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Layla Martinez

The house breathes. 
 
The house contains bodies and secrets. 
 
‘A house of women and shadows built from poetry and revenge’ Mariana Enriquez 
 
The house is visited by ghosts, by angels that line the roof like insects, and by saints that burn the bedsheets with their haloes. 
 
It was built by a small-time hustler as a means of controlling his wife, and even after so many years, their daughter and her granddaughter can’t leave. 
 
They may be witches or they may just be angry, but when the mysterious disappearance of a young boy draws unwanted attention, the two isolated women, already subjects of public scorn, combine forces with the spirits that haunt them in pursuit of something that resembles justice. 
 
Layla Martínez’s eerie debut novel Woodworm is class-conscious horror that drags generations of monsters into the sun. 
 
Translated by Sophie Hughes and Annie McDermott

Woodworm

Tom Lee

Claustrophobic, intense, troubled, these twelve astonishing stories hold a flare to the strange, elusive corners of our world, past and present; from the United States of the Gold Rush era to the Berlin of today, from Victorian England to the dusty border towns and high cities of modern South America. 
 
A young couple's passionate affair unravels as they wait anxiously in their hotel room for news of a recklessly conceived drug deal. 
 
An academic inherits a set of diaries detailing her great-grandfather's development of a bizarre new field of science; an endeavour which has shocking implications for his young daughter and unfaithful wife. 
 
And in Greenfly, a housebound woman is driven to distraction by the insects infesting her house - putting strain on an already fractured relationship with her partner. 
 
Lee's stories announce the arrival of a writer whose vision is razor sharp, blackly funny and startlingly original.

Greenfly

George Orwell

Volume 2 of The Complete Works of George Orwell 
 
Burmese Days was first published in the United States, by Harper &amp; Brothers, in October 1934. It was Orwell's second book to be published and his first novel. It draws on his experiences serving in the Indian Imperial Police in Burma (some preliminary sketches survive on Government of Burma paper). he resigned from the Burma Police in autumn 1927 'because he disliked putting people into prison for doing the same things which he should have done in their circumstances'. 
 
Orwell was convinced that publication of his novel in England would be impeded by the India Office because of his exposure of the evils of colonialism - his title, so appropriate to a volume of conventional memoirs, is subtly ironic - but his difficulties proved quite different. Victor Gollancz, though keen to publish Burmese Days, feared action for defamation and libel. 
 
After modification, an English version was brought out in June 1935. Although at the time Orwell considered the changes required to be 'trifling', he later rejected the English edition as 'garbled'. However, as well as forced changes, it does include genuine authorial revisions, something which Orwell had forgotten.

Burmese Days

William Peskett

Survivors is William Peskett's second book in the Secker &amp; Warburg Poets series. At one level, it marks his move 'From Belfast to Suffolk' (the title of one of the poems), but more importantly it shows him coming to terms with the world of nature and the world of man with a new maturity.

Survivors

Po Bronson

Entrepreneurs and tech wizards, immigrants and investors, dreamers and visionaries are heading West to seek their fortune.Their Mecca is Silicon Valley - where one person can achieve so much with just initiative, talent and a good idea. 
 
Meet David Filo, co-founder of Yahoo and worth over $500 million, who still sleeps under his desk one night a week. Meet the 26 year-old who is already on his fifth start-up venture. Meet the man with the biggest brain in the world. Meet the nudist who works the late shift.

The Nudist On The Lateshift

and Other Tales of Silicon Valley

Paul Durcan

Paul Durcan's twenty-second collection finds Monsieur le Poète on the road in Paris, New York City, Chicago, Brisbane, and Achill Island, meditating upon the sanctuary of home and what it means to feel truly at home. 
 
Regarded by many as the great poet of contemporary Ireland, Durcan is on top form here as he contemplates the fall of the Celtic Tiger, while railing against bankers and 'bonus boys'. There are poems of love lost and won, and poems in memory of friends and relatives who have passed on, but there is also joy to be found in the birth of a grandson, and there is praise, too, for the modest heroism of truckers, air traffic controllers and nurses, those 'slim, sturdy, buxom nourishers' of fallen mankind. If for Sartre 'hell is other people', for Durcan 'heaven is other people, especially women'.

Praise in Which I Live and Move and Have my Being

Sherman Alexie

Flight follows this troubled foster teenager - a boy who is not a 'legal' Indian because he was never claimed by his father - as he learns that violence is not the answer. 
 
The journey for Flight's young hero begins as he's about to commit a massive act of violence. At the moment of the decision, he finds himself shot back through time to resurface in the body of an FBI agent during the civil rights era, where he sees why 'Hell is Red River, Idaho, in the 1970s'. Red River is only the first stop in an eye-opening trip through moments in American history. He will continue travelling back to inhabit the body of an Indian child during the battle at Little Bighorn and then ride with an Indian tracker in the nineteenth century before materialising as an airline pilot jetting through the skies today. During these travels through time, his refrain grows: 'Who's to judge?' 
 
This novel seeks nothing less than an understanding of why human beings hate. Flight is irrepressible and fearless - Sherman Alexie at his most brilliant.

Flight

Enrique Vila-Matas

A man's obsession with literature leads him to see the world through the eyes of fiction 
 
Literature can be contagious; it can also be our only means of salvation. That at least is the experience of Montano, the 'unreliable narrator' of Enrique Vila-Matas' prize-winning novel, a man and a writer who is so obsessed with the books of certain celebrated contemporaries that he is unable to put pen to paper or utter a word without summoning up their work or their lives, and whose malady is that he finds it impossible to distinguish between real life and fictional reality. Part picaresque novel, part intimate diary, part memoir, part philosophical musings, Vila-Matas has created a labyrinth in which writers as various as Cervantes, Sterne, Kafka, Musil, Perec, Bolaño, Coetzee, Sebald and Magris cross endlessly surprising paths, while his protagonist leads the reader on an unsettling journey from European cities such as Nantes, Barcelona, Lisbon, Prague and Budapest to the Azores and the Chilean port of Valparaíso. 
 
Yet for all the author's dazzling literary pyrotechnics, this is a novel that is always witty and accessible.

Montano

William Peskett belongs to the brilliant generation of young poets from Northen Ireland who broke through in the 1970s. The intent observation and delicate structure of his poems are unusual. They feel their way into situations with both tact and exactness, and move with equal poise through human relationships and the natural world. 
 
William Peskett's work appeared in periodicals and on the radio, and it attracted special attention when a group of poems appeared in Faber's Poetry Introduction 2. 
 
The Night Owl's Dissection is his first full-length collection of poetry.

The Nightowl's Dissection

Kotaro Isaka

'Fascinating and thought provoking with some genuine surprises and incredibly clever ideas that kept me thinking about it long after I finished it… a Japanese Black Mirror!' Ajay Chowdhury, author of The Waiter 
 
Some mother-in-laws are hard. This one might be murder. 
 
Miyako suspects her mother-in-law is a murderer. It’s not just a case of them rubbing each other up the wrong way – there is definitely something suspicious going on. But Miyako isn’t exactly what she seems either. Her husband has no idea about her past life as a secret agent. When she decides to use her professional skills to investigate her mother-in-law, the delicate equilibrium of their lives is thrown wildly out of balance. 
 
Many decades later, in a future world where electronic communication has been irrevocably compromised, confidential messages must be delivered by trusted couriers like Mito. But one delivery pulls Mito into a conspiracy beyond his wildest imaginings, and forces him into a race against time to defeat a world-changing technological threat. 
 
Seesaw Monster contains two sharp, thrilling linked novellas - SEESAW MONSTER and SPIN MONSTER - from the bestselling and multi-award-winning writer Kotaro Isaka, internationally celebrated for his offbeat humour and inventive talent for twists. 
 
PRAISE FOR KOTARO ISAKA: 
 
‘Unlike anything you're likely to have read before . . . white-hot with double-crosses’ Financial Times 
 
‘Entertaining . . . high-speed . . . with lots of twists and turns’ The Times 
 
‘Thoroughly enjoyable’ Guardian

Seesaw Monster

Michel Laub

*Selected as one of the Best Books 2017 in the Financial Times* 
'One of Brazil’s finest authors offers a meditation on betrayal, guilt, survival and the many ways in which personal and collective histories collide' - Ángel Gurría-Quintana 
 
Is it better to burn out than to fade away? An entrancing novel of loss and regret, from the prizewinning Brazilian novelist Michel Laub. 
 
In this sinuous meditation on passion, youth and guilt, a man looks back over twenty years to his relationship with his first love, Valeria, and its tragic climax.. 
 
They both had tickets to Nirvana in 1993, the only gig the band ever played in Brazil. But he was on military service and failed to join her. She was there with his best friend instead. Consumed by insecurities and tricks of memory, he continues to feel, two decades later, that one fateful night has defined his entire adult life. 
 
Entwining this most personal story with seminal events of the 1990s, A Poison Apple circles around and back to some of the biggest questions: what is a life worth? What does it mean to really commit to living? And can we ever break free of the past? 
 
Successor to his prizewinning Diary of the Fall, this is a beautiful and haunting novel that shows Michel Laub at his mesmeric best.

A Poison Apple

Yury Dombrovsky

The Keeper of Antiquities is simultaneously one of the great Russian modern novels and a key to understanding the terrible Stalinist purges of the late 1930s. 
 
Set far from Moscow in the remote Kazakhstan capital of Alma-Ata, The Keeper of Antiquities begins with a leisurely, almost scholarly air - like a devious story by Borges. But very soon we find ourselves watching with horror as professional rivalry between the keeper of the town's museum and the chief librarian turns into a deadly struggle for control over the meaning of the past - and therefore over the present.

The Keeper Of Antiquities

Mia Couto

Shortlisted for the International Dublin Literary Award 2017 
A finalist for the 2015 Man Booker International Prize 
 
My sister Silência was the most recent victim of the lions, which have been tormenting our village for some weeks now… 
 
When Mariamar Mpepe’s sister is killed by lions, her father imprisons her at home. With only the ghost of her sister for company, she dreams of escape, and of the hunter who abandoned her years before. 
 
I’m the last of the hunters. And this is my last hunt. 
 
Archangel Bullseye, born into a long line of marksmen, is summoned back to Kulumani. But as he tracks the lions in the surrounding wilderness, his suspicions grow – that the darkest threats lie not outside the village, but at its very heart. 
 
What was happening was what always happened: The lions were coming back… 
 
Set in a forgotten corner of East Africa haunted by superstition, tradition and the shades of civil war, this is a struggle that blurs the savagery of nature, and the savagery of man.

Confession of the Lioness

Gabriela Ybarra

LONGLISTED FOR THE 2018 MAN BOOKER INTERNATIONAL PRIZE 
 
The Dinner Guest is Gabriela Ybarra’s prizewinning literary debut: a singular autobiographical novel piecing together the kidnap and murder of her grandfather by terrorists, reflecting on the personal impact of private pain and public tragedy. 
 
The story goes that in my family there’s an extra dinner guest at every meal. He’s invisible, but always there. He has a plate, glass, knife and fork. Every so often he appears, casts his shadow over the table, and erases one of those present. 
 
The first to vanish was my grandfather. 
 
In 1977, three terrorists broke into Gabriela Ybarra’s grandfather’s home, and pointed a gun at him in the shower. 
 
This was the last time his family saw him alive, and his kidnapping played out in the press, culminating in his murder. 
 
 Ybarra first heard the story when she was eight, but it was only after her mother’s death, years later, that she felt the need to go deeper and discover more about her family’s past. 
 
The Dinner Guest is a novel, with the feel of documentary non-fiction. It connects two life-changing events – the very public death of Ybarra’s grandfather, and the more private pain as her mother dies from cancer and Gabriela cares for her. Devastating yet luminous, the book is an investigation, marking the arrival of a talented new voice in international fiction.

The Dinner Guest

Günter Grass

In 1990, Günter Grass - a reluctant diarist - felt compelled to make a record of the interesting times through which he was living. 
 
Following the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989 and the collapse of Communism, Germany and Europe were enduring a period of immense upheaval. Grass resolved to immerse himself in these political debates: he travelled widely throughout both Germanys, the former East and the former West, conducting a lively exchange with political enemies, friends and his own children about all the questions posed by reunification. 
 
His account gives the reader an unparalleled insight into a key moment in the life of modern Europe, seen through the eyes of one of its most acclaimed writers. It also provides a startling insight into the creative process as the reader witnesses ideas for novels occurring and then taking shape. 
 
From Germany to Germany is both a personal journal by a great creative artist and a penetrating commentary on recent European history by someone who was simultaneously an acute observer and a highly engaged participant.

From Germany to Germany

Diary 1990

Maxine Hong Kingston

Maxine Hong Kingston, author of such seminal works as The Woman Warrior and China Men, is one of the most important American writers of her generation. In this remarkable memoir, she writes from the point of view of being sixty-five, looking back on a rich and complex life of literature and political activism, always against the background of what it is like to have a mixed Chinese-American identity. 
 
Passages of autobiography, in which she describes such events in her life as being imprisoned with Alice Walker for demonstrating against the Iraq war, meld with a ficitonal journey in which she sends her avatar Wittman Ah Sing on a trip to modern China. She also evokes her own poignant journey, without a guide, back to the Chinese villages her father and mother left in order to come to America.

I Love a Broad Margin To My Life

Tim Parks

Daniel Burrow once began a beautiful walk from Konstanz to Como with Julia, mercurial professor of literature, mother to two of his pupils, married, and the love of his life. 
 
After years of their secret affair, they stepped out together on top of the world, full of delight in one another and in the future they imagined. Or was it only Dan who imagined it, really? He never had the chance to find out, because a few days into their adventure a single phone call changed everything. 
 
Now, at the height of summer, with only a rucksack, a few pages of DH Lawrence that had been Julia’s, and his private strata of memory and forgetting, Dan is back on the trail. Step by step, with a tumult of emotions jostling with the demands of the dramatic Alpine landscape, he reckons with what his life is and what it might have been, had he been a different man with different choices. 
 
'A writer operating at the height of his powers. One follows the twists and turns of this story of discovery and self-discovery in a sustained state of delight' J.M. Coetzee 
 
'An intensely satisfying novel, superbly crafted' Nicholas Shakespeare 
 
'Parks is a prolific writer and Mr Geography is one of his finest books, matching virtuoso technical skill with deep emotional resonance' The Tablet

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