A multi award-winning story of friendship and feuds in a remote Armenian mountain village. In an isolated village high in the Armenian mountains, a close-knit community bickers, gossips and laughs. Their only connection to the outside world is an ancient telegraph wire and a perilous mountain road that even goats struggle to navigate. As they go about their daily lives - harvesting crops,...

Set in a boarding school in a remote area of the Habsburg Empire at the turn of the last century, The Confusions of Young Torless is an intense study of an adolescent's psychological development as he struggles to come to terms with his conflicting emotions. Through his relationship with two other boys Torless is led into sadistic and sexual encounters with a third pupil which both repel and...

His short story collection Drei Frauen (Three Women) -- consisting of Grigia, The Portuguese Lady, and Tonka -- was published in 1924. Musil in these tales explores Europe on the verge between civilization and brutality, the modern and pre-modern, nationalism and humanism, and between ‘precision and soul,’ to use Musil's own phrase. In encounters with the three women of the title, each male...

The novel ‘A Darkness Falls on the Old Steps,’ recognized as the best work of the 2000s (Russian Booker of the Decade Award, 2011), is based on the author’s family history. Alexander Pavlovich Chudakov, one of the greatest Russian philologists of the 20th century, grew up in an intelligent family, by the will of fate thrown to the ends of the world - to Shchuchinsk, a city of exiles on the...

For his debut novel (Former Son, 2014), Sasha Filipenko received the Russian Prize a year ago. On the first try - a first degree diploma in the ‘Large Prose’ category. So how can you start reading the next book after this? Moreover, the author clearly ‘made up’ the hero of ‘Former Son,’ which captivated everyone, from himself, his biography, his youthful impressions and feelings. Will his own...

Violeta comes into the world on a stormy day in 1920, the first girl in a family with five boisterous sons. From the start, her life is marked by extraordinary events, for the ripples of the Great War are still being felt, even as the Spanish flu arrives on the shores of her South American homeland almost at the moment of her birth.

You just boarded a flight to New York. There are one hundred and forty-three other passengers onboard. What you don’t know is that thirty minutes before the flight your pilot’s family was kidnapped. For his family to live, everyone on your plane must die. The only way the family will survive is if the pilot follows his orders and crashes the plane. Enjoy the flight.

Cat’s Cradle is Kurt Vonnegut’s satirical commentary on modern man and his madness. An apocalyptic tale of this planet’s ultimate fate, it features a midget as the protagonist, a complete, original theology created by a calypso singer, and a vision of the future that is at once blackly fatalistic and hilariously funny. A book that left an indelible mark on an entire generation of readers, Cat’s...

Three friends must urgently find the fourth, who disappeared in an unknown direction, and inform him about the suicide of his stepfather. Sasha Carburetor must make it to the funeral...

Philosophical digressions, fantastic images, exquisite metaphors and specific humor - everything that is so attractive in Serhiy Zhadan's works is here. Stories of Babylon, retold for those who are interested in questions of love and death. The life of the city lying between the years, biographies of characters fighting for their right to be heard and understood, a chronicle of street fights...

This is the exciting - yet little known - story of the making of England in the ninth and 10th centuries, the years in which King Alfred, his son and grandson defeated the Danish Vikings who had invaded and occupied three of England's four kingdoms.

Liesel Meminger is a foster girl living outside of Munich, who scratches out a meager existence for herself by stealing when she encounters something she can’t resist–books. With the help of her accordion-playing foster father, she learns to read and shares her stolen books with her neighbors during bombing raids as well as with the Jewish man hidden in her basement.