Set in Italy during World War II, this is the story of the incomparable, malingering bombardier, Yossarian, a hero who is furious because thousands of people he has never met are trying to kill him. But his real problem is not the enemy-it is his own army, which keeps increasing the number of missions the men must fly to complete their service. Yet if Yossarian makes any attempt to excuse...

The era in which Andrei Bitov lived ... These are the years of the thaw - a time of hope, a bright entry into literature, and a period of 'stagnation', when the main novel 'Pushkin's House' could only be read in samizdat. And perestroika, and the turbulent 1990s, and transformations in the country - a different breath, changes in life and work. An intellectual writer, a unique interlocutor -...

If every war needs its master chronicler, Ukraine has Serhiy Zhadan, one of Europe's most promising novelists. Recalling the brutal landscape of The Road and the wartime storytelling of A Farewell to Arms, The Orphanage is a searing novel that excavates the human collateral damage wrought by the ongoing conflict in eastern Ukraine. When hostile soldiers invade a neighboring city, Pasha, a...

'Goodbye To Berlin' is the original story of the chanteuse heroine Sally Bowles. Isherwood ironically captures life in Weimar Berlin, a city infamous for its flourishing demimonde and violent politics.

Ein Haus an einem märkischen See: Schauplatz für fünfzehn Lebensläufe, Geschichten, Schicksale, von den Zwanzigerjahren bis heute. Seine Bewohner erleben die Weimarer Republik, das Dritte Reich, den Krieg und dessen Ende, die DDR, die Wende und die Zeit der Nachwende. Jedem einzelnen Schicksal gibt Jenny Erpenbeck eine eigene literarische Form, jedes entfaltet auf ganz eigene Weise seine...

Twenty-six-year-old Jean Louise Finch - 'Scout' - returns home to Maycomb, Alabama from New York City to visit her aging father, Atticus. Set against the backdrop of the civil rights tensions and political turmoil that were transforming the South, Jean Louise’s homecoming turns bittersweet when she learns disturbing truths about her close-knit family, the town, and the people dearest to...

Told through the eyes of Tish, a nineteen-year-old girl, in love with Fonny, a young sculptor who is the father of her child, Baldwin’s story mixes the sweet and the sad. Tish and Fonny have pledged to get married, but Fonny is falsely accused of a terrible crime and imprisoned. Their families set out to clear his name, and as they face an uncertain future, the young lovers experience a...

K is for Kidd. Set in South Carolina during the tumultuous summer of 1964, The Secret Life of Bees also ushered young Lily Owens, a girl transformed by the power and divinity of the female spirit, into the canon of modern-day heroines. Lily and her fierce-hearted black ‘stand-in mother’ escape the racism of their hometown and find refuge with an eccentric trio of black beekeeping sisters,...

The very first novel of the writer - ‘The Former Son’ - tells about a young man who was injured in a terrible stampede on Nemiza and was in a coma for 10 years. He was looked after by his grandmother, who, in turn, tried to see the world through the eyes of her grandson, to tell him everything when he recovered. She tells, and the reader remembers what Belarusians experienced during that...

The novel begins with the events of June 23, 1941, when the offensive of the German army launched another wave of the fight against spies in the USSR. The work immerses the reader in the atmosphere of the 1930s and is based on the materials of the investigative case of the first director of the Moscow crematorium, Pyotr Ilyich Nesterenka, through whose testimony and diaries one can trace the...

Ein Klassiker der 1930er-Jahre-Literatur, neu entdeckt: das Schicksal einer klugen und ehrgeizigen Frau als Bankangestellte in der Weltwirtschaftskrise