With the emotionally rich voice of great fiction and the diamond-sharp analytical eye of a scientist, Annie Ernaux provides a powerful reflection on experience and the power of violent memory to endure through time, to determine the course of a life.

    Unlike the friends she makes at school, Paula strives to understand the specifics of what she's painting--replicating a wood's essence or a marble's wear requires method, technique, and talent, she finds, but also something else: craftsmanship. She resolutely chooses the painstaking demands of craft over the abstraction of high art.With the attention of a documentary filmmaker, de Kerangal follows Paula's apprenticeship, punctuated by brushstrokes, hard work, sleepless nights, sore muscles, and long, festive evenings. After completing her studies at the Institute, Paula continues to practice her art in Paris, in Moscow, then in Italy on the sets of great films, all as if rehearsing for a grand finale: at a job working on Lascaux IV, a facsimile reproduction of the world's most famous paleolithic cave art and the apotheosis of human cultural expression.An enchanted, atmospheric, and highly aesthetic coming-of-age novel, Painting Time is an intimate and unsparing exploration of craft, inspiration, and the contours of the contemporary art world. As she did in her acclaimed novels The Heart and The Cook, Maylis de Kerangal unravels a tightly wound professional world to reveal the beauty within.

    However, his life has not always been a bed of roses. When was just a 12-year-old boy, he saved his best friend from a grisly death at the hands of the outlaw gang that killed her parents. As if that wasn’t enough, his friend was sent away to an orphanage in Denver City and John vowed to one day find the murderers and bring them to justice. Years go by and he works out a plan to shed some blood and take down those who stood in the way of his friend’s happiness. What will John be willing to risk in order to get the revenge he’s been waiting for his whole life?Maggie McDermott is deeply traumatized by the events of that nightmarish night. Having lost all of her childhood memories—even those of her best friend, John, she can’t help but wonder whether she’ll find peace one day. That is until John shows up at her door many years after the haunting event that changed her life. He has become a successful bounty hunter and has a bold plan to recover her childhood memories. His plan involves Maggie joining him on a dangerous mission of vengeance, in order to capture the gang that destroyed her life. Will Maggie find the courage to follow this dangerous prescription to get her childhood memories back?Even though John and Maggie haven’t seen each other for many years, their wild thirst for revenge will take them on a sprawling adventure with gunfire, romance, and a longing for justice. Will John be able to protect the girl from the most infamous outlaw gang in the West? Or will they be forced to abandon all hope for a better life once and for all?

    I cross the Seine, I walk with men and women who are anonymous and yet who are my reflection. We make up a single heart, a single cell. We are alive...'In All Men Naturally Want to Know the author traces her blissful childhood in Algeria, a sun-soaked paradise, recalling long trips across the desert with her mother and sister and hazy summer afternoons spent on the beach with her friend Ali. But Nina's mother is French - moving to Algeria for love at a time when most Europeans were desperate to leave - and as civil war approaches, their sunny idyll gives way to increasingly hostile and violent outbreaks. When something unspeakable happens to her mother, the family flee to Paris.In Paris, Nina lives alone. She is eighteen years old. It's the 1980s. Four nights a week she walks across Paris to a legendary women-only nightclub, the Katmandou. She sits alone at the bar, afraid of her own desires, of her sudden and intoxicating freedom. There she meets the glamorous, deeply troubled Ely, her volatile friends Lizz and Laurence, and the beautiful Julia, with whom she falls desperately in love. And, most importantly, she starts to write.

    Translated from the French by Wyatt Alexander Mason. Pierre Michon is one of the foremost contemporary French writers. He has won many prizes, including the Prix de la Ville de Paris. In THE ORIGIN OF THE WORLD, a twenty-year-old takes his first teaching job in a sleepy French town. Lost in a succession of rainy days and sleepless nights, he falls under the spell of one of the town's residents, Yvonne. "Everything about her screamed desire, something that people say enough that it's almost meaningless, but it was a quality that she gave of generously to everyone, to herself, to nothing, when she was alone and had forgotten herself, setting something in motion while settling a fingertip to the counter, turning her head slightly, gold earrings brushing her cheek while she watched you or watched nothing at all; this desire was open, like a wound; and she knew it, wore it with valor, with passion. But what are words?"

    "Brains before bullets" - ancient and modern wisdom for "mechanics and motorcycle enthusiasts"Essential reading for fans of the show, this book takes readers deeper into the Sons of Anarchy Motorcycle Club, the Teller-Morrow family, and the ethics that surround their lives and activities.Provides fascinating moral insights into Sons of Anarchy, its key characters, plot lines and ideas Investigates compelling philosophical issues centering on loyalty, duty, the ethics of war, authority, religion and whether the ends justify the means Teaches complex philosophical ideas in a way that's accessible to the general interest reader in order to inspire them to further reading of the great philosophers Authors use their deep knowledge of the show to illuminate themes that are not always apparent even to die-hard fans

    Funny, moving and inspirational, it is just as delightful as Canfor-Dumas’ first novel, ‘The Buddha, Geoff and Me’. When we catch up with our hero Ed, he’s abandoned his Buddhist practice and is stuck in a rut – no career, no love life and no cash.Plunged unwittingly into a world of street crime and dodgy property deals, Ed finds himself dusting down his beads and reluctantly picking up his Nichiren Buddhist practice to guide him through a series of dramas, dilemmas and big decisions. Spiritual insights then emerge from the grit, grime and SNAFUs of Ed’s everyday life. By turns unsettling and uplifting, this is a book that will also get you thinking about complex issues of our time such as depression, racism, bereavement, suicide and youth crime.And it gives possibly the best ever explanation of the wisdom that comes from chanting Nam Myoho Renge Kyo: “Like sending a truffle hound to root around in the leaf-litter of my subconscious and dig up what’s bothering me.” The description by the publisher is spot on – this absolutely is a book “for everyone who's ever wondered whether enlightenment really is compatible with the daily commute.” Welcome back Ed, lovin' yer truffles…

    But he has found a way to break the cycle—Bilodo has taken to stealing people's mail, steaming open the envelopes, and reading the letters inside. And so it is he comes across Ségolène's letters. She is corresponding with Gaston, a master poet, and their letters are each composed of only three lines. They are writing each other haikus. The simplicity and elegance of their poems move Bilado and he begins to fall in love with her. But one day, out on his round, he witnesses a terrible and tragic accident. Just as Gaston is walking up to the post-box to mail his next haiku to Ségolène, he is hit by a car and dies on the side of the road. And so Bilodo makes an extraordinary decision—he will impersonate Gaston and continue to write to Ségolène under this guise. But how long can the deception continue for? Denis Thériault weaves a passionate and elegant tale, comic and tragic with a love story at its heart.

    The eight stories in this collection, his first to be published in English, represent some of his best writing and most imaginative storylines: from the love story between Balthazar, wealthy and successful author, and Odette, cashier at a supermarket, to the tale of a barefooted princess; from the moving story of a group of female prisoners in a Soviet gulag to the entertaining portrait of a perennially disgruntled perfectionist. Here are eight contemporary fables, populated by a cast of extravagant and affecting characters, about people in search of happiness. Behind each story lies a simple, if elusive, truth: happiness is often right in front of our eyes, though we may frequently be blind to it.

    But she was also a Jew, and in 1942 she was arrested and deported to Auschwitz: a month later she was dead at the age of thirty-nine. Two years earlier, living in a small village in central France—where she, her husband, and their two small daughters had fled in a vain attempt to elude the Nazis—she'd begun her novel, a luminous portrayal of a human drama in which she herself would become a victim. When she was arrested, she had completed two parts of the epic, the handwritten manuscripts of which were hidden in a suitcase that her daughters would take with them into hiding and eventually into freedom. Sixty-four years later, at long last, we can read Némirovsky's literary masterpiece The first part, "A Storm in June," opens in the chaos of the massive 1940 exodus from Paris on the eve of the Nazi invasion during which several families and individuals are thrown together under circumstances beyond their control. They share nothing but the harsh demands of survival—some trying to maintain lives of privilege, others struggling simply to preserve their lives—but soon, all together, they will be forced to face the awful exigencies of physical and emotional displacement, and the annihilation of the world they know. In the second part, "Dolce," we enter the increasingly complex life of a German-occupied provincial village. Coexisting uneasily with the soldiers billeted among them, the villagers—from aristocrats to shopkeepers to peasants—cope as best they can. Some choose resistance, others collaboration, and as their community is transformed by these acts, the lives of these these men and women reveal nothing less than the very essence of humanity.Suite Française is a singularly piercing evocation—at once subtle and severe, deeply compassionate, and fiercely ironic—of life and death in occupied France, and a brilliant, profoundly moving work of art.