Almost the first thing callow young Englishman John Denton sees when he steps ashore in Shanghai in 1903 is the public beheading of some pirates. Shocked and sickened though he is, he must adapt himself to the brutal but fascinating city of extremes, and he spends the rest of his life there, through all the vicissitudes of revolution, riot, lawlessness and war. He makes, loses, and regains a fortune, dangerously crosses a powerful triad leader, enters politics, is imprisoned by the Japanes...

“Well, here I am at five and three quarters. It’s Christmas 1939 in a little Austrian village in Hitler’s Third Reich and I’m just beginning to notice things. Like what my brothers and sisters are about and why my parents are often crying and my father usually shouting when he isn’t crying. I think it has something to do with the war we’re fighting, which according to the wireless is due to The International Jewish Conspiracy, whatever that is, but that’s not all. I don’t know it yet, but ...

Literature, like the visual arts, poses its own philosophical problems. While literary theorists have discussed the nature of literature intensively, analytic philosophers have usually dealt with literary problems either within the general framework of aesthetics or else in a way that is accessible only to a philosophical audience. The present book is unique in that it introduces the philosophy of literature from an analytic perspective accessible to both students of literature and student...

Hong Kong's demi-monde at the height of the British Empire... Franziska Goldmann, an opera singer fallen on hard times, has become the star courtesan in 19th century Hong Kong. A chance encounter with Queen Victoria's musical second son seems to offer Franziska an opportunity to resume her career as a singer. But it is the other unpredictable characters in her life, including her German anarchist lover and a devious procurer, who may ultimately determine her destiny. The haunting story of ...

After years of suffering under the communist regime in Cold War Hungary, Eszter Turján - fanatical underground journalist - would sacrifice anything, and anyone, to see the government fall. When she manipulates news broadcasts on Radio Free Europe, she ignites a vicious revolution, commits a calamitous murder, and is dragged away screaming to a secret underground prison.Her daughter Dora, then a teenager, cowers in her bedroom as the secret police arrest her mother. Haunted and hur...

The thrilling true story of the daring double agents who thwarted Hitler's spy machine in Britain and turned the tide of World War II.After the fall of France in the mid-1940s, Adolf Hitler faced a British Empire that refused to negotiate for peace. With total war looming, he ordered the Abwehr, Germany's defense and intelligence organization, to carry out Operation Lena—a program to place information-gathering spies within Britain.Quickly, a network of secr...

**** Longlisted for The Center for Fiction's best debut novel of 2019 **With the hypnotic intensity of Emily Fridlund’s The History of Wolves and Fiona McFarlane’s The Night Guest, Katherine Forbes Riley has created a mesmerizing love story, in lush, gorgeous prose, that examines art, science, and the magic of human chemistry.**"Teeming with lush imagery and mystical settings, and brimming with alluring magical realism, Riley’s tale is a beguil...

Introducing Victorian England’s most illustrious amateur sleuth (if not necessarily its most adept): Bertie, Prince of Wales, who can’t help but poke his royal nose into a suspicious-sounding circumstance.Bertie, Prince of Wales and future King Edward VII, is a charismatic but self-indulgent man who enjoys the finer things in life, including dining, flirting, and flitting from party to party with his entire thirty-person staff in tow. But the fun and games come to ...

A Kirkus Indie Book of the MonthWinner, Sarton Women's Book Award for Historical FictionWhen the Germans invade her city, Rachel Klein is a teenager falling in love. Within a year, she's delivering illegal papers and confronting Nazi soldiers. In this “compelling and touching tale” (Laurel Corona), Rachel finds her courage and faces wrenching choices.Follow Rachel Klein as she faces double danger as a young Jewish woman and resistance worker...

”[A] primer on the threat to democracy posed by—and I can’t believe I’m saying this—the current president of the United States.”—David Litt, New York Times bestselling authorDonald Trump isn’t a despot. But he is increasingly acting like The Despot’s Apprentice, an understudy in authoritarian tactics that threaten to erode American democracy, including:Attacking the pressThreatening rule of law by firing tho...

National Book Award Finalist: "A multigenerational epic of the Sadr family's life in Iran and their eventual exile . . . Full of surprises" ( The Globe and Mail).Winner of the 2019 Albertine Prize and Lambda Literary AwardKimiâ Sadr fled Iran at the age of ten in the company of her mother and sisters to join her father in France. Now twenty-five and facing the future she has built for herself, as well as the prospect of a new generation, Kim...

A startling debut novel about the burden of Holocaust memory and the implacable zest for life.Thirty-six years after her mother was liberated from Bergen-Belsen, the unnamed narrator lives a comfortable life in Paris. Her mother sees ghosts at every turn, longing to find the family that disappeared behind the miasma of the Holocaust, but she cannot reconcile her mother’s trauma to the cheery bustle of daily life that surrounds them. The pain of memories that are no...