**“Raffish and spirited . . . a nonconformist cri de coeur . . . Usually, comparisons to Bourdain are fatuous. This time it’s accurate . . . It’s been a long time since I’ve read so good and rowdy a memoir about blue-collar work.” — Dwight Garner, The New York TimesAN INDIE BESTSELLERA Montreal garbageman's sharp and funny memoir/exposé, in which he attempts to convince people to "stop imagining that your garbage magically disappears" . . .**This f...

'Hans Castorp filled his lungs with the pure mountain air--this fresh, light atmosphere that was so easy to inhale and held no scent of moisture, no content, no memories...' Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain (1924) is a social comedy with tragic overtones, providing a portrait of Europe in the first decades of the twentieth century. The novel recounts how an apparently simple North German engineer, Hans Castorp, comes to a tuberculosis sanatorium in Davos, Switzerl...

DISCOVER THE TECHNO THRILLER THAT ROCKED THE INTERNET GENERATIONA Guardian thriller of the month: 'Elsberg is nothing if not prescient'_______ZERO, an anonymous activist, has given the world a warning: stop the tech giants before it’s too late.But is anyone listening?Thousands of teenagers are signing up to Freemee, the biggest new social media site, uploading personal information in exchange for advice on wha...

CORRUPT BIG BUSINESS, ECONOMY IN MELTDOWN, THE THRILLER THAT WARNED US ALL'Marc Elsberg is nothing if not prescient' GUARDIANIt’s the near future: the world economy is in freefall. Mass unemployment and hunger rage as banks, corporations and countries go bankrupt. But one group are doing just fine: the super-rich.Nobel prize-winning economist Herbert Thompson drives to an emergency summit in Berlin, to deliver his ground-br...

**A vivid, hallucinatory rediscovered classic about split identity in the wake of World War I trauma, translated into English for the first time."Unsettling... Creates a picture of a tormented mind, and evokes the profound dislocation felt by veterans returning home from a savage conflict." —The Times**In this searingly poetic novel, we are plunged into the disturbed consciousness of an ex-soldier suffering post-traumatic stress. It is a world in which nothing is s...

Asma Mhalla’s wildly popular Cyberpunk is a prescient, urgent deep dive into techno-political totalitarianism with more than 50,000 copies sold since its release in France.French political scientist Mhalla interrogates how the marriage of Big Tech with anti-democratic shifts in government toward totalitarianism is transforming our brains into political battlefields. To Mhalla, control of civil society no longer operates primarily through censorship or repr...

**“An enthralling and insightful cultural history—one that shows how, over the course of one pivotal decade, love, freedom and the freedom to love gave way to fear, madness and despair.” —Malcolm Forbes, Washington Post Book ReviewAn ingeniously orchestrated popular history brings to life the most pivotal decade of the twentieth century**As the Roaring Twenties wind down, Jean-Paul Sartre waits in a Paris café for a first date with Simone de Beauvoir, who never sho...

Summer 1918. The First World War is drawing to a close when Léon Le Gall, a French teenager from Cherbourg who has dropped out of school and left home, falls in love with Louise Janvier. Both are severely wounded by German artillery fire, are separated, and believe each other to be dead. Briefly reunited two decades later, the two lovers are torn apart again by Louise's refusal to destroy Léon's marriage and by the German invasion of France. In occupied Paris during the Second World War, w...

In The Atlas of an Anxious Man, Christoph Ransmayr offers a mesmerizing travel diary—a sprawling tale of earthly wonders seen by a wandering eye. This is an exquisite, lyrically told travel story.Translated by Simon Pare, this unique account follows Ransmayr across the globe: from the shadow of Java’s volcanoes to the rapids of the Mekong and Danube Rivers, from the drift ice of the Arctic Circle to Himalayan passes, and on to the disenchanted islands of the South Pacific....

Now in paperback, the touching, timely story of an Iraqi refugee in Germany.In our era of mass migration, much of it driven by war and its aftermath, A Slap in the Face could not be more timely. It tells the story of Karim, an Iraqi refugee living in Germany whose right to asylum has been revoked in the wake of Saddam Hussein’s defeat. But Hussein wasn’t the only reason Karim left, and as Abbas Khider unfolds his story, we learn both the secret struggles h...

A gripping, real-life thriller following the authors’ attempt to uncover the truth about one of the world’s most wanted men.Karl Lee, alias Li Fangwei, plays a key role in the secret struggle between the world powers, bypassing Western sanctions to supply dictators with the weapons they need to wipe out their neighbouring countries — or even to trigger a third world war.For almost two decades, intelligence agencies have been hunting for Karl Lee. The FBI ha...

Berlin in the early 1990s, right after the fall of the Berlin Wall: this is the place to be. Berlin-Mitte, the central district of the city, with its wastelands and decaying houses, has become the centre of a new movement. Artists, musicians, squatters, club owners, DJs and ravers are reclaiming the old city centre and bringing it back to life. This interregnum between two systems – the collapse of the old East Germany, the gentrification of the new Berlin – lasts only a few years. West Be...