Λογοτεχνία

Okonowo is the greatest warrior alive. His fame has spread like a bushfire in West Africa and he is one of the most powerful men of his clan. But he also has a fiery temper. Determined not to be like his father, he refuses to show weakness to anyone - even if the only way he can master his feelings is with his fists. When outsiders threaten the traditions of his clan, Okonowo takes violent action. Will the great man's dangerous pride eventually destroy him?

Winner of the Anglo-Hellenic League Runciman Award 2023. Shortlisted for the London Hellenic Prize 2022. The Poetry Book Society Winter Special Commendation 2022.

'The ancients taught me how to sound modern,' A.E. Stallings said in an interview. 'They showed me that technique was not the enemy of urgency, but the instrument.' For her, 'technique' is rooted in traditions of strict forms and metres, an interest that sets her apart as modern - and American - in challenging ways, for being on the face of it old-fashioned, yet ambitiously experimental among the forms she uses.

Raised in Atlanta, Georgia, she lives in Athens, Greece. Her poems come out of life's dailiness - as a wife, mother, teacher, an expatriate between languages, a brilliant translator of ancient and modern Greek. She also translates Latin, her most notable large work being the Penguin Lucretius, translated into fourteeners.

Being a poet in Greece entails, for her, being part of that world. She was among volunteers helping refugees as they arrived in Greece, and their experience haunted her to write, 'My love, I'm grateful tonight / Our listing bed isn't a raft / Precariously adrift / As we dodge the coast guard light...' The sharp quatrain commends the observation to memory. The poems, without self-indulgence or confession, are intimate as they address 'My love', children or friends.

SHORTLISTED FOR THE AN POST IRISH BOOK AWARDS SUNDAY INDEPENDENT NEWCOMER OF THE YEAR'A landmark book by an important new voice in Irish writing' EMILIE PINETHIS HOSTEL LIFE tells the stories of migrant women in a hidden Ireland. Queuing for basic supplies in an Irish direct provision hostel, a group of women squabble and mistrust each other, learning what they can of the world from conversations about reality television and Shakespeare. In another story, a student shares her work with a class only to be critiqued about her own lived experience, and a mother of young twins, living in Nigeria, is at risk of losing her newborns to ancient superstitious beliefs. An essay by Liam Thornton (UCD School of Law) is also included, explaining the Irish legal position in relation to asylum seekers and direct provision. 'Fresh, devastating stories . . . Okorie writes with uncomfortable clarity about things we think we already know' LIA MILLS 'Melatu Uche Okorie has important things to say - and she does it quite brilliantly' RODDY DOYLE

Thom Gunn (1929-2004) was educated at Cambridge University, and had his first collection of poems, Fighting Terms, published while still an undergraduate. He moved to northern California in 1954 and taught in American universities until his death. His last collection was Boss Cupid (2000).

In this series, a contemporary poet selects and introduces a poet of the past. By their choice of poems and by the personal and critical reactions they express in their prefaces, the editors offer insights into their own work as well as providing an accessible and passionate introduction to some of the greatest poets of our literature.

Nothing quite like this has ever been published before."-The Guardian"This is high stakes, subversive literature."-The Daily Telegraph"With the publication of her Neapolitan Novels, (Ferrante) has established herself as the foremost writer in Italy-and the world."-The Sunday Times"An unconditional masterpiece . . . I was totally enthralled."-Jhumpa Lahiri"An extraordinary epic."-Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times"To the uninitiated, Elena Ferrante is best described as Balzac meets The Sopranos and rewrites feminist theory."-The Times"Ferrante's writing seems to say something that hasn't been said before, in a way so compelling its readers forget where they are, abandon friends and disdain sleep."-London Review of Books"Stunning. An intense, forensic exploration of friendship."-The Times Literary SupplementSet in the late 1960s and the 1970s, Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay continues the story of the feisty and rebellious Lila and her lifelong friend, the brilliant and bookish Elena. Lila, after separating from her husband, is living with her young son in a new neighbourhood of Naples and working at a local factory. Elena has left Naples, earned a degree from an elite college, and published a novel, all of which has opened the doors to a world of learned and fascinating interlocutors. The era, with its dramatic changes in sexual politics and social costumes, with its seemingly limitless number of new possibilities, is rendered with breathtaking vigour. This third Neapolitan Novel is not only a moving story of friendship but also a searing portrait of a rapidly changing world.

You cannot swim for new horizons until you have courage to lose sight of the shore. William Faulkner
These short works offer three different approaches to Faulkner, each representative of his work as a whole. "Spotted Horses" is a hilarious account of a horse auction, and pits the cold practicality of women against the boyish folly of men. "Old Man" is something of an adventure story. When a flood ravages the countryside of the lower Mississippi, a convict finds himself adrift with a pregnant woman. And "The Bear," perhaps his best known shorter work, is the story of a boy s coming to terms wit the adult world. By learning how to hunt, the boy is taught the real meaning of pride, humility, and courage."

Winner of the 2020 Prix du Meilleur Livre Etranger, France's best foreign book of the year. 'Astounding' Sebastian Barry 'A masterpiece' Ayad Akhtar 'This little book is ruminative, humane, and gorgeously precise'Jonathan Lethem In this genre-defying book, best-selling memoirist and critic Daniel Mendelsohn explores the mysterious links between the randomness of the lives we lead and the artfulness of the stories we tell. Combining memoir, biography, history, and literary criticism, Three Rings weaves together the stories of three exiled writers who turned to the classics of the past to create masterpieces of their own-works that pondered the nature of narrative itself. Erich Auerbach, the Jewish philologist who fled Hitler's Germany and wrote his classic study of Western literature, Mimesis, in Istanbul. Francois Fenelon, the seventeenth-century French archbishop whose ingenious sequel to the Odyssey,The Adventures of Telemachus - a veiled critique of the Sun King and the best-selling book in Europe for one hundred years - resulted in his banishment. And the German novelist W. G. Sebald, self-exiled to England, whose distinctively meandering narratives explore Odyssean themes of displacement, nostalgia, and separation from home. Intertwined with these tales of exile and artistic crisis is an account of Mendelsohn's struggles to write two of his own books-a family saga of the Holocaust and a memoir about reading the Odyssey with his elderly father-that are haunted by tales of oppression and wandering. As Three Rings moves to its startling conclusion, a climactic revelation about the way in which the lives of its three heroes were linked across borders, languages, and centuries forces the reader to reconsider the relationship between narrative and history, art and life.

Three Soldiers explores fear and ambition, conformity and rebellion, desertion and violence in impossible circumstances. It remains a towering testament to the brutal and dehumanizing effects of a regimented war machine.