A poignant glimpse into pre-war Germany, where everyday life unfolds against the backdrop of a rising darkness.Set on a sultry September evening in Bremen, this novel captures the charm and squalor of a waterfront community. Through a stream of vivid images, Friedo Lampe introduces us to children, old people, performers, and seamen, each navigating their lives amidst growing social and political tensions. Horrible things happen, touching things hap...

**A unique testament to the persistence of ordinary life through the disaster of modern war, perfect for fans of books like Suite FrançaiseSharply immediate, evocative diaries from the heart of Occupied Paris in World War II by a classic German writer, in English for the first time**The writer Felix Hartlaub died in obscurity at just 31, vanishing from Berlin in 1945. He left behind a small oeuvre of private writings from the Second World War: fragments and observa...

Henry Miller's famously banned book is "a matter-of-fact celebration of chucking one's dreary life and following your heart to Paris" (Richard Price).Now hailed as an American classic, Tropic of Cancer, Henry Miller's masterpiece, was banned as obscene in this country for twenty-seven years after its first publication in Paris in 1934. Only a historic court ruling that changed American censorship standards, ushering in a new era of freedom and frankness in...

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • In this witty and warm-hearted account, Peter Mayle tells what it is like to realize a long-cherished dream and actually move into a 200-year-old stone farmhouse in the remote country of the Lubéron with his wife and two large dogs.He endures January's frosty mistral as it comes howling down the Rhône Valley, discovers the secrets of goat racing through the middle of town, and delights in the glorious regional cuisine. A Y...

Gustav Perle grows up lonely and watchful in post-war Switzerland, aching for a closeness his own mother cannot give him.In a small Swiss town still marked by the moral compromises of the Second World War, Gustav finds the companionship he longs for in Anton Zwiebel, a brilliant, fragile boy whose music expresses what neither of them can say aloud. Their bond, forged in childhood in the late 1940s, deepens into an intense attachment that neither fully understands.

THE ACCLAIMED INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER'One of the most extraordinary and compelling novels written about World War II. Ever' Alan FurstInspired by a true story, Hans Fallada's Alone in Berlin is a gripping wartime thriller following one ordinary man's determination to defy the tyranny of Nazi ruleBerlin, 1940, and the city is filled with fear. At the house on 55 Jablonski Strasse, its various occupants try ...

"Elegantly written and intensely intimate" this story of a complex mother-daughter relationship is "a moving, poetic debut" (Marisa de los Santos, New York Times–bestselling author of Love Walked In).For nine-year-old Beth Lowe, it should have been a magical summer—sun-kissed days lounging in rickety deck chairs, nights gathered around the fire. But what begins as an innocent vacation to Hungary ends with the devastating separation of her parents. ...

Self-confessed loafer Time Moore, seduced by the speed and glamour of the biggest annual sporting even in the world, sets out to cycle the course of the Tour de France. All 3,630km of it. Racing old men on butchers' bikes and chased by cows, Moore soon resorts to standard race tactics - cheating and drugs - in a hilarious and moving tale of true adventure.

A thriller of war that never was—of survival in an impossible city—of surreal cataclysm. In The Last Days of New Paris, China Miéville entwines true historical events and people with his daring, uniquely imaginative brand of fiction, reconfiguring history and art into something new.“Beauty will be convulsive. . . .”In the chaos of wartime Marseille, American engineer—and occult disciple—Jack Parsons stumbles onto a c...

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...

Prix Goncourt-winning masterpiece by the writer who brought you Alex, Irène and Camille**.**October 1918: the war on the Western Front is all but over. Desperate for one last chance of promotion, the ambitious Lieutenant Henri d'Aulnay Pradelle sends two scouts over the top, and secretly shoots them in the back to incite his men to heroic action once more.And so is set in motion a series of devastating events that...

The New York Times bestseller: the secrets of the City of Light, revealed in the lives of the great, the near-great, and the forgotten—by the author of the acclaimed The Discovery of France.This is the Paris you never knew. From the Revolution to the present, Graham Robb has distilled a series of astonishing true narratives, all stranger than fiction, of the lives of the great, the near-great, and the forgotten.A young artillery lieutenant, strolling throu...