Escaping with her family as soon as possible after the collapse of the Berlin Wall, she lived in Britain, New Zealand, and Argentina, and several other places. But when Bulgaria was formally inducted to the European Union she decided it was time to return to the home she had spent most of her life trying to escape. What she found was a country languishing under the strain of transition. This two-part memoir of Kapka's childhood and return explains life on the other side of the Iron Curtain.

    Luft.

    This classic work of post-war fiction was made into a magnificent BBC television series starring Emma Thompson and Kenneth Branagh.

    Anya is preoccupied with what she feels is a relationship on the verge; unequal, precarious. Luke, reserved, stoic, gives away nothing. As the sun sets one evening, he proposes, and they return to London engaged.But planning a wedding does little to settle Anya’s unease. As a child, she escaped from Sarajevo, and the idea of security is as alien now as it was then. When social convention forces Anya to return, she begins to change. The past she sought to contain for as long as she can remember resurfaces, and the hot summer builds to a startling climax.Lean, sly and unsettling, Asylum Road is about the many borders governing our lives: between men and women, assimilation and otherness, nations, families, order and chaos.What happens, and who do we become, when they break down?

    A magnificent blend of travel journal, cultural commentary, and historical insight, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon probes the troubled history of the Balkans, and the uneasy relationships amongst its ethnic groups. The landscape and the people of Yugoslavia are brilliantly observed as West untangles the tensions that rule the country's history as well as its daily life.

    From the Reformation through the Napoleonic and Cold Wars to European Union, a superb history of Austria's central role in uniting Western civilization is covered. 24 pages of photographs and maps are included. "Connoisseurs of Austria and its delightful and infuriating inhabitants will agree that Mr. Brook-Shepherd has got it just about right.'—The Wall Street Journal "Engrossing, elegantly written history.'—Publishers Weekly

    . . presented with sympathy and frequently with humor . . . [of] a disparate people who were never united except by their resentment of a foreign conqueror." - Atlantic MonthlyIn The Impossible Country, Brian Hall relates his encounters with Serbs, Croats, and Muslims-- "real people, likeable people" who are now overcome with suspicion and anxiety about one another. Hall takes the standard explanations, the pundits' predictions, and the evening news footage and inverts our perceptions of the country, its politics, its history, and its seemingly insoluble animosities.

    Don't wait. Climb aboard the rollercoaster today. Read The Last Window-Giraffe as an elaborate, erudite, gut-wrenching belly-laugh at everything that went wrong and all the people who failed to fix it.' Lawrence Norfolk, author of ‘In the Shape of a Boar’This book is about the madness of everyday life under a dictatorship. It shifts in theme and time, testing the borderlines of prose and poetry, fiction and non-fiction, history and autobiography - all in the unassuming guise of a child’s ABC. Filled with his own striking photographs, Péter Zilahy gives fascinating insight into whole other universe behind the Iron Curtain. The Last Window-Giraffe is one of the most unusual, beguiling books you will ever read. 'Wonderful!' Victor Pelevin, author of ‘Babylon’ ‘'In these bittersweet pages you will find the fall of the regimes, and the last twenty years of Eastern Europe.' Enrico Remmert, Rolling Stone Magazine 'Péter Zilahy, wanderer, adventurer, initiator of a great many performances and provocations, much resembles Jean-Arthur Rimbaud during the Commune of Paris.' Yuri Andrukhovych, author of ‘Twelve Rings’ and ‘The Secret’

    But Tanja's act of academic rebellion incites the rage of one renegade member of her class—and pulls her dangerously close to another—which, in turn, exacerbates the tensions of a life in exile that has now begun to spiral seriously out of control.

    Maass examines how an ordinary Serb could wake up one morning and shoot his neighbor, once a friend--then rape that neighbor's wife. He conveys the desperation that makes a Muslim beg the United States to bomb his own city in order to end the misery. And Maass does not falter at the spectacle of U.N. soldiers shining searchlights on fleeing refugees--who are promptly gunned down by snipers waiting in the darkness. Love Thy Neighbor gives us an unflinching vision of a late-20th-century hell that is also a scathing inquiry into the worst extremes of human nature. Like Michael Herr's Dispatches (also available in Vintage paperback), it is an utterly gripping book that will move and instruct readers for years to come.

    The fruit of this literary research is this book, a book that will help you grasp the essence of the Serbian people and their way of life. This longtime columnist for the distinguished Serbian daily Politika and the monthly magazine JAT Review, published by JAT Airways, has compiled the best and most interesting of his articles for this book, which is richly illustrated with his own drawings. This book's readers will learn, through a self-ironic and humorous tone typical of books by George Mikesh, Efraim Kishon and Art Buchwald, what Serbs like and dislike, whom they admire and despise, what they eat and what they drink, how they spend their free time, what they dream about and what they believe; in a word, book is about what constitutes a Serb from the inside.

    They have refused to negotiate with the Ottoman Empire, and war is now inevitable. Soon enough dust kicked up by Turkish horses is spotted from a citadel. Brightly coloured banners, hastily constructed minarets and tens of thousands of men fill the plain below. From this moment on, the world is waiting to hear that the fortress has fallen. The Siege tells the enthralling story of the weeks and months that follow – of the exhilaration and despair of the battlefield, the constantly shifting strategies of war, and those whose lives are held in balance, from the Pasha himself to the technicians, artillerymen, astrologer, blind poet and harem of women that accompany him. Brilliantly vivid, as insightful as it is compelling, The Siege is an unforgettable account of the clash of two great civilisations. As a portrait of war, it resonates across the centuries and confirms Ismail Kadare as one of our most significant writers.

    A group of entrepreneurs brings roaring back to life a defunct turbine factory and the town around it, promising a return to the days of dignity, jobs and the good life and bright future that a manufacturing center can dispense to a small town. But is a return to the days of plenty possible? And what of the changed relationships between lovers, and within families, that have transpired in the years since that earlier time? Peri�ic takes us there, into the past and into the future, and watches with a bemused sad smile as the inevitable wreaks havoc with the possible. Robert Peri�ic's second novel to be translated into English is a cause for delight.

    Omer is the seraskier, commander in chief of the Sultan’s armies, and as the book begins he arrives from Istanbul, dispatched to bring Sarajevo’s landowners to heel, a task that he accomplishes with his usual ferocity and efficiency. And yet the seraskier’s expedition to Bosnia is a time of reckoning for him as well: he was born in the Balkans, a Serb and a subject of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, a bright boy who escaped his father’s financial disgrace by running away and converting to Islam. Now, at the height of his power, he heads an army of misfits, adventurers, and outcasts from across Europe and Asia, and yet wherever he goes he remains a stranger.Ivo Andrić, who won the Nobel Prize in 1961, is a spellbinding storyteller and a magnificent stylist, and here, in his final novel, he surrounds his enigmatic central figure with many vivid and fascinating minor characters, lost souls and hopeless dreamers all, in a world that is slowly sliding towards disaster. Omer Pasha Latas combines the leisurely melancholy of Joseph Roth’s The Radetzky March with the stark fatalism of an old ballad.

    Croatian by birth, Jergovic ? spent his childhood in Sarajevo and chose to remain there throughout most of the war. A dazzling storyteller, he brings a profoundly human, razor-sharp understanding of the fate of the city’s young Muslims, Croats, and Serbs with a subterranean humor and profoundly personal vision. Their offbeat lives and daily dramas in the foreground, the killing zone in the background.