NEW RELEASES
Polly Barton reflects on her experience of moving to the Japanese island of Sado at the age of twenty-one and on her journey to becoming a literary translator. Written in fifty semi-discrete entries, Fifty Sounds is a personal dictionary of the Japanese language that draws together a variety of cultural reflections — from conformity and being an outsider, to the gendering of Japanese society, and attitudes towards food and the cult of 'deliciousness' — alongside insights into the transformative powers of language-learning.
>>Uwaa: the sound of the feeling that cannot be spoken.
>>Connection fever.
>>Uwaa: the sound of the feeling that cannot be spoken.
>>Connection fever.
Permafrost's no-bullshit lesbian narrator is an uninhibited lover and a wickedly funny observer of modern life. Desperate to get out of Barcelona, she goes to Brussels, 'because a city whose symbol is a little boy pissing was a city I knew I would like'; as an au pair in Scotland, she develops a hatred of the color green. And everywhere she goes, she tries to break out of the roles set for her by family and society, chasing escape wherever it can be found: love affairs, travel, thoughts of suicide.
"Permafrost is a discomfiting book about a sensual intoxication with life that just barely contains the desire for it to be over and done with forever. Like a perfect song, Eva Baltasar's words, as translated by Julia Sanches, have a sheen and inevitability that I won't soon forget. It held me in a trance." —Catherine Lacey
"Reading Eva Baltasar's Permafrost is like having a rug continuously pulled out from under you until finally the rug disappears. How can a novel that orbits suicide be so surprising, so intensely liberating and funny, and at the same time, so full of grief? That is its genius." —Amina Cain
Childhood does not last long in the Argentine mountains of Córdoba, and adult lives fall apart quickly. In disarming, darkly humorous stories, Federico Falco explores themes of obsessive love, romantic attachment and the strategies we must find to cope with death and painful longing.
"His stories shimmer like revelations - the clarity, mystery, beauty, depth, and sheer, thrilling peculiarity of ordinary life when the veil lifts. They're exhilarating to read, just as exhilarating to re-read." —Deborah Eisenberg
>>Read the title story.
>>Landscapes, hermits and storytelling.
>>Read the title story.
>>Landscapes, hermits and storytelling.
If the dead could speak, what would they say to the living? From their graves in Paulstadt's cemetery, the town's late inhabitants tell stories. Some recall just a moment — perhaps the one in which they left this world, perhaps the one they now realize shaped their life forever. Some remember all the people they've been with, or the only person they ever loved. This chorus of voices — young, old, rich, poor — builds a picture of a community, as viewed from below ground. The streets of the small provincial town are given shape and meaning by those who lived, loved, worked, mourned, and died there. From the author of A Whole Life.
An acidic portrait of the grifters and pretenders of the art world, from the celebrated author of The Mars Room. In Rachel Kushner's novella an unnamed artist recounts her travels from New York City to Cologne—where she contemplates German guilt and art-world grifters, and Leipzig—where she encounters live 'adult entertainment' in a business hotel. The narrator gossips about everyone, including the author.
Mania descends upon a family when the father finds himself in possession of a concrete mixer. As he seeks to upgrade every aspect of their lives, disaster strikes when the younger sibling is subsumed by concrete. Through puns, wordplay, and dizzying verbal effect, Garréta reinvents the novel form and blurs the line between spoken and written language in an attempt to confront the elasticity of communication.
“Garréta and Ramadan continue to redefine the limits of language—these are not words to read but words to bite, chew, choke on. Consuming In Concrete, with all its pleasures and surprises, feels like learning a new game, ruled by Garréta's definitive and mystifying blend of folklore and testimony.” — Kyle Alderdice
Alzayat captures luminously how it feels to be ‘other’: as a Syrian, as an Arab, as an immigrant, as a woman. Each one of the nine stories collected here is a snapshot of those moments when unusual circumstances suddenly distinguish us from our neighbours, when our difference is thrown into relief. Here are ‘dangerous’ women transgressing, missing children in 1970s New York, a family who were once Syrian but have now lost their name, and a young woman about to discover the hollowness of the American dream. At its centre lies ‘Alligator’: a remarkable compilation of real and invented sources, which rescues from history the story of a Syrian American couple who were murdered at the hands of the state.
The definitive work on chessboard problems. It is not simply about chess but the chessboard itself. And, more importantly, the fascinating mathematics behind it. From the Knight's Tour Problem and Queens Domination to their many variations, John Watkins surveys all the well-known problems in this surprisingly fertile area of recreational mathematics. Can a knight follow a path that covers every square once, ending on the starting square? How many queens are needed so that every square is targeted or occupied by one of the queens? Each main topic is treated in depth from its historical conception through to its status today.
In his follow-up to the equally fascinating and beautiful Around the World in 80 Trees, Jonathan Drori takes another trip across the globe, bringing to life the science of plants by revealing how their worlds are intricately entwined with our own history, culture and folklore. From the seemingly familiar tomato and dandelion to the eerie mandrake and Spanish 'moss' of Louisiana, each of these stories is full of surprises. Some have a troubling past, while others have ignited human creativity or enabled whole civilisations to flourish.
In the Line the dead still have a say, and their say counts for double. It’s a necrocracy and so everyone left alive walks into tomorrow facing backwards. Willard, his mother, and his girlfriend Nyla have spent their entire lives in an endless procession, where daily survival is dictated by the ultimate imperative: obey the rules, or lose your place in the Line. Everything changes the day Willard’s mother dies and he finds a book hidden among her few belongings.
"An enthralling work of high imagination and storytelling flair." —Donal Ryan
"Line is an extraordinary novel – gripping, unsettling, brilliant." —Roddy Doyle
"A powerful, discomfiting fable of uncertainty and failure, poetically crafted, politically pointed. From the brass tacks of language we construct to make ourselves feel stable, to the artifice of routine built from obligation, Line is a Ballardian take on the near-now that shows us how fleeting our idea of absoluteness really is." —June Caldwell
"A powerful, discomfiting fable of uncertainty and failure, poetically crafted, politically pointed. From the brass tacks of language we construct to make ourselves feel stable, to the artifice of routine built from obligation, Line is a Ballardian take on the near-now that shows us how fleeting our idea of absoluteness really is." —June Caldwell
"Line is a modern parable of the most ambitious kind. A Grapes of Wrath for the age of digital capitalism. Niall Bourke writes with passionate urgency and skilful clarity." —Rónán Hession
The Sackler name adorns the walls of many storied institutions — Harvard, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Oxford, the Louvre. They are one of the richest families in the world, known for their lavish donations in the arts and the sciences. The source of the family fortune was vague, however, until it emerged that the Sacklers were responsible for making and marketing Oxycontin, a blockbuster painkiller that was a catalyst for the opioid crisis-an international epidemic of drug addiction which has killed nearly half a million people.
The "ghetto girls" paid off Gestapo guards, hid revolvers in loaves of bread and jars of marmalade, helped build systems of underground bunkers. They flirted with Nazis, bought them off with wine, whiskey and home cooking, and shot and killed them. They helped the sick and taught the kids, they bombed German train lines and blew up Vilna's water supply.
What does the future hold? This question can be daunting—or delightfully promising. Shinsuke Yoshitake's picture books are a delightful introduction to philosophy, perfectly pitched to young children.
In Sweden, refugee children fall asleep for months and years at a time. In upstate New York, high school students develop contagious seizures. In the US Embassy in Cuba, employees complain of headaches and memory loss after hearing strange noises in the night. These disparate cases are some of the most remarkable diagnostic mysteries of the twenty-first century, as both doctors and scientists have struggled to explain them within the boundaries of medical science and - more crucially - to treat them. What unites them is that they are all examples of a particular type of psychosomatic illness: medical disorders that are influenced as much by the idiosyncratic aspects of individual cultures as they are by human biology.
An unambitious twenty-two-year-old, Darren lives in a Brooklyn brownstone with his mother, who wants nothing more than to see him live up to his potential. But Darren is content working at Starbucks in the lobby of a Manhattan office building, hanging out with his girlfriend, Soraya, and eating his mother's home-cooked meals. All that changes when a chance encounter with Rhett Daniels, the silver-tongued CEO of Sumwun, NYC's hottest tech startup, results in an exclusive invitation for Darren to join an elite sales team on the thirty-sixth floor. After enduring a "hell week" of training, Darren, the only Black person in the company, reimagines himself as 'Buck', a ruthless salesman unrecognizable to his friends and family. But when things turn tragic at home and Buck feels he's hit rock bottom, he begins to hatch a plan to help young people of color infiltrate America's sales force, setting off a chain of events that forever changes the game.
"Askaripour closes the deal on the first page of this mesmerizing novel, executing a high wire act full of verve and dark, comic energy." —Colson Whitehead
A wife is abandoned by her new husband in a ghost estate, with blood on her hands; a young woman is tormented by visions of the man murdered by her brother during the Troubles; a pregnant mother fears the worst as her husband grows illegal cannabis with the help of a vulnerable teenage girl; a woman struggles to forgive herself after an abortion threatens to destroy her marriage. Ireland's folklore and politics loom large in these short stories.
A beautifully illustrated surbey of the cultural history of bees and beekeeping. In her travels Möller encounters a trigger-happy Californian beekeeper raging against both killer bees and bee politics, warring beekeepers on the Danish island of Læso, and Brother Adam of Buckfast Abbey, breeder of the Buckfast queen now popular throughout Europe and beyond, as well a host of others as passionate as she about the complex world of apiculture both past and present.
It is the summer of 2013 and Abigail Kamara has been left to her own devices. This might, by those who know her, be considered a mistake. While her cousin, police constable and apprentice wizard Peter Grant, is off in the sticks, chasing unicorns, Abigail is chasing her own mystery. Teenagers around Hampstead Heath have been going missing but before the police can get fully engaged, the teens return home—unharmed but vague about where they've been. Aided only by her new friend, Simon, her knowledge that magic is real and a posse of talking foxes that think they're spies, Abigail must venture into the wilds of Hampstead to discover who is luring the teenagers and more importantly—why?
Turtle really likes standing in his favourite spot. He likes it so much that he asks his friend Armadillo to come over and stand in it, too. But now that Armadillo is standing in that spot, he has a bad feeling about it... A hilarious meditation on the workings of friendship, fate, shared futuristic visions, and that funny feeling you get that there’s something off somewhere, but you just can’t put your finger on it.