rubble of his life after liberation. And through it all we are witness to workings of a uniquely brilliant mind struggling to create a language that will express his experience of this shattered world. Here is a remarkable story of survival and determination, and a portrait of the extremes of human experience alchemized into timeless art.

Far away, in the ancient empire of Greater Fallowfields, things are falling apart. The imperial orchestra is presided over by a conductor who has never played a note, the clocks are changed constantly to ensure that the sun always sets at five o' clock, and the Astronomer Royal is only able to use the observatory telescope when he can find a sixpence to put in its slot. But while the kingdom drifts, awaiting the return of the young emperor, who has gone abroad and communicates only by penny post, a sinister and unfamiliar enemy is getting closer and closer…A Cruel Bird Came to the Nest and Looked In is Magnus Mills's most ambitious work to date. A surreal portrait of a world that, although strange and distant, contains rather too many similarities to our own for the alien not to become brilliantly familiar and disturbingly close to home. It is comic writing at its best — and it is Magnus Mills's most ambitious, enjoyable and rewarding novel to date.

'Yes, bastard, you're the one I love' A pair of lovers — a young female journalist and an older man who owns an isolated farm in the Brazilian outback — spend the night together. The next day they proceed to destroy each other. Amid vitriolic insults, cruelty and warring egos, their sexual adventure turns into a savage power game. This intense, erotic cult novel by one of Brazil's most infamous modernist writers explores alienation, the desire to dominate and the wish to be dominated. A new translation by Stefan Tobler.

From the author of Silence Once Begun—one of our most audacious and original writers — a beguiling new novel about a man starting over at the most basic level, and the strange woman who insinuates herself into his life and memory.A man and a woman have moved into a small house in a small village. The woman is an "examiner," the man, her "claimant." The examiner is both doctor and guide, charged with teaching the claimant a series of simple functions: this is a chair, this is a fork, this is how you meet people. She makes notes in her journal about his progress: he is showing improvement, yet his dreams are troubling. One day, the examiner brings him to a party, and here he meets Hilda, a charismatic but volatile woman whose surprising assertions throw everything the claimant has learned into question. What is this village? Why is he here? And who is Hilda? A fascinating novel of love, illness, despair, and betrayal, A Cure for Suicide is the most captivating novel yet from one of our most exciting young writers.

Reading Dostoevsky in Afghanistan becomes “crime without punishment”Rassoul remembers reading Crime and Punishment as a student of Russian literature in Leningrad, so when, with axe in hand, he kills the wealthy old lady who prostitutes his beloved Sophia, he thinks twice before taking her money or killing the woman whose voice he hears from another room. He wishes only to expiate his crime and be rightfully punished. Out of principle, he gives himself up to the police. But his country, after years of civil war, has fallen into chaos. In Kabul there is only violence, absurdity, and deafness, and Rassoul’s desperate attempt to be heard turns into a farce.This is a novel that not only flirts with literature but also ponders the roles of sin, guilt, and redemption in the Muslim world. At once a nostalgic ode to the magic of Persian tales and a satire on the dire reality of now, A Curse on Dostoevsky also portrays the resilience and wit of Afghani women, an aspect of his culture that Rahimi never forgets.Review“Rahimi turns his attention to Crime and Punishment and juxtaposes literature against the Muslim world in Kabul, the themes of civil war, chaos, sin, guilt and redemption for Afghani women again being the theme. ‘Crime without punishment?’”—Electric Literature“A darkly comic meditation on life in a lawless land… In restrained prose, Rahimi explores both the personal and the political; it’s both in dialogue with a classic and is daringly outspoken.”—Publishers Weekly“In a rare imaginative feat, Rahimi renews many of Dostoevsky’s original psychological insights and opens piercing new ones. Unforgettable.”—Booklist (Starred) Review“Atiq Rahimi, like the great story tellers of Afghanistan, is a master of using a small moment to tell the sweeping story of the pain and loss of war. In A Curse on Dostoevsky he yet again imprints images in the memory, as he captures both the unspeakable absurdity of the Afghan civil war and the ingenious ways Afghans have found to move beyond it.”—Qais Akbar Omar, author of A Fort of Nine Towers: An Afghan Family Story“Rahimi does a masterful job both in echoing Dostoevsky and in updating the moral complexities his protagonist both creates and faces.”—Kirkus“Here, Atiq Rahimi sings an incandescent, raging story, which dissects, in a highly sensitive way, the chaos of his homeland and the contradictions of his people.”—L’Express

With prose that is at once sensual and spare, dreamlike and deliberate, Christine Schutt gives voice in this collection to what most keep hidden. Many of the stories take place in the home, where what is behind the thin domestic barriers of doors tends toward violence, unseemly sexual encounters, and mental anguish. Schutt opens these doors in sudden, bold moments and exposes the unsettling intimacy of the rooms and corridors of our innermost lives. Yet at the same time, her characters are often hopeful, even optimistic.Startling and smartly wrought, A Day, a Night, Another Day, Summer is a breathtaking follow-up to Schutt's widely revered debut collection, Nightwork, and her critically acclaimed debut novel, Florida, which was a National Book Award Finalist.

Jerry Delfont leads an aimless life in Calcutta, struggling in vain against his writer's block, or 'dead hand,' and flitting around the edges of a half-hearted romance. Then he receives a mysterious letter asking for his help. The story it tells is disturbing: A dead boy found on the floor of a cheap hotel, a seemingly innocent man in flight and fearing for reputation as well as his life.Before long, Delfont finds himself lured into the company of the letter's author, the wealthy and charming Merrill Unger, and is intrigued enough to pursue both the mystery and the woman. A devotee of the goddess Kali, Unger introduces Delfont to a strange underworld where tantric sex and religious fervor lead to obsession, philanthropy and exploitation walk hand in hand, and, unless he can act in time, violence against the most vulnerable in society goes unnoticed and unpunished.An atmospheric and masterful thriller from "the most gifted, the most prodigal writer of his generation"-Jonathan Raban.

Shortlisted for the 2015 Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse prize for comic fiction.A rampaging force of nature is wreaking havoc on the streets of Edinburgh, but has top shagger, drug-dealer, gonzo-porn-star and taxi-driver, ‘Juice’ Terry Lawson, finally met his match in Hurricane ‘Bawbag’?Can Terry discover the fate of the missing beauty, Jinty Magdalen, and keep her idiot-savant lover, the man-child Wee Jonty, out of prison?Will he find out the real motives of unscrupulous American businessman and reality-TV star, Ronald Checker?And, crucially, will Terry be able to negotiate life after a terrible event robs him of his sexual virility, and can a new fascination for the game of golf help him to live without… A DECENT RIDE?A Decent Ride sees Irvine Welsh back on home turf, leaving us in the capable hands of one of his most compelling and popular characters, ‘Juice’ Terry Lawson, and introducing another bound for cult status, Wee Jonty MacKay: a man with the genitals and brain of a donkey.In his funniest, filthiest book yet, Irvine Welsh celebrates an un-reconstructed misogynist hustler — a central character who is shameless but also, oddly, decent — and finds new ways of making wild comedy out of fantastically dark material, taking on some of the last taboos. So fasten your seatbelts, because this is one ride that could certainly get a little bumpy…

From Publishers WeeklyMaqiao, a fictitious rural village lost in the vitals of Mao's Communist empire, is to Han's magical novel what Macondo is to One Hundred Years of Solitude-a place in which the various brutalities and advances of contemporary history are transformed within the "fossil seams" of popular myth. Han adopts the rules of the dictionary to the rules of fiction, distributing mini-sagas of rural bandits, Daoist madmen and mixed up Maoists across the definitions of terms with special meaning in Maqiao. Han, narrator as well as author, is sent to Maqiao as part of a cadre of "Educated Youth" during the Cultural Revolution. A sharp, sophisticated observer, he narrates these folkloric tales from the vantage point of contemporary China, situating them within a richly informative historical and philosophical framework. Among the stories that deserve mention are those of Wanyu, the village's best singer and reputed Don Juan, who is discovered to lack the male "dragon"; of "poisonous" Yanzao, so called both because his aged mother has a reputation as a poisoner and because he is assigned to spread pesticides (and in so doing absorbs such a quantity of toxins that mosquitoes die upon contact with him); and of Tiexiang, the adulterous wife of Party Secretary Benyi, who takes up with Three Ears, so called because of the rudimentary third ear that grows under one of his armpits. Flawlessly translated by Lovell, this novel should not be missed by lovers of literature.Review"The best novel of the year isn't that DeLillo-on-automatic-pilot thing that broke out, along with SARS, this spring; nor the smutty anti-Islamic screed by the super-annuated French juvenile delinquent; nor even Jane Smiley's excellent investigation of the unlikely souls of real estate agents. Rather, it is this 'dictionary' of the dialect of a fictitious village, Maqiao, lost in the squat hills of South China." – San Francisco Chronicle Book Review "[A] subtle and smashingly effective critique of the futility of totalitarian efforts to suppress language and thought – and, more to the point, a stunningly imaginative and absorbing work of fiction." – Kirkus Reviews "[A Dictionary of Maqiao] is a magnificent book, epic in its ambitions and sweep without any of the sentimental obfuscation on which that genre so often depends." – The Village Voice "[B]oth fascinating and masterful… Han paints a detailed, intriguing and amusing picture of what happens when Marxism collides with entrenched village beliefs, and how traditional China coexists with modernity. The book is filled with peculiar, beguiling, tragic characters and scenery so real you can touch it… This is an intelligent, amusing, clever, fascinating and well-written view of a China most of us never see, or don't recognize when we do." – Asian Review of Books "To enter [A Dictionary of Maqiao]'s pages is to cross into a world of bandits and ghosts, where 'rude' means 'pretty,' and homosexuals are 'Red Flower Daddies' and people don't die, they 'scatter.'" – The New York Times Book Review " Dictionary of Maqiao is a wonderful, many-layered novel written as a series of definitions which gains further depth from a good translation… Han Shaogong's novel [is] clever, sympathetic and amused… Julia Lovell's translation is an impressive achievement, a fine reflection of a complex book." – Times Literary Supplement "Han Shaogong's novel has won wide acclaim, and deservedly so; through his treatment of language, he not only vividly portrays village life in rural China, but also inspires readers to rethink what they are accustomed to taking for granted." – Persimmon "Sometimes humorous, but crude and grim at other times, the entries all intertwine to give readers a picture of life in this distant region." – Library Journal "The narrator's folkloric stereotypes the provincial simpletons and fools, the cuckolded husbands, the long-suffering wives resolve affectingly into distinct human beings. And the peasant vocabulary vulgar, quaint, superstitious which so perplexesthe earnest young outsider is also revealed to be cunningly subversive, an antidote to the totalitarian imposition of a "reality"irreconcilably at odds with the real thing." – Amanda Heller, The Boston Globe "This is a serious, ground-breaking and finally brilliant novel by one of China's leading authors… The translation is everywhere excellent – fluent, colloquial where appropriate, without being excessively so, learned in places, and without any hint anywhere of 'translationese'… surely destined for classic status." – Bradley Winterton, Taipei Times "In its formal inventiveness, its nuanced depiction of Chinese peasant life, and its speculative explorations into the Chinese cultural psyche, this is one of the finest novels of the post-Mao era to so far make its way into English." – Jeffrey Twitchell-Waas, Review of Contemporary Fiction "Worth reading…fascinating and surprisingly accessible." – Anton Graham, China Economic Review "Han is a good storyteller, ingeniously leading the reader into the heart of his stories… A Dictionary of Maqiao is readable and enjoyable." – Fatima Wu, World Literature Today***In a country where much can hinge on the written word, Chinese author Han Shaogong gives it the respect it deserves. In a beautiful afterword to his A Dictionary of Maqiao, he writes: “Words have lives of their own. They proliferate densely, endlessly transform, gather and scatter for short bursts, drift along without mooring, shift and intermingle, sicken and live on, have personalities and emotions, flourish, decline, even die out.”Contrary to what the title suggests, A Dictionary of Maqiao is actually a novel, written in an interesting technique, almost through the point of view a spectator. Han spends much of the years of the Cultural Revolution in China, in a small village in the south called Maqiao. He spreads the words of the authority while staying useful and productive in the village. Han knows as well as anybody that the language of a region is an effective mirror of its culture. Through “dictionary entries,” explanations of region-specific terms, a picture of Maqiao (arguably even China) appears. The entries are fascinating some just a paragraph in length, others going for at least a few pages. A single entry can count for larger criticisms or appreciation of culture. For example, an examination of the word, “sweet,” indicates that the word can actually cover a wide spectrum of flavors in Maqiao. Han also makes a beautifully executed leap to generalizations peoples of the world make about each other: “Even today, the majority of Chinese people still have great difficulty in distinguishing the facial types of western, northern, and eastern Europeans, and in making out cultural differences between the British, the French, the Spanish, the Norwegians, the Poles etc. The names of each European people are no more than empty symbols in school textbooks, and many Chinese, when put on the spot, are still unable to make any link between them and corresponding characteristics in facial type, clothing, language and customs. This baffles Europeans, just as it baffles the Chinese that Europeans cannot differentiate clearly between people from Shanghai, Canton, and the Northeast.”Another interesting “entry” is one on science where the residents consider science to be the product of “lazybones” and therefore deride its use. As with any culture, modern values soon make their appearance even in Maqiao. Towards the end, Han explains: “In Maqiao during the 1990s, a lot of new words came into fashion and passed into common usage: 'television,' 'paint,' 'diet,' 'operate,' Ni-Ping (a well-known television host), 'disco dancing,' 'Highway 107,' 'seafood,' 'lottery tickets,' 'build the Great Wall (play Mahjong),' 'bump-the-butt' (motorbike), 'hold the basket' (act as mediator) and so on.”While these dictionary entries make for a fascinating glimpse into China, the book is not easy reading. For one, the very small print creates practical difficulties. This combined with the heft of the material can weigh the reader down significantly. Still, the end result is well worth the reader’s effort. A Dictionary of Maqiao (translated ably by Julia Lovell) emerges as a wonderful, if fractured, portrait of China. Han Shaogong, through his award-winning novel, provides not only a nuanced look into modern China, but also focuses on language as an instrument of keeping culture alive. “Strictly speaking, what we might term a 'common language' will forever remain a distant human objective,” he says, “providing we don’t intend exchange to become a process of mutual neutralization, of mutual attrition, then we must maintain vigilance and resistance toward exchange, preserving in this compromise our own, indomitable forms of expression.” A Dictionary of Maqiao establishes wonderfully, the vital link between language and culture. In a world of rapid globalization, the subtle warning about the increasing loss of languages is only too timely and important.Reviewed by Poornima Apte

"Jemc's novel My Only Wife is a brilliant, haunting, and heartbreaking debut that explores themes of loss and love." — Largehearted BoyA thief steals the air from a room. Children invent a nursery rhyme to make sense of their fate. A band of girls rot from the outside in. These characters stumble through joy and murder and confusion, only to survive and wait for the next catastrophe to arrive. Moments so brief and disturbing you can't afford to look away. Jac Jemc's affecting stories mine the territory between what is real and the stories we tell to create understanding.

Charlie Asher is a pretty normal guy. A little hapless, somewhat neurotic, sort of a hypochondriac. He's what's known as a Beta Male: the kind of fellow who makes his way through life by being careful and constant — you know, the one who's always there to pick up the pieces when the girl gets dumped by the bigger/taller/stronger Alpha Male.But Charlie's been lucky. He owns a building in the heart of San Francisco, and runs a secondhand store with the help of a couple of loyal, if marginally insane, employees. He's married to a bright and pretty woman who actually loves him for his normalcy. And she, Rachel, is about to have their first child.Yes, Charlie's doing okay for a Beta. That is, until the day his daughter, Sophie, is born. Just as Charlie — exhausted from the birth — turns to go home, he sees a strange man in mint-green golf wear at Rachel's hospital bedside, a man who claims that no one should be able to see him. But see him Charlie does, and from here on out, things get really weird...People start dropping dead around him, giant ravens perch on his building, and it seems that everywhere he goes, a dark presence whispers to him from under the streets. Strange names start appearing on his nightstand notepad, and before he knows it, those people end up dead, too. Yup, it seems that Charlie Asher has been recruited for a new job, an unpleasant but utterly necessary one: Death. It's a dirty job. But hey, somebody's gotta do it.Christopher Moore, the man whose Lamb served up Jesus' "missing years" (with the funny parts left in), and whose Fluke found the deep humor in whale researchers' lives, now shines his comic light on the undiscovered country we all eventually explore — death and dying — and the results are hilarious, heartwarming, and a hell of a lot of fun.

Patrick Doyle is a 29-year-old teacher in an ordinary school. Disaffected, frustrated and increasingly bitter at the system he is employed to maintain, Patrick begins his rebellion, fuelled by drink and his passionate, unrequited love for a fellow teacher. A Disaffection is the apparently straightforward story of one week in a man's life in which he decides to change the way he lives. Under the surface,however, lies a brilliant and complex examination of class, human culture and character written with irony, tenderness,enormous anger and, above all, the honesty that has marked James Kelman as one of the most important writers in contemporary Britain.

From the prize-winning Chilean novelist Antonio Skármeta, author of Il Postino, comes this soulful novella about a son and his estranged father.Jacques is a schoolteacher in a small Chilean village, and a French translator for the local paper. He owes his passion for the French language to his Parisian father, Pierre, who, one year before, abruptly returned to France without a word of explanation. Jacques and his mother’s sense of abandonment is made more acute by their isolation in this small community where few read or think. While Jacques finds distraction in a crush on his student’s older sister, his preoccupation with his father’s disappearance continues to haunt him. But there is often more to a story than the torment it causes. This one is about forgiveness and second chances.

Dorothy is a retired schoolteacher who has recently moved to a housing estate in a small village. Solomon is a night-watchman, an immigrant from an unnamed country in Africa. Each is desperate for love. And yet each harbors secrets that may make attaining it impossible.With breathtaking assurance and compassion, Caryl Phillips retraces the paths that lead Dorothy and Solomon to their meeting point: her failed marriage and ruinous obsession with a younger man, the horrors he witnessed as a soldier in his disintegrating native land, and the cruelty he encounters as a stranger in his new one. Intimate and panoramic, measured and shattering, A Distant Shore charts the oceanic expanses that separate people from their homes, their hearts, and their selves.

" **Inspirational fiction superstar" ( *Publishers Weekly* ) and #1 *New York Times* bestselling author of life-changing fiction returns with this high-stakes love story of danger, passion, and faith.**

She was a child caught in a riptide in the Caribbean Sea. He was a teenager from the East Coast on vacation with his family. He dove in to save her, and that single terrifying moment changed both their lives forever.

Ten years later Jack Ryder is a daring secret agent with the FBI and Eliza Lawrence still lives on that pristine island. She's an untainted princess in a kingdom of darkness and evil, on the brink of a forced marriage with a dangerous neighboring drug lord, a marriage arranged by her father.

This time when Jack and Eliza meet, there's a connection neither of them can explain. Both their lives are on the line, and once again, the stakes are deadly high. Can they join forces in a complicated and dangerous mission, pretending to have a...

In this mesmerizing novel, Ethan Canin, the New York Times bestselling author of America America and other acclaimed works of fiction, explores the nature of genius, jealousy, ambition, and love in several generations of a gifted family.Milo Andret is born with an unusual mind. A lonely child growing up in the woods of northern Michigan in the 1950s, Milo gives little thought to his talent, and not until his acceptance at U.C. Berkeley does he realize the extent, and the risks, of his singular gifts. California in the seventies is an initiation and a seduction, opening Milo’s eyes to the allure of both ambition and indulgence. The research he begins there will make him a legend; the woman, and the rival, he meets there will haunt him always. For Milo’s brilliance is inextricably linked to a dark side that ultimately threatens to unravel his work, his son and daughter, and his life.Moving from California to Princeton to the Midwest and to New York, A Doubter’s Almanac explores Milo’s complex legacy for the next generations in his family. Spanning several decades of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, A Doubter’s Almanac is a suspenseful, surprising, and deeply moving novel, written in stunning prose and with superb storytelling magic.Advance praise for The Doubter’s Almanac“I’ve been reading Ethan Canin’s books since he first burst on the literary scene with the remarkable Emperor of the Air. I thought he could never equal the power of his last work, America America, but his latest novel is, I believe, his best by far. With A Doubter’s Almanac, Canin has soared to a new standard of achievement. What a story, and what a cast of characters. The protagonist, Milo Andret, is a mathematical genius and one of the most maddening, compelling, appalling, and unforgettable characters I’ve encountered in American fiction. This is the story of a family that falls to pieces under the pressure of living with an abundantly gifted tyrant. Ethan Canin writes about mathematics as brilliantly as T. S. Eliot writes about poetry. With this extraordinary novel, Ethan Canin now takes his place on the high wire with the best writers of his time.”—Pat Conroy, #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Prince of Tides and The Great Santini.

When a copywriter is stranded on a small island in the Pacific after helping a soft drink commercial shoot, she uncovers a terrible secret that eventually drives her to the brink of insanity. Svoboda's stunning novel, frighteningly mysterious and complex, deals with many themes: a child's accidental death and the guilt a surviving parent must cope with, the inhumanity with which faraway governments often treat indigenous peoples, and the relationship between sex and reproduction in both personal and social contexts.

As a child during the Depression and World War II, Pete Hamill learned early that drinking was an essential part of being a man, inseparable from the rituals of celebration, mourning, friendship, romance, and religion. Only later did he discover its ability to destroy any writer's most valuable tools: clarity, consciousness, memory. In *A Drinking Life*, Hamill explains how alcohol slowly became a part of his life, and how he ultimately left it behind. Along the way, he summons the mood of an America that is gone forever, with the bittersweet fondness of a lifelong New Yorker.