Daniel leads a rich life in the university town of Athens, Georgia. He’s got a couple close friends, a steady paycheck working for a regional airline, and of course, for a few glorious days each Fall, college football tailgates. He considers himself to be a mostly lucky guy-despite the fact that he’s suffered from a debilitating disease since he was a small child, one that has left him unable...

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...

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...

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.

Konstanty Willemann, a Varsovian, but the son of a German aristocrat and a Polonized Silesian woman, cares little for patriotic slogans and traditions sanctified by the blood of heroic soldiers. He is a cynic, a scoundrel and a bon vivant. An unfaithful husband and a bad father. Konstanty reluctantly takes part in the September campaign, and after its defeat, he also becomes a member of a...

France, 1685. The Sun King establishes Catholicism as the only legal religion. Huguenot groups cross the country to reach the north, where they hope to find a new homeland

Three stories, three ways of coming to terms with death in one of Olga Tokarczuk's most moving novels.

A literary, imaginative ode to the borderland, not only geographical, physical, but in the broadest sense of the word... One of the most famous and most widely commented novels by Olga Tokarczuk.