First adventure for Domingo Salazar, a Dominican monk, who is a Vatican secret agent

The Last of the Vostyachs won two literary prizes in Italy: The Premio Campiello and The Premio Stresa. As a child, Ivan and his father work as forced labourers in a mine in Siberia, the father having committed some minor offence against the regime. Ivan's father is then murdered in front of his young son, after which Ivan - who is a Vostyach, an imaginary ethnic group of whose language he is the last remaining speaker - is struck dumb by what he has witnessed. Some twenty years later the ...

'It has been a long while in Italian fiction since such an authentic and engaging voice has appeared.' Bruno Quaranta in La Stampa 'This memoir of four generations of a family provides a vivid and eloquent picture of Italian life stretching from the late 19th century, when the peasant lifestyle had changed little from medieval times, up to the consumer culture of the 1950s. It’s a saga that embraces characters like Maria, who emigrated to the USA for an unwise marriage, returning a few yea...

100 years of italian history seen through the lives of the Peruzzi family

Smarra is a highly charged vampire novel & Trilby a fairy tale set in the Scottish Highlands

'The Interpreter isn't merely the sequel to New Finnish Grammar and The Last of the Vostyachs: it is a singular and deeply felt thesis, a warped manifesto of sorts, derived from a career spent immersed in languages. For Marani is up to his old tricks. Like in its predecessors, the novel comes dripping in satire, but this time of a more avowedly self reflexive nature... A primordial, universal language is the trick, and it is this which, and it is this with which Marani's interpreter, the s...

'To find Marani harnessing the genre of detective story for creative effect is not surprising; after all, he plays with the form in his Europanto synthetic-language sequence Las Adventures des inspector Cabillot and The Last of the Vostyachs revolves similarly around a murderously suppressed linguistic secret. Here, though the terse economy of detective prose works to move events briskly to their violent conclusion. In this Marani is very well served again by Judith Landry's excellent Engl...

I Malavoglia is one of the great landmarks of Italian Literature. It is so rich in character, emotion and texture that it lives forever in the imagination of all who read it. What Verga called in his preface a 'sincere and dispassionate study of society' is an epic struggle against poverty and the elements by the fishermen of Aci Trezza, told in an expressive language based on their own dialect. "Giovanni Verga's novel of 1881 I Malavoglia presented its translator Judith Landry with formid...

a haunting classic Madeleine Kingsley in She Magazine �An intricate, finely crafted and polished tale, The Weeping Woman on the Streets of Prague brings magic-realism to the dimly lit streets of Prague. Through the squares and alleys a woman walks, the embodiment of human pity, sorrow, death. Everyone she passes is touched by her, and Germain skilfully creates an intense mood and feel in her attempt to produce a spiritual map of Prague." The Observer "Firmly rooted in magic realism, Germ...

Charles Nodier was one of the first populariser of the literary vampire story: Smarra, or the Demons of the Night(1821) is the most notable and horrific of his stories. Nodier also carried forward the French tradition of literary fairy tales, which he enriched with the fantastic extravagance of the romantics. The best of these half fairy and half fantasy tales is Trilby, or the imp of Argyll(1822), which is set in Scotland."Nodier's contes are dense, rich, varied in their settings ...

One night at Trieste in September 1943 a seriously wounded soldier is found on the quay. The doctor, of a newly arrived German hospital ship gives the unconscious soldier medical assistance. His new patient has no documents or anything that can identify him. When he regains consciousness he has lost his memory and cannot even remember what language he speaks. From a few things found on the man the doctor, who is originally from Finland, believes him to be a sailor and a fellow countryman, ...

Alvaro summons up the devil and gets more than he bargains for. World ex USA, Can