The school is run by a peculiar set of rules by which every minute is regimented and controlled. Soon, they suspect they are guinea pigs in a bizarre social experiment and that their only hope of escape is to break through a dangerous threshold of time and space. Peter Høeg's "brilliant" and dystopian Borderliners is a "uniquely philosophical thriller" (Boston Sunday Globe) and a haunting story of childhood travail and hope.

    A despairing author abandons his wife, but in the course of a long night's wandering, he learns love's true value and returns to her, only to find her a different woman than the one he left. A landowner, seeking to prove a principle, inadvertently exposes the ferocity of mother love. A wealthy young traveler melts the hauteur of a lovely woman by masquerading as her aged and loyal servant.Shimmering and haunting, Dinesen's Winter's Tales transport us, through their author's deft guidance of our desire to imagine, to the mysterious place where all stories are born.

    This tragedy is the springboard for a complex novel posing essential questions about human experience: What does sorrow do to a person? How can one live with the pain of unbearable loss? How far can a man be driven by the grief and despair surrounding the death of a child? A dark and harrowing story, drawing on elements from dreams, fairy tales, and horror stories, the better to explore the mysterious depths of sorrow and love, Through the Night is Stig Saterbakken at his best.

    Like all his work, it is valuable for far more than just its historical implications. In seven wonderfully integrated parts, different aspects of human existence are magnified and reduced, reordered and emphasized, newly examined, analyzed and experienced.

    In the process of compacting, he has acquired an education so unwitting he can't quite tell which of his thoughts are his own and which come from his books. He has rescued many from jaws of hydraulic press and now his house is filled to the rooftops. Destroyer of the written word, he is also its perpetrator.But when a new automatic press makes his job redundant there's only one thing he can do - go down with his ship.This is an eccentric romp celebrating the indestructability- against censorship, political opression etc - of the written word.

    Investigating the strange ways in which love, in spite of everything - time, war, betrayal - can last, Zweig tells the story of Ludwig, an ambitious young man from a modest background who falls in love with the wife of his rich employer. His love is returned, and the couple vow to live together, but then Ludwig is dispatched on business to Mexico, and while he is there the First World War breaks out. With travel and even communication across the Atlantic now shut down, Ludwig makes a new life in the New World. Years later, however, he returns to Germany to find his beloved a widow and their mutual attraction as strong as ever. But is it possible for love to survive precisely as the impossible?

    Written in a taut and beautifully naturalistic tone, it remains Stig Dagerman’s most widely read novel and is one of the crowning works of his short but celebrated career.

    When he receives an astronomical invoice from a random national bureaucratic agency, everything will tumble into madness as he calls the hotline night and day to find out why he is the recipient of the largest bill in the entire country. What is the price of a cherished memory? How much would you pay for a beautiful summer day? How will our carefree idealist, who is content with so little and has no chance of paying it back, find a way out of this mess? All these questions pull you through The Invoice and prove once again that Jonas Karlsson is simply a master of entertaining, intelligent, and life-affirming work.

    Told through the journals of this schoolteacher turned apiarist, The Death of a Beekeeper, is his gentle, courageous, and sometimes comic meditation on living with pain. Westin has refused to surrender the time left him to the impersonation of a hospital, preferring to take his fate upon himself, to continue solitary, reflective life in the Swedish countryside. "I took little walks and noticed that in the last months the pain had actually colored the landscape in a peculiar way. Here and there is a tree where it really hurt, here and there is a fence against whose post I struck my hand in passing." His inner landscape is also re-forming: "This constant concern with an indefinite dangerous secret in one’s own body, this feeling that some dramatic change is taking place, without one’s being able to have any clarity about what really is... reminds me of prepuberty. I even recognize this gentle feeling of shame again." The relentlessly intimate burning in his gut provides a point of psychic detachment, rendering his survival "a unique art form whose level of difficulty is so high that no one exists who can practice it.” Yet he insists, "We begin again. We never give up."

    Schemes, crimes, infidelities, hopes of escape, and above all trust and its constant betrayal are Krasznahorkai’s meat. “At the center of Satantango,” George Szirtes has said, “is the eponymous drunken dance, referred to here sometimes as a tango and sometimes as a csardas. It takes place at the local inn where everyone is drunk. . . . Their world is rough and ready, lost somewhere between the comic and the tragic, in one small insignificant corner of the cosmos. Theirs is the dance of death.” “You know,” Mrs. Schmidt, a pivotal character, tipsily confides, “dance is my one weakness.”

    Lonely and introspective, Doctor Glas has long felt an instinctive hostility toward the odious local minister. So when the minister’s beautiful wife complains of her husband’s oppressive sexual attentions, Doctor Glas finds himself contemplating murder. A masterpiece of enduring power, Doctor Glas confronts a chilling moral quandary with gripping intensity.

    Her three sons have been quietly immersed in their work: one an undertaker, one a window-dresser, and the eldest running the family farm, but now they are forced to reunite for the first time in many years. Their personalities are as disparate as their careers, and tensions mount from the second they meet, climaxing over Christmas dinner when the matter of inheritance prompts the revelation of disturbing family secrets. Anne B. Ragde has created an engrossing dark comedy brought vividly to life through extraordinary characters. While perfectly in tune with their professions the Neshov sons as a family are little short of dysfunctional; nevertheless, the real theme of the novel is a sense of belonging. The farm itself defines this, with its power to draw people back to their roots, whether they like it or not.

    The story unfolds in sweltering wood saunas, amidst chain thrashings and gang warfare, learning to play the guitar in the garage, over a traditional wedding meal, on the way to China, during drinking competitions, while learning secret languages, playing ice hockey surrounded by snow drifts, outsmarting mice, discovering girls, staging a first rock concert, peeing in the snow, skiing under a sparkling midnight sky. In the manner of David Mitchell’s Black Swan Green, Mikael Niemi tells a story of a rural Sweden at once foreign and familiar, as a magical childhood slowly fades with the seasons into adult reality.

    Shocked and disbelieving, the siblings try to come to terms with their parents’ decision as it echoes through the homes they have built for themselves and forces them to reconstruct the shared narrative of their childhood and family history. A bittersweet novel of regret, relationships and rare psychological insights, A Modern Family encourages us to look at the people closest to us a little more carefully and ultimately reveals that it’s never too late for change....

    The king's house had many other doors, but this was the door for petitions. Since the king spent all his time sitting at the door for favors (favors being offered to the king, you understand), whenever he heard someone knocking at the door for petitions, he would pretend not to hear . . ." Why the petitioner required a boat, where he was bound for, and who volunteered to crew for him, the reader will discover in this delightful fable, a philosophic love story worthy of Swift or Voltaire.