Ermanno Cavazzoni admits that his books push the novel to its very limits — “like outpourings of the maniacal”, he says. “That’s how they come to me, you must understand.” Here in The Nocturnal Library, we have the maniacal that we all know from our own dreams: a dreamer’s lack of control and a dreamer’s dogged acceptance of the absurd. Here we have the dream as paranoia and the vain struggle to understand the rules that govern life. Here we have the dream as a bizarre library in which the...

A stunningly powerful novel of humanity's will to survive against all odds during an epidemic by a winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature.An International Bestseller • "This is a shattering work by a literary master.”—Boston Globe A city is hit by an epidemic of "white blindness" which spares no one. Authorities confine the blind to an empty mental hospital, but there the criminal element holds everyone captive, stealing food rations and...

**A NEW YORK TIMES 10 BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR AND A NEW YORKER "ESSENTIAL READ"NAMED A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR BY THE NEW YORKER AND VOGUE“Bennett writes like no one else. She is a rare talent, and Checkout 19 is a masterful novel.” –Karl Ove KnausgaardFrom the author of the “dazzling. . . . and daring” Pond (O magazine), the adventures of a young woman discovering her own genius, through the people she meets–and dr...

From Lovecraft to Borges to Gaiman, a century of intrepid literary experimentation has created a corpus of dark and strange stories that transcend all known genre boundaries. Together these stories form The Weird, and its practitioners include some of the greatest names in twentieth and twenty-first century literature.Exotic and esoteric, The Weird plunges you into dark domains and brings you face to face with surreal monstrosities. You won't find any elves or wiz...

**“A sharp, funny, and eccentric debut … Pond makes the case for Bennett as an innovative writer of real talent. … [It]reminds us that small things have great depths.”–New York Times Book Review"Dazzling…exquisitely written and daring ." –O, the Oprah Magazine**Immediately upon its publication in Ireland, Claire-Louise Bennett’s debut began to attract attention well beyond the expectations of the tiny Irish press that published it. A deceptively s...

'Some books read as if they are touched by magic, so wondrous and astonishing is the experience of immersing yourself in them. That's how I feel about The Wonder Lover. It is written with confidence and daring, with a joyous freedom and a love for story and language that is only possible when an artist has truly mastered their craft. It is a compulsive and thrilling read, a dazzling achievement. There is a word that should be used very rarely but I believe is absolutely right for this ...

Selected by The New York Times as one of the 50 Best Memoirs of the Past 50 YearsThe New York Times bestselling author Hilary Mantel, two-time winner of the Man Booker Prize, is one of the world’s most accomplished and acclaimed fiction writers. Giving Up the Ghost, is her dazzling memoir of a career blighted by physical pain in which her singular imagination supplied compensation for the life her body was denied....

As a child, Luke’s mother often tells him the story of the Dumb House, an experiment on newborn babies raised in silence, designed to test the innateness of language.As Luke grows up, his interest in language and the delicate balance of life and death leads to amateur dissections of small animals – tiny hearts revealed still pumping, as life trickles away. But as an adult, following the death of his mother, Luke’s obsession deepens, resulting in a haunting and biza...

"Hall's writing manages to combine acute sensitivity and daring. ... Visceral and engaging. ... The emotional lives of her characters are skillfully realized in this bright weave of disparate voices–for whom art is at once a way of seeing and a way of life." —The Times (London)The lives of four individuals—a dying painter, a blind girl, a landscape artist, and an art curator—intertwine across nearly five decades in this luminous and searching novel of extr...

Moving and unsentimental story of inner reconstruction after a devastating lossShortlisted for the prestigious Premio Strega in Italy in 2014, this is the story of a broken family coming to terms, in the aftermath of the earthquake in L'Aquila in 2009, with the loss of one of them - a twin sister, a daughter, a mother - while living in temporary accommodation on the outskirts of the city. The terse and clean voice of the spiky, single, thirty-something female narrator wards off sen...

Visceral, raw, singular, and distinctive, Frost is the story of a friendship between a young man at the beginning of his medical career and a painter who is entering his final days.A writer of world stature, Thomas Bernhard combined a searing wit and an unwavering gaze into the human condition. Frost follows an unnamed young Austrian who accepts an unusual assignment. Rather than continue with his medical studies, he travels to a bleak mining town in the back of b...

Facing the disarray and disorientation around his father's death, a man contends with the strange and haunting power of the house his parents once lived in.He sets about the mundane yet exhausting process of sorting through the remnants of his father's life -- clearing away years of accumulated objects, unearthing forgotten memories and the haunted realms of everyday life. At the same time, he embarks on an eccentric side-project. And as he grows increasingly obsessed with this new project...