NEW RELEASES (20.4.26)

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On the Calculation of Volume IV by Solvej Balle (translated from Danish by Sophia Hersi Smith and Jennifer Russell) $42
We're a little more than halfway through Balle's hypnotic, monumental seven-volume novel about a woman set adrift within the walls of November 18th. Balle's riveting project continues to wring ever more fascinating dimensions from time and its hapless, mortal captives. In Book III we saw the addition of a handful of new characters to Tara's world — fellow travelers within November 18th — and now Book IV heralds the arrival of many others, and soon to be even more, roaming uncertainly through the same November day. Could this be the first stirrings of an alternative civilisation? The big house in Bremen turns into the headquarters for this growing group of time-trapped individuals. But who are they and what has happened to them? Are they loopers, repeaters, or returners? A brilliant modern spin on the myth of Babel in the Book of Genesis, Book IV asks urgent questions, concerning the naming of things, of people, and of the functions of language itself-must a social movement have a common language in order to exist? Snatches of conversation, argument, and late-night chatter crowd onto the pages of Tara's notebooks. Amid the buzz and excitement of a new social order coming into being, Book IV ends with a sudden, unexpected, and tantalizing cliffhanger that no one — not even Tara, our steady cataloguer and cartographer of the endless November day — could have foreseen. [Paperback]
”Absolutely, absolutely incredible.” —Karl Ove Knausgård
”A total explosion.” —Nicole Krauss
”Unforgettable.” —Hernan Díaz
”Breathtaking.” —Chetna Maroo
”Brilliant.” —Jon McGregor
”Absolutely marvellous.” —Lauren Groff
>>Bleeding in the dishes.
>>The cult of Solvej Balle.
>>The Faber edition of this volume is also available, if you prefer that.
>>All the volumes so far.
>>Read our reviews of the first volume.
>>Read Thomas’s review of the second volume.

My Dreadful Body by Egana Djabbarova (translated from Russian by Lisa C. Hayden) $45
A dazzling debut novel about a young woman's vexed coming of age in a traditional Azerbaijani community in Russia, grappling under the weight of Muslim patriarchal norms and a debilitating neurological condition. The mysterious affliction leaves her unable to control her muscles, plagued by pain and speech disorders, defying diagnosis. Addressing each body part with the scrupulousness of a medical researcher, the narrator explores memories, traditions, and taboos related to her physical self. In the process, a woman once destined for the role of a beautiful marriageable daughter comes to be perceived as damaged goods. With verbal elegance and poetic power, Egana Djabbarova unveils a hidden world in which illness unexpectedly facilitates her liberation. [Paperback]
"Djabbarova debuts with a potent portrait of illness and gender oppression in contemporary Azerbaijan, Georgia, and Russia . . . This passionate and lyrical work packs a stinging punch." —Publishers Weekly
"Essential feminist, anticolonial reading. My Dreadful Body is about power. The power of one nation to colonise another, which is in turn echoed by the power of men to control women. It is about having the power to be in control of one's own body. But it is also about having the power to fight back." —Full Stop
"A woman maps cultural expectations and desires onto her ailing body in Egana Djabbarova's singular novel. An incisive novel, My Dreadful Body celebrates women's agency, mourns physical losses, and rebels against inherited boundaries." —Foreword Reviews
>>Tongue.
>>Silence speaks.
>>Illness as a sometimes-liminal space.

Discipline by Larissa Pham $40
When two people fall apart, who gets to tell their story? Christine is a young writer touring her debut novel — a thinly disguised tale of the affair she had with her professor ten years earlier. He was magnetic, domineering, both the sponsor of her early promise and its destroyer. But he surely forgot her long ago, and the temptation to exorcise her past was overwhelming. Then, between hotel rooms and bookstores, formal dinners and road-trip hook-ups, she receives a series of sly, unsettling emails and finally an invitation to visit the professor's isolated house on an island off the coast of Maine. Against her better judgement, Christine is drawn back into his orbit, risking forever losing control of the narrative she's worked so hard to create. [Hardback]
”Discipline coolly questions the ethics and processes of fiction and art, examining the toll they take both on the practitioner and anyone unlucky enough to be in their orbit” —Financial Times
”A deceptively quiet and beautifully written story, Discipline plays masterfully with issues of consent, memory and artistic licence. It asks its readers to judge which is more real: what actually happened in the past, or how we feel about it in the present.: —Buzz Magazine
”A story of ideas, but it combines deep philosophical inquiry with thriller vibes.” —Crack
>>Protect that pain.
>>Writing toward the void.
>>”I want to lie.”

The Art of Asking Your Boss for a Raise by Georges Perec (translated from Fench by David Bellos) $30
A long-suffering employee in a big corporation has summoned up the courage to ask for a raise. But as he runs through the looming encounter in his mind, his neuroses come to the surface — What is the best day to see the boss? What if he doesn’t offer you a seat when you go into his office? The Art of Asking Your Boss for a Raise is a hilarious account of an employee losing his identity — and possibly his sanity — as he tries to put on the most acceptable face for the corporate world, with its rigid hierarchies and hostility to new ideas. If he follows a certain course of action, so this logic goes, he will succeed — but, in accepting these conditions, are his attempts to challenge his world of work doomed from the outset? Neurotic and pessimistic, yet endearing, comic and never less than entertaining, Perec’s novella presents an acute and penetrating vision of the world of office work, as pertinent today as it was when it was written in 1968. [Paperback]
”Perec's novels are games, each different. They are played for real stakes and in some cases breathtakingly large ones. As games should be, and as literary games often are not, they are fun.” —Los Angeles Times
>>A one-sentence review.
>>Questioning the quotidian.

False Calm: A journey through the ghost towns of Patagonia by María Sonia Cristoff (translated from Spanish by Katherine Silver) $28
With time I have reached the conclusion that, as it is in my personal history, isolation is present in everything I have ever read about Patagonia . . . I returned to write an account of this eminently Patagonian characteristic. I wanted to see the shapes it takes today; I wanted to locate it at its furthest extremes. Part reportage, part personal essay, part travelogue, False Calm finds Argentinian author María Sonia Cristoff writing against romantic portrayals of Patagonia as she journeys from one small town to the next. Cristoff returns home to chronicle the ghost towns left behind by the oil boom. She explores Patagonia's complicated legacy through the lost stories of its people and the desolate places they inhabit. In one town, a man struggles to maintain one of just two remaining stores because buses refuse to stop as scheduled; in another, the television in each household plays the same channel; elsewhere, she speaks with an amateur pilot who assembles model aeroplanes to keep himself company. Everywhere, Cristoff blends superstition, myth and firsthand accounts to conjure the reality of a Patagonia that unveils a startlingly lucid netherworld. [Paperback with French flaps]
”An artful, atmospheric, thought-provoking depiction of life between silence and open space.” —Los Angeles Review of Books
”It has a magical quality, an intimate journey, so humane, one that opens the imagination and reminds us of who we have been and what we have, and have lost.” —Philippe Sands

Women Without Men: A novel of modern Iran by Shahrnush Parsipur (a new translation from Persian by Faridoun Farrokh) $40
An internationally acclaimed novel that traces the interwoven destinies of five women — including a wealthy middle-aged housewife, a sex worker and a schoolteacher — as they arrive by different paths to live together in an abundant garden on the outskirts of Tehran. Drawing on elements of Islamic mysticism and recent Iranian history, the novel depicts women escaping the narrow confines of family and society, and imagines their future living in a world without men. Originally published in Persian in 1989 and banned in Iran ever since, Women Without Men was longlisted for the International Booker Prize 2026. Foreword by Shirin Neshat. [Paperback]
”Some works of fiction move through time, gaining depth with every decade. In Shahrnush Parsipur’s Women Without Men, we follow the lives of five women against the background of revolution and coups as they find their way to a garden, shedding their old lives like snakeskin. Parsipur was imprisoned for daring to write about women’s desires, and now lives in exile in America; Women Without Men has been banned in Iran for over three decades. But her layered tales, glittering in a fresh translation, continue to beckon you into a world that is simultaneously scoured by reality, and touched with fable and myth.” —International Booker Prize judges’ citation
"Parsipur is a courageous, talented woman, and above all, a great writer." —Marjane Satrapi, author of Persepoplis
"Using the techniques of both the fabulist and the polemicist, Parsipur continues her protest against traditional Persian gender relations in this charming, powerful novella." —Publishers Weekly
>>Read an extract.
>>An interview with the author and the translator.
>>The book was made into an astounding film by Shirin Neshat.

Seasons of Glass and Iron by Amal el-Mohtar $45
Full of glimpses into gleaming worlds and fairy tales with teeth. Like miscellany from other worlds, these stories are told in letters, diary entries, reference materials, folktales, and lyrical prose. [Hardback]
"An essential collection of work from one of today's most poignant speculative writers. El-Mohtar creates immersive worlds with beautiful language." —Library Journal
"A collection of 14 stories and four poems that shine both individually and as a whole, while still showcasing El-Mohtar's characteristic lyricism and striking imagery. There's not a false note here." —Publisher's Weekly
>>Womanhood, identity, and fairy tales.
>>There is no art that is separate from politics.

Cello: A journey through silence to sound by Kate Kennedy $30
Kennedy weaves together the lives of four remarkable cellists who suffered various forms of persecution, injury and misfortune. The Hungarian Jewish cellist and composer Pál Hermann managed to keep one step ahead of the Gestapo for much of the Second World War but was eventually captured and murdered. Lise Cristiani, the first female professional cello soloist, undertook an epic and ultimately fatal concert tour of Siberia in the 1850s, taking with her one of the world's greatest Stradivari cellos. Anita Lasker-Wallfisch was incarcerated in both Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen camps, only surviving because she was the cellist in the Auschwitz-Birkenau women's orchestra. Amedeo Baldovino of the Trieste Piano Trio was forced to jump from a burning ship with his 'Mara' Stradivari, losing the cello, and nearly losing his own life when the boat was shipwrecked off Buenos Aires. Counterpointing the themes raised by these extraordinary stories are a sequence of interludes that draw together the author's reflections on the nature and history of the cello, and her many interviews and encounters with contemporary cellists. Kate Kennedy's own relationship with the cello is a complicated one. As a teenager, she suffered an injury to her arm that imposed severe limitations on her career as a performer on the instrument that was her first love. She realised that, in order to understand what the cello meant to her, she needed to find out what the cello and, crucially, the absence of the cello had meant to some other cellists, past and present. [Paperback]
”This wonderful book is a love-letter to cellos and cellists, a gripping quest across Europe for lost and sometimes miraculously re-found instruments, a startling plunge into the dark histories of our times, a meditation and improvisation on music and musicians, and a moving personal story of a cellist who has rediscovered her own gift for playing and with it the central meaning of her life.” —Hermione Lee
”Kate Kennedy's quest across seas and continents, following the lives of four great cellists, is a rare musical adventure. Brimming with life, comic, thoughtful, and at times heartbreaking, Cello explores the bond between players and their instruments and its enduring power.” —Jenny Uglow
>>A different life.
>>Kammersonate.
>>The ’Mara’ Stradivari.

Nocturnal Apparitions by Bruno Schulz (translated from Polish by Stanley Bill) $28
A fantastical collection of short stories by one of the twentieth century's most iconic cult authors. The stories in this collection are rich, tangled, and suffused with mystery and wonder. In the narrowing, winding city streets, strange figures roam. Great flocks of birds soar over rooftops, obscuring the sun. Cockroaches appear through cracks and scuttle across floorboards. Individuals careen from university buildings to dimly lit parlour rooms, through strange shops and endless storms. Crowded with moments of stunning beauty, the stories in this collection showcase Schulz's darkly modern sensibility, and his status as one of the great transformers of the ordinary into the fantastical. Contents: August / Visitation / Birds / Cinnamon Shops / The Street of Crocodiles / Cockroaches / The Gale / The Night of the Great Season / The Book / The Age of Genius / My Father Joins the Fire Brigade / The Sanatorium under the Hourglass / Father's Last Escape / Undula. [New paperbback edition]
 “One of the the great transmogrifiers of the world into words.” —John Updike
”One of the most original imaginations in modern Europe.” —Cynthia Ozick
”Schulz redrafts the lines between fantasy and reality.” —Chris Power
”I read Schulz's stories and felt the gush of life.” —David Grossman
”Bruno Schulz has this weird sense of humour, this tenderness, and at the same time his writing is very complex. Reading him for the first time was something totally unique. That is still what I feel when I read him.“ —Alejandro Zambra

Black Bag by Luke Kennard $38
A penniless out-of-work actor picks up a job working for Dr Blend, a university professor who is conducting a psychological experiment. How will Dr Blend's students react to someone zipped into on oversized bag, sitting at the back of the lecture hall over a series of autumn term lectures? The role, eagerly accepted, soon has unexpected consequences. A professor of post-humanism develops research questions of her own, in particular can you love someone secreted away inside a black bag? Meanwhile, the actor's childhood friend and flatmate forms a vision for monetising this new situation. A warped campus novel, an investigation into the crisis of masculinity and an off-kilter love story, Black Bag is a firework of a novel: blazingly funny and profoundly humane. [Paperback]
”Gleefully absurd, a triumph of deadpan comedy. From his gloriously unhinged premise, Kennard explores broader questions of identity, masculinity and the pursuit of meaning in art and in life. Kennard is superb at capturing a chaotic interior life. The novel's off-kilter humour combines minute social observation with incongruous ideas, drawing on a wide sphere of reference from religion to pornography. Conceptually, Black Bag is as surreal and ambitious as Tom McCarthy's Remainder, only written by someone with the comic instincts of Peep Show's Jesse Armstrong. But beneath the playfulness lies a thoughtful, tender meditation on the difficulty of being a man in the modern world: how to find purpose, how to make art that matters, and how to connect with other people when you suspect you might not possess a fully formed self to offer them. In Kennard's hands, the bag contains a lot, and he's so generous with the jokes that I found myself laughing on almost every page. A brilliant comic tour de force.” —Johanna Thomas-Corr, Sunday Times
”Black Bag is a masterpiece from one of the best writers at work today. In his endlessly quotable prose, Kennard explores modern masculinity with compassion and brutal honesty, warmth and despair — through a narrator who, on every page, discovers his true self and simultaneously buries it. Wildly original and funny, yet always underpinned by depth of feeling, this is a novel like no other.” —Joe Dunthorne
>>Theories of attraction.
>>Waiting for it to happen.

MEDesque: Everyday recipes with Mediterranean roots by Georgina Hayden $60
”Warmth, boldness, approachability and a general sense that all is good in the world. All this applies to the food in MEDesque. It's joyful, generous and drenched in olive oil.” —Yotam Ottolenghi
”With this wonderful new book Georgie takes us on a dream tour around the Mediterranean and picks up all the best bits so that our meals can be sunnier, happier, easier and infinitely more delicious — what a treat!” —Itamar Srulovich, Honey & Co.
”Irresistible recipes that spark cravings on every page.” —Yasmin Khan
Includes: Lamb, apricot and feta sausage rolls; Gnocchi puttanesca; Spiced lemony roast chicken with crushed baby potatoes; One-pan 'nduja, pepper and three cheese lasagne; Double chocolate pannacotta with cherries; Salted honey butter madeleines. [Hardback]
>>Look inside.
>>All of Hayden’s cookbooks should be on your cookbook shelf.