Ein Drama aus Blut und Tränen, Haß und Verrat, Leid und Tod – nur wenig gemildert durch Liebe und Leidenschaft, Hingabe und Treue – nimmt seinen Lauf, als der schwelende Konflikt in der Sklavereifrage sich zum offenen Krieg zwischen den Süd- und den Nordstaaten entzündet. Amerika erlebt den blutigen Bürgerkrieg, muß Hunderttausende von Toten beklagen, fast jede Familie erleidet Entsetzliches. Mitbetroffen sind auch die Familien von Orry Main, dem Plantagenbesitzer aus dem Süden, und George Hazard, dem Großindustriellen aus dem Norden. Auf Gedeih und Verderb ist das Schicksal der Mains mit dem der Hazards verbunden, verketten unlösbare Bande die Familien, die alle Stadien des Kriegsverlaufes durchmachen: die anfängliche Begeisterung, die Zermürbung und Enttäuschung, das Elend und das Entsetzen vor dem, wozu Menschen fähig sind. Und schließlich das Ende des Krieges mit dem Zusammenbruch des Südens, eines Zusammenbruchs, der kein strahlender Sieg und auch kein folgenloser Triumph des Nordens sein wird …Die amerikanische Originalausgabe erschien 1984 unter dem Titel »Love and War« bei Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Publishers, San Diego, New York, London© 1984 by John Jakes© 1986 der deutschsprachigen Ausgabe

From the 2010 winner of the Best Translated Book Award comes a harrowing, controversial novel about a woman's revenge, Jewish identity, and how to talk about Adolf Hitler in today's world.Elinor's comfortable life — popular newspaper column, stable marriage, well-adjusted kids — is totally upended when she finds out that her estranged uncle is coming to Jerusalem to give a speech asking forgiveness for his decades-old book, Hitler, First Person.A shocking novel that galvanized the Jewish diaspora, Hitler, First Person was Aaron Gotthilf's attempt to understand — and explain — what it would have been like to be Hitler. As if that wasn't disturbing enough, while writing this controversial novel, Gotthilf stayed in Elinor's parent's house and sexually assaulted her "slow" sister.In the time leading up to Gotthilf's visit, Elinor will relive the reprehensible events of that time so long ago, over and over, compulsively, while building up the courage — and plan — to avenge her sister in the most conclusive way possible: by murdering Gotthilf, her own personal Hilter.Along the way to the inevitable confrontation, Gail Hareven uses an obsessive, circular writing style to raise questions about Elinor's mental state, which in turn makes the reader question the veracity of the supposed memoir that they're reading. Is it possible that Elinor is following in her uncle's writerly footpaths, using a first-person narrative to manipulate the reader into forgiving a horrific crime?

One of the two books that J. M. Coetzee won the Booker Prize for (he was also awarded the 2003 Nobel Prize for Literature), The Life and Times of Michael K. is the story of a simple man attempting to survive (from without) in a society that has seen its humanity perverted by war into horror. He is trying only to live in quiet absence and is senselessly thwarted at every turn. Like all of the rest of Coetzee's work, Life and Times is something more than shattering, more than moving.In a south Africa turned by war, Michael K. sets out to take his ailing mother back to her rural home. On the way there she dies, leaving him alone in an anarchic world of brutal roving armies. Imprisoned, Michael is unable to bear confinement and escapes, determined to live with dignity. This life affirming novel goes to the center of human experience-the need for an interior, spiritual life; for some connections to the world in which we live; and for purity of vision.

The sequel Life after a Balla begins with Skye doing whatever it takes to obtain the riches she whole heartedly thinks she deserves. Between lavish gifts and million-dollar promises she tries hard to forget her past turmoil with Sandingo, her abusive no-good husband. Skye becomes helpless with Sandingo's tricky business proposition, and soon life takes a turn for the worse as she has to sleep next to the enemy. Will this shattered woman be able to rebuild her life now that the tables are turned? They say payback is a bitch…or is it?

**The long-anticipated sequel to Sister Souljah's million copy bestseller *The Coldest Winter Ever*.**

Winter Santiaga hit time served. Still stunning, still pretty, still bold, still loves her father more than any man in the world, still got her hustle and high fashion flow. She's eager to pay back her enemies, rebuild her father's empire, reset his crown, and ultimately to snatch Midnight back into her life no matter which bitch had him while she was locked up. But Winter is not the only one with revenge on her mind. Simone, Winter's young business partner and friend, is locked and loaded and Winter is her target. Will she blow Winter's head off? Can Winter dodge the bullets? Or will at least one bullet blast Winter into another world? Either way Winter is fearless. Hell is the same as any hood and certainly the Brooklyn hood she grew up in. That's what Winter thinks.

A heart warming, heart burning, passionate, sexual, comical, and completely original...

A young man is found lying unconscious on the outskirts of Bucharest. No one knows who he is and everyone has a different theory about how he got there. The stories of the various characters unfold, each closely interwoven with the next, and outlining the features of what ultimately turns out to be the most important and most powerful character of all: the city of Bucharest itself. The novel covers the last 13 days of 1897 and culminates in a beautiful tableau of the future as imagined by the different characters. We might, in fact, say that it is we who inhabit their future. And so too does Dan Creţu, alias Dan Kretzu, the present-day journalist hurled back in time by some mysterious process for just long enough to allow us a wonderful glimpse into a remote, almost forgotten world.Parvulescus' book is a magical tale full of enchanting characters who can carry the reader to another time…Winner of the EUROPEAN UNION PRIZE FOR LITERATURE

From the author of If I Loved You, I Would Tell You This, Life Drawing is a fierce, honest and moving story of married life-its betrayals, intimacies, and secrets.Augusta and Owen have taken the leap. Leaving the city and its troubling memories behind, they have moved to the country for a solitary life where they can devote their days to each other and their art, where Gus can paint and Owen can write.But the facts of a past betrayal prove harder to escape than urban life. Ancient jealousies and resentments haunt their marriage and their rural paradise.When Alison Hemmings moves into the empty house next door, Gus is drawn out of isolation, despite her own qualms and Owen’s suspicions. As the new relationship deepens, the lives of the two households grow more and more tightly intertwined. It will take only one new arrival to intensify emotions to breaking point.Fierce, honest and astonishingly gripping, Life Drawing is a novel as beautiful and unsparing as the human heart.

A book of stories, or "narrations," by the finest Catalan writer of his generation. In this beautiful work, translated into English for the first time, Pla transcribes his witnessings of basic truths: the waves of the sea, the hardness of rolled tobacco. The reader feels tangibly the pleasure with which Pla puts the sensual and real on paper.

Thomas C. Squire, creator of the hit documentary series Frankenstein Among the Arts, one-time secret agent and founder of the Society for Popular aesthetics, is attending an international media symposium in Sicily. It is here that he becomes involved with lovely, but calculating Selina Ajdina. Alongside the drama of the conference is the story of Squire’s private life—the tale of his infidelity, the horrifying circumstances surrounding his father’s death and the threatened future of his ancestral home in England. Selected by Anthony Burgess as one of the 99 best novels since 1939.

Life is a Dream (1931) is Gyula Krudy's magical collection of ten short stories. Creating a world where editors shoot themselves after a hard day's brunching, men attend duels incognito and lovers fall out over salad dressing, Life is a Dream is a comic, nostalgic, romantic and erotic glimpse into the Hungary of the early twentieth century. Focussing on the poor and dispossessed, these tales of love, food, death and sex are ironic and wise about the human condition and the futility of life, and display fully Krudy's wit and mastery of the form.

One boy, one boat, one tiger . . . After the tragic sinking of a cargo ship, a solitary lifeboat remains bobbing on the wild, blue Pacific. The only survivors from the wreck are a sixteen year-old boy named Pi, a hyena, a zebra (with a broken leg), a female orangutan – and a 450-pound Royal Bengal tiger. The scene is set for one of the most extraordinary and best-loved works of fiction in recent years.

A stunning selection of the best short fiction from the recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature.This collection of Nadine Gordimer’s short fiction demonstrates her rich use of language and her unsparing vision of politics, sexuality, and race. Whether writing about lovers, parents and children, or married couples, Gordimer maps out the terrain of human relationships with razor-sharp psychological insight and a stunning lack of sentimentality. The selection, which spans the course of Gordimer’s career to date, presents the range of her storytelling abilities and her brilliant insight into human nature. From such epics as “Friday’s Footprint” and “Something Out There” to her shorter, more experimental stories, Gordimer’s work is unfailingly nuanced and complex. Time and again, it forces us to examine how our stated intentions come into conflict with our unspoken desires.This definitive volume, which includes four new stories from the Nobel laureate, is a testament to the power, force, and ongoing relevance of Gordimer’s vision.

This tour de force by a master of experimental novels finds the author reflecting on her old age and its effects on her writing. As she reflects on her own career, her experiments with narrative, and on the narrative she writes here, she ultimately reasserts herself and accepts the life behind her.

A haunting, enigmatic, Kafkaesque modern fairytale, steeped in visual imagery and consolingly lyrical prose. The Times February is persecuting the townspeople. It has been winter for more than three hundred days. All forms of flight are banned and the children have started to disappear, taken from their beds in the middle of the night. The priests hang ominous sheets of parchment on the trees, signed "February". And somewhere on the outskirts of the town lives February himself, with the girl who smells of honey and smoke… In short bursts of intensely poetic language, this beautifully strange and otherworldly first novel tells the story of the people in the town and their efforts to combat the mysterious spectre of February. Steeped in visual imagery, this is a hauntingly enigmatic modern fairy tale in which nothing is as it seems.

"Engrossing, thrilling and ultimately satisfying: each story has the weight of a novel." — The EconomistThis was the day after Mike Tyson bit off Evander Holyfield’s ear. You remember that. It was a moment in history — not like Kennedy or the planes flying into the World Trade Center — not up at that level. This was something much lower, more like Ben Johnson, back when his eyes were that thick, yellow color and he tested positive in Seoul after breaking the world-record in the hundred. You might not know exactly where you were standing or exactly what you were doing when you first heard about Tyson or about Ben, but when the news came down, I bet it stuck with you. When Tyson bit off Holyfield’s ear, that cut right through the everyday clutter. — from Miracle MileTwo runners race a cargo train through the darkness of a rat-infested tunnel beneath the Detroit River. A drugstore bicycle courier crosses a forbidden threshold in an attempt to save a life and a young swimmer conquers her fear of water only to discover she's caught in far more dangerous currents. An auto-worker who loses his family in a car accident is forced to reconsider his relationship with the internal combustion engine.Alexander MacLeod is a writer of "ferocious intelligence" and "ferocious physicality" (CTV). Light Lifting, his celebrated first collection, offers us a suite of darkly urban and unflinching elegies that explore the depths of the psyche and channel the subconscious hopes and terrors that motivate us all. These are elemental stories of work and its bonds, of tragedy and tragedy barely averted, but also of beauty, love and fragile understanding.

This exquisite, resonant novel by PEN/Faulkner winner James Salter is a brilliant portrait of a marriage by a contemporary American master. It is the story of Nedra and Viri, whose favored life is centered around dinners, ingenious games with their children, enviable friends, and near-perfect days passed skating on a frozen river or sunning on the beach. But even as he lingers over the surface of their marriage, Salter lets us see the fine cracks that are spreading through it, flaws that will eventually mar the lovely picture beyond repair. Seductive, witty, and elegantly nuanced, Light Years is a classic novel of an entire generation that discovered the limits of its own happiness—and then felt compelled to destroy it.

The Los Angeles Dana Spiotta evokes in her bold and strangely lyrical first novel is a land of Spirit Gyms and Miracle Miles, a great centerless place where chains of reference get lost, or finally don't matter.Mina lives with her screenwriter husband and works at her best friend Lorene's highly successful concept restaurants, which exploit the often unconscious desires and idiosyncrasies of a rich, chic clientele. Almost inadvertently, Mina has acquired two lovers. And then there are the other men in her life: her father, a washed-up Hollywood director living in a yurt and hiding from his debtors, and her disturbed brother, Michael, whose attempts to connect with her force Mina to consider that she might still have a heart — if only she could remember where she had left it.Between her Spiritual Exfoliation and Detoxification therapies and her elaborate devotion to style, Lorene is interested only in charting her own perfection and impending decay. Although supremely confident in a million shallow ways, she, too, starts to fray at the edges.And there is Lisa, a loving mother who cleans houses, scrapes by, and dreams of food terrorists and child abductors, until even the most innocent events seem to hint at dark possibilities.Lightning Field explores the language tics of our culture — the consumerist fetishes, the self-obsession and the Þeeting possibility that you just might have gotten it all badly wrong. In funny, cutting, unsentimental prose, Spiotta exposes the contradictions of contemporary lives in which "identity is a collection of references." She writes about overcoming not just despair but ambivalence.Playful and dire, raw and poetic, Lightning Field introduces a startling new voice in American fiction.

A gripping and deftly plotted narrative of family and belonging, Lights All Night Long is a dazzling debut novel from an acclaimed young writer

“Lights All Night Long is utterly brilliant and completely captivating…. One of the most propulsive, un-put-downable literary novels I’ve read in ages.”—Anthony Marra, author of A Constellation of Vital Phenomena

Fifteen-year-old Ilya arrives in Louisiana from his native Russia for what should be the adventure of his life: a year in America as an exchange student. The abundance of his new world—the Super Walmarts and heated pools and enormous televisions—is as hard to fathom as the relentless cheerfulness of his host parents. And Sadie, their beautiful and enigmatic daughter, has miraculously taken an interest in him.

But all is not right in Ilya’s world: he’s consumed by the fate of his older brother Vladimir, the magnetic rebel to Ilya’s dutiful wunderkind, back in their tiny Russian hometown. The two have always been close, spending their days dreaming of escaping to America. But when Ilya was tapped for the exchange, Vladimir disappeared into their town’s seedy, drug-plagued underworld. Just before Ilya left, the murders of three young women rocked the town’s usual calm, and Vladimir found himself in prison.

With the help of Sadie, who has secrets of her own, Ilya embarks on a mission to prove Vladimir’s innocence. Piecing together the timeline of the murders and Vladimir’s descent into addiction, Ilya discovers the radical lengths to which Vladimir has gone to protect him—a truth he could only have learned by leaving him behind.

A rich tale of belonging and the pull of homes both native and adopted, Lights All Night Long is a spellbinding story of the fierce bond between brothers determined to find a way back to each other.

Lights in a Western Sky is a collection of twenty short stories encompassing a wide variety of genres, settings and historical periods. With themes ranging from romance to horror, and with settings in the most exotic of locations, the tales contain twists and turns and plenty of unexpected denouements.

This collection of short stories have human tribulation as a common theme. They include a sentimental love story, a tale of lost opportunity in the pursuit of a mythical beast in Africa, an account of an autistic boy’s tragic attempt to do good as he sees it, a simple ghost story, an act of terrorism in which an innocent party becomes implicated, and others that touch upon the supernatural and horror. Also included within Lights in a Western Sky is a trilogy of stories offering thought-provoking interpretations of some of the events surrounding the demise and crucifixion of the biblical Jesus.

Inspired by Roald Dahl’s employment of terminal twists, this book will appeal to readers of short stories. It will also be enjoyed by fans of Roger’s previous literary works.

A shy and apolitical herpetologist-in-training finds the weight of history bearing down on him as the effects of repression ramp up in his country.In an unspecified country that combines elements of Chile under its military regime, South Africa under apartheid, and Italy under fascism, fifteen-year-old Karel Roeder asks only to be left alone to learn from Albert, his mentor at the zoo’s reptile house, and to devote himself to his girlfriend, Leda. But both Leda and Albert lead him into increasingly proscribed areas of thought and speech, and thus into conflict with a newly ascendant party that intends to prosecute a border war against an officially despised ethnic group and criminalize dissent. Citizens have been disappearing and surveillance in the name of safety has become all-pervasive. When Kehr, a special assistant of the civil guard, billets himself at Karel’s house for unknown reasons, Karel finds his already tenuous hold on his own innocence crushed as Kehr — tribune, inquisitor, and metaphysician of terror — instructs his unwilling protégé in those moments when history is let off the leash.Lights Out in the Reptile House is at once a dystopian political parable, a meditation on totalitarianism, and a moving coming-of-age story, as its protagonist struggles to understand his own values and meaning even in the most extreme of crucibles.