He has glimpsed his neighbors—beautiful manicurist Rayleen, lonely old Ms. Hinman, bigoted and angry Mr. Lafferty, kind-hearted Felipe, and 9-year-old Grace and her former addict mother Eileen. But most of them have never seen Billy. Not until Grace begins to sit outside on the building’s front stoop for hours every day, inches from Billy’s patio. Troubled by this change in the natural order, Billy makes it far enough out onto his porch to ask Grace why she doesn’t sit inside where it’s safe. Her answer: “If I sit inside, then nobody will know I’m in trouble. And then nobody will help me.” Her answer changes everything.

    Life is a struggle to make ends meet, but he does not mind. When his mother decides to take a lodger to help pay the bills, he watches with interest as she freshens up their small apartment with new wallpaper and a sofa paid for in installments. He befriends their new male lodger, whose television is more tempting to him than his mother would like.When a half sister whom he never knew joins the household, Finn takes her under his wing over an everlasting summer on Håøya Island. But he can't understand why everyone thinks his new sister is so different from every other child. Nor can he fathom his mother's painful secret, one that pushes them ever farther apart. As summer comes to a close, Finn must attempt to grasp the incomprehensible adult world and his place within it.Child Wonder is a powerful and unsentimental portrait of childhood. Roy Jacobsen, through the eyes of a child, has produced an immensely uplifting novel that shines with light and warmth.

    Then meet the grandmother who raised her. Foul-mouthed, outrageous, orange-haired Gina Pontin. Two women who couldn’t be more different. When Gina has an accident the two of them are forced together in the last place Stella wants to return to. But as the June temperature soars in more ways than one, they, and the residents of Mapton-on-Sea, are in for an explosive summer no one will ever forget. 'The Last Resort has laugh out loud moments, tenderness and real heartbreak. This is a story of family and friendships which, ultimately, is as warm as the golden sand we feel between our toes. Great stuff. ' LeftLion Magazine

    Nixon is about to be impeached, his wife is leaving him, and his worldview is rapidly becoming outdated. His daughter, Daley, has spent the first eleven years of her life carefully negotiating her parents’ conflicting worlds: the liberal, socially committed realm of her mother, and the conservative, liquor-soaked life of her father. But when they divorce, and Gardiner’s basest impulses are unleashed, the chasm quickly widens and Daley feels herself stretched thinly across it.As she grows into adulthood, Daley rejects the narrow world that nourished her father’s fears and prejudices, and embarks on her own separate life—until he hits rock bottom. Lured back home by the dream of getting her father sober and rebuilding a trust that was broken years ago, Daley risks losing everything she has found beyond him, including her new love, Jonathan, who represents so much of what Daley’s father claims to hate, and who has given her so much of what he could never provide.Intimate in its detail yet epic in range, Father of the Rain is a raw, compelling journey into the emotional complexities, mercurial contours, and magnetic pull of family. It is also the stunning portrait of a deeply complex man and his daughter’s fierce, primal attachment to him.

    On his journey, Parsifal—a wise fool if there ever was one—encounters several librarians, a therapist, numerous blind people, and Misty, a beautiful woman who may well be under the influence of recreational drugs.Head-spinning and hilarious, Parsifal is a book like no other about the entanglement of the past and present, as well as the limitations of the future.

    A four-year-old boy named Romochka, abandoned by his mother and uncle, is left to fend for himself. Curious, he follows a stray dog to its home in an abandoned church cellar on the city's outskirts. Romochka makes himself at home with Mamochka, the mother of the pack, and six other dogs as he slowly abandons his human attributes to survive two fiercely cold winters. Able to pass as either boy or dog, Romochka develops his own moral code. As the pack starts to prey on people for food with Romochka's help, he attracts the attention of local police and scientists. His future, and the pack's, will depend on his ability to remain free, but the outside world begins to close in on him as the novel reaches its gripping conclusion. In this taut and emotionally convincing narrative, Eva Hornung explores universal themes of the human condition: the importance of home, what it means to belong to a family, the consequences of exclusion, and what our animal nature can teach us about survival.

    Set on a farm in Suffolk just before the Second World War, it introduces a girl on the cusp of adulthood. Fourteen-year-old Edie Mather lives with her family at Wych Farm, where the shadow of the Great War still hangs over a community impoverished by the Great Depression. Glamorous outsider Constance FitzAllen arrives from London, determined to make a record of fading rural traditions and beliefs, and to persuade Edie's family to return to the old ways rather than embrace modernity. She brings with her new political and social ideas – some far more dangerous than others.For Edie, who has just finished school and must soon decide what to do with her life, Connie appears to be a godsend. But there is more to the older woman than meets the eye. As harvest time approaches and the pressures mount on the entire Mather family, Edie must decide whose version of reality to trust, and how best to save herself from disaster. A masterful evocation of the rhythms of the natural world and pastoral life, All Among the Barley is also a powerful and timely novel about influence, the lessons of history and the dangers of nostalgia.

    In drawings that capture both the tumult and the telling details of that street life, Unterzakhn (Yiddish for “Underthings”) tells the story of these sisters: as wide-eyed little girls absorbing the sights and sounds of a neighborhood of struggling immigrants; as teenagers taking their own tentative steps into the wider world (Esther working for a woman who runs both a burlesque theater and a whorehouse, Fanya for an obstetrician who also performs illegal abortions); and, finally, as adults battling for their own piece of the “golden land”, where the difference between just barely surviving and triumphantly succeeding involves, for each of them, painful decisions that will have unavoidably tragic repercussions.

    Estranged from his father, newly divorced, unable to communicate with his only daughter, he realizes that while he may have seventy-four friends on Facebook, there is nobody in the world with whom he can actually share his problems. Then a business proposition comes his way - a strange exercise in corporate PR that will require him to spend a week driving from London to a remote retail outlet on the Shetland Isles. Setting out with an open mind, good intentions and a friendly voice on his SatNav for company, Maxwell finds that this journey soon takes a more serious turn, and carries him not only to the furthest point of the United Kingdom, but into some of the deepest and darkest corners of his own past. In his sparkling and hugely enjoyable new book, Jonathan Coe reinvents the picaresque novel for our time.

    Wearing thrift store clothes, praying to the gods of adolescence that some loud-mouthed kid doesn't recognize his old shirt. Building up firewood reserves while other boys are out popping fly balls without a care in the world. It’s a relentless condition without a single redeeming quality. Of course, being poor is something that Lincoln has had time to accept. That his father is a convicted murderer, on the other hand... well, that's a fresh wound that’ll take some getting used to. And soon enough it’ll be the least of his problems. Yet all is not lost. Because in a long neglected hayfield, something extraordinary is happening—something so contrary to human thinking that the rules of possibility begin to unravel. And for a boy like Lincoln, it doesn’t merely change the way he sees the world.It changes everything.

    Seamlessly alternating between the present day and a summer thirty years past, its twin stories unfold at a cottage along the eastern coast of England.Will Pagett receives an unexpected gift on his fortieth birthday, two weeks at a perfect beach house in Cornwall. Seeking some distance from the married man with whom he's having an affair, he invites his aging mother and father to share his holiday, knowing the sun and sea will be a welcome change for. But the cottage and the stretch of sand before it seem somehow familiar and memories of a summer long ago begin to surface. Thirty-two years earlier. A young married couple and their eight year-old son begin two idyllic weeks at a beach house in Cornwall. But the sudden arrival of unknown American relatives has devastating consequences, turning what was to be a moment of reconciliation into an act of betrayal that will cast a lengthy shadow.As Patrick Gale masterfully unspools these parallel stories, we see their subtle and surprising reflections in each other and discover how the forgotten dramas of childhood are reenacted throughout our lives.Deftly navigating the terrain between humor and tragedy, Patrick Gale has written an unforgettable novel about the lies that adults tell and the small acts of treason that children can commit. Rough Music gracefully illuminates the merciful tricks of memory and the courage with which we continue to assert our belief in love and happiness.From the Hardcover edition.

    Funny, poignant and smart, full of unforgettable characters, these stories explore the violence of family, the constraints of small-town life and the elusive promise of escape.In "Ice Cream Man," an adolescent girl struggles to come to terms with her mother's death and her father's seeming indifference while conducting a secret affair with an older man from the local arena. Gerald, the young boy in "Big Dog Rage," goes to extreme and reckless measures to thwart the expectations of his parents, teachers, and the local priest, leaving his childhood friend to look longingly on. And in the title story, Bethany sees her gentle fiancé anew as she enters the raucous world of his hard-drinking family. Receiving a sharp shot to the mouth from her future sister-in-law Bethany finds her place in this clan secured.With her incisive, resonant prose, Lynn Coady elicits laughter, sadness, and compassion. Play the Monster Blind is a keenly observed, imaginative collection from one of the most distinctive talents to arrive on Canada's literary scene in years.

    They are always on the run, and as they move from place to place, the boy is often distraught to leave behind new friendships. Because it would be dicey for him to go to school, his anarchistic father gives him an unconventional education intended to contradict as much as possible the teachings of his own father, a preacher and a pervert. Ten years later, when the boy is entering adulthood, with a fake name and a monotonous job, he tries to conform to the demands of ordinary life, but the lessons of the past thwart his efforts, and questions about his father’s childhood cannot be left unanswered. Spanning the mid-1980s to early-twenty-first-century in Copenhagen, this coming-of-age novel examines what it means to be a stranger in the modern world, and how, for better or for worse, a father’s legacy is never passed on in any predictable fashion.

    When his grandfather dies, Aleks channels his storytelling talent to help with his grief.It is a gift he calls on again when the shadow of war spreads to Višegrad, and the world as he knows it stops. Though Aleks and his family flee to Germany, he is haunted by his past - and by Asija, the mysterious girl he tried to save. Desperate to learn of her fate, Aleks returns to his hometown on the anniversary of his grandfather's death to discover what became of her and the life he left behind.Translated from the German by Anthea Bell.

    And suddenly there's a strange boy at the bottom of Flynn's garden. Soon, she and her wayward brother Sam are walking out of the house in the middle of a hot summer's night and crossing four fields to find him again. But as well as the boy, Flynn and Sam find a whole gang of runaway kids. There's Diana, who's just had a baby. There's Mouse, who's only five and likes to set fire to things. And there is the boy himself, who stirs up feelings in Flynn that she's never felt before.But there's also someone else - the unspeakably malign and terrifying presence they're all running from. Escaping him, they stumble on an amazing and extraordinary house by a waterfall, a house which seems to offer safety and meets their every desire and need - or does it? The youngest character in the novel is one day old, and the oldest only seventeen. But the themes that lie at the heart of this ferociously original story are as adult, unsettling and universal as those of Julie Myerson's other novels.