Literature

Easily the most purely entertaining novel I have read so far this year" David Mills, The Sunday Times"A really excellent suspense novelist" Stephen KingThe second volume of Pierre Lemaitre's enthralling, award-winning between-the-wars trilogyIn 1927, the great and the good of Paris gather at the funeral of the wealthy banker, Marcel Pericourt. His daughter, Madeleine, is poised to take over his financial empire (although, unfortunately, she knows next to nothing about banking). More unfortunately still, when Madeleine's seven-year-old son, Paul, tumbles from a second floor window of the Pericourt mansion on the day of his grandfather's funeral, and suffers life-changing injuries, his fall sets off a chain of events that will reduce Madeleine to destitution and ruin in a matter of months. Using all her reserves of ingenuity, resourcefulness, and a burning desire for retribution, Madeleine sets about rebuilding her life. She will be helped by an ex-Communist fixer, a Polish nurse who doesn't speak a word of French, a brainless petty criminal with a talent for sabotage, an exiled German Jewish chemist, a very expensive forger, an opera singer with a handy flair for theatrics, and her own son with ideas for a creative new business to take Paris by storm. A brilliant, imaginative, free-falling caper through between-the-wars Paris, and a portrait of Europe on the edge of disaster. Translated from the French by Frank WynneWith the support of the Creative Europe Programme of the European UnionFrom the reviews for The Great Swindle"The most purely enjoyable book I've read this year" Jake Kerridge, Sunday Telegraph"The vast sweep of the novel and its array of extraordinary secondary characters have attracted comparisons with the works of Balzac. Moving, angry, intelligent - and compulsive" Marcel Berlins, The Times

One by one the boys begin to fall...In 1914, a room full of German schoolboys, fresh-faced and idealistic, are goaded by their schoolmaster to troop off to the 'glorious war'. With the fire and patriotism of youth, they sign up. What follows is the moving story of a young 'unknown soldier' experiencing the horror and disillusionment of life in the trenches.

In June 1939 Annemarie Schwarzenbach and fellow writer Ella Maillart set out from Geneva in a Ford, heading for Afghanistan. The first women to travel Afghanistan's Northern Road, they fled the storm brewing in Europe to seek a place untouched by what they considered to be Western neuroses. The Afghan journey documented in All the Roads Are Open is one of the most important episodes of Schwarzenbach's turbulent life.

Her incisive, lyrical essays offer a unique glimpse of an Afghanistan already touched by the "fateful laws known as progress," a remote yet "sensitive nerve centre of world politics" caught amid great powers in upheaval. In her writings, Schwarzenbach conjures up the desolate beauty of landscapes both internal and external, reflecting on the longings and loneliness of travel as well as its grace. Maillart's account of their trip, The Cruel Way, stands as a classic of travel literature, and, now available for the first time in English, Schwarzenbach's memoir rounds out the story of the adventure.

Praise for the German Edition "Above all, [Schwarzenbach's] discovery of the Orient was a personal one. But the author never loses sight of the historical and social context. .

. . She shows no trace of colonialist arrogance.

In fact, the pieces also reflect the experience of crisis, the loss of confidence which, in that decade, seized the long-arrogant culture of the West."-Suddeutsche Zeitung

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. Allen Ginsberg (1926-97) was born in Newark, New Jersey, to a poet-teacher father and Russian emigre mother. Along with his friend Jack Kerouac, he attended Columbia University, but was initially expelled for writings obscenities on his dormitory window before returning to complete his graduation in 1948. When "Howl and Other Poems" was impounded by San Francisco customs in 1956, the subsequent trial for obscenity catapulted Ginsberg and his publisher City Lights to national fame and helped to define the Beat Generation. His "Collected Poems: 1947-1997" appeared in 2006.

'An extraordinary story of grace, forgiveness and moral courage' Patrick Radden Keefe The English language has no specific word for the parent that has lost a child. There exist words for orphan, widow and widower, but there is no word that captures and conveys this tragic type of loss. It has been eleven years since Diane Foley s son, the American journalist James Foley, was kidnapped in northern Syria, and nearly ten since that day in August 2014 when she would learn that he had been murdered by ISIS in a public beheading that would ricochet in video around the world. A whole decade. Time rushes past. And yet, for Diane, that moment is unending. In American Mother, legendary author Colum McCann tells Diane s story as she recalls the months of his captivity, the efforts made to bring him home and the days following his death, in which Diane came face to face with one of the men responsible for her son s kidnapping and torture. A testament to the power of radical empathy and moral courage, American Mother takes us inside one woman s extraordinary journey to find connection in a world torn asunder, and to fight for others as a way to keep her son s memory alive.

Fourteen tales include "The Enormous Radio" by Cheever, Faulkner's "Dry September," Katherine Anne Porter's "He," "A Worn Path" by Eudora Welty, and tales by Hawthorne, Twain, Poe, Fitzgerald, Wharton, others.

Winner of the Kobo Emerging Writer Prize for Literary FictionShortlisted for the Arthur C. Clarke Award for Science Fiction Book of the Year. Shortlisted for the James Tait Black Prize for Fiction. 2074. America's future is Civil War. Sarat's reality is survival. They took her father, they took her home, they told her lies . . . She didn't start this war, but she'll end it. Omar El Akkad's powerful debut novel imagines a dystopian future: a second American Civil War, a devastating plague and one family caught deep in the middle. In American War, we're asked to consider what might happen if America were to turn its most devastating policies and deadly weapons against itself.

A tremendous bestseller when it was published in 1925, "An American Tragedy" is the culmination of Theodore Dreiser's elementally powerful fictional art. Revised reissue.

A love song between an angel and an accountant in the suburbs of London from Man Booker shortlisted LevyShe is a shimmering, melancholy angel, flown from Paradise to save him from the suburbs of hell. He an accountant, dreaming of a white Christmas, a little garden and someone to love. She attempts to fly him away from his habits and fears, while he holds on tight to all he knows.

Man Booker Prize shortlisted Deborah Levy whips up a storm of romance and slapstick, of heavenly and earthly delights, in this dystopian philosophical poem about individual freedom and the search for the good life.

The parish of St Basil, on the fringes of North Kensington, is all of a flutter due to the arrival of Rupert Stonebird, a most eligible bachelor, in the neighbourhood. The local matchmakers are sure he will make a suitable husband for the vicar’s wife’s sister, Penny, or perhaps for local librarian Ianthe Broome?

But Ianthe is in danger of forming a most unsuitable attachment for her new library assistant, John, a man of questionable background with not a penny to his name…