From the flamboyant and unpredictable Maryska, who scandalises the town when she cuts short her golden tresses, to the eccentric Uncle Pepin, who always has to have a ready supply of furniture to smash when he's angry, Bohumil Hrabal creates a range of enchanting and memorable characters - confirming his status as one of Europe's greatest writers.

Helena Pelletier has a loving husband, two beautiful daughters, and a business that fills her days. But she also has a secret: she is the product of an abduction. Her mother was kidnapped as a teenager by her father and kept in a remote cabin in the marshlands of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. Helena, born two years after the abduction, loved her home in nature, and despite her father’s sometimes...

On a rainy November day, police detectives Pia Kirchhoff and Oliver von Bodenstein are summoned to a mysterious traffic accident: a woman has fallen from a pedestrian bridge onto a car driving underneath. According to a witness, the woman may have been pushed. The investigation leads Pia and Oliver to a small village, and the home of the victim, Rita Cramer.

The crime story takes place in 1992, just after the political transformation in former Czechoslovakia. Commissioner Krauz (very young, cheeky, quick and inexperienced, but promising) investigates a murder. The clues lead to the former communist political police and church services. In the new order, both the Church (preparing to return to big politics) and the former security officers who are...

Heinrich Düring, Gemeindebeamter in Fallingbostel, führt ein Doppelleben: Er verachtet das NS-Regime und den Alltag des deutschen Kleinbürgertums, nach außen aber gibt er sich angepasst. Seinen Ausgleich findet er in der Natur, durchstreift unermüdlich die geliebte Heidelandschaft, liest Wieland und Tieck. Im Wald entdeckt er eine Hütte und bezieht sie als Versteck für sich und seine...

The cult novel by George Orwell, one of the main anti-utopias of the 20th century. A creepy and frightening text that has not lost its relevance even 70 years later. For the first time, 1984 is published in Russian in a new, complete, uncensored and cuts, translation by Daria Tselovalnikova.

The three novellas of Farewell, Aylis take place over decades of transition in a country that rather resembles modern-day Azerbaijan.

The Stranger is the debut work of a young writer, a kind of creative manifesto. The concept of absolute freedom is the main postulate of this manifesto. The hero of this story is on trial for a murder he committed for the most stupid of all possible reasons. And this is the truth that the hero is not afraid to throw in the face of his judges, go against everything, forget about all conventions...

Chess Story, also known as The Royal Game, is the Austrian master Stefan Zweig's final achievement, completed in Brazilian exile and sent off to his American publisher only days before his suicide in 1942. It is the only story in which Zweig looks at Nazism, and he does so with characteristic emphasis on the psychological.

This selection from his extensive lyrical work enables many discoveries and allows you to experience how Rilke ‘made the German poem perfect for the first time’ (Robert Musil). With a compact biography of the author.

It presents a richly detailed portrait of life in Berlin under the Nazis and tells the sweeping saga of one working-class couple who decides to take a stand when their only son is killed at the front. With nothing but their grief and each other against the awesome power of the Reich, they launch a simple, clandestine resistance campaign that soon has an enraged Gestapo on their trail, and a...

One of the most intense yet absorbing studies ever done of a normal man's descent into drunkenness.