After World War II, Mathilde leaves France for Morocco to be with her husband, whom she met while he was fighting for the French army. A spirited young woman, she now finds herself a farmer’s wife, her vitality sapped by the isolation, the harsh climate, and the mistrust she inspires as a foreigner. But she refuses to be subjugated or confined to her role as mother of a growing family. As...

Shots rang out in Savannah's grandest mansion in the misty,early morning hours of May 2, 1981. Was it murder or self-defense? For nearly a decade, the shooting and its aftermath reverberated throughout this hauntingly beautiful city of moss-hung oaks and shaded squares.

Elisha is a young Jewish man, a Holocaust survivor, and an Israeli freedom fighter in British-controlled Palestine; John Dawson is the captured English officer he will murder at dawn in retribution for the British execution of a fellow freedom fighter. The night-long wait for morning and death provides Dawn, Elie Wiesel's ever more timely novel, with its harrowingly taut, hour-by-hour...

From one of Russia’s most exciting new voices, Wound follows a young lesbian poet on a journey from Moscow to her hometown in Siberia, where she has promised to bury her mother’s ashes. Woven throughout this fascinating travel narrative are harrowing and at times sublime memories of her childhood and her sexual and artistic awakening. As she carefully documents her grief and interrogates her...

In its opening paragraphs, a successful journalist and Holocaust survivor steps off a New York City curb and into the path of an oncoming taxi. Consequently, most of Wiesel's masterful portrayal of one man's exploration of the historical tragedy that befell him, his family, and his people transpires in the thoughts, daydreams, and memories of the novel's narrator. Torn between choosing life or...

This is a book in which Valentin Kataev cites episodes from his own biography, paints a panorama of Russian literary life in the twenties of the twentieth century in broad masks and shares many details about many famous writers and poets whom he met during his long and eventful life. Among the heroes of the book - naturally, under recognizable pseudonyms - are Vladimir Mayakovsky, Yuri Olesha,...

Maxim Osipov, who lives and practices medicine in a town ninety miles outside Moscow, is one of Russia's best-regarded writers. In the tradition of Anton Chekhov and William Carlos Williams, he draws on his experiences in medicine to craft stories of great subtlety and striking insight. Rich in comparison but devoid of cheap sentiment, Osipov's fiction presents a nuanced, collage-like portrait...

What does a Labrador think about when his owner drinks wine and cries? How can dogs help with promotion at work, save from bullies and shake the nervous system of the owner? What does your beloved pet think about your exes? What is the secret of the success of a not very smart and not even the most formidable dog, in front of which a huge Rottweiler trembles?

Cormac McCarthy's masterwork, Blood Meridian, chronicles the brutal world of the Texas-Mexico borderlands in the mid-nineteenth century. Its wounded hero, the teenage Kid, must confront the extraordinary violence of the Glanton gang, a murderous cadre on an official mission to scalp Indians and sell those scalps. Loosely based on fact, the novel represents a genius vision of the historical...

November 11, 1918. Leutnant Alois Pokora leaves the hospital and enters the streets of rebellious Berlin. The old world has ended.La Belle Époque died in the trenches of World War I. A new world is born in pain: on the Western Front and during the revolution that swept through defeated Germany.

Konrad Widuch, who comes from Upper Silesia, is a veteran of the Great War, a communist who is wholeheartedly devoted to the revolution. After the war, he and Karol Radek go to Soviet Russia and implement the proletarian order, fighting in the ranks of the Konarmia in the war of 1920. However, the revolution devours its own children. During the purges of 1937, comrade Widuch is arrested,...

Let's say that Erwin Piontek, a 73-year-old miner, is going on a voyage around the world. On an old Venus-class sailing yacht, with a worn-out rubber oilskin, a red woolen cap, a scout compass in a sailing bag and meticulously calculated provisions, he is prepared for a solo expedition. He has an ambitious plan to never put into port, for the entire twenty-nine thousand miles.