As Pankaj Mishra remarked in The Nation, one of the remarkable qualities of Bolaño’s short stories is that they can do the “work of a novel.” The Return contains thirteen unforgettable stories bent on returning to haunt you. Wide-ranging, suggestive, and daring, a Bolaño story might concern the unexpected fate of a beautiful ex-girlfriend or a dream of meeting Enrique Lihn: his plots go anywhere and everywhere and they always surprise. Consider the title piece: a young party animal collapses in a Parisian disco and dies on the dance floor; just as his soul is departing his body, it realizes strange doings are afoot — and what follows next defies the imagination (except Bolaño’s own).Although a few have been serialized in The New Yorker and Playboy, most of the stories of The Return have never before appeared in English, and to Bolaño’s many readers will be like catnip to the cats.

From the Prix Médicis winner comes a haunting meditation on the nature of identity.Dany Laferrière’s most celebrated book since How to Make Love to a Negro, The Return is a bestseller in France and Quebec and the winner of many awards, including the prestigious Prix Médicis and the Grand Prix du livre de Montréal.At age 23, the narrator, Dany, hurriedly left behind the stifling heat of Port-au-Prince for the unending winter of Montreal. It was 1976, and Baby Doc Duvalier’s regime had just killed one of his journalist colleagues. Thirty-three years later, a telephone call informs Dany of his father’s death in New York. Windsor Laferrière had fled Haiti in the 1960s, fearing persecution for his political activities. After the funeral, Dany plans to return his father to Baradères, the village in Haiti where he was born. It is not the body he will take, but the spirit.How does one return from exile? In acutely observed details, Dany reveals his affection for his father and for the land of his birth. Translated by two-time Governor General’s Award — winner David Homel, The Return blends the gritty reality of daily life with the lush sensuality and ecstatic mystery that underlie Haitian culture. It is the novel of a great writer.

A group of young people are searching for meaning in a dark world. The Course, a religious movement led by a charismatic priest, seem to offer everything they have been looking for: a community of bright, thoughtful, beautiful people. But as they are drawn deeper into the Course, money, sex and God collide, threatening to rip them apart.

Extravagant, absurd, and self-aware, The Revolutionaries Try Again plays out against the lost decade of Ecuador's austerity and the stymied idealism of three childhood friends — an expat, a bureaucrat, and a playwright — who are as sure about the evils of dictatorship as they are unsure of everything else, including each other.Everyone thinks they're the chosen ones, Masha wrote on Antonio's manuscript. See About Schmidt with Jack Nicholson. Then she quoted from Hope Against Hope by Nadezhda Mandelstam, because she was sure Antonio hadn't read her yet: Can a man really be held accountable for his own actions? His behavior, even his character, is always in the merciless grip of the age, which squeezes out of him the drop of good or evil that it needs from him. In San Francisco, besides the accumulation of wealth, what does the age ask of your so called protagonist? No wonder he never returns to Ecuador.“Exuberant, cacophonous. . Cardenas dizzyingly leaps from character to character, from street protests to swanky soirees, and from lengthy uninterrupted interior monologues to rapid-fire dialogues and freewheeling satirical radio programs, resulting in extended passages of brilliance.” —Publishers Weekly

After traveling through Europe for two years, Scully and his wife Jennifer wind up in Ireland, and on a mystical whim of Jennifer's, buy an old farmhouse which stands in the shadow of a castle. While Scully spends weeks alone renovating the old house, Jennifer returns to Australia to liquidate their assets. When Scully arrives at Shannon Airport to pick up Jennifer and their seven-year-old daughter, Billie, it is Billie who emerges — alone. There is no note, no explanation, not so much as a word from Jennifer, and the shock has left Billie speechless. In that instant, Scully's life falls to pieces.The Riders is a superbly written and a darkly haunting story of a lovesick man in a vain search for a vanished woman. It is a powerfully accurate account of marriage today, of the demons that trouble relationships, of resurrection found in the will to keep going, in the refusal to hold on, to stand still. The Riders is also a moving story about the relationship between a loving man and his tough, bright daughter.

This extraordinary debut novel from Whiting Writers’ Award winner John Wray is a poetic portrait of a life redeemed at one of the darkest moments in world history.Twenty years after deserting the army in the first world war, Oskar Voxlauer returns to the village of his youth. Haunted by his past, he finds an uneasy peace in the mountains — but it is 1938 and Oskar cannot escape from the rising tide of Nazi influence in town. He attempts to retreat to the woods, only to be drawn back by his own conscience and the chilling realization that the woman whose love might finally save him is bound to the local SS commander. Morally complex, brilliantly plotted, and heartbreakingly realized, The Right Hand of Sleep marks the beginning of an important literary career.

Shortlisted for the 1998 Los Angeles Times Book Award in Fiction: "Stunning and strange. . Sebald has done what every writer dreams of doing. . The book is like a dream you want to last forever. . It glows with the radiance and resilience of the human spirit." — Roberta Silman, The New York Times Book Review"Ostensibly a record of a journey on foot through coastal East Anglia," as Robert McCrum in the London Observer noted, The Rings of Saturn "is also a brilliantly allusive study of England's imperial past and the nature of decline and fall, of loss and decay. . The Rings of Saturn is exhilaratingly, you might say hypnotically, readable. . It is hard to imagine a stranger or more compelling work." The Rings of Saturn — with its curious archive of photographs — chronicles a tour across epochs as well as countryside. On his way, the narrator meets lonely eccentrics inhabiting tumble-down mansions and links them to Rembrandt's "Anatomy Lesson," the natural history of the herring, a matchstick model of the Temple of Jerusalem, the travels of Sir Thomas Browne's skull, and the massive bombings of WWII. Cataloging change, oblivion, and memories, he connects sugar fortunes, Joseph Conrad, and the horrors of colonizing the Belgian Congo. The narrator finds threads which run from an abandoned bridge over the River Blyth to the terrible dowager Empress Tzu Hsi and the silk industry in Norwich. "Sebald," as The New Yorker stated, "weaves his tale together with a complexity and historical sweep that easily encompasses both truth and fiction." The Emigrants (hailed by Susan Sontag as an "astonishing masterpiece-perfect while being unlike any book one has ever read") was "one of the great books of the last few years," as Michael Ondaatje noted: "and now The Rings of Saturn is a similar and as strange a triumph."

The Rise & Fall of Great Powers begins in a dusty bookshop. What follows is an abduction, heated political debate, glimpses into strangers’ homes, and travel around the globe. It’s a novel of curious personalities, mystery, and lots of books: volumes that the characters collect, covet, steal.Tooly Zylberberg, owner of a bookshop in the Welsh countryside, spends most of her life reading. Yet there’s one tale that never made sense: her own life. In childhood, she was spirited away from home, then raised around Asia, Europe and the United States. But who were the people who brought her up? And what ever happened to them?There was Humphrey, a curmudgeon from Russia; there was the charming but tempestuous Sarah, who hailed from Kenya; and there was Venn, the charismatic leader who transformed Tooly forever. Until, quite suddenly, he vanished.Years later, she has lost hope of ever knowing what took place. Then, the old mysteries stir again, sending her — and the reader — on a hunt through place and time, from Wales to Bangkok to New York to Italy, from the 1980’s to the Year 2000 to the present, from the end of the Cold War, to the rise and wobbles of U.S. power, to the digital revolution of today.Gradually, all secrets are revealed…

A searing, postapocalyptic novel destined to become Cormac McCarthy's masterpiece.A father and his son walk alone through burned America. Nothing moves in the ravaged landscape save the ash on the wind. It is cold enough to crack stones, and when the snow falls it is gray. They sky is dark. Their destination is the coast, although they don't know what, if anything, awaits them there. They have nothing; just a pistol to defend themselves against the lawless bands that stalk the road, the clothes they are wearing, a cart of scavenged food – and each other.The Road is the profoundly moving story of a journey. It boldly imagines a future in which no hope remains, but in which the father and his son, "each the other's world entire," are sustained by love. Awesome in the totality of its vision, it is an unflinching meditation on the worst and the best that we are capable of: ultimate destructiveness, desperate tenacity, and the tenderness that keeps two people alive in the face of total devastation.The prose is quintessentially McCarthy: spare, desolate, unemotional, reserved of both unnecessary vocabulary and punctuation (he recognized the necessary evil of periods denoting the end of a sentence. Some contractions are so designated with an apostrophe, some not. Exclamation points are avoided with the same vigilance as would be shown to beanies with propellers). Although most English teachers I've been a captive audience to would consider him Satan incarnate, he still can turn a phrase of almost unbearable beauty.

“Tip” Marugg’s The Roar of Morning has been widely praised as an intensely personal, often dreamlike literary masterpiece that balances Caribbean mysticism with the magical realism of Latin American fiction while reflecting the Calvinist sensibilities of the region’s Dutch colonial past.The story begins on a tropical Antilles night. A man drinks and awaits the coming dawn with his dogs, thinking he might well commit suicide in “the roar of morning.” While contemplating his possible end, the events of his life on Curaçao and on mainland Venezuela come rushing back to him. Some memories are recent, others distant; all are tormented by the politics of a colonialist “gone native.” He recalls sickness and sexual awakening as well as personal encounters with the extraordinary and unexplained. As the day breaks, he has an apocalyptic vision of a great fire engulfing the entire South American continent. The countdown to Armageddon has begun, in a brilliantly dissolute narrative akin to Malcolm Lowry’s Under the Volcano and the writings of Charles Bukowski.

The young Brahman Samar has come to the holy city of Benares to complete his education and take a civil service exam. But in this city redolent of timeworn customs, where pilgrims bathe in the sacred Ganges and breathe in smoke from burning ghats along the shore, Samar is offered entirely different perspectives on his country from the people he encounters. More than illustrating the clash of cultures, Mishra presents the universal truth that our desire for the other is our most painful joy.

“I never set foot in J’s bedroom. . I presume that even J’s mother rarely set foot in there and only in genuine emergencies, perhaps because not even she was protected by the awe that he held for her. He wouldn’t let anything touch his mother, but that wouldn’t necessarily have stopped him from touching her breasts. . Even though I spent a lot of time in my grandmother’s house as a child, I can’t picture J’s room at all. I don’t know where the bed was, though there must have been one, and I don’t have a clue what else could have been in there. I simply can’t picture it. Venturing in there during the years of the stench would have been hell. I would have died of disgust. . Today, it’s my study. I’ve always written novels in there, but until now it had never occurred to me to write about my mentally-impaired-at-birth uncle J. About him and his room. About the house and the street. And about my family. And our gravestones. And the Wetterau, which is the whole world. . “ With brilliant irony, Andreas Maier describes his uncle J’s fraught detachment from the real world and the life of small-town Germany in the years after World War II. The Room is both a memoir and a novel, the first installment of an epic family saga, and a love-letter to an unknowable soul.

Funny, clever, surreal, and thought-provoking, this Kafka-esque masterpiece introduces the unforgettable Bjorn, an exceptionally meticulous office worker striving to live life on his own terms.Bjorn is a compulsive, exacting bureaucrat who discovers a secret room at the government office where he works-a secret room that no one else in his office will acknowledge. When Bjorn is in his room, what his coworkers see is him standing by the wall and staring off into space looking dazed, relaxed, and decidedly creepy. Bjorn's bizarre behavior eventually leads his coworkers to try to have him fired, but Bjorn will turn the tables on them with help from his secret room. Author Jonas Karlsson doesn't leave a word out of place in this brilliant, bizarre, delightful take on how far we will go-in a world ruled by conformity-to live an individual and examined life.

National Book Award WinnerOne Sunday in the spring of 1988, a woman living on a reservation in North Dakota is attacked. The details of the crime are slow to surface as Geraldine Coutts is traumatized and reluctant to relive or reveal what happened, either to the police or to her husband, Bazil, and thirteen-year-old son, Joe. In one day, Joe's life is irrevocably transformed. He tries to heal his mother, but she will not leave her bed and slips into an abyss of solitude. Increasingly alone, Joe finds himself thrust prematurely into an adult world for which he is ill prepared.While his father, who is a tribal judge, endeavors to wrest justice from a situation that defies his efforts, Joe becomes frustrated with the official investigation and sets out with his trusted friends, Cappy, Zack, and Angus, to get some answers of his own. Their quest takes them first to the Round House, a sacred space and place of worship for the Ojibwe. And this is only the beginning.

Since the publication of his first book in 1987, William T. Vollmann has established himself as one of the most fascinating and unconventional literary figures on the scene today. Named one of the twenty best writers under forty by the New Yorker in 1999, Vollmann received the best reviews of his career for The Royal Family, a searing fictional trip through a San Francisco underworld populated by prostitutes, drug addicts, and urban spiritual seekers. Part biblical allegory and part skewed postmodern crime novel, The Royal Family is a vivid and unforgettable work of fiction by one of today's most daring writers.

Kate Furnivall was inspired by her mother’s story to write this book. The Russian Concubine contains fictional characters and events, but makes use of the extraordinary situation that was her mother’s childhood experience – that of two White Russian refugees, a mother and daughter, stuck without money or papers in an International Settlement in China. Kate Furnivall and her husband live by the sea in the beautiful county of Devon.***A sweeping novel set in war-torn 1928 China, with a star-crossed love story at its center.In a city full of thieves and Communists, danger and death, spirited young Lydia Ivanova has lived a hard life. Always looking over her shoulder, the sixteen-year-old must steal to feed herself and her mother, Valentina, who numbered among the Russian elite until Bolsheviks murdered most of them, including her husband. As exiles, Lydia and Valentina have learned to survive in a foreign land.Often, Lydia steals away to meet with the handsome young freedom fighter Chang An Lo. But they face danger: Chiang Kai Shek's troops are headed toward Junchow to kill Reds like Chang, who has in his possession the jewels of a tsarina, meant as a gift for the despot's wife. The young pair's all-consuming love can only bring shame and peril upon them, from both sides. Those in power will do anything to quell it. But Lydia and Chang are powerless to end it.

A visionary novel from the author of Super Sad True Love Story and Little Failure.The Russian Debutante’s Handbook introduces Vladimir Girshkin, one of the most original and unlikely heroes of recent times. The twenty-five-year-old unhappy lover to a fat dungeon mistress, affectionately nicknamed "Little Failure" by his high-achieving mother, Vladimir toils his days away as a lowly clerk at the bureaucratic Emma Lazarus Immigrant Absorption Society. When a wealthy but psychotic old Russian war hero appears, Vladimir embarks on an adventure of unrelenting lunacy that takes us from New York’s Lower East Side to the hip frontier wilderness of Prava—the Eastern European Paris of the nineties. With the help of a murderous but fun-loving Russian mafioso, Vladimir infiltrates the Prava expat community and launches a scheme as ridiculous as it is brilliant.Bursting with wit, humor, and rare insight, The Russian Debutante’s Handbook is both a highly imaginative romp and a serious exploration of what it means to be an immigrant in America.

Hegel and Manfried Grossbart may not consider themselves bad men – but death still stalks them through the dark woods of medieval Europe.The year is 1364, and the brothers Grossbart have embarked on a naïve quest for fortune. Descended from a long line of graverobbers, they are determined to follow their family's footsteps to the fabled crypts of Gyptland. To get there, they will have to brave dangerous and unknown lands and keep company with all manner of desperate travelers-merchants, priests, and scoundrels alike. For theirs is a world both familiar and distant; a world of living saints and livelier demons, of monsters and madmen.The Brothers Grossbart are about to discover that all legends have their truths, and worse fates than death await those who would take the red road of villainy.

Following on from the success of ‘The Speckled People’, Hugo Hamilton's new memoir recounts the summer he spent working at a local harbour in Ireland, at a time of tremendous fear and mistrust.Young Hugo longs to be released from the confused identity he has inherited from his German mother and Irish father, but the backdrop of his mother’s shame at the hands of Allied soldiers in the aftermath of the Second World War, along with his German cousin’s mysterious disappearance somewhere on the Irish West Coast and the spiralling troubles in the north, seems determined to trap him in history. In an attempt to break free of his past, Hugo rebels against his father’s strict and crusading regime and turns to the exciting new world of rock and roll, still a taboo subject in the family home.His job at the local harbour, rather than offering a welcome respite from his speckled world, entangles him in a bitter feud between two fishermen — one Catholic, one Protestant. Hugo listens to the missing persons bulletins going out on the radio for his German cousin, and watches the unfolding harbour duel end in drowning before he can finally escape the ropes of history.