Mahmoud's passion for his wife Fereiba, a schoolteacher, is greater than any love she's ever known. But their happy, middle-class world — a life of education, work, and comfort — implodes when their country is engulfed in war, and the Taliban rises to power.Mahmoud, a civil engineer, becomes a target of the new fundamentalist regime and is murdered. Forced to flee Kabul with her three children, Fereiba has one hope to survive: she must find a way to cross Europe and reach her sister's family in England. With forged papers and help from kind strangers they meet along the way, Fereiba make a dangerous crossing into Iran under cover of darkness. Exhausted and brokenhearted but undefeated, Fereiba manages to smuggle them as far as Greece. But in a busy market square, their fate takes a frightening turn when her teenage son, Saleem, becomes separated from the rest of the family.Faced with an impossible choice, Fereiba pushes on with her daughter and baby, while Saleem falls into the shadowy underground network of undocumented Afghans who haunt the streets of Europe's capitals. Across the continent Fereiba and Saleem struggle to reunite, and ultimately find a place where they can begin to reconstruct their lives.

A sly, provocative, and psychologically astute debut story collection from a 2015 Whiting Award winner.In Leopoldine Core's stories, you never know where you are going to end up. Populated by sex workers and artists, lovers and friends, her characters are endlessly striving to understand each other. And while they may seem to operate at the margins, there is something eminently relatable, even elemental about their romantic relationships, their personal demons, and the strange shapes their joy can take.Refreshing, witty, and absolutely close to the heart, Core's twenty stories, set in and around New York City, have an other-worldly quality along with a deep seriousness — even a moral seriousness. What we know of identity is smashed and in its place, true individuals emerge, each bristling with a unique sexuality, a belief-system all their own. Reminiscent of Jane Bowles, William Burroughs, and Colette, her writing glows with an authenticity that is intoxicating and rare.Dirty and squalid, poetic and pure, Core bravely tunnels straight to the center of human suffering and longing. This collection announces a daring and deeply sensitive new voice.

Christopher and Alexandra's passion for one another raises eyebrows and invites envy. This beautiful, blinkered couple do the unthinkable and run away from home, abandoning their two teenage children. Their sudden departure is an act of glorious wilfulness. Life in the countries they visit serves as nothing more than a backdrop to the vagaries of their love affair. Initially their loyal neighbour receives the odd postcard, but that soon stops.Fifteen years later Alexandra is in remote Bolivia with a lover young enough to be her son and Christopher is in Venice, desolate and alone but for the pigeons and prostitutes. Tormented by past mistakes, neither can accept that they may never meet again.A haunting story of obsessive love and a moving testimony to the bonds that tie us to our past, regardless of distance or time traveled.Maggie Gee was chosen as one of Granta's original 'Best Young British Novelists'. She has published many novels to great acclaim, including The White Family, which was shortlisted for the 2002 Orange Prize for Fiction and for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award 2004; and The Flood, which was longlisted for the 2004 Orange Prize. She has also published My Cleaner, My Driver, The Ice People and My Animal Life with Telegram. Virginia Woolf in Manhattan is her latest novel.Maggie was the first female Chair of the Royal Society of Literature, 2004–2008, and is now one of its Vice-Presidents. She lives in London.

Where Europe Begins presents a collection of startling new stories by Japanese writer Yoko Tawada. Moving through landscapes of fairy tales, family history, strange words and letters, dreams, and every-day reality, Tawada's work blurs divisions between fact and fiction, prose and poetry. Often set in physical spaces as disparate as Japan, Siberia, Russia, and Germany, these tales describe a fragmented world where even a city or the human body can become a sort of text. Suddenly, the reader becomes as much a foreigner as the author and the figures that fill this book: the ghost of a burned woman, a woman traveling on the Trans-Siberian railroad, a mechanical doll, a tongue, a monk who leaps into his own reflection. Tawada playfully makes the experience of estrangement — of a being in-between — both sensual and bewildering, and as a result practically invents a new way of seeing things while telling a fine story.

Stella is married, she has a child and a fulfilling job. She lives with her young family in a house in the suburbs.Her life is happy and unremarkable, but she is a little lonely-her husband travels a lot for work and so she is often alone in the house with only her daughter for company. One day a stranger appears at her door, a man Stella's never seen before. He says he just wants to talk to her, nothing more. She refuses. The next day he comes again. And then the day after that. He will not leave her in peace. When Stella works out that he lives up the road, and tries to confront him, it makes no difference. This is the beginning of a nightmare that slowly and remorselessly escalates.Where Love Begins is a delicately wrought, deeply sinister novel about how easily the comfortable lives we construct for ourselves can be shattered.

A daring novel that explores the taboos surrounding male-female relationships in Saudi Arabia’s deeply conservative society, Where Pigeons Don’t Fly scrutinises the public tyranny of the so-called ‘Committee for Virtue’, which monitors young unmarried couples in Riyadh. Focusing on one young man, the novel follows him from early childhood to the point where he decides to flee from Saudi Arabia to Britain, as a result of the destructive policies that prohibit genuine love in the country. These policies force male-female love underground, often leading to jail or banishment from Saudi Arabia. The author, through the lens of this one character, reveals truths about his country’s male-dominated and divided society.

**A brilliant writer confronts grief and transforms it into art, in a book of surprising beauty and love.**

The narrator of *Where Reasons End* writes, " *I had but one delusion, which I held on to with all my willpower: We once gave Nikolai a life of flesh and blood; and I'm doing it over again, this time by words*."

Yiyun Li meets life's deepest sorrows as she imagines a conversation between a mother and child in a timeless world. Composed in the months after she lost a child to suicide, *Where Reasons End* trespasses into the space between life and death as mother and child talk, free from old images and narratives. Deeply moving, these conversations portray the love and complexity of a relationship.

Written with originality, precision, and poise, *Where Reasons End* is suffused with intimacy, inescapable pain, and fierce love.

**Advance praise for** * **Where Reasons End***

"The most intelligent, insightful, heart-wrenching...

The magnum opus from Alejandro Jodorowsky — director of The Holy Mountain, star of Jodorowsky’s Dune, spiritual guru behind Psychomagic and The Way of Tarot, innovator behind classic comics The Incal and Metabarons, and legend of Latin American literature.There has never been an artist like the polymathic Chilean director, author, and mystic Alejandro Jodorowsky. For eight decades, he has blazed new trails across a dazzling variety of creative fields. While his psychedelic, visionary films have been celebrated by the likes of John Lennon, Marina Abramovic, and Kanye West, his novels — praised throughout Latin America in the same breath as those of Gabriel García Márquez — have remained largely unknown in the English-speaking world. Until now.Where the Bird Sings Best tells the fantastic story of the Jodorowskys’ emigration from Ukraine to Chile amidst the political and cultural upheavals of the 19th and 20th centuries. Like One Hundred Years of Solitude, Jodorowsky’s book transforms family history into heroic legend: incestuous beekeepers hide their crime with a living cloak of bees, a czar fakes his own death to live as a hermit amongst the animals, a devout grandfather confides only in the ghost of a wise rabbi, a transgender ballerina with a voracious sexual appetite holds a would-be saint in thrall. Kaleidoscopic, exhilarating, and erotic, Where the Bird Sings Best expands the classic immigration story to mythic proportions.

Love, in its many forms and complexities, weaves through this collection by Amy Bloom, the New York Times bestselling author of Away. Bloom's astonishing and astute new work of interconnected stories illuminates the mysteries of passion, family, and friendship.Propelled by Bloom's dazzling prose, unmistakable voice, and generous wit, Where the God of Love Hangs Out takes us to the margins and the centers of real people's lives, exploring the changes that love and loss create. A young woman is haunted by her roommate's murder; a man and his daughter-in-law confess their sins in the unlikeliest of places. In one quartet of interlocking stories, two middle-aged friends, married to others, find themselves surprisingly drawn to each other, risking all while never underestimating the cost. In another linked set of stories, we follow mother and son for thirty years as their small and uncertain family becomes an irresistible tribe.Insightful, sensuous, and heartbreaking, these stories of passion and disappointment, life and death, capture deep human truths. As The New Yorker has said, "Amy Bloom gets more meaning into individual sentences than most authors manage in whole books."

Amos Oz's first book: a disturbing and beautiful collection of short stories about kibbutz life. Written in the '60s, these eight stories convey the tension and intensity of feeling in the founding period of Israel, a brand-new state with an age-old history.

From the acclaimed John Barth, "one of the greatest novelists of our time" (Washington Post Book World) and "a master of language" (Chicago Sun-Times), comes a lively triad of tales that delight in the many possibilities of language and its users.The first novella, "Tell Me," explores a callow undergraduate's initiation into the mysteries of sex, death, and the Heroic Cycle. The second novella, "I've Been Told," traces no less than the history of storytelling and examines innocence and modernity, ignorance and self-consciousness. And the three elderly sisters of the third novella, "As I Was Saying. .," record an oral history of their youthful muse-like services to (and servicings of) a subsequently notorious and now mysteriously vanished novelist.Sexy, humorous, and brimming with Barth's deep intelligence and playful irreverence, Where Three Roads Meet will surely delight loyal fans and draw new ones.John Barth is the author of numerous works of fiction, including The Sot-Weed Factor, The Tidewater Tales, Lost in the Funhouse, The Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor, the National Book Award winner Chimera, and most recently The Book of Ten Nights and a Night. He taught for many years in the writing program at Johns Hopkins University."Teller, tale, torrid. . inspiration: Barth's seventeenth book brings these three narrative 'roads' together inimitably, and thrice. [Where Three Roads Meet] employs all of his familiar devices — alliteration, shifts in diction and time, puns — to tease and titillate, while at the same time articulate — obliquely, sadly, angrily, gloriously — a farewell to language and its objects: us." — Publishers Weekly, starred review

Winner of the Prix Médicis, this multifaceted literary novel follows the Jesuit scholar Athanasius Kircher across 17th century Europe and Eleazard von Wogau, a retired French correspondent, through modern Brazil.When Eleazard begins editing a strange, unpublished biography of Kircher, the rest of his life seems to begin unraveling — his ex-wife goes on a dangerous geological expedition to Mato Grosso; his daughter abandons school to travel with her young professor and her lesbian lover to an indigenous beach town, where the trio use drugs and form interdependent sexual relationships; and Eleazard himself starts losing his sanity, escalated by loneliness, and his work on the biography. Patterns begin to emerge from these interwoven narratives, which develop toward a mesmerizing climax.Shortlisted for the Goncourt Prize and the European Book Award, and already translated into 14 languages, Where Tigers Are At Home is large-scale epic, at once literary and entertaining, that belongs in the company of Umberto Eco and Haruki Murakami.

With spare, simple prose, Kent Haruf paints a revealing and insightful portrait of small-town life and the chilling consequences of one man's actions.

**A marvelous new novel from the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of *The Lowland* and *Interpreter of Maladies* --her first in nearly a decade--about a woman questioning her place in the world, wavering between stasis and movement, between the need to belong and the refusal to form lasting ties.

A Most Anticipated Novel of 2021 from **• ***Buzzfeed*** • *** O, The Oprah Magazine ***• *** TIME ***• *** Vulture ***• *** Vogue ***• *** LitHub ***• *** Harper's Bazaar***

**

**Exuberance and dread, attachment and estrangement: in this novel, Jhumpa Lahiri stretches her themes to the limit. In the arc of one year, an unnamed narrator in an unnamed city, in the middle of her life 's journey, realizes that she's lost her way. The city she calls home acts as a companion and interlocutor:...

While the Gods Were Sleeping is a novel about the magnitude and impact of the First World War, the recollections of which are recorded in the notebooks of the elderly Helena. The young Helena is sent to her uncle’s country house before the war, and from here she witnesses scenes of indescribable horror. But it is also where she meets Matthew again, a British Army photographer who she goes on to marry. This is a story not about spectacular events; rather, Mortier is concerned with writing about war, history and the past with great empathy and engagement, and with a mixture of melancholy, qualification and resignation.

A Dozen unforgettable stories by "one of the most original writers at work today" (Wyatt Mason, The New York Times Book Review). Slippery figures in anomalous situations — ghosts, spies, bodyguards, criminals — haunt these stories by Javier Marías, "the most subtle and gifted writer in contemporary Spanish literature" (The Boston Globe)

One of Time Magazine's Ten Best Books of 2014.Selected by NPR, Slate, and Kirkus as one of the Best Books of 2014.Shortlisted for the Pacific Northwest Book AwardThree young adults grapple with the usual thirty-something problems-boredom, authenticity, an omnipotent online oligarchy-in David Shafer's darkly comic debut novel.The Committee, an international cabal of industrialists and media barons, is on the verge of privatizing all information. Dear Diary, an idealistic online Underground, stands in the way of that takeover, using radical politics, classic spycraft, and technology that makes Big Data look like dial-up. Into this secret battle stumbles an unlikely trio: Leila Majnoun, a disillusioned non-profit worker; Leo Crane, an unhinged trustafarian; and Mark Deveraux, a phony self-betterment guru who works for the Committee.Leo and Mark were best friends in college, but early adulthood has set them on diverging paths. Growing increasingly disdainful of Mark's platitudes, Leo publishes a withering takedown of his ideas online. But the Committee is reading-and erasing-Leo's words. On the other side of the world, Leila's discoveries about the Committee's far-reaching ambitions threaten to ruin those who are closest to her.In the spirit of William Gibson and Chuck Palahniuk,Whiskey Tango Foxtrot is both a suspenseful global thriller and an emotionally truthful novel about the struggle to change the world in- and outside your head.

A little knowledge can be a very dangerous thing…Innocent in the ways of the world, an ingénue when it comes to pop and fashion, the Elect of God of a small but committed Stirlingshire religious cult: Isis Whit is no ordinary teenager.When her cousin Morag - Guest of Honour at the Luskentyrian's four-yearly Festival of Love - disappears after renouncing her faith, Isis is marked out to venture among the Unsaved and bring the apostate back into the fold. But the road to Babylondon (as Sister Angela puts it) is a treacherous one, particularly when Isis discovers the Morag appears to have embraced the ways of the Unsaved with spectacular abandon …Truth and falsehood; kinship and betrayal; 'herbal' cigarettes and compact discs - Whit is an exploration of the techno-ridden barrenness of modern Britain from a unique perspective.'Fierce contemporaneity, an acrobatic imagination, social comment, sardonic wit ... the peculiar sub-culture of cult religion is a natural for Banks, and Luskentyrianism is a fine creation' The Times'One of the most relentlessly voyaging imaginations around' Scotsman'Banks is a phenomenon ...I suspect we have actual laws against this sort of thing, in the United States, but Iain Banks, whether you take him with the "M" or without, is currently a legal import' William Gibson'Entertaining ... comically inspired' Guardian

A novel about London — its past, its people, its underbelly and its madness."In this extraordinary work Sinclair combines a spiritual inquest into the Whitechapel Ripper murders and the dark side of the late Victorian imagination with a posse of seedy book dealers hot on the trail of obscure rarities of that period. These ruined and ruthless dandies appear and disappear through a phantasmagoria interspersed with occult conjurings and reflections on the nature of fiction and history" Guardian