had pencilled across the title page of this autobiographical novel. Although the manuscript survived, it has remained unpublished since its completion in the 1920s. Regarded by many as one of the major poets of the modernist period, H.D. created in Asphodel a remarkable and readable experimental prose text, which in its manipulation of technique and voice can stand with the works of Joyce, Woolf, and Stein; in its frank exploration of lesbian desire, pregnancy and motherhood, artistic independence for women, and female experience during wartime, H.D.'s novel stands alone.A sequel to the author's HERmione, Asphodel takes the reader into the bohemian drawing rooms of pre-World War I London and Paris, a milieu populated by such thinly disguised versions of Ezra Pound, Richard Aldington, May Sinclair, Brigit Patmore, and Margaret Cravens; on the other side of what H.D. calls "the chasm," the novel documents the war's devastating effect on the men and women who considered themselves guardians of beauty. Against this riven backdrop, Asphodel plays out the story of Hermione Gart, a young American newly arrived in Europe and testing for the first time the limits of her sexual and artistic identities. Following Hermione through the frustrations of a literary world dominated by men, the failures of an attempted lesbian relationship and a marriage riddled with infidelity, the birth of an illegitimate child, and, finally, happiness with a female companion, Asphodel describes with moving lyricism and striking candor the emergence of a young and gifted woman from her self-exile.Editor Robert Spoo's introduction carefully places Asphodel in the context of H.D.'s life and work. In an appendix featuring capsule biographies of the real figures behind the novel's fictional characters, Spoo provides keys to this roman à clef.

    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.

    He dreams of one day making a film—a searing portrait of his times—that the authorities would never allow. When the communist regime collapses, Pavel finds himself unprepared for the new world of supposedly unlimited freedom, and unable to make the film he has always wanted to make. His dilemma—that of a man choosing between the ideals and temptations of freedom—informs every sentence of this important novel.

    Two years before, an assignment to follow a strayed husband and his mistress appeared simple enough, but this routine job left George a transformed man.Suspenseful, moving, and hailed by critics as a detective story unlike any other, The Light of Day is a gripping tale of murder and redemption, as well as a bold exploration of love and self-discovery. This powerful novel signals yet another groundbreaking achievement from Graham Swift, the author of the Booker Prize-winning novel Last Orders.

    Returning to Ireland to reclaim a painting that is part of his patrimony, a thirty-eight-year-old man commits a ghastly and motiveless murder, which he confesses in a novel-length narrative.

    With an obsession for the Guinness Book of Records, a keenly inquisitive mind, and a kind of faith, John remains hopeful despite the unfavorable cards life deals him.This is one year in a boy's life. On the cusp of adolescence, from his changing voice and body, through to his parents’ difficult travails and the near collapse of his sanity, John is like a tuning fork sensitive to the vibrations within himself and the trouble that this creates for he and his family.Carry Me Down is a restrained, emotionally taut, and sometimes outrageously funny portrait whose drama drives toward, but narrowly averts, an unthinkable disaster.

    Howard Halliday, the editor of the Midnight Examiner and the unlikely protagonist in William Kotzwinkle's latest novel, becomes embroiled with several shady characters, including a bloodthirsty crime lord and a porn queen in danger, who lead him into a bizarre escapade that rivals only the freakish headlines in the Midnight Examiner.

    Before their journey ends, one of them will be hanged, one will vanish, and the others will face a murder trial. Out of the truths and lies that envelop these events, John Fowles has created a novel that is at once a tale of erotic obsession, an exploration of the conflict between reason and superstition, an astonishing act of literary legerdemain, and the story of the birth of a new faith.

    Perhaps the greatest novel by Gerald Murnane, Australia’s reply to Proust and Calvino, and a Nobel favorite for several years running, Inland shows that one can as easily be an exile in one’s own interior as out in the wide world, and as easily feel the loss of people one has only imagined as those who have shared our lives in the flesh.

    In this new edition, the original topics have been brought up to date, added to and elaborated upon: Abbreviations, for example, now includes an essential array of chat room acronyms; Fashion boasts a complete list of British Hairdressers of the Year; and Music features a comprehensive listing of every Top Ten single of the last 40 years.

    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.

    Nol, "the judge's son, ' is the person whose moral sentiments are being educated. But that education is acquired at the expense of an infinitely more valuable person, the young woman Nol loves, who has been exploited by men of weight and standing in their provincial community-all of them human, disgracefully human. Not tells the story from the time he was five years old, when, inspired by a rendition of one of Souza's marches in the garden where the brass band played, he danced with the conductor's daughter, taller and older than himself, before a bemused assemblage of adults. The web of incident and reflection in Nol's narration astonishes the reader with the texture of the lives it evokes, ending with Nol's small, crucial defection that precipitates tragedy. In The Garden Where the Brass Band Played, as with every real novel of the genre, it is the reader whose sentiments are educated, by the pain of it, and no doubt rather too late

    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.

    The two men discover that a quite different link already exists between them: it was Pye's strange, disturbed sister who once upon a time abducted Christopher and kept him in her room until Pye rescued the terrified child. In the apocalyptic atmosphere of the Blitz the relationship between the two men develops as each of them grapples with his own troubled emotional attachments, the one to his dead wife, the other to his unhappy sister. Inevitably matters come to a head when history shows signs of repeating itself. The subtle handling of relationships, the brilliance of the dialogue and description - including one of the best accounts ever written of London under the Blitz - established Caught as one of Henry Green's most powerful novels.

    The Gault family leads a life of privilege in early 1920s Ireland, but the threat of violence leads the parents of nine-year-old Lucy to decide to leave for England, her mother's home. Lucy cannot bear the thought of leaving Lahardane, their country house with its beautiful land and nearby beach, and a dog she has befriended. On the day before they are to leave, Lucy runs away, hoping to convince her parents to stay. Instead, she sets off a series of tragic misunderstandings that affect all of Lahardane's inhabitants for the rest of their lives.