Wallander's First Case (Kindle Single)


Henning Mankell - 1999
    Suspicious about the circumstances surrounding the apparently open and shut case of suicide, Wallander starts an off-the-books investigation - only to find that following his instincts is a very dangerous thing to do. Discover the case that began Kurt Wallander's career - first published in The Pyramid, a collection of short stories featuring Wallander.OUT NOW: An Event in Autumn - a new, never before published Wallander novella.

Poems of the Night


Jorge Luis Borges - 2010
    Poems of the Night is a moving collection of the great literary visionary's poetic meditations on nighttime, darkness, and the crepuscular world of visions and dreams, themes that speak implicitly to the blindness that overtook Borges late in life-and yet the poems here are drawn from the full span of Borges's career. Featuring such poems as "History of the Night" and "In Praise of Darkness" and more than fifty others in luminous translations by an array of distinguished translators-among them W.S. Merwin, Christopher Maurer, Alan Trueblood, and Alastair Reid-this volume brings to light many poems that have never appeared in English, presenting them en face with their Spanish originals. For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

Tokyo Ueno Station


Miri Yū - 2014
    It is here that Kazu’s life in Tokyo began, as a labourer in the run up to the 1964 Olympics, and later where he ended his days, living in the park’s vast homeless ‘villages’, traumatised by the destruction of the 2011 tsunami and enraged by the announcement of the 2020 Olympics.Akutagawa-award-winning author Yū Miri uses her outsider’s perspective as a Zainichi (Korean-Japanese) writer to craft a novel of utmost importance to this moment, a powerful rebuke to the Imperial system and a sensitive, deeply felt depiction of the lives of Japan’s most vulnerable people.

My Father Baliah


Y.B. Satyanarayana - 2011
    This triggers his migration from Vangapally, his ancestral village in the Karimnagar District of Telangana - the single most important event that would free his family and future generations from caste oppression. Years later, it saves his son Baliah from the fate reserved for most Dalits: a life of humiliation and bonded labour. A book written with the desire to make known the inhumanity of untouchability and the acquiescence and internalization of this condition by the Dalits themselves, Y.B. Satyanarayana chronicles the relentless struggle of three generations of his family in this biography of his father. A narrative that derives its strength from the simplicitywith which it is told, My Father Baliah is a story of great hardship and greater resilience.

There's No Such Thing as an Easy Job


Kikuko Tsumura - 2015
    But observing someone for hours on end can be so inconvenient and tiresome. How will she stay awake? When can she take delivery of her favourite brand of tea? And, perhaps more importantly – how did she find herself in this situation in the first place?As she moves from job to job, writing bus adverts for shops that mysteriously disappear, and composing advice for rice cracker wrappers that generate thousands of devoted followers, it becomes increasingly apparent that she's not searching for the easiest job at all, but something altogether more meaningful...

Winter in Sokcho


Elisa Shua Dusapin - 2016
    The cold slows everything down. Bodies are red and raw, the fish turn venomous, beyond the beach guns point out from the North’s watchtowers. A young French Korean woman works as a receptionist in a tired guesthouse. One evening, an unexpected guest arrives: a French cartoonist determined to find inspiration in this desolate landscape.The two form an uneasy relationship. When she agrees to accompany him on trips to discover an ‘authentic’ Korea, they visit snowy mountaintops and dramatic waterfalls, and cross into North Korea. But he takes no interest in the Sokcho she knows – the gaudy neon lights, the scars of war, the fish market where her mother works. As she’s pulled into his vision and taken in by his drawings, she strikes upon a way to finally be seen.An exquisitely-crafted debut, which won the Prix Robert Walser, Winter in Sokcho is a novel about shared identities and divided selves, vision and blindness, intimacy and alienation. Elisa Shua Duspain’s voice is distinctive and unmistakable.

The Employees


Olga Ravn - 2018
    Millions of kilometres from Earth.The crew of the Six-Thousand ship consists of those who were born, and those who were created. Those who will die, and those who will not. When the ship takes on a number of strange objects from the planet New Discovery, the crew is perplexed to find itself becoming deeply attached to them, and human and humanoid employees alike find themselves longing for the same things: warmth and intimacy. Loved ones who have passed. Our shared, far-away Earth, which now only persists in memory.Gradually, the crew members come to see themselves in a new light, and each employee is compelled to ask themselves whether their work can carry on as before – and what it means to be truly alive.Structured as a series of witness statements compiled by a workplace commission, Ravn’s crackling prose is as chilling as it is moving, as exhilarating as it is foreboding. Wracked by all kinds of longing, The Employees probes into what it means to be human, emotionally and ontologically, while simultaneously delivering an overdue critique of a life governed by work and the logic of productivity.

Africa Rising: How 900 Million African Consumers Offer More Than You Think


Vijay Mahajan - 2008
    In this book legendary global business consultant Vijay Mahajan reveals this remarkable marketplace in all its richness and complexity, and helps companies understand the massive opportunity it presents.

Moonstone: The Boy Who Never Was


Sjón - 2013
    But it is also Sjón's most realistic, accessible, and heartfelt work yet. It is the story of a young man on the fringes of a society that is itself at the fringes of the world--at what seems like history's most tumultuous, perhaps ultimate moment.Máni Steinn is queer in a society in which the idea of homosexuality is beyond the furthest extreme. His city, Reykjavik in 1918, is homogeneous and isolated and seems entirely defenseless against the Spanish flu, which has already torn through Europe, Asia, and North America and is now lapping up on Iceland's shores. And if the flu doesn't do it, there's always the threat that war will spread all the way north. And yet the outside world has also brought Icelanders cinema! And there's nothing like a dark, silent room with a film from Europe flickering on the screen to help you escape from the overwhelming threats--and adventures--of the night, to transport you, to make you feel like everything is going to be all right. For Máni Steinn, the question is whether, at Reykjavik's darkest hour, he should retreat all the way into this imaginary world, or if he should engage with the society that has so soundly rejected him.

Maya Cosmogenesis 2012: The True Meaning of the Maya Calendar End-Date


John Major Jenkins - 1998
    The Maya discovered that the periodic alignment of the Sun with the center of the Milky Way galaxy is the formative influence on human evolution. These alignments also define a series of World Ages. The fourth age ends on December 21, 2012, when an epoch chapter in human history will come to an end. Maya Cosmogenesis 2012 reveals the Maya's insight into the cyclic nature of time, and prepares us for our own cosmogenesis--the birth of a new world.

Prodigal Genius: The Life of Nikola Tesla


John J. O'Neill - 1943
    -from Chapter One First published in 1944 and long a favorite of Tesla fans, this is a definitive biography of the man without whom modern civilization would not exist. Nikola Tesla, pioneer of electrical engineering, was a close friend of Pulitzer Prize-winning author O'Neill, and here, O'Neill captures the man as a scientist and as a public figure, exploring: . how Tesla's father inspired his life in engineering . why Tesla clung to his theories of electricity in the face of opposition . how the shy but newly popular Tesla navigated the social life of New York in the gay 1890s . Tesla's friendship with Mark Twain . the story of Tesla's lost Nobel Prize . Tesla's dabblings in the paranormal . and much more. JOHN JOSEPH O'NEILL (b. 1889) also wrote Engineering the New Age and You and the Universe: What Science Reveals.

The White Book


Han Kang - 2016
    THE WHITE BOOK becomes a meditation on the color white, as well as a fictional journey inspired by an older sister who died in her mother's arms, a few hours old. The narrator grapples with the tragedy that has haunted her family, an event she colors in stark white--breast milk, swaddling bands, the baby's rice cake-colored skin--and, from here, visits all that glows in her memory: from a white dog to sugar cubes.As the writer reckons with the enormity of her sister's death, Han Kang's trademark frank and chilling prose is softened by retrospection, introspection, and a deep sense of resilience and love. THE WHITE BOOK--ultimately a letter from Kang to her sister--offers powerful philosophy and personal psychology on the tenacity and fragility of the human spirit, and our attempts to graft new life from the ashes of destruction.

Father Knows Less Or: "Can I Cook My Sister?": One Dad's Quest to Answer His Son's Most Baffling Questions


Wendell Jamieson - 2007
    He spoke to movie directors and ship captains, brain surgeons and stabbing victims, lottery winners and museum curators, politicians, judges, compulsive shoppers, mothers-in-law, magicians, Yoko Ono and a dominatrix, until what began as a lark quickly grew into something larger. Blending a charming father-son journey with the surprising, sometimes hilarious questions and answers it spawned, Father Knows Less offers a heartwarming exploration of the childlike curiosity that lives within us all.

Texas Wildflower


Susan Wiggs - 1987
    Now, she finally has her chance --- by bringing sexy outlaw Justin McCord to her employer, a powerful judge who wants him to marry the daughter he allegedly compromised. But Justin has other ideas. The secret spy has a mission to complete, one that holds the fate of a free Texas in the balance. He knows what will happen once they reach Houston: he'll be forced into a sham of a marriage that will allow the corrupt judge to destroy the dream of Texas independence he's fought for, unless ... he's already married. In one bold moment, the tables turn, and Shiloh finds herself the captive of a new husband she cannot trust or completely resist. What begins as a desperate ruse soon leaves them both vulnerble to a passion as wild and unforgiving as the land they both love, even as they are pursued by those who would stop at nothing to destroy everything they hold dear ...

The Accusation: Forbidden Stories from Inside North Korea


Bandi - 2014
    Set during the period of Kim Il-sung and Kim Jong-il’s leadership, the seven stories that make up The Accusation give voice to people living under this most bizarre and horrifying of dictatorships. The characters of these compelling stories come from a wide variety of backgrounds, from a young mother living among the elite in Pyongyang whose son misbehaves during a political rally, to a former Communist war hero who is deeply disillusioned with the intrusion of the Party into everything he holds dear, to a husband and father who is denied a travel permit and sneaks onto a train in order to visit his critically ill mother. Written with deep emotion and writing talent, The Accusation is a vivid depiction of life in a closed-off one-party state, and also a hopeful testament to the humanity and rich internal life that persists even in such inhumane conditions.