The dread shadow of Nazism falls upon the Carnovsky family, three generations of Jews who believe themselves totally assimilated into German society. David, who has prospered in "enlightened, civilized" Berlin and considers himself "more German than the Germans”, cannot rationalize the momentous events engulfing him. His son Georg, a famous doctor, taught by his father to be "Jewish at home, a German in the street", is stripped of his practice, his possessions, and ultimately his illusions. And his young son Jegor is pulled between his love for the fatherland and the Jewishness he scorns. A tragedy of torn loyalties, this powerful and panoramic novel has become one of the classics of our time.

"The Imperial Wife is a smart, engaging novel that parallels two fascinating worlds and two singular women. Irina Reyn writes beautifully of immigrants, art and the vagaries of love."--Jess Walter, National Book Award finalist and author of the New York Times bestseller, Beautiful Ruins Two women's lives collide when a priceless Russian artifact comes to light. Tanya Kagan, a rising specialist in Russian art at a top New York auction house, is trying to entice Russia's wealthy oligarchs to bid on the biggest sale of her career, The Order of Saint Catherine, while making sense of the sudden and unexplained departure of her husband. As questions arise over the provenance of the Order and auction fever kicks in, Reyn takes us into the dazzling world of Catherine the Great, the infamous 18th-century empress, who may have owned the priceless artifact, and who, it turns out, faced many of the same issues Tanya wrestles with in her own life. Suspenseful and beautifully written, The Imperial Wife asks whether we view female ambition any differently today than we did in the past. Can a contemporary marriage withstand an "Imperial Wife"?

A contemporary Frankenstein that defies expectations, this is a thrilling novel, couched in luminous, captivitating prose, about a journalist, Cédric Allyn-Weberson, who suffers a horrific accident, paralyzing him from the neck down. An ideal candidate for a body transplant, Cédric survives the surgery but has both physical and existential trouble with his recovery and adaptation: encountering his lover with a new body, discovering the life history of his donor, and attempting to understand the mind-body relationship as he lives it.

"This rediscovered gem of Czech literature, a crime novel by renowned Holocaust memoirist Heda Margolius Kovaly, depicts a chilling moment in history, redolent with the stifling atmosphere of political and personal oppression of the early days of Socialist Czechoslovakia. In 1985, Czech Holocaust memoirist, literary translator, and political exile Heda Margolius Kovaly turned her pen to fiction. Inspired by the stories of Raymond Chandler, Kovaly knit her own terrifying experiences in early 1950s Socialist Prague -- her husband's imprisonment and wrongful execution, her own persecution at his disgrace -- into a gorgeous psychological thriller-cum-detective novel. Set in and around a cinema where a murder was recently committed, Innocence follows the unfolding of the investigation while telling the stories of the women who work there as ushers, each of whom is forced to support herself in difficult circumstances. As the novel brings this group alive, it tells their various life stories that have brought them to this job, the secrets they share with one another, and the secrets they keep. When the detective trying to solve the first murder is found slain by the cinema, all of their secrets come into the light. A smart, evocative, and deeply stirring literary crime novel with international appeal"--

When eight members of the Chicago White Sox were accused of throwing the 1919 World Series, the team became known as the "Black Sox." Hoopla blends the narrative of team member George Weaver with the view of Luther Pond, who exposed the scandal. Filled with cameo portraits of prominent sports legends of the early twentieth century, this novel brings to life an era when America was passionate, even patriotic, about baseball; and when one reporter's words had the power to rock a nation.

warriors of the way a novel.

It's 4 a.m. and dawn is about to break over the Lovelace estate. Cathy Mason drags herself out of bed as she swelters in her overheated bedroom - the council still haven't turned the radiators off despite temperatures reaching the 30s. In a kitchen across London, Home Secretary Peter Whiteley enjoys the tea that his security detail left for him before he joins his driver and heads to Parliament, whilst his new police chief, Joshua Yares, clears his head for his first day with a run. All three will have reasons to recollect this morning as their lives collide over ten days they will never forget. Ten Days takes an unflinching look at how lives are ruined and careers are made when small misjudgements have profound effects on frustrated communities and damaged individuals. Gillian Slovo's game-changing novel about political expediency and personal disenfranchisement is as page-turning as it is culturally significant.

An amazing comic novel by Kersh (Night and The City). It's the tale of a young man who enters the peculiar underworld of Cockney Theatre, and quickly finds himself wrapped up in scams, treachery, nitro-glycerine and midgets. This bawdy, rollicking novel, featuring in Sam Yudenow the most fittingly peculiar dialogue since Sheridan's Mrs. Malaprop graced the stage, is the last to be written by Kersh. Published in 1957, only a year after The Ginger Man's runaway success in London, the work may have suffered by its release from a mainstream UK publisher. (Where were the censors?) So to guarantee success this time around, when we print Fowlers End, we're going to go the extra mile and make sure to have ads in the back for some of the most spectular Olympia titles. Kersh deserves no less.

Frederick Busch has built a reputation as a master storyteller, a magician with words, and a writer who deserves to be a household name. In his new novel, Girls, he once again treats readers to the "ice-clear, dagger-sharp" (Seattle Times) writing he's become known for and a story that's deeply affecting, terrifying, and tragic. Jack is a security officer at an upstate New York college. When 14-year-old Janice Tanner vanishes from a neighboring town, he reluctantly becomes involved in the search as a favor to a friend of the girl's parents. A suicidal young woman, a teenage runaway, and two more missing girls make it impossible for Jack to drive resurfacing memories of his own daughter's death from his mind. In the course of the investigation, as he comes to confront Janice's murderer, Jack comes to realize just how dangerous it is to be a girl: "I wondered if girls had been kidnapped, murdered, preyed upon for years. Maybe it was the times, and therefore everything human and otherwise from when we began might not be at fault." Girls is a novel that is both a thriller and a stylistic wonder, and, like its protagonist, is tender and tough at the same time.

Life might have been very different for Gideon. Failed academic turned literary odd-jobber, Gideon Shand is bedevilled by his youth. Through his own fault, the chance of a brilliant Cambridge career has been missed. Nor is all well with his seemingly happy marriage: his wife should have married someone else... When Gideon s alter ego, Stephen Heilman, helps the Shands move to his own neighbourhood from the troublesome city of Chaworth, the past finally catches up with them, forcing Gideon to face the truth. This stylish novel of sexual deceit, ambition- and failure - has all the mordant wit and stinging social comment that mark Raphael as one of our most dazzling novelists. Raphael is spot on in his observation. One of our most competent and consistently entertaining chroniclers - Guardian By far and away the best thing he has ever done. The book is written with great aplomb... and the dialogue is exceptional -Financial Times Cover illustration by Gary Keane

Of course, I've always had a secret. Have I always known it? I suppose I did, in a way - in the way that children know such things. That is, I knew and didn't know.In this novel, Eva Hoffman explores various kinds and strata of secrets: intimate secrets and secrets of family past: the kinds of secrets that can be decoded from clues, and the kind that themselves seem to offer tantalizing clues to the fundamental mysteries of the human selfhood. This is a story about a peculiarly powerful mother daughter bond and about a haunting, about a young womans quest for individuation and the challenges posed by contemporary science to our deepest notions of individuality. Using the near future to reflect on the conditions of the present, Hoffman has written self knowledge a novel of ideas for our time, and an imaginative fable whose resonance is timeless.

A captivating coming-of-age novel about love, sisterhood, secrets and betrayal[Bokinfo]

Elisa - orphaned as a child, raised by a 'fallen woman', fed by fairy tales - has lived in an outlandish imaginary world for years. When her guardian dies, she feels compelled to confront her family's tortured and dramatic past, weaving the tale of her mother and grandmother through a history of intrigue, treachery, deception and desire. But as her saga of three generations of Sicilian women proceeds, it becomes something else entirely, taking in a whole legacy of oppression and injustice. By turns flamboyant and intense, raging and funny, Lies and Sorcery is a celebration of the female imagination, and the power of storytelling itself. First published in 1948, Elsa Morante's debut novel won the Viareggio Prize and earned her the lasting admiration of generations of writers from Italo Calvino and Natalia Ginzburg to Elena Ferrante. Translated by Jenny McPhee

Award-winning author and radio personality Ellen Kushner’s inspired retelling of an ancient legend weaves myth and magic into a vivid contemporary novel about the mysteries of the human heart. Brimming with ballads, riddles, and magical transformations, here is the timeless tale of a charismatic bard whose talents earn him a two-edged otherworldly gift. A minstrel lives by his words, his tunes, and sometimes by his lies. But when the bold and gifted young Thomas the Rhymer awakens the desire of the powerful Queen of Elfland, he finds that words are not enough to keep him from his fate. As the Queen sweeps him far from the people he has known and loved into her realm of magic, opulence—and captivity—he learns at last what it is to be truly human. When he returns to his home with the Queen’s parting gift, his great task will be to seek out the girl he loved and wronged, and offer her at last the tongue that cannot lie.

Kurt Janisch is an ambitious, but frustrated country policeman. Things are not going right in his life - at least not fast enough. But a country policeman gets talking to a lot of people in the line of duty - particularly women. Lonely, middle-aged women, women with a bit of property perhaps...Matters go from bad to worse: for Kurt Janisch, for the women who fall for him. Someone sees too much, knows too much. Soon there's a body in a lake and a murderer to be caught. A thriller set amid the mountains and small towns of southern Austria, "Greed" is Elfriede Jelinek's most accessible novel since "The Piano Teacher". But, as always, Jelinek gives the reader a lot more to think about: the ecological costs of affluence, the inescapable burden and inadequacy of our everyday words, the exploitative nature of relations between men and women, the impossibility of life without relationships. A meditative reflection on ageing, "Greed" is another chapter in Jelinek's chronicling of her love/hate relationship with Austria.

This is a startling novel - as much for the power and beauty of the writing as for its vivid, searing tale of life on the road as a stripper in Canada. Sarah is the product of a university family that blew angrily apart and the survivor of a childhood disease that meant lonely years spent in the grip of an insensitive medical establishment. Now, scarred in more ways than one, she is a seventeen-year-old high school dropout trying to make a living in the recession. Prospects are dim, and soon she is "Tabitha," heading out on the circuit of motels and strip-bars through the mining towns and suburbs of a seemingly bucolic West Coast. On-stage, dressed in elaborate costumes, she offers a vision of a sex and beauty. Off-stage, she tries to befriend the bikers and strippers and populate her life on the road, but friendships are fleeting when home is a Greyhound bus or a room behind a neon sign on the highway. Diana Atkinson paints a poignant, darkly humorous portrait of the reality behind voyeurism and desire. Delving into the shadowy moments of sex and survival, her work flashes with loss and beauty and a true empathy for those who live on the margins.

David Szalay's debut novel is set in the alcohol-sodden, materialistic, insecure and increasingly sham world of a telephone salesman. The salesman in question is Paul Rainey, a 40-year-old functioning alcoholic on anti-anxiety medication who commutes into London every day from Hove.

Paul Dogolov, divorced Vietnam War hero and novelist, teaches a writing class in a maximum security prison. Convinced that one of his students, serving a life sentence for brutal murder, is innocent, he sets out to find the real killer. The search leads him to a remote, dust-blasted California desert town and a scorpion's nest of bizarre and vicious characters. The result is a tale of intrigue, corruption, and savage humor, in which Dogolov, through his encounter with the horrific, yet wildly comic, Fat Lady of the title, learns about terror, degradation, and ultimately, love in a funhouse-mirror world where illusion is reality, reality, a chimera. "David Scott Milton is certainly one of the most talented, uncompromising prose writers of his generation, and The Fat Lady Sings is perhaps his best and also most appealing novel." — Peter Bogdanovich

'Brilliantly clever . . . mercilessly funny.' - Kenneth Allsop, Daily Mail 'One of the most brilliantly written books since the war.' - Ian Fleming, Sunday Times ' A] clever and pitiless novel.' - Neil Ascherson, Observer ' An] extremely promising and funny first novel.' - New Yorker 'I laughed until I cried. Benedictus is a dazzling new wit and a blazing new talent.' - Patrick Dennis David Benedictus was only twenty-three when his shock-filled, highly controversial first novel was published in 1962. In The Fourth of June , Benedictus shows what it was like to have attended Eton College, one of England's most prestigious schools. Among its hallowed buildings, a boy is savagely beaten into paralysis by his House Captain, a bishop spends his evening spying on a chaplain's half-dressed daughter, and a housemaster is seduced by a desperate mother. Condemned by some reviewers as a farrago of sex, snobbery, and sadism, The Fourth of June nonetheless met with rave reviews from other critics, who proclaimed Benedictus one of the most promising new novelists of his generation, and went on to be a bestseller on both sides of the Atlantic. This new edition, the first in more than 30 years, includes an introduction by the author.

'Brilliant . . . exhilarating . . . Exciting and memorably written, this is one of those rare reads that has you galloping to the end, but feeling bereft at having to say goodbye so soon' Independent Behind a crumbling facade of seeming normality, secrets begin to stir within the Lux family home. Jean Lux, constrained academic wife and guilty mother, is waiting for excitement - and it will come from an unexpected source. Meanwhile Eve, her intelligent elder daughter, luxuriates in wounded jealousy, until her loathing for her only sister verges on the murderous. Into this climate of static repression and bitterness enters Raymond Snow, the deadly rival of Jean's husband, who begins to show interest in the vulnerable Eve. Meanwhile, Jean's best friend, Helena, has something she is yearning to tell: a confession that may alter everyone's life forever. Beautifully written and very funny, Daughters of Jerusalem is a gripping tale of hidden love and hate, of the desire to belong and the need for escape. Daughters of Jerusalem won both the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize and a Somerset Maugham Award. 'Brilliant and witty . . . Mendelson's second bewitchingly erotic and darkly dramatic novel confirms her as a stylish, perceptive chronicler of the heart's hidden desires' Daily Mail