She came seeking freedom from a strict father and an oppressive regime, but her dreams of becoming a film star ended in shame. Now that the civil war in Somalia is over, her homeland beckons. Yet Adua has a husband who needs her, a young man, also an immigrant, who braved a dangerous crossing of the Mediterranean Sea. When her father, who worked as an interpreter for Mussolini’s fascist regime, dies, Adua inherits the family home. She must decide whether to make the journey back to reclaim her material inheritance, but also how to take charge of her own story and build a future.Igiaba Scego is an Italian novelist and journalist. She was born in Rome in 1974 to Somali parents who took refuge in Italy following a coup d’état in their native country, where her father served as foreign minister.

    Just like a "real boy." Until he learns that to become truly real, he must open his heart and think of others.

    But since its original prewar translation there has been no completely new version in English. Now, Penguin brings Proust's masterpiece to new audiences throughout the world, beginning with Lydia Davis's internationally acclaimed translation of the first volume, Swann's Way.Swann's Way is one of the preeminent novels of childhood: a sensitive boy's impressions of his family and neighbors, all brought dazzlingly back to life years later by the taste of a madeleine. It also enfolds the short novel "Swann in Love," an incomparable study of sexual jealousy that becomes a crucial part of the vast, unfolding structure of In Search of Lost Time. The first volume of the work that established Proust as one of the finest voices of the modern age — satirical, skeptical, confiding, and endlessly varied in its response to the human condition — Swann's Way also stands on its own as a perfect rendering of a life in art, of the past re-created through memory.

    The Travels recounts Polo's journey to the eastern court of Kublai Khan, the chieftain of the Mongol empire which covered the Asian continent, but which was almost unknown to Polo's contemporaries. Encompassing a twenty-four year period from 1271, Polo's account details his travels in the service of the empire, from Beijing to northern India and ends with the remarkable story of Polo's return voyage from the Chinese port of Amoy to the Persian Gulf. Alternately factual and fantastic, Polo's prose at once reveals the medieval imagination's limits, and captures the wonder of subsequent travel writers when faced with the unfamiliar, the exotic or the unknown.

    With the off-handed knowingness of a remorseless young Eve, the narrator describes life as a captive of the school and her designs to win the affections of the apparently perfect new girl, Fréderique. As she broods over her schemes as well as on the nature of control and madness, the novel gathers a suspended, unsettling energy. Now translated into six languages, I beati anni del castigo in its Italian original won the 1990 Premio Bagutta and the 1990 Premio Speciale Rapallo. In Tim Parks’ consummate translation (with its "spare, haunting quality of a prose poem"), Sweet Days of Discipline was selected as one of the London Times Literary Supplement’s Notable Books of 1992: "In a period when novels are generally overblown and scarcely portable, it is good to be able to recommend [one that is] miraculously short and beautifully written."

    When she’s called to investigate a gruesome murder near a mountainside town, she’s paired with a young male inspector she’s not sure she trusts. But she has no choice—in this remote town full of secrets, eerie folktales and primal instincts, the killer seems drawn to a group of local children, who may be in grave danger.As Teresa inches closer to the truth, she must confront the possibility that her faculties, no longer what they once were, may fail her before the chase is over.

    I was only four then. I never thought I'd hear from him again, but now we're writing a book together'To Georg Røed, his father is no more than a shadow, a distant memory. But then one day his grandmother discovers some pages stuffed into the lining of an old red pushchair. The pages are a letter to Georg, written just before his father died, and a story, 'The Orange Girl'. But 'The Orange Girl' is no ordinary story - it is a riddle from the past and centres around an incident in his father's youth. One day he boarded a tram and was captivated by a beautiful girl standing in the aisle, clutching a huge paper bag of luscious-looking oranges. Suddenly the tram gave a jolt and he stumbled forward, sending the oranges flying in all directions. The girl simply hopped off the tram leaving Georg's father with arms full of oranges. Now, from beyond the grave, he is asking his son to help him finally solve the puzzle of her identity.

    Leo Pontecorvo, an internationally revered pediatric oncologist, is forty-eight. His wife, Rachel, is a physician and the loving mother to Filippo and Samuel, two amiable pre-teens. The evening news is on in the living room but nobody pays it any attention until Dr. Pontecorvo's name surfaces from the background noise and a news item airs that will change the lives of the Pontecorvos forever. Leo Pontecorvo has been publicly accused of a vile crime. A spotlight is turned on him that reveals the mistakes, regrets, and contradictions of a lifetime. Every detail of his private and professional life is about to come under scrutiny, to be debated by both friends and foes, by ravenous reporters and punctilious prosecutors. But Leo could bear all this if it weren't for the suspicious gazes of his wife and children. Surely they, of all people, believe in his innocence! Alessandro Piperno is widely acknowledged as one of today's most talented European novelists. His voice is singular and shocking at times, yet always possessed of tenderness and enormous generosity of heart. His vision is broad and encompassing, his psychological insights penetrating and undeniable. In this deeply felt family drama, Alessandro Piperno paints a broad canvas and fills it with psychologically complex characters whom readers will instantly recognize and never forget.

    Lorenzo, just a young boy when his mother leaves, recalls the incisive fragments of their life - when they would playfully wrestle each other, watch the sunrise, or test out his mother’s newest scientific creation. Now a young man, Lorenzo travels to Romania for his mother’s funeral and reflects on the strangeness of today’s Europe, which masks itself as a beacon of Western civilization while iniquity and exploitation run rampant. With elliptical, piercing prose, Bajani tells a story of abandonment and initiation, of sentimental education and shattered illusions, of unconditional love.

    Rome, in all her glory, has expanded her territories beyond the wildest dreams of her citizens, led by Caius Julius Caesar -- Pontifex Maximus, dictator perpetuo, invincible military leader and only fifty-six years old. He is a man in command of his destiny, who wields enormous power throughout the vast empire. However his god-given mission - to end the blood-splattered fratricidal wars, reconcile implacably hostile factions and preserve Roman civilization and world order - is teetering dangerously close to collapse... His power is draining away. None of his supporters can stop the inexorably evolving plot against him and prophecy will explode into truth on the Ides of March and the world will change forever.This is political thriller laced through with all the intrigue and action surrounding one of the most crucial turning points in the history of western civilization.

    In a secluded woodland castle an old General prepares to receive a rare visitor, a man who was once his closest friend but who he has not seen in forty-one years. Over the ensuing hours host and guest will fight a duel of words and silences, accusations and evasions. They will exhume the memory of their friendship and that of the General’s beautiful, long-dead wife. And they will return to the time the three of them last sat together following a hunt in the nearby forest--a hunt in which no game was taken but during which something was lost forever. Embers is a classic of modern European literature, a work whose poignant evocation of the past also seems like a prophetic glimpse into the moral abyss of the present

    Since childhood, Knecht has been consumed with mastering the Glass Bead Game, which requires a synthesis of aesthetics and philosophy, which he achieves in adulthood, becoming a Magister Ludi (Master of the Game).

    This novel parallels the myth of Hero and Leander, telling of two lovers in Belgrade, one from the turn of the 18th century, the other from early in the 20th, who reach out to each other across the gulf of time.

    Filled with slang and obscenities and written in raw, colloquial language, Journey to the End of the Night is a literary symphony of violence, cruelty and obscene nihilism. This book shocked most critics when it was first published in France in 1932, but quickly became a success with the reading public in Europe, and later in America where it was first published by New Directions in 1952. The story of the improbable yet convincingly described travels of the petit-bourgeois (and largely autobiographical) antihero, Bardamu, from the trenches of World War I, to the African jungle, to New York and Detroit, and finally to life as a failed doctor in Paris, takes the readers by the scruff and hurtles them toward the novel's inevitable, sad conclusion.

    She could neither read nor write, and she was the reviled victim in a public rape trial, rejected by her father, and later abandoned by her husband. Nevertheless, she was one of the first women in modern times to uphold through her work and deeds the right of women to pursue careers compatible with their talents and on an equal footing with men. This edition features a new introduction by the celebrated critic and writer Susan Sontag. Anna Banti, the pen name of Lucia Lopresti, was born in Florence in 1895. Trained as an art historian, she turned to novels, stories, and autobiographical prose in the 1930s. Artemisia, her second novel, published in 1947, is the most acclaimed of the sixteen works of fiction she published during her long life, and is considered a classic of twentieth century Italian literature. Her last, harrowingly confessional novel, A Piercing Cry (Un grido lacerante), appeared in 1981. Banti also wrote art criticism and monographs on painters (Lorenzo Lotto, Fra Angelico, Velázquez, Monet), literary criticism and film reviews, and translated novels by Thackery, Colette, Alain Fournier, and Virginia Woolf. She died in Ronchi di Massa (Tuscanny) in 1985.