Although known principally as a writer, he was closely associated with the tumultuous revolutionary period of his own country. Of all Gorky's novels, The Artamonov Business ('Decadence' in the USA edition) is the most impressive & dramatic. Here in concentrated form is the tragic failure of Russia's middle classes in the decades before the Revolution, seen in the small town microcosm of a family of textile manufacturers.

    Now, in old age, living out in the country, Moran is still fighting - with his family, his friends, even himself - in a poignant struggle to come to terms with the past.

    Beautifully rendered, this is a world and a time never before dealt with in fiction-a period when powerful colonizers took over the lands of Hottentot tribes, exposing aborigines for the first time to Western eyes and Western ways. Through the life stories of seven men-all involved with and defined in one way or another by Pieternella, the beautiful daughter of the first mixed marriage of the new colony-we gain an understanding of the vast historical forces at work.Teeming with characters, rich with lived experience, gripping in its unexpected turns, Islands is a story of greed, power, war, courage, and international intrigue, at once a meticulously researched portrait of the age, and a great adventure story.

    As the nameless writer confronts his fears, he goes on with his life in one of the most original and provocative works from a contemporary writer.

    Winner of the Egon Hostovský Prize as the best Czech book of the year, this epic novel powerfully captures the sense of dislocation that followed the Czechs’ newfound freedom in 1989. More than just the story of its young protagonist—who is part businessman, part gang member, part drifter—it is a novel that includes terrifying dream scenes, Czech and American Indian legends, a nightmarish Eastern European flea market, comic scenes about the literary world, and an oddly tender story of the love between the protagonist and his spiritual sister.

    Sembène Ousmane, in this vivid and moving novel, evinces all of the colour, passion and tragedy of those decisive years in the history of West Africa.'Ever since they left Thiès, the women had not stopped singing. As soon as one group allowed the refrain to die, another picked it up, and new verses were born at the hazard of chance or inspiration, one word leading to another and each finding, in its turn, its rhythm and its place. No one was very sure any longer where the song began, or if it had an ending. It rolled out over its own length, like the movement of a serpent. It was as long as a life.'

    The first of Roussel's two major prose works, Impressions of Africa is not, as the title may suggest, a conventional travel account, but an adventure story put together in a highly individual fashion and with an unusual time sequence, whereby the reader is even made to choose whether to begin with the first or the tenth chapter.A veritable literary melting pot, Roussel's groundbreaking text makes ample use of wordplay and the surrealist techniques of automatic writing and private allusion.

    If Helping Verbs of the Heart was an homage to his mother, then this is a memorial to his father. It is actually two works in one. Book 1, "Numbered Sentences from the Life of the Esterházy Family", comprises 371 paragraphs, some elusively succinct, others pages long, that amount to a gloriously kaleidoscopic romp through the centuries that lie behind this European dynasty. Not that the name Esterházy is ever uttered: the main protagonist of each episode is invariably identified as "my father", whether he is an anti-Habsburg Kuruc insurrectionist or a Habsburg-loyal Labanc, a hammer of the Ottomans, a dying old man, a prisoner of war, a lord charming enough to enchant Goethe himself, or a childless man, to mention but a few of "my fathers", all evoked through the language and literature proper to each persona. This strategy of anonymity allows Esterházy to extend his typically vast net of quotations to sources that originally have no family connotations whatsoever, thereby lending broader significance to the particulars of this one family, however grand, and, vice versa, appropriating the general (European) experience to the family's specific circumstances. The baroquely exuberant proliferation of anecdotal gleanings and fragments of real and fictional history, drawing on a gamut of written genres, from maxims to parables, from confessional autobiography to the account books and chronicles, is ultimately threaded together by an unobtrusive, profoundly witty and wise philosophical vein.Book 2, subtitled "Confessions of an Esterházy family", is ostensibly a more conventional family novel. Its very subtitle alludes to an earlier Hungarian masterpiece of the genre, Confessions of a Bourgeois, 1934-35 by Sándor Márai. It consists of a series of snapshots of key events in the lives of the author's great-grandfather, grandfather, father and the young Esterházy himself. These are built up, over two hundred numbered passages, into a more or less chronological portrait of a century-and-a-half of steady decline of the family's fortunes. After 1945 the Esterházys suffered an almost catastrophic repeat of the confiscations and curtailment of liberties that befell them during the short-lived Commune of 1919 one that not only stripped them of their former rank and privileges but threatened their very subsistence. Largely anecdotal and often absurd in tone, much of this is recounted with great gusto from the author's personal perspective, not least the stories of his own childhood, such as being accidentally dropped into the baptismal font; the trek to a godforsaken village in July 1950 when an official deportation order resulted in the family being dumped in one of two rooms in a peasant couple's house; schooldays and trips to matches with his football-mad father. For all the vicissitudes and uncertainties it describes, the tone of his writing throughout is one of blithely upbeat humour and harmony, without a hint of reproach, regret or complaint."A captivatingly rich novel in terms of both its form and its stance. Certainly it is the most striking work of the fifty-year-old author's career to date, and I would evenventure to call it an epitome of the Esterházy oeuvre. Given its formal richness, however, it is in a way also a compendium of two to three centuries of Hungarianprose." -Péter Dérczy, Élet és Irodalom"This new novel is no less constructed of fragments than his earlier novels, and those are no less whole, but this has the widest span of any Esterházy composition to date: it is a sweeping, baroque work." -József Tamás Reményi, Népszabadság

    Chariton's Callirhoe, subtitled Love Story in Syracuse, is a fast-paced historical romance of the first century CE and the oldest extant novel.

    These four volumes record in detail the life of Miriam Henderson. Through her experience - personal, spiritual, intellectual - Dorothy Richardson explores intensely what it means to be a woman, presenting feminine conciousness with a new voice, a new identity.

    A tragic legacy of the German occupation, illegitimate Tora is a social outcast. Worse, Tora also has to cope with the fear of her brutish stepfather and his sexual assaults. She consoles herself with lonely fantasies about her real father, with books, and with the friendship and support of a few village women. This proletarian feminist novel is about the victimization of women, but also about women's solidarity and power. Awarded a coveted Nordic prize, this is the first volume of a trilogy.

    Zapparoni, a brilliant businessman, has turned his advanced understanding of technology and his strategic command of the information and entertainment industries into a discrete form of global domination. But Zapparoni is worried that the scientists he depends on might sell his secrets. He needs a chief of security, and Richard, a veteran and war hero, is ready for the job. However, when he arrives at the beautiful country compound that is Zapparoni's headquarters, he finds himself subjected to an unexpected ordeal. Soon he is led to question his past, his character, and even his senses....

    Extinction, his last novel, takes the form of the autobiographical testimony of Franz-Josef Murau. The intellectual black sheep of a powerful Austrian land-owning family, Murau lives in self-exile in Rome. Obsessed and angry with his identity as an Austrian, he resolves never to return to the family estate of Wolfsegg. But when news comes of his parents' deaths, he finds himself master of Wolfsegg and must decide its fate.Written in Bernhard's seamless style, Extinction is the ultimate proof of his extraordinary literary genius.

    After being drawn into the Second World War to command retreating German forces despite his anti-Nazi feelings, Faehmel struggles to re-establish a normal life at the end of the war. He adheres to a rigorous schedule, including a daily game of billiards. When his routine is breached by an old friend from his past, now a power in German reconstruction, Faehmel is forced to confront both public and private memories.

    Three appalling crimes leave all of Paris aghast: the Marquise de Langruen is hacked to death, the Princess Sonia is robbed, and Lord Beltham is found dead, stuffed into a trunk. Inspector Juve knows that all the clues point to one suspect: the master of disguise, Fantômas. Juve cleverly pursues him in speeding trains, down dark alleys, through glittering Parisian salons, obsessed with bringing the demon mastermind to justice. As thrilling to read now as it was when first published in 1915, Fantômas is not a puzzle but an intoxicant” (The Village Voice).