Two French schoolgirls discover obsessive pleasures in repressed secrets in this "masterpiece on the tyranny of love" ( Independent, UK)."Violette Leduc was Simone de Beauvoir's protege, an erotic writer to match Jean Genet and a feminist tour de force" (Rafia Zakaria, The Guardian). With this startling new translation of Leduc's hidden classic, the groundbreaking Thérèse and Isabelle proves an authentic and liberating exploration of quee...

An obsessive and revealing self-portrait of a remarkable woman humiliated by the circumstances of her birth and by her physical appearance, La Bâtarde relates Violette Leduc’s long search for her own identity through a series of agonizing and passionate love affairs with both men and women.When first published, La Bâtarde earned Violette Leduc comparisons to Jean Genet for the frank depiction of her sexual escapades and immoral behavior. A confession that contains...

In a small French town, a young girl grows up under the hard blue gaze of a mother who will not hold her hand. Her only comfort lies in the warmth of an ill grandmother. Yet the world around her is full of curiosity. From the obsessive Madame Barbaroux and her endless spring cleaning, to the homeless Monsieur Dezaille and his beloved collection of saucepans, Leduc reveals the eccentricities of provincial life with unflinching candour and striking beauty.An extraordinary tale of a s...

Censored in France in 1954, Therese and Isabelle was published for the first time in its full original version in 2000. Leduc's novella follows the story of a passionate love affair between two schoolgirls, aiming to describe 'as exactly, as minutely as possible the sensations of physical love'.

"Their eyes met at the same instant, Therese glancing up from a box she was opening, and the woman just turning her head so she looked directly at Therese. She was tall and fair, her long figure graceful in the loose fur coat that she held open with a hand on her waist. Her eyes were gray, colorless, yet dominant as light or fire, and caught by them, Therese could not look away."This chance meeting in a department store launches one of the greatest love stories in the history of le...

**ONE OF TIME MAGAZINE'S 100 BEST MYSTERY AND THRILLER BOOKS OF ALL TIME • INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER • A contemporary literary classic and "an accomplished psychological thriller ... absolutely chilling" (Village Voice), from the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Goldfinch.One of The Atlantic’s Great American Novels of the Past 100 Years**Under the influence of a charismatic classics professor, a group of clever, eccentric misfits at a ...

What if you could live again and again, until you got it right?On a cold and snowy night in 1910, Ursula Todd is born to an English banker and his wife. She dies before she can draw her first breath. On that same cold and snowy night, Ursula Todd is born, lets out a lusty wail, and embarks upon a life that will be, to say the least, unusual. For as she grows, she also dies, repeatedly, in a variety of ways, while the young century marches on towards its second cataclysmic ...

What if the best morning of your life suddenly turned into your worst nightmare? Sam Case is about to find out. Saving Rachel is the story of what happens when killers force a man to choose between his wife and his mistress...and the one he rejects must die. "If Dean Koontz collaborated with Alfred Hitchcock at the circus, this would be their brain child." –Vintage DM Book Reviews

From the bestselling author of The Handmaid's Tale and The Testaments—in the gated community of Consilience, residents who sign a contract will get a job and a lovely house for six months of the year...if they serve as inmates in the Positron prison system for the alternate months.“Captivating...thrilling.” —The New York Times Book ReviewStan and Charmaine, a young urban couple, have been hit by job loss...

In "a dazzlingly clever and immensely entertaining novel," an Englishman switches lives with his doppelganger, a French count with a dysfunctional family ( New York Times).By chance, John and Jean—one English, the other French—meet in a provincial railway station. Their resemblance to each other is uncanny, and they spend the next few hours talking and drinking —until at last John falls into a drunken stupor. It's to be his last carefree moment, for when he...

A young seamstress wearing a velvet mask is strangled in Paris's La Villette district, a black unicorn medallion left beside her body. Within days two wealthy, respected men are found brutally murdered.Victor Legris cannot resist this tantalizing puzzle, and soon he is embroiled in the shady dealings of a fashionable dressmaking workshop and a clandestine society of the rich and powerful. But he risks exposing secrets buried for decades, ones many people are desperate to keep hidde...

James Baldwin’s groundbreaking novel whose frank exploration of sexuality and self-acceptance was decades ahead of its time—named one of The Atlantic’s Great American Novels of the past 100 years“Baldwin writes . . . with unusual candor and yet with such dignity and intensity.”—The New York TimesIn 1950s Paris, a young American expatriate finds himself caught between his repressed desires and conventional morality. David h...