From the winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature comes a memoir of childhood and legacy.In 1948, a young J. M. G. Le Clézio left behind a still-devastated Europe with his mother and brother to join his father, a military doctor in Nigeria, from whom he had been separated by the war.In his characteristically intimate, poetic voice, the Nobel Prize-winning author relates both the child's dazzled discovery of freedom in the African savannah and the torment of recalling his fra...

When Sybille arrives in Paris from Guadeloupe with her infant son, she encounters the extravagant and marvelous Lila. Sybille is young and black with her life still ahead of her; an ex-actress, Lila is white and seventy years old. Despite their differences, the women become inseparable. Haunted by memories, Lila confides in Sybille and, among other things, relates the endless cycle of lovers in her life. Her most cherished memories are of Henry, a black man from the British Caribbean whom ...

A masterpiece from J. M. G. Le Clézio, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature. The parallel stories of a lost culture in the North African desert and their descendants, unwanted immigrants in Europe.Desert is two stories. The first takes place between 1909 and 1912 and is about the migration of a young adolescent boy, Nour, and his people, the Blue Men. They are warriors of the desert. Driven from their lands by French colonial soldiers, ...

From master storyteller J. M. G. Le Clézio: winner of the Nobel Prize in LiteratureThe African is a work of bewitching beauty and humanity. With penetrating prose and an eye for lyrical detail, he vividly captures the rhythmic space of his memoir’s African backdrop and makes bare the universal complexity of father-son relationships. A triumph!—Chinua AchebeA short autobiographical account of a crucial moment in Nob...

The Black Terrorist is a fictional account built around the true, extraordinary, but little-known story of Addi Bâ. Addi Bâ was born in Guinea about 1916, brought to France in the late 1930s, and became a riflemen in the Twelfth Regiment de Tirailleurs Sénégalais (African soldiers from French colonies) fighting for France during World War II. Captured after the Battle of the Meuse, Addi escapes from German forces, wanders in the forests, before finding refuge in a village in the V...

"You took my baby from me, Mum! She should be here with us and her siblings, not stuck with two old stupid fools like you!"She looked through me like I was invisible, pathetically calling out to her husband, in the next room. This woman was incapable of taking responsibility for anything!"Don…Don, don't you think I did the right thing? I did the right thing, didn't I, Don?!"He didn't answer.Our mother-daughter relationship was always tumult...

From the bestselling author of The Sex Lives of Cannibals, the laugh-out-loud true story of his years on the islands of Vanuatu and Fiji, among cannibals, volcanoes . . . and the world’s best narcotics.With The Sex Lives of Cannibals, Maarten Troost established himself as one of the most engaging and original travel writers around. Getting Stoned with Savages again reveals his wry wit and infectious joy of discovery in a side-splittingly ...

Winner of the PEN/Malamud Award for Short Story • A New York Times Notable Book"A fantastical travel guide, reminiscent of Gulliver's Travels, in which the narrator visits fifteen planes and describes the people, language and customs with the eye of an anthropologist and the humor of a satirist." —USA TodayIn these classic "vivid, entertaining, philosophical dispatches"

In May 1914, Helene Noisette’s father believes war is imminent. Convinced Germany will head straight for Paris, he sends his wife, daughter, mother and younger son to Beaufort, a small village in northern France. But when war erupts two months later, the German army invades neutral Belgium, sweeping south towards Paris. And by the end of September, Beaufort is less than twenty miles from the front. During the years that follow, with the rumbling of guns ever present in the distance, three ...

**NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • From the bestselling master espionage writer, hailed by Vince Flynn as “the best in the business,” comes a riveting novel about the French Resistance in Nazi-occupied Paris.NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY THE WASHINGTON POST**The City of Light is dark and silent at night. But in Paris and in the farmhouses, barns, and churches of the French countryside, small groups of ordinary men and women are d...

NOW A MINISERIES ON BBC AMERICA STARRING DAVID TENNANTAn autumn evening in 1937. A German engineer arrives at the Warsaw railway station. Tonight, he will be with his Polish mistress; tomorrow, at a workers’ bar in the city’s factory district, he will meet with the military attaché from the French embassy. Information will be exchanged for money. So begins The Spies of Warsaw*,* the brilliant new novel by Alan Furst, lauded by The New York Time...

When I was 10, I was taken from my quiet, safe corner of old Europe and deposited into an exotic new world. Africa, at once breathtaking and soul-destroying, from the snow-capped mountains and teeming game plains of Kenya and Tanzania to the haunted hunger-stalked dustbowls of Ethiopia and the Sudan – the hideous and the magnificent have always gone hand in hand there.Nobody who has once set foot on the soil of Africa will ever be quite free of it again. When I first went there, I ...