Charlotte O'Keefe's beautiful, much-longed-for, adored daughter Willow is born with osteogenesis imperfecta – a very severe form of brittle bone disease. If she slips on a crisp packet she could break both her legs, and spend six months in a half body cast. After years of caring for Willow, her family faces financial disaster. Then Charlotte is offered a lifeline. She could sue her obsetrician for wrongful birth – for not having diagnosed Willow's condition early enough in the pregnancy to be able to abort the child. The payout could secure Willow's future. But to get it would mean Charlotte suing her best friend. And standing up in court to declare that if she would have prefered that Willow had never been born…

Jedna z najgłośniejszych polskich powieści lat dziewięćdziesiątych, długo obecna na listach bestsellerów. Opowieść o wielkim uczuciu, nadziei i niespełnionej miłości. Poruszająca historia niemieckiego lekarza, który po II wojnie został w polskim Gdańsku. Głębokie studium melancholii na tle wielkich wydarzeń z najnowszej historii Polski i Niemiec. Pełne poezji obrazy Gdańska z pierwszej połowy XX wieku i Gdańska budzącego się do życia po wojennej katastrofie. Współczesne losy bohaterów skonfrontowane ze wstrząsającymi scenami słynnych samobójstw – niemieckiego poety Heinricha Kleista i polskiego pisarza Stanisława Ignacego Witkiewicza. Książka wielokrotnie nagradzana, inscenizowana w radiu, telewizji i teatrze, przyniosła autorowi sławę. W roku 1997 ukazało się jej niemieckie wydanie.

Populating a small town in the Pacific Northwest, the characters in Lucia Perillo's story collection all resist giving the world what it expects of them and are surprised when the world comes roaring back. An addict trapped in a country house becomes obsessed with vacuum cleaners and the people who sell them door-to-door. An abandoned woman seeks consolation in tales of armed robbery told by one of her fellow suburban housewives. An accidental mother struggles to answer her daughter's badgering about her paternity. And in three stories readers meet Louisa, a woman with Down syndrome who serves as an accomplice to her younger sister's sexual exploits and her aging mother's fantasies of revenge. Together, Happiness Is a Chemical in the Brain is a sharp-edged, witty testament to the ambivalence of emotions, the way they pull in directions that often cancel one another out or twist their subjects into knots. In lyrical prose, Perillo draws on her training as a naturalist and a poet to map the terrain of the comic and the tragic, asking how we draw the boundaries between these two zones. What's funny, what's heartbreaking, and who gets to decide?

"Astonishing. Okparanta’s narrators render their stories with such strength and intimacy, such lucidity and composure, that in each and every case the truths of their lives detonate deep inside the reader’s heart, with the power and force of revelation." — Paul HardingHere are Nigerian women at home and transplanted to the United States, building lives out of longing and hope, faith and doubt, the struggle to stay and the mandate to leave, the burden and strength of love. Here are characters faced with dangerous decisions, children slick with oil from the river, a woman in love with another despite the penalties. Here is a world marked by electricity outages, lush landscapes, folktales, buses that break down and never start up again. Here is a portrait of Nigerians that is surprising, shocking, heartrending, loving, and across social strata, dealing in every kind of change. Here are stories filled with language to make your eyes pause and your throat catch. Happiness, Like Water introduces a true talent, a young writer with a beautiful heart and a capacious imagination."Intricate, graceful prose propels Okparanta’s profoundly moving and illuminating book. I devoured these stories and immediately wanted more. This is an arrival." — NoViolet Bulawayo"Okparanta's prose is tender, beautiful and evocative. These powerful stories of contemporary Nigeria are told with compassion and a certain sense of humor. What a remarkable new talent." — Chika Unigwe"A haunting and startlingly original collection of short stories about the lives of Nigerians both at home and in America. Happiness, Like Water is a deeply affecting literary debut, the work of a sure and gifted new writer." — Julie Otsuka

The internationally acclaimed playwright and novelist Yasmina Reza stages a band of eighteen characters at war with their lives, with only humor to sustain them.Happy are the loved ones and the lovers and those who can do without love. Happy are the happy.— Jorge Luis BorgesSchnitzler’s La Ronde gives these twenty short chapters their shape while Borges’s poem gives them their content. As we move from story to story, thrilled to reconnect with an old acquaintance from an earlier scene, we can’t help but admit that we are very much at home in this human comedy that understands all too well the passing thoughts, desires, actions, fears, and mistakes that we have and make day after day, but that we would be incapable of rendering with such acuity and compassion.

The internationally acclaimed author Carlos Fuentes, winner of the Cervantes Prize and the Latin Civilization Award, delivers a stunning work of fiction about family and love across an expanse of Mexican life, reminding us why he has been called “a combination of Poe, Baudelaire, and Isak Dinesen” (Newsweek).In these masterly vignettes, Fuentes explores Tolstoy’s classic observation that “happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” In “A Family Like Any Other,” each member of the Pagan family lives in isolation, despite sharing a tiny house. In “The Mariachi’s Mother,” the limitless devotion of a woman is revealed as she secretly tends to her estranged son’s wounds. “Sweethearts” reunites old lovers unexpectedly and opens up the possibilities for other lives and other loves. These are just a few of the remarkable stories in Happy Families, but they all inhabit Fuentes’s trademark Mexico, where modern obsessions bump up against those of the mythic past, and the result is a triumphant display of the many ways we reach out to one another and find salvation through irrepressible acts of love.In this spectacular translation, the acclaimed Edith Grossman captures the full weight of Fuentes’s range. Whether writing in the language of the street or in straightforward, elegant prose, Fuentes gives us stories connected by love, including the failure of love — between spouses, lovers, parents and children, siblings. From the Mexican presidential palace to the novels of the poor and the vast expanse of humanity in between, Happy Families is a magnificent portrait of modern life in all its complicated beauty, as told by one of the world’s most celebrated writers.

Анна пыталась честно трудиться в рекламном агентстве, но из-за собственной беспечности и досадных недоразумений с шефом потеряла престижную работу. Увы, жизнь домохозяйки полна забот и проблем, о которых офисные барышни и не догадываются. За неделю Анна умудряется вывести из строя всю технику, испортить отношения с соседями и свекровью, устроить на кухне пожар и понять: домоседки из нее не получится… И тут – счастливый случай! Анна знакомится с импозантным президентом крупной компании и мгновенно попадает под гипнотическое обаяние этого человека. Он предлагает заняться любимым делом за не реальные деньги! Какая же мышь откажется от бесплатного сыра, даже зная, где обычно его выдают?Анна соглашается, не раздумывая…

It has been almost ten years since Evan Hunter burst upon the literary scene with his first book, The Blackboard Jungle. That best-selling novel, with its important sociological implications, established Hunter immediately as a most exciting topical writer. In the ensuing decade his reputation has grown enormously and become solidified as a result of four other major novels, the most recent of which is Mothers and Daughters.

During this same period, Hunter wrote a number of short stories for magazine publication. This collection presents the best of them and displays the stunning range of the author’s interests and talents. There are gay stories and grim stories; realistic stories and wildly fantastic stories; stories of character and stories of action. Only one thing about the collection is uniform: the intense quality that Hunter puts into everything he writes, which holds the reader spellbound to the page.

Evan Hunter fans will find the two very long stories in the volume of particular interest, for each is a substantial work on its own and represents the author at top form. These are the title story, Happy New Year, Herbie, and the lead-off story, Uncle Jimbo’s Marbles.

Happy Valley is a place of dreams and secrets, of snow and ice and wind. In this remote little town, perched in its landscape of desolate beauty, everybody has a story to tell about loss and longing and loneliness, about their passion to escape. I must get away, thinks Dr. Oliver Halliday, thinks Alys Browne, thinks Sidney Furlow. But Happy Valley is not a place that can be easily left, and White's vivid characters, with their distinctive voices, move bit by bit towards sorrow and acceptance.Happy Valley is Patrick White's first novel. It was published in 1939 when he was just twenty-seven. This restless and jagged study of small-town life is a prolonged glimpse of literary genius in the making. White never allowed it to be republished in his lifetime, and the novel has been until now the missing piece in the extraordinary jigsaw of White's work.

Признанный сюрреалист среди японских писателей. Банана Ёсимото умеет создавать мистический эффект как никто другой.Данная книга представляет собой два исследования понятий «любовь», «память» и «скорбь».Фрейд описывает сверхъестественное как особое ощущение, возникающее, когда объяснимое переплетается с необъяснимым. Банана Есимото, признанный сюрреалист среди японских писателей, умеет создавать мистический эффект как никто другой.Ее последняя книга представляет собой два исследования понятий «любовь», «память» и «скорбь».Если в первом романе героиня приходит к пониманию того, что ее отношения являлись ничем иным, как заполнением пустого места в чужой душе, то во втором реальность примиряет героиню со смертью сестры.

Named a Fall Pick by Boston Globe, ELLE, Library Journal and MyDomainAn eerie debut collection featuring missing parents, unrequited love, and other uncomfortable momentsA man hangs from the ceiling of an art gallery. A woman spells out messages to her sister using her own hair. Children deemed “bad” are stolen from their homes. In Hardly Children, Laura Adamczyk’s rich and eccentric debut collection, familiar worlds—bars, hotel rooms, cities that could very well be our own—hum with uncanny dread.The characters in Hardly Children are keyed up, on the verge, full of desire. They’re lost, they’re in love with someone they shouldn’t be, they’re denying uncomfortable truths using sex or humor. They are children waking up to the threats of adulthood, and adults living with childlike abandon.With command, caution, and subtle terror, Adamczyk shapes a world where death and the possibility of loss always emerge. Yet the shape of this loss is never fully revealed. Instead, it looms in the periphery of these stories, like an uncomfortable scene viewed out of the corner of one’s eye.

"Czechoslovakia's greatest living writer." — Milan Kundera.In this moving, absorbing novel, we meet the eccentric residents of a home for the elderly who reminisce about their lives and their changing country. Written with a keen eye for the absurd and peppered with dialogue that captures the poignancy of the everyday, Harlequin's Millions is a sensual delight.Bohumil Hrabal (1914–1997) worked as a railway dispatcher during the Nazi occupation of then-Czechoslovakia, a traveling salesman, a steelworker, a recycling mill worker, and a stagehand. His novels were censored under the Communist regime and have since been translated into nearly thirty languages.

Книга Петера Эстерхази (р. 1950) «Harmonia cælestis» («Небесная гармония») для многих читателей стала настоящим сюрпризом. «712 страниц концентрированного наслаждения», «чудо невозможного» — такие оценки звучали в венгерской прессе. Эта книга — прежде всего об отце. Но если в первой ее части, где «отец» выступает как собирательный образ, господствует надысторический взгляд, «небесный» регистр, то во второй — земная конкретика. Взятые вместе, обе части романа — мистерия семьи, познавшей на протяжении веков рай и ад, высокие устремления и несчастья, обрушившиеся на одну из самых знаменитых венгерских фамилий. Книга в целом — плод художественной фантазии, содержащий и подлинные события из истории Европы и семейной истории Эстерхази последних четырехсот лет, грандиозный литературный опус, побуждающий к размышлениям о судьбах романа как жанра. Со времени его публикации (2000) роман был переведен на восемнадцать языков и неоднократно давал повод авторитетным литературным критикам упоминать имя автора как возможного претендента на Нобелевскую премию по литературе.

Harraga. The term means "to burn," and it refers to those Algerians in exile, who burn their identity papers to seek asylum in Europe. But for Boualem Sansal, whose novels are banned in his own country, there is a kind of internal exile even for those who stay; and for no one is it worse than for the country's women.Lamia is thirty-five years old, a doctor. Having lost most of her family, she is accustomed to living alone, unmarried and contentedly independent when a teenage girl, Chérifa, arrives on her doorstep. Chérifa is pregnant by Lamia's brother in exile — Lamia's first indication since he left that he is alive — and she'll surely be killed if she returns to her parents. Lamia grudgingly offers her hospitality; Chérifa ungratefully accepts it. But she is restless and obstinate, and before long she runs away, out into the hostile streets — leaving Lamia to track her, fearing for the life of the girl she has come, improbably, to love as family.Boualem Sansal creates, in Lamia, an incredible narrator: cultured, caustic, and compassionate, with an ironic contempt for the government, she is utterly convincing. With his deceptively simple story, Sansal delivers a brave indictment of fundamentalism that is also warm and wonderfully humane.

A powerful tale of love, friendship, and becoming American in late ’70s Cambridge from the best-selling novelist."If you like brave, acute, elated, naked, brutal, tender, humane, and beautiful prose, then you’ve come to the right place.”—Nicole KraussCambridge, 1977: A Harvard graduate student, a Jew from Egypt, is preparing to become the assimilated American professor he longs to be. But when he bonds with a brash, charismatic Arab cab driver nicknamed Kalashnikov, he begins to neglect his studies. Together they carouse the bars and cafés of Cambridge, seduce strangers, ridicule “jumbo-ersatz” America, and skinny-dip in Walden Pond. As final exams approach and the cab driver is threatened with deportation, the grad student faces the decision of his life: whether to cling to his dream of New World assimilation or ditch it all to defend his Old World friend.Sexually charged and enormously moving, this is a deeply American novel of identity and ideals in conflict. It is the book that will seal André Aciman’s reputation as one of the finest writers of our time.

On the morning after harvest, the inhabitants of a remote English village awaken looking forward to a hard-earned day of rest and feasting at their landowner's table. But the sky is marred by two conspicuous columns of smoke, replacing pleasurable anticipation with alarm and suspicion.One smoke column is the result of an overnight fire that has damaged the master's outbuildings. The second column rises from the wooded edge of the village, sent up by newcomers to announce their presence. In the minds of the wary villagers a mere coincidence of events appears to be unlikely, with violent confrontation looming as the unavoidable outcome. Meanwhile, another newcomer has recently been spotted taking careful notes and making drawings of the land. It is his presence more than any other that will threaten the village's entire way of life.In effortless and tender prose, Jim Crace details the unraveling of a pastoral idyll in the wake of economic progress. His tale is timeless and unsettling, framed by a beautifully evoked world that will linger in your memory long after you finish reading.

“In this breathless, startling novel, Jodi Picoult reveals the fragile threads that hold people together, or let them break apart. Her narrative, especially her sense of family, is reminiscent of a young Anne Tyler. Hers is a remarkable new voice, and it tells us a story that goes straight to the heart.” – -Mary Morris, author of A Mother’s Love and Nothing to Declare“Picoult weaves a beautiful tale from threads of sympathetic characters into a pattern told from two points of view, then fringes it with suspense and drama.” – -The Charlotte Observer“A brilliant, moving examination of motherhood, brimming with detail and emotion.” – -Richmond Timea-Dispatch“Picoult’s depiction of families and their relationships over time is rich and accurate… Harvesting the Heart (is] a moving portrayal of the difficulties of marriage and parenthood.” – -Orlando Sentinel“Picoult considers various forces that can unite or fracture families and examines the complexities of the human heart in both literal and figurative ways.” – -Library Journal“Picoult brings her considerable talents to this contemporary story of a young woman in search of her identity… Told in flashbacks, this is a realistic story of childhood and adolescence, the demands of motherhood, the hard paths of personal growth and the generosity of spirit required by love. Picoult’s imagery is startlinwth peg and brilliant; her characters move credibly through this affecting drama.” – -Publishers Weekly***The author of Picture Perfect "explores the fragile ground of ambivalent motherhood" (New York Times Book Review). Paige's mother left when she was five. When Paige becomes a mother herself, she is overwhelmed by the demands. Unable to forget her past, Paige struggles with the difficulties of marriage and motherhood.

The collection of stories

The award-winning Canadian writer Alice Munro's collection Hateship, friendship, courtship, loveship, marriage is about the lives, hopes, dreams and ends of women: their marriages, their relationships with those who touch their lives in some momentous way-however brief or long-standing-and the extraordinary effects wrought by the hand of fate. She is not only a genius storyteller, she has a cunning ability to make you believe the short story you've just read was actually a full-length novel. So if you've ever thought twice about buying a book of short stories, then the marvellous Alice Munro will make you think again…Munro's world is one of post-war Canada, when women are beginning to experience a constrained kind of freedom. In "What is Remembered", a chance meeting at a funeral has a profound, yet stabilising effect on Meriel, a young wife and mother. "Young husbands", writes Munro, "were stern in those days". Between learning how to kowtow to bosses and manage wives, there was so much else to learn: mortgages, lawns and politics for a start. The wives, meantime, were afforded the opportunity of "a second kind of adolescence"-but only in the confines of the family home, while the men were absent, and only after wifely jobs were accounted for. In the book's title story, a capable, spinsterly housekeeper finds love in the most unexpected place, in the most unexpected way. However the opportunity presents itself, it is what you choose to make of it that really matters, the author seems to be saying. Johanna could be deeply disappointed with her "opportunity" but, in her straightforward way, amends a few details and makes the most of it.Alice Munro's stories are retrospective; tales of lives lived, for better or worse. If you want something, take it, quickly. You only get one life, and this is it.

In uncompromising and fresh prose, Tillman tells the story of three very contemporary girls. Grace, Emily and Jane collide with friends, family, and culture under dark and comic circumstances, presented in uncanny, disturbing, and sometimes shocking terms. In Haunted Houses, Tillman wries of the past within the present, and of the inescapability of private memory and public history. A caustic account of how America makes and unmakes a young woman.