"This is the E8," my father said. "It runs from London to Moscow."For a million years people have been travelling throughout Europe, from the mysterious homo antecessor who left his footprints on the coast of England to travellers on the motorways of today. Under every footstep lies an older one, under every paved road a donkey trail or wagon rut, under every footpath the prints of a hunter or his prey.And yet the long, nation-spa...

Two Blankets, Three Sheets does for the beleaguered political asylum seeker stuck in legal limbo what Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 did for the hapless soldier trapped in a military at war…Translated from the Dutch into nimble and conversational English by Jonathan Reeder…it is a tale for and of our time."—Rayyan Al-Shawaf, Los Angeles Review of BooksBased on the author’s true story, this is the account of Iraqi refugee Samir, who spends nine years...

After nine years in a Dutch asylum center, an Iraqi refugee tries to start a new life as a European citizen and discovers that to make friends in the western world, you need a dog.After nine years in a Dutch asylum center, Samir finally has the chance to start his new life as a European citizen. But it’s a full-time occupation for him to discover what integration really means. Happily, this distracts him from what is happening in his native land, Iraq, and from Led...

Even readers unfamiliar with The Last Poets’ historic significance as building blocks of the hip-hop and rap movement, will instantly find this novel a compelling read.The Last Poets were self-proclaimed prophets of ‘hope and change’. The band was formed in 1968 against an incendiary backdrop of the black power movement and murders of Martin Luther King, Kennedy and Malcolm X. Today their socio-political lyrics have a renewed sense of urgency, rallying loud and cle...

Professor Siem Sigerius-maths genius, jazz lover, judo champion, Renaissance man. When Aaron meets his girlfriend Joni's family for the first time, her multitalented father could hardly be a more intimidating figure, but somehow the underachieving photographer manages to bluff his way to a friendship with the paterfamilias. With his feet under the table at the beautiful Sigerius farmhouse, Aaron feels part of a perfect family.Until, that is, things start to fall apart. A cataclysmic...

In 1932, Isay Rottenberg, a Jewish paper merchant, bought a cigar factory in Germany: Deutsche Zigarren-Werke. When his competitors, supported by Nazi authorities, tried to shut it down, the headstrong entrepreneur refused to give up the fight.Isay Rottenberg was born into a large Jewish family in Russian Poland in 1889 and grew up in Lodz. He left for Berlin at the age of eighteen to escape military service, moving again in 1917 to Amsterdam on the occasion of his...

**A New Scientist Best Popular Science Book of 2023How seeing Earth through the eyes of an astronaut brings new wonder and meaning to life on our planet.**One stifling summer night, the poet and journalist Marjolijn van Heemstra lay awake, unable to sleep—like so many of us feeling anxious and alienated, deeply exhausted yet restless. Amid the suffocating stream of daily obligations, the clamor of notifications and increasingly dismal headlines, she longed for a wa...

When Stalin came to power, making music became a dangerous endeavour. Russian composers now had to create work that served the socialist state, and all artistic production was scrutinized for potential subversion.The Sound of Utopia offers a vivid portrait of Soviet musicians and composers struggling to create art in this climate of terror. Some successfully toed the ideological line, diluting their work in the process; others ended up facing the Gulag or even death. With p...

**A New Scientist Best Popular Science Book of 2023How seeing Earth through the eyes of an astronaut brings new wonder and meaning to life on our planet.**One stifling summer night, the poet and journalist Marjolijn van Heemstra lay awake, unable to sleep—like so many of us feeling anxious and alienated, deeply exhausted yet restless. Amid the suffocating stream of daily obligations, the clamor of notifications and increasingly dismal headlines, she longed for a wa...

**"Dazzling...Critics hailed Buwalda as 'The Dutch answer to Jonathan Franzen', but his brilliance is entirely unique."--The Times (UK)Siem Sigerius is a beloved, brilliant professor of mathematics with a promising future in politics. His family—including a loving wife, two gorgeous, intelligent stepdaughters and a successful future son-in-law—and carefully appointed home in the bucolic countryside complete the portrait of a comfortable, morally upright household....

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST • NAMED ONE OF TIME’S TEN BEST FICTION BOOKS OF THE DECADE • NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE DECADE BY ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY AND BUZZFEED • NAMED ONE OF THE TEN BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEWOne of the New York Times’s 100 Best Books of the 21st Century**A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR: People, The New York ...

#1 New York Times bestselling author Karin Slaughter’s Pretty Girls is a sophisticated and chilling psychological thriller of dangerous secrets, cold vengeance, and unexpected absolution, in which two estranged sisters must come together to find truth about two harrowing tragedies, twenty years apart, that devastate their lives.Sisters. Strangers. Survivors.CLAIRE: A glamorous trophy wife of an Atlanta mil...