Andor Weér, a thirty-six-year-old writer, lives in a cramped apartment with his shut-in mother, Rebeka, who was once among the most celebrated stage actresses in Budapest. Unable to withstand her maniacal tyranny but afraid to leave her alone, their bitter interdependence spirals into a Sartrian hell of hatred, lies, and appeasement. Then Andor meets the beautiful and nurturing Eszter, a woman who seems to have no past, and they fall wildly in love at first sight. With a fulfilling life seemingly within reach for the first time, Andor decides that he is ready to bring Eszter home to meet Mother. Though Bartis’s characters are unrepentantly neurotic and dressed in the blackest humor, his empathy for them is profound. A political farce of the highest ironic order, concluding that "freedom is a condition unsuitable for humans," Tranquility is ultimately, at its splanchnic core, a complex psychodrama turned inside out, revealing with visceral splendor the grotesque notion that there’s nothing funnier than unhappiness.

    It is a formidable world and the people who live there are constantly subjected to extremes—both of geography and of culture.The Wandering Falcon begins with a young couple, refugees from their tribe, who have traveled to the middle of nowhere to escape the cruel punishments meted upon those who transgress the boundaries of marriage and family. Their son, Tor Baz, descended from both chiefs and outlaws, becomes “The Wandering Falcon,” a character who travels throughout the tribes, over the mountains and the plains, in the towns and tents that comprise the homes of the tribal people. The media today speak about this unimaginably remote region, a geopolitical hotbed of conspiracies, drone attacks, and conflict—now, told in the rich, dramatic tones of a master storyteller, this stunning, honor-bound culture is revealed from the inside.Jamil Ahmad has written an unforgettable portrait of a world of custom and compassion, of love and cruelty, of hardship and survival, a place fragile, unknown, and unforgiving.

    She insists they are middle class, but Orestes is not convinced. And after another fraudulent election and the disappearance of his younger brothers Castor and Pollux, he heads off on an adventure.Orestes meets a procession of pilgrims, a stoner uncle called Pink Floyd and a beguiling politician who teaches him how to lie, and he learns some valuable lessons about families, truth and bovine artificial insemination.With Quesadillas, Juan Pablo Villalobos serves up a wild banquet. Anything goes in this madcap Mexican satire about politics, big families, and what it means to be middle class.

    HER ONLY CRIME WAS TO BE AN INDEPENDENT WOMAN When Mata Hari arrived in Paris she was penniless. Within months she was the most celebrated woman in the city. As a dancer, she shocked and delighted audiences; as a courtesan, she bewitched the era’s richest and most powerful men. But as paranoia consumed a country at war, Mata Hari’s lifestyle brought her under suspicion. In 1917, she was arrested in her hotel room on the Champs Elysees, and accused of espionage. Told in Mata Hari’s voice through her final letter, The Spy is the unforgettable story of a woman who dared to defy convention and who paid the ultimate price.

    At the center of the vortex stands Yalo, a young man drifting between worlds like a stray dog on the streets of Beirut during the Lebanese civil war. Living with his mother who "lost her face in the mirror," he falls in with a dangerous circle whose violent escapades he treats as a game. The game becomes a horrifying reality, however, when Yalo is accused of rape and armed robbery, and is imprisoned. Tortured and interrogated at length, he is forced to confess to crimes of which he has little or no recollection. As he writes, and rewrites his testimony, he begins to grasp his family's past, and the true Yalo begins to emerge. Ha'aretz calls Yalo "a heartbreaking book . . . hypnotic in beauty."

    Their erotic and ideological vicissitudes are driven by a reality they cannot control, like that of Homer’s characters. Invisible gods intervene in their lives to intertwine their physical attraction and intellectual admiration, courage and fear, secrets and unexpected complicity. They build their difficult and beautiful love in one of the most turbulent and romantic scenarios of Latin American history. They swim with the current; they enjoy it and enlarge it. But they are also dragged along by eddies that leave them breathless and turn their world upside down. Aguinis’ titles tend to be paradoxical. However, for this novel, he has preferred to place emphasis on the multiple meanings of the word passion. Passion refers to love, and also to the strength of ideals, to suffering, pleasure, salvation and the yearning for freedom. The emotional combat of the protagonists runs in parallel with the dizzying brilliance of concrete situations. This is what allows the suspense to grab the reader from the first page to the very end. A free-flowing, sweeping, and thrilling rhythm dominates the text, like that of musical passions. It should come as no surprise that this novel—where the voices of the female protagonist, her lover, and the omniscient writer alternate—has been written following Bach’s counterpoint model. From a distance, ineffable, we still hear the resounding epic of another war where the liberators sang to a different Carmela—also a torch, also a passion. Aguinis portrays his creations skillfully and renders them indelible. His skill in handling emotions does leaves no line void of poetry or consequences. And his extremely accurate style is a grounding that turns this work—situated in exceptional times—into one of the best love stories to mark out the course of literature.

    They called the place New Thule. But as the years wear on, communication between New Thule and the people back home has become less and less frequent, until finally it stops altogether. They fear that the people of New Thule have gone native--or, worse yet, gone pagan. A cardinal orders an evangelical mission in order to see what has become of the people, and to revive their faith. The ship, built especially for this journey, is called The Short Serpent, and at its helm is an abbot named Montanus. Across an ocean of hard and motionless ice under an indifferent sky, The Short Serpent carries its crew toward a horror that no one could conceive. The children of New Thule have taken on a truly primitive life, wandering on the ice in the search of seal meat, of mounds of peat, and of other warm bodies with which to copulate. Slowly, the crew of The Short Serpent begin to succumb to the filth and depraved excesses of New Thule. Told in an elegant, compulsive, and increasingly unhinged style, Bernard du Boucheron's The Voyage of the Short Serpent is a masterpiece about mutable human morality in inhuman conditions--a story about truth, obsession, and the myth of utopia.

    They have only one desire: to make a fortune by exploiting the mineral wealths of the country. They work during the day in mining concession and, as soon as night falls, they go out to get drunk, dance, eat and abandon themselves in Tram 83, the only night-club of the city, the den of all the outlaws: ex children-soldiers, prostitutes, blank students, unmarried mothers, sorcerers' apprentices …Lucien, a professional writer, fleeing the exactions and the censorship, finds refuge in the city thanks to Requiem, a youth friend. Requiem lives mainly on theft and on swindle while Lucien only thinks of writing and living honestly. Around them gravitate gangsters and young girls, retired or runaway men, profit-seeking tourists and federal agents of a non-existent State.Tram 83 plunges the reader into the atmosphere of a gold rush as cynical as, sometimes, comic and colorfully exotic. It's an observation of human relationships in a world that has become a global village. It could be described as an African-rap or rhapsody novel or puzzle-novel hammered by rhythms of jazz.

    It all started with Askild 'the Crackpot', chased by bloodhounds on a German plain after escaping from a Nazi concentration camp: he is a painter, a murderer and a thief.His son, Niels 'Jug Ears' Junior, is born in an outhouse, wins respect by kicking other boys in the balls, and uses dynamite to blow up the privy when his father sells his cherished coin collection.And his son, Asger 'the Liar', collects stories about his shipwrecked family which are always exciting though not entirely true. He is haunted by the time he spent hidden in the space under the stairs with his fat aunt, aka 'the Little Bitch'. He has a confession to make and a buried treasure to find. Unable to banish Doghead, a horror from his childhood, to the shadow realm, he reveals the very bad deeds children can do - to push his family story forward, past a point of no return.Doghead is a richly imaginative farcical tragedy; a witty saga of three generations of wild Eriksson men. It touches on chilling themes - concentration camps, child abuse, alcoholism, rape - yet warmly celebrates the stories that hold families together.

    It is 1984 and they live in Skopje, which will one day be the capital of Macedonia but is currently a part of Yugoslavia. A Spare Life tells the story of their childhood, from their only friend Roza to their neighbor Bogdan, so poor that he one day must eat his pet rabbit. Treated as freaks and outcasts—even by their own family—the twins just want to be normal girls. But after an incident that almost destroys their bond as sisters, they fly to London, determined to be surgically separated. Will this be their liberation, or only more tightly ensnare them?At once extraordinary and quotidian, A Spare Life is a chronicle of two girls who are among the first generation to come of age under democracy in Eastern Europe. Written in touching prose by an author who is also a master poet, it is a saga about families, sisterhood, immigration, and the occult influences that shape a life. Funny, poignant, dark, and sharply observed, Zlata and Srebra reveal an existence where even the simplest of actions is unlike any we’ve ever experienced.

    Set in Israel between the Six Day War and the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin, 'If You Awaken Love' is an intensely moving story of a stormy and spiritual young girl and her love-hate relationships with her childhood sweetheart, with her father, and with God.

    Set in Norway and Iceland at the beginning of the eleventh century, Gunnar's Daughter is the story of the beautiful, spoiled Vigdis Gunnarsdatter, who is raped by the man she had wanted to love. A woman of courage and intelligence, Vigdis is toughened by adversity. Alone she raises the child conceived in violence, repeatedly defending her autonomy in a world governed by men. Alone she rebuilds her life and restores her family's honor--until an unremitting social code propels her to take the action that again destroys her happiness.First published in 1909, Gunnar's Daughter was in part a response to the rise of nationalism and Norway's search for a national identity in its Viking past. But unlike most of the Viking-inspired art of its period, Gunnar's Daughter is not a historical romance. It is a skillful conversation between two historical moments about questions as troublesome in Undset's own time--and in ours--as they were in the Saga Age: rape and revenge, civil and domestic violence, troubled marriages, and children made victims of their parents' problems.

    But he soon finds himself mysteriously detained at a highway inn in the strange and varied company of thieves, brigands, cabbalists, noblemen, coquettes and gypsies, whose stories he records over sixty-six days. The resulting manuscript is discovered some forty years later in a sealed casket, from which tales of characters transformed through disguise, magic and illusion, of honour and cowardice, of hauntings and seductions, leap forth to create a vibrant polyphony of human voices. Jan Potocki (1761-1812) used a range of literary styles - gothic, picaresque, adventure, pastoral, erotica - in his novel of stories-within-stories, which, like the Decameron and Tales from the Thousand and One Nights, provides entertainment on an epic scale.

    Ludo’s quiet existence changes the day he meets Lila, a girl from the aristocratic Polish family who own the estate next door. In a single glance, Ludo instantly falls in love forever; Lila, on the other hand, remains elusive. Thus begins Ludo’s adventure of longing, passion, and steadfast love for Lila, who begins to reciprocate his feelings just as Europe descends into war. After Germany invades Poland, Lila and her family disappear, and Ludo’s journey to save her from the Nazis becomes a journey to save his loved ones, his country, and ultimately himself.Filled with unforgettable characters—an indomitable chef who believes Michelin stars are more enduring than military conquests; a Jewish brothel Madam who reinvents everything about herself during the war; a piano virtuoso turned RAF pilot—The Kites is Romain Gary’s poetic call for resistance in whatever form it takes.

    Set in the Baltic provinces in the aftermath of World War I, Coup de Grace tells the story of an intimacy that grows between three young people hemmed in by civil war: Erick, a Prussian fighting with the White Russians against the Bolsheviks; Conrad, his best friend from childhood; and Sophie, whose unrequited love for Erik becomes an unbearable burden.