Based on a true story and inspired by the work of Primo Levi, The German Mujahid is a heartfelt reflection on guilt and the harsh imperatives of history.The two brothers Schiller, Rachel and Malrich, couldn't be more dissimilar. They were born in a small village in Algeria to a German father and an Algerian mother, and raised by an elderly uncle in one of the toughest ghettos in France. But there the similarities end. Rachel is a model immigrant — hard working, upstanding, law-abiding. Malrich has drifted. Increasingly alienated and angry, his future seems certain: incarceration at best. Then Islamic fundamentalists murder the young men's parents in Algeria and the event transforms the destinies of both brothers in unexpected ways. Rachel discovers the shocking truth about his family and buckles under the weight of the sins of his father, a former SS officer. Now Malrich, the outcast, will have to face that same awful truth alone.Banned in the author's native Algeria for of the frankness with which it confronts several explosive themes, The German Mujahid is a truly groundbreaking novel. For the first time, an Arab author directly addresses the moral implications of the Shoah. But this richly plotted novel also leaves its author room enough to address other equally controversial issues; Islamic fundamentalism and Algeria's "dirty war" of the early 1990s, for example or the emergence of grim Muslim ghettos in France's low-income housing projects. In this gripping novel, Boualem Sansal confronts these and other explosive questions with unprecedented sincerity and courage.

Rainbow Rowell’s FANGIRL for adults, written with a penchant for old maps and undocumented 15th century explorers. For literary readers with a taste for suspense: two women hunt for a missing pop star and become ensnared in her secret society, following clues through the dark underbelly of Chicago.A frightening, whip-smart adventure through Chicago that begins when a pop star, Molly Metropolis, disappears before a major performance. And two young women who set out to find her. At first, the mystery of her disappearance is a lighthearted scavenger hunt…until they both realize that they’re in greater danger than they could have ever imagined.

"Ismail Kadare is one of Europe's most consistently interesting and powerful contemporary novelists, a writer whose stark, memorable prose imprints itself on the reader's consciousness." — Los Angeles TimesAn old woman is awoken in the dead of night by knocks at her front door. The woman opens it to find her daughter, Doruntine, standing there alone in the darkness. She has been brought home from a distant land by a mysterious rider she claims is her brother Konstandin. But unbeknownst to her, Konstandin has been dead for years. What follows is chain of events which plunges a medieval village into fear and mistrust. Who is the ghost rider?

The year is 1950, and in a small town on Cape Cod twenty-six-year-old librarian Peggy Cort feels like love and life have stood her up. Until the day James Carlson Sweatt — the “over-tall” eleven-year-old boy who’s the talk of the town — walks into her library and changes her life forever. Two misfits whose lonely paths cross at the circulation desk, Peggy and James are odd candidates for friendship, but nevertheless they soon find their lives entwined in ways that neither one could have predicted. In James, Peggy discovers the one person who’s ever really understood her, and as he grows — six foot five at age twelve, then seven feet, then eight — so does her heart and their most singular romance.

The connections and interconnections of past and present the realization that life is a whole continuously echoing back to the past and unfolding toward the future were sources of the strength, renewal, and joy celebrated in H.D.'s Trilogy and, in a differing, but no less real way, in The Gift her novelistic memoir of childhood."

Two of Cecelia’s best-loved novels available as an ebook duo for the first time! THE GIFT and THANKS FOR THE MEMORIES will make a wonderful treat for any Cecelia fan this Christmas. If you could wish for one gift this Christmas, what would it be? Two people from very different walks of life meet one Christmas, and find their worlds changed beyond measure. THE GIFT is an enchanting and thoughtful Christmas story that speaks to all of us about the value of time and what is truly important in life. THANKS FOR THE MEMORIES is a compelling and perceptive tale of intimacy, memory and relationships from this No.1 bestselling author. After all, how can you know someone that you’ve never met before?

"Highly original. Infinitely charming. And ever so touching." – Paul AusterA publishing phenomenon in Japan and a heartwarming story that will change the way we all see math, baseball, memory, and each other She is a housekeeper by trade, a single mom by choice, shy, brilliant, and starting a new tour of duty in the home of an aging professor. He is the professor, a mathematical genius, capable of limitless kindness and intuitive affection, but the victim of a mysterious accident that has rendered him unable to remember anything for longer than eighty minutes. Root, the housekeepers ten-year-old son, combines his mothers sympathy with a sensitive curiosity all his own. Over the course of a few months in 1992, these three develop a profoundly affecting friendship, based on a shared love of mathematics and baseball, that will change each of their lives permanently. Chosen as the most popular book in Japan by readers and booksellers alike, The Gift of Numbers is Yoko Ogawas first novel to be published in English, and in the U.S.

At the twilight of the stone age, an isolated village lives in relative prosperity. A young man, a one-armed dreamer unable to work the stone, elects himself the village storyteller, and hunts restlessly, far and wide, for inspiration. But the information he finds and the people he meets warn of a fissure in their world: the advent of a new age and the coming of a metal that will change their community's life irrevocably.'A tour de force, finely and firmly written. Crace is a virtuoso' Frank Kermode'His work is among the most original in comtemporary fiction' "The Times"

Set against the beautiful backdrop of Cape Cod, "The Gin Chowder Club" is an eloquent, tender story of friendship, longing, and the enduring power of love…The friendship between the Coleman and Shepherd families is as old and comfortable as the neighbouring houses they occupy each summer on Cape Cod. Samuel and Sarah Coleman love those warm months by the water; the evenings spent on their porch, enjoying gin and tonics, good conversation and homemade clam chowder. Here they've watched their sons, Isaac and Asa, grow into fine young men, and watched, too, as Nate Shepherd, aching with grief at the loss of his first wife, finally found love again with the much younger Noelle. But beyond the surface of these idyllic gatherings, the growing attraction between Noelle and handsome, college-bound Asa threatens to upend everything. In spite of her guilt and misgivings, Noelle is drawn into a reckless secret affair with far-reaching consequences. And over the course of one bittersweet, unforgettable summer, Asa will learn more than he ever expected about love – the joys and heartache it awakens in us, the lengths we'll go to keep it, and the countless ways it can change our lives forever…

A grief-stricken librarian decides to have sex with every man who enters her library. A half-mad, unbearably beautiful heiress follows a strange man home, seeking total sexual abandon: He only wants to watch game shows. A woman falls in love with a hunchback; when his deformity turns out to be a prosthesis, she leaves him. A wife whose husband has just returned from the war struggles with the heartrending question: Can she still love a man who has no lips?Aimee Bender's stories portray a world twisted on its axis, a place of unconvention that resembles nothing so much as real life, in all its grotesque, beautiful glory. From the first line of each tale she lets us know she is telling a story, but the moral is never quite what we expect. Bender's prose is glorious: musical and colloquial, inimitable and heartrending.Here are stories of men and women whose lives are shaped-and sometimes twisted-by the power of extraordinary desires, erotic and otherwise. The Girl in the Flammable Skirt is the debut of a major American writer.

In her latest enchanting novel, New York Times bestelling author Sarah Addison Allen invites you to a quirky little Southern town with more magic than a full Carolina moon. Here two very different women discover how to find their place in the world.no matter how out of place they feel.Emily Benedict came to Mullaby, North Carolina, hoping to solve at least some of the riddles surrounding her mother's life. For instance, why did Dulcie Shelby leave her hometown so suddenly? Why did she vow never to return? But the moment Emily enters the house where her mother grew up and meets the grandfather she never knew – a reclusive, real-life gentle giant – she realizes that mysteries aren't solved in Mullaby, they're a way of life.Here are rooms where the wallpaper changes to suit your mood. Unexplained lights skip across the yard at midnight. And a neighbor bakes hope in the form of cakes.Everyone in Mullaby adores Julia Winterson's cakes. She offers them to satisfy the town's sweet tooth and in the hope of bringing back the love she fears she's lost forever. In Julia, Emily may have found a link to her mother's past. But why is everyone trying to discourage Emily's growing relationship with the handsome and mysterious son of Mullaby's most prominent family? Emily came to Mullaby to get answers, but all she's found so far are more questions.Is there really a ghost dancing in her backyard? Can a cake really bring back a lost love?In this town of lovable misfits, maybe the right answer is the one that just feels.different.

“Explosive… Poignant and shattering… While [the] climax is inevitable and the stories lead directly toward it, a reader is still shocked and horrified when it occurs.” -The Boston Globe“Shan Sa creates a sense of foreboding that binds the parallel tales of her protagonists. Her measured prose amplifies the isolation amid turmoil that each character seems to inhabit.” – San Francisco Chronicle“Dreamy… powerful… This unlikely love story… is beautiful, shocking, and sad.” – Entertainment Weekly“Compelling… Emotionally charged chapters evoke the stop-and-start rhythms of adolescence… Sa handles the intersection of the personal and the political quite deftly.” – The Washington Post Book World“What makes Sa’s novel so satisfying is the deceptive simplicity of her narrative strategy.” – San Jose Mercury News“An awesome read… Shan Sa describes the story so well that you almost forget you’ve never visited the places in her book… This book is truly for every reader.” -The Decatur Daily“Entrancing… [With] an ending that you won’t predict.” – Austin American-Statesman“It has the sweep of war and the intimacy of a love story… Shan Sa is a phenomenon.” – The Observer (London)“Spellbinding… Sa’s language is graceful and trancelike: her fights are a whirling choreography of flying limbs and snow, her emotions richly yet precisely expressed.” – The Times (London)“One is struck by the economy of the tale, its speed, and the brutality of its calculations. There is never an excess word or a superfluous phrase: each paragraph counts… Fine literary work.” – Le Figaro Magazine (France)“An astonishing book… Ends up taking one’s breath away… Goes straight to our hearts.” – Le Point (France)“Gripping… A wrenching love story… [The protagonists’] shared sense of immediacy and the transience of life is what in the final analysis makes this novel so strong, so intelligent, so moving… You’ll have to look far and wide to find a better new novel on an East Asian subject than this finely crafted story, satisfying as it is on so many different levels.” – The Taipei Times***In a remote Manchurian town in the 1930s, a sixteen-year-old girl is more concerned with intimations of her own womanhood than the escalating hostilities between her countrymen and their Japanese occupiers. While still a schoolgirl in braids, she takes her first lover, a dissident student. The more she understands of adult life, however, the more disdainful she is of its deceptions, and the more she loses herself in her one true passion: the ancient game of go.Incredibly for a teenager-and a girl at that-she dominates the games in her town. No opponent interests her until she is challenged by a stranger, who reveals himself to us as a Japanese soldier in disguise. They begin a game and continue it for days, rarely speaking but deeply moved by each other's strategies. As the clash of their peoples becomes ever more desperate and inescapable, and as each one's untold life begins to veer wildly off course, the girl and the soldier are absorbed by only one thing-the progress of their game, each move of which brings them closer to their shocking fate.In The Girl Who Played Go, Shan Sa has distilled the piercing emotions of adolescence into an engrossing, austerely beautiful story of love, cruelty and loss of innocence.

“Just then, Rahul saw a spot of yellow far away. . The yellow glowed beautifully in the morning light. There was something different about this particular yellow. This one entered through his eyes, dissolved in his blood, and went straight to his heart.” Uday Prakash’s novel of contemporary India is a tender love story — university student Rahul is swept away by a “sweet fever” of love for Anjali, the enchanting girl with the golden parasol. But Prakash’s tale is set in a world where the 3,000-year-old Hindu caste system still holds sway and social realities doom the chances of a non-Brahmin boy who loves a Brahmin girl.The Girl with the Golden Parasol is the first English translation of Prakash’s work to be published in the United States. His audacious novel captures the profound contradictions of India today, where the forces aligned against change outweigh even the power of love.

Girls — their vulnerability, strength, and passion to belong — are at the heart of this stunning first novel for readers of Jeffrey Eugenides’s The Virgin Suicides and Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad.Northern California, during the violent end of the 1960s. At the start of summer, a lonely and thoughtful teenager, Evie Boyd, sees a group of girls in the park, and is immediately caught by their freedom, their careless dress, their dangerous aura of abandon. Soon, Evie is in thrall to Suzanne, a mesmerizing older girl, and is drawn into the circle of a soon-to-be infamous cult and the man who is its charismatic leader. Hidden in the hills, their sprawling ranch is eerie and run down, but to Evie, it is exotic, thrilling, charged — a place where she feels desperate to be accepted. As she spends more time away from her mother and the rhythms of her daily life, and as her obsession with Suzanne intensifies, Evie does not realize she is coming closer and closer to unthinkable violence, and to that moment in a girl’s life when everything can go horribly wrong.Emma Cline’s remarkable debut novel is gorgeously written and spellbinding, with razor-sharp precision and startling psychological insight. The Girls is a brilliant work of fiction — and an indelible portrait of girls, and of the women they become.

These days the news is full of reports about the graying of America, yet it's rare that old people appear in contemporary fiction except as stock characters: the indulgent grandmother, the wicked witch. In her first novel in a dozen years, the acclaimed author of How She Died and Sweetsir gives us four grand old ladies, sisters, each unique and indelibly real, in a poignant and very funny story about the last American taboos, old age and dying.As the novel opens, Jenny, the youngest at eighty, has flown down to Miami — that gaudy, pastel-hued haven of the elderly — to look after her two failing oldest sisters: Eva, ninety-five, always the family mainstay, and Naomi, ninety, who is riddled with cancer but still has her tart tongue and her jet-black head of hair. The fourth sister, Flora, still has her black hair too, straight out of the bottle, but no head for the hard decisions facing Eva and Naomi. An energetic eighty-five, Flora spends her time dating ("He's mad about me, I only hope he can get it up!”) and making the rounds of the retirement homes with her standup routine, the Sandra Bernhard of the senior set.The Girls gives us these four full-if-wrinkled-fleshed women with all their complaints and foibles, their self-absorption and downright orneriness, their unquenchable humor and immense courage. Aches and pains, wrinkles and hearing aids, wheelchairs and walkers — out of these, and out of the human spirit, Helen Yglesias fashions a novel that moves us, opens our eyes, and makes us laugh out loud.

Like the May of Teck Club itself—"three times window shattered since 1940 but never directly hit"—its lady inhabitants do their best to act as if the world were back to normal: practicing elocution, and jostling over suitors and a single Schiaparelli gown. The novel's harrowing ending reveals that the girls' giddy literary and amorous peregrinations are hiding some tragically painful war wounds.Chosen by Anthony Burgess as one of the Best Modern Novels in the Sunday Times of London, The Girls of Slender Means is a taut and eerily perfect novel by an author The New York Times has called "one of this century's finest creators of comic-metaphysical entertainment."

"Call Jeff Wood's The Glacier what you will — a novel-in-screenplay-form; a prose poem on the themes of death, suburbia, and the cruel symmetries of cosmic time; a surreal prophecy from America's anguished heartland — it will remain what it was always aiming to be, and that's one of the most indelible and visionary movies you've ever seen."— Jon Raymond, author of Old Joy, Wendy and Lucy, and Meek's CutoffA spellbinding work in the spirit of Tarkovsky or Jodorowsky that reimagines the American frontier at the turn of the millennium, a time when suburban development was metastasizing and the Social was about to implode. Following a caterer at a convention center, a surveyor residing in a storage unit, and the masses lining up for an Event on the horizon, The Glacier is a poetic rendering of the pre-apocalypse and a requiem for the passing of one world into another.Jeff Wood is an actor and writer from Ohio currently living in Brooklyn and Berlin. He is a founding member of the experimental film/art group Rufus Corporation and the Wallabout Oyster Theatre Brooklyn. His ten-year collaboration with Eve Sussman and Rufus Corporation has resulted in the works 89 Seconds at Alcazar; The Rape of the Sabine Women; and numerous international screenings including the Whitney Museum of American Art, MoMA NYC, MoMA SF, IFC Center NY, and Sundance New Frontier. He is a 2014 Fellow in Screenwriting from the New York Foundation for the Arts.

This is Hesse’s last and greatest work, a triumph of imagination which won for him the Nobel Prize for Literature. Described as “sublime” by Thomas Mann, admired by André Gide and T. S. Eliot, this prophetic novel is a chronicle of the future about Castalia, an elitist group formed after the chaos of the 20th-century’s wars. It is the key to a full understanding of Hesse’s thought.Something like chess but far more intricate, the game of Magister Ludi known as the Glass Bead Game is thought in its purest form, a synthesis through which philosophy, art, music and scientific law are appreciated simultaneously. The scholar-players are isolated within Castalia, an autonomous elite institution devoted wholly to the mind and the imagination…

From the award-winning author of Station Eleven, an exhilarating novel set at the glittering intersection of two seemingly disparate events—a massive Ponzi scheme collapse and the mysterious disappearance of a woman from a ship at sea.

Vincent is a bartender at the Hotel Caiette, a five-star lodging on the northernmost tip of Vancouver Island. On the night she meets Jonathan Alkaitis, a hooded figure scrawls a message on the lobby’s glass wall: “Why don’t you swallow broken glass.” High above Manhattan, a greater crime is committed: Alkaitis is running an international Ponzi scheme, moving imaginary sums of money through clients’ accounts. When the financial empire collapses, it obliterates countless fortunes and devastates lives. Vincent, who had been posing as Jonathan’s wife, walks away into the night. Years later, a victim of the fraud is hired to investigate a strange occurrence: a woman has seemingly vanished from the deck of a container ship between ports of call.

In this captivating story of crisis and survival, Emily St. John Mandel takes readers through often hidden landscapes: campgrounds for the near-homeless, underground electronica clubs, the business of international shipping, service in luxury hotels, and life in a federal prison. Rife with unexpected beauty, The Glass Hotel is a captivating portrait of greed and guilt, love and delusion, ghosts and unintended consequences, and the infinite ways we search for meaning in our lives.