Sephy is a Cross: dark-skinned and beautiful, she lives a life of privilege and power. But she’s lonely, and she burns with injustice at the world she sees around her. Callum is a nought: pale-skinned and poor, he’s considered to be less than nothing, there to serve Crosses, but he dreams of a better life. They’ve been friends since they were children, and they both know that’s as far as it can...

Between canceled dates with her long-sought-after royal consort, a second semester of the dreaded Algebra, more princess lessons from Grandmère, and the inability to stop gnawing on her fingernails, isn't there anything Mia is good at besides inheriting an unwanted royal title?

In 1990, a country disappeared. When the Iron Curtain fell, East Germany ceased to be. For over forty years, from the ruin of the Second World War to the cusp of a new millennium, the German Democratic Republic presented a radically different Germany than what had come before and what exists today. Socialist solidarity, secret police, central planning, barbed wire: this was a Germany forged on...

Russian-born journalist Mikhail Zygar was ten years old when the Soviet Union collapsed. Now, after nearly ten years of research, he offers a timely and compelling new approach on Russian history—one that rewrites everything we thought we knew about the fall of the Soviet Union—and argues that its ending is yet to come. Starting with the historic launch of the first human into space in April...

An extraordinary love story and a captivating novel about the power of memory and imagination: Flanders 1922. After serving as a soldier in the Great War, Noon Merckem has lost his memory and lives in a psychiatric asylum. Countless women, responding to a newspaper ad, visit him there in the hope of finding their spouse who vanished in battle. One day a woman, Julienne, appears and recognizes...

In this compelling book, the renowned historian Karl Schlögel reconstructs with meticulous care the process through which, month by month, the terrorism of the Soveit regime in the late 1930s spiralled into the ‘Great Terror’ during which one and a half million human beings lost their lives within a single year. He shows how, in the shadow of the reign of terror, the regime around Stalin also...

Twisting the art of the fairytale into something entirely her own, Alla Gorbunova’s (Th)ings and (Th)oughts is a spellbinding collection of thematically-linked short prose. A teacher contemplates leaving her husband after learning that he doesn’t have a soul; a functionary realizes that the only way to survive in contemporary Russia is to go insane; cars fall inexplicably from the sky;...

September 1913. A young Pole suffering from tuberculosis arrives at Wilhelm Opitz’s Guesthouse for Gentlemen in the village of Görbersdorf, a health resort in the Silesian mountains. Every evening the residents gather to imbibe the hallucinogenic local liqueur and debate the great issues of the day: Monarchy or democracy? Do devils exist? Are women born inferior? War or peace? Meanwhile,...

The compassion, simplicity, and gentle humor with which he treats the poignant quest of a hapless civil servant for the return of his stolen overcoat-and the fantastic yet realistic manner in which he takes revenge on his nemesis, the Very Important Person-mark 'The Overcoat' as one of the greatest achievements of Gogol's genius.

A towering figure in the pantheon of twentieth-century literature, Thomas Mann has often been perceived as a dry and forbidding writer-'the starched collar,' as Bertolt Brecht once called him. But in fact, his fiction is lively, humane, sometimes hilarious. In these fresh renderings of his best short work, award-winning translator Damion Searls casts new light on this underappreciated aspect of...

The bestselling and award-winning German author Jenny Erpenbeck has gained international praise for her novels including Visitation, Kairos, and Go, Went, Gone. Things that Disappear is an exciting collection of interlinked miniature prose pieces that grapple with the phenomenon of disappearance on scales both large and small. The things that disappear in these pages range from everyday objects...