Lamps, penknives, paperbacks, mechanical pencils, inflatable headrests. Marcin Wicha's mother Joanna was a collector of everyday objects. She found intrinsic – and often idiosyncratic – value in each item. When she dies and leaves her apartment intact, Wicha is left to sort through her things.The objects are the seemingly ordinary possessions of an ordinary life. But through them, Wicha begins to construct an image of Joanna as a Jewish woman, a mother, and a citizen. As Poland eme...

Doppler has a nice house, a nice wife and a nice job. But Doppler isn't happy.'Wonderfuly subversive, funny and original' Observer.'A darkly comic fable' Independent.When his father dies, Doppler decides to leave everything behind and start a new life in the forest. There, deep amongst the trees, he reconnects with nature, ponders the meaning of life, and bonds with a baby elk called Bongo.Sweet, funny and s...

Combining the authenticity of reportage with the emotional intensity of an extraordinary imagination, The Inventory is a profoundly unsettling account of the effects of Nazi paranoia upon every segment of German society. Writing with piercing clarity and searing irony, Gila Lustiger weaves together the tales of ordinary people swept up in a society where brutal oppression and extermination are everyday events.Amid the routine of daily life-with its flirtations and quarrels...

Martin Amis's dazzling autobiographical novel of a unique literary life seen through the lens of friendships, family, sex and love, is wise, warm, heartbreaking and funny: the heart-to-heart testimony of an incomparable writer.This is the portrait of an extraordinary life lived by a great writer. Martin Amis leads us through boisterous romantic entanglements and literary friendships, the encompassing ties of family to generously revealing details about how to write...

SHORTLISTED FOR THE BOOKER PRIZEIn a red brick mansion block off the Marylebone Road, Vivien, a sensitive, bookish girl grows up sealed off from both past and present by her timid refugee parents. Then one morning a glamorous uncle appears, dressed in a mohair suit, with a diamond watch on his wrist and a girl in a leopard-skin hat on his arm. Why is Uncle Sándor so violently unwelcome in her parents' home?This is a novel about survival - both banal and her...

BONUS: This edition contains excerpts from Arthur Phillips's The Tragedy of Arthur, The Song Is You, The Egyptologist, and Angelica.A first novel of startling scope and ambition, Prague depicts an intentionally lost Lost Generation as it follows five American expats who come to Budapest in the early 1990s to seek their fortune—financial, romantic, and spiritual—in an exotic city newly opened to the West. They harbor the vague suspicion that their ...

From the author of Confessions of a Bookseller, a cankerous and darkly funny field guide to bookstore customers.It does take all kinds and through the misanthropic eyes of a very grumpy bookseller, we see them all. There's the Expert (with subspecies from the Bore to the Helpful Person), the Young Family (ranging from the Exhausted to the Aspirational), Occultists (from Conspiracy Theorist to Craft Woman).Then there's the Loiterer (including...

**'The stories here will provoke, delight and impress. Joost Zwagerman's selection forms a fascinating guidebook to a landscape you'll surely want to wander in again.' Clare Lowden, TLS'There is a lot of northern European melancholy in the collection, though often tinged with wry humour...an excellent book' Jonathan Gibbs, Minor Literatures***'*We were kids - but good kids. If

Caroline Baum's fascinating and moving memoir about being an only child in a very unusual family.Three barely felt like a family. It felt like it did not count. Like we were unfinished. Incomplete. There was always a gap at the table, room to set places for others. Visitors were few and far between. Mostly, there was only me.Only is a memoir of an unconventional childhood that explores what it means to be an Only Child -- as both child and...

Featuring:Gyrdir Eliasson (Iceland) - Frode Grytten (Norway) - Micheal O Conghaile (Ireland) - Danielle Picard (France) - Mehmet Zaman Saclioglu (Turkey) - Ingo Schulze (Germany) - Roman Simic (Croatia) - Jean Sprackland (England) - Olga Tokarczuk (Poland) - Mirja Unge (Sweden) What do we mean by small town? How has this innocuous term – one up from ‘village’, a couple down from ‘city’ – come to function as a pejorative? Pressed to describe what the phrase ‘...

In his ambitious and fiercely inventive new novel, The Lost Time Accidents, John Wray takes us from turn-of-the-century Viennese salons buzzing with rumors about Einstein's radical new theory to the death camps of World War Two, from the golden age of postwar pulp science fiction to a startling discovery in a Manhattan apartment packed to the ceiling with artifacts of modern life.Haunted by a failed love affair and the darkest of family secrets, Waldemar 'Waldy' Tolliver wa...

Dropout Neville Lister accompanies acclaimed photographer Saul Auerbach for a day, to learn a lesson for life. They play a game: from a hill above Johannesburg they pick three houses and decide to knock on their doors in search of a story. Auerbach's images of the first two will become classic portraits, but soon the light fades. Lister only reaches the third house decades later, returning to post-apartheid South Africa and a Johannesburg altered almost beyond recognition. How to live when...