There are the Ruttledges, who came from London in search of a different life on the edge of the village lake; John Quinn, who will stop at nothing to ensure a flow of women through his life; Jimmy Joe McKiernan, head of the local IRA as well as town auctioneer and undertaker; the gentle Jamesie and his wife, Mary, who have never left the lake and who know about everything that ever stirred or moved there; Patrick Ryan, the builder who never quite finishes what he starts; Bill Evans, the farmhand whose orphaned childhood was marked with state-sanctioned cruelties and whose adulthood is marked by the scars; and the wealthiest man in town, known as the Shah. A year in the lives of these and other characters unfolds through the richly observed rituals of work and play, of religious observance and annual festivals, and the details of the changing seasons, of the cycles of birth and death. With deceptive simplicity and eloquence, the author reveals the fundamental workings of human nature as it encounters the extraordinary trials and pleasures, terrors and beauty, of ordinary life.By the Lake is John McGahern’s most ambitious, generous, and superbly realized novel yet.(above copied from amazon.com)

    Set in the steamy monsoon heat of Calcutta, it brings together three suffering characters. There is Anne-Marie Stretter, beautiful wife of the French ambassador, seeking the love of younger men as if desperate for a carefree youth she never had. One of those men who falls for her is the former Vice-Consul of Lahore, an awkward, solitary man prone to irrational, violent rages. And there is a mysterious Cambodian beggar woman whose presence in India intrigues the Europeans, just as the woman herself seems drawn to them. Excerpted from a review at Amazon.com

    Leskov deftly layers social satire and subtle criticism atop myth and fable, resulting in a richly entertaining collection.

    He is hardly surprised and not in the least daunted. "The previous English pontiff was Hadrian the Fourth," he declares. "The present English pontiff is Hadrian the Seventh. It pleases Us; and so, by Our own impulse, We command."Hadrian is conceived in the image of his creator, Fr. Rolfe, whose aristocratic pretensions (he called himself Baron Corvo), religious obsession, and anarchic and self-aggrandizing sensibility have made him known as one of the great English eccentrics. Fr. Rolfe endured a lifetime of indignities and disappointments. However, in the hilarious and touching pages of this, his finest novel, he triumphs.

    A simple, apolitical man, he believes in the essential fairness of the South African government and its policies—until the sudden arrest and subsequent "suicide" of a black janitor from Du Toit's school. Haunted by new questions and desperate to believe that the man's death was a tragic accident, Du Toit undertakes an investigation into the terrible affair—a quest for the truth that will have devastating consequences for the teacher and his family, as it draws him into a lethal morass of lies, corruption, and murder.

    Mila at first finds the dramatic vistas overwhelming. Gradually, however, she adjusts to the unfamiliar and frightening landscape as well as to the harsh, wintry life of the ancient complex where she and Matias serve as caretakers. But each falls under the spell of a different local and a different way of life. The twin seductions of husband and wife lead to inevitable and dire consequences.

    Now they meet as old friends at a glittering New Year's Eve party to welcome in the 1980s. It is the dawn of the Thatcher era, and Britain is on the brink of great social and political upheaval. How will these three ambitious and confident middle-aged women survive the personal and professional challenges, and the changing values of the next decade? The Radiant Way brilliantly explores their loves, losses, hopes and fears, and the strength of their friendship.

    When word comes that her long-estranged daughter, Maud, has disappeared in Quebec City, she decides to return home, accepting the part of Winnie, the old crone in Samuel Beckett's Happy Days, at a local theatre. The visit unexpectedly turns into a devastating confrontation with her past and present illusions, as Flora finds she must come to terms with all the roles she has ever played in life, as actress, woman, mother, child, and lover.

    Papini, journalist, polemical critic, poet, and novelist, whose avant-garde polemics made him one of the most controversial Italian literary figures in the early and mid-20th century. He gained international fame with his religious novel Storio Di Christo and the English translation, The Life of Christ, was a huge bestseller.

    Astradeni leaves behind a close-knit community, a natural setting that stimulates her imagination, and a rich store of traditional values in which both religion and magic lore have their place. The author lets her tell her own story with winning charm and candour in a style that allows her sensitivity and the sparkle of her intelligence to shine through.A born storyteller, Astradeni supplies vivid details of the life and human relations on a remote Aegean island, as well as her efforts to adapt to the hard and alienating conditions of city life. For beneath the surface charm of a young girl's narrative the reader is in fact witnessing a painful process of social change, the violence done to the sense of values of individuals experiencing an abrupt transition from a traditional agrarian culture to a competitive, industrialised society of consumers.

    from Cuba. Filled with puns, wordplay, lists upon lists, and Sternean typography--such as the section entitled "Some Revelations," which consists of several blank pages--this novel has been praised as a more modern, sexier, funnier, Cuban Ulysses. Centering on the recollections of a man separated from both his country and his youth, Cabrera Infante creates an enchanting vision of life and the many colorful characters found in steamy Havana's pre-Castro cabaret society.

    His extravagant and hopeless undertakings, his brushes with the law and scrapes with death, and his enduring friendships and unlooked-for love affairs make him a Don Quixote for our day, driven from one place to another by a restless and irregular quest for the absolute. Álvaro Mutis's seven dazzling chronicles of the adventures and misadventures of Maqroll have won him numerous honors and a passionately devoted readership throughout the world. Here for the first time in English all these wonderful stories appear in a single volume in Edith Grossman's prize-winning translation.

    Intent upon his private dream he is unaware that he, his laboratory, and his accomplishments are pawns in a savage game of espionage and nuclear terror.

    When she begins using her gift of pyrokinesis to take the law into her own hands and punish violent criminals, her executions attract the attention of two very different groups: the Guardians, a secretive vigilante organization that tries to recruit her, and the arson squad of the Tokyo Metropolitan Police Department. Soon the police are on Junko's trail, most notably Detective Chikako Ishizu, a rationalist who must come to terms with the existence of paranormal forces. As Junko's crusade against evil escalates and she finds it harder to control her power, we are taken on a breathtaking and brutal journey through the urban landscape of Tokyo on a journey that challenges us, along with Chikako, to think about what's right and what's wrong in the name of justice.Atmospheric, suspenseful, provocative, and even romantic, Crossfire is a tour de force sure to secure Miyuki Miyabe's place in the pantheon of today's top mystery writers.

    T. A. Hoffmann (1776-1822) who first explored many of the themes and techniques which were later used by writers from Dickens to Dostoyevsky, Poe to Kafka, Baudelaire to Marquez. His career reached a glorious climax in The Tomcat Murr, perhaps the strangest novel of the nineteenth century.. "Hoffmann was a follower of Cervantes and Sterne, a pioneering 'magic realist', fascinated by Gothic horror, extreme mental states and supernatural events occurring within sharply (and sometimes satirically) rendered social settings. A talented composer and painter, he portrayed himself in the guise of Johannes Kreisler - the hypochondriac, antisocial and moody but brilliant musician. In this astonishing book, a vain and very bourgeois tomcat sets out to write his memoirs, using a biography of Kreisler as a blotting pad. By a printer's error, the two lives get spliced together into a bizarre double narrative. A supreme example of literary bravado, The Tomcat Murr is also shot through with the warmth, humanity and almost uncanny ability to captivate his readers which make Hoffmann the greatest of German story-tellers.