Winner of the 2019 Man Booker International PrizeIn the village of al-Awafi in Oman, we encounter three sisters: Mayya, who marries after a heartbreak; Asma, who marries from a sense of duty; and Khawla, who chooses to refuse all offers and await a reunion with the man she loves, who has emigrated to Canada.These three women and their families, their losses and loves, unspool beautifully against a backdrop of a rapidly changing Oman, a country evolving from a traditional, slave-owning society into its complex present. Through the sisters, we glimpse a society in all its degrees, from the very poorest of the local slave families to those making money through the advent of new wealth.The first novel originally written in Arabic to ever win the Man Booker International Prize, and the first book by a female Omani author to be translated into English, Celestial Bodies marks the arrival in the United States of a major international writer.
Publisher: n/a
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9781948226943
|
Paperback
Violeta
By Allende, Isabel
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.Through her father's prescience, the family will come through that crisis unscathed, only to face a new one as the Great Depression transforms the genteel city life she has known. Her family loses everything and is forced to retreat to a wild and beautiful but remote part of the country. There, she will come of age, and her first suitor will come calling.She tells her story in the form of a letter to someone she loves above all others, recounting times of devastating heartbreak and passionate affairs, poverty and wealth, terrible loss and immense joy.
Publisher: n/a
|
9780593496206
|
Hardcover
Love in a Fallen City
By Chang, Eileen
A New York Review Books Original"[A] giant of modern Chinese literature" -The New York Times"With language as sharp as a knife edge, Eileen Chang cut open a huge divide in Chinese culture, between the classical patriarchy and our troubled modernity. She was one of the very few able truly to connect that divide, just as her heroines often disappeared inside it. She is the fallen angel of Chinese literature, and now, with these excellent new translations, English readers can discover why she is so revered by Chinese readers everywhere." -Ang LeeEileen Chang is one of the great writers of twentieth-century China, where she enjoys a passionate following both on the mainland and in Taiwan. At the heart of Chang's achievement is her short fiction - tales of love, longing, and the shifting and endlessly treacherous shoals of family life.
Publisher: n/a
|
9781681372440
|
eBook
The End of Days
By Erpenbeck, Jenny
Winner of the Presigious Hans Fallada Prize and a bestseller in Europe, The End of Days offers a unique view on twentieth-century German history.The End of Days, by acclaimed German writer Jenny Erpenbeck, consists essentially of five “books,” each leading to a different death of an unnamed woman protagonist. How could it all have gone differently? the narrator asks in the intermezzos between. The first chapter begins with the death of a baby in the early twentieth-century Hapsburg Empire. In the next chapter, the same girl grows up in Vienna, but her strange relationship with a boy leads to another death. In the next scenario, she survives adolescence and moves to Russia with her husband. Both are dedicated Communists, but our heroine is sent to a labor camp.
Publisher: n/a
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9780811221924
|
Hardcover
A Family Lexicon
By Ginzburg, Natalia
"Natalia Ginzburg, one of Italy's great writers, introduced A Family Lexicon, her most celebrated work, with an unusual disclaimer: "The places, events and people are all real. I have invented nothing. Every time that I have found myself inventing something in accordance with my old habits as a novelist, I have felt impelled at once to destroy everything thus invented." A Family Lexicon re-creates with extraordinary objectivity the small world of a family enduring some of the most difficult years of the twentieth century, the period from the rise of Mussolini through World War II (Ginzburg's first husband, who was a member of the resistance, was killed by the Nazis) and its immediate aftermath. Every family has its store of phrases and sayings by which it maintains its sense of what it means to be a family. Such sayings and stories lie at the heart of a great novel about family and history"--
Publisher: n/a
|
1590178386
|
Print book
Swallowing Mercury
By Grzegorzewska, Wioletta
"Enchantingly elliptical fiction debut that sparkles with a gem-like quality." - The Guardian"Shines with a surreal and unsettling vigour. As an award-winning poet, Greg writes with a lyricism that brings alive the charms and dangers of Wiola's life." - The Financial Times"Both magical and sinister, a memoir and a fairy tale and, like Wiola, completely captivating." - The Irish NewsWhile political change hums in the background, Wiola looks back on her youth in a close-knit agricultural community in 1980s Poland: the superstitions of the village women, rumored visits from the Pope, and the locked room in the dressmaker's house. In prose that sparkles with the comedy of daily life, Wioletta Greg's debut animates the strange wonders of growing up.
Publisher: n/a
|
9781846276071
|
Hardcover
Vagabonds
By Jingfang, Hao
A century after the Martian war of independence, a group of kids are sent to Earth as delegates from Mars, but when they return home, they are caught between the two worlds, unable to reconcile the beauty and culture of Mars with their experiences on Earth in this spellbinding novel from Hugo Award-winning author Hao Jingfang. This genre-bending novel is set on Earth in the wake of a second civil war ... not between two factions in one nation, but two factions in one solar system: Mars and Earth. In an attempt to repair increasing tensions, the colonies of Mars send a group of young people to live on Earth to help reconcile humanity. But the group finds itself with no real home, no friends, and fractured allegiances as they struggle to find a sense of community and identity, trapped between two worlds. Fans of Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go and Naomi Alderman's The Power will fall in love with this novel about lost innocence, an uncertain future, and never feeling at home, no matter where you are in the universe. Translated by Ken Liu, bestselling author of The Paper Menagerie and translator of Cixin Liu's The Three-Body Problem,Vagabonds is the first novel from Hao Jingfang, the first Chinese woman to ever win the esteemed Hugo Award.
Publisher: n/a
|
9781534422087
|
Hardcover
The Vegetarian
By Han, Kang
WINNER OF THE INTERNATIONAL BOOKER PRIZE * "[Han] Kang viscerally explores the limits of what a human brain and body can endure, and the strange beauty that can be found in even the most extreme forms of renunciation." - Entertainment Weekly "Ferocious." - The New York Times Book Review (Ten Best Books of the Year) "Both terrifying and terrific." - Lauren Groff"Provocative [and] shocking." - The Washington PostBefore the nightmares began, Yeong-hye and her husband lived an ordinary, controlled life. But the dreams - invasive images of blood and brutality - torture her, driving Yeong-hye to purge her mind and renounce eating meat altogether. Its a small act of independence, but it interrupts her marriage and sets into motion an increasingly grotesque chain of events at home. As her husband, her brother-in-law and sister each fight to reassert their control, Yeong-hye obsessively defends the choice thats become sacred to her. Soon their attempts turn desperate, subjecting first her mind, and then her body, to ever more intrusive and perverse violations, sending Yeong-hye spiraling into a dangerous, bizarre estrangement, not only from those closest to her, but also from herself. Celebrated by critics around the world, The Vegetarian is a darkly allegorical, Kafka-esque tale of power, obsession, and one womans struggle to break free from the violence both without and within her. One of the Best Books of the Year - BuzzFeed, Entertainment Weekly, Wall Street Journal, Time, Elle, The Economist, HuffPost, Slate, Bustle, The St. Louis Dispatch, Electric Literature, Publishers Weekly
Publisher: n/a
|
9780553448184
|
Paperback
First Person Singular
By Murakami, Haruki
The eight masterful stories in this new collection are all told in the first person by a classic Murakami narrator, a lonely man. Some of them (like "With the Beatles," "Cream" and "On a Stone Pillow") are nostalgic looks back at youth. Others are set in adulthood--"Charlie Parker Plays Bossa Nova," "Carnaval," "Confessions of a Shinagawa Monkey" and the title story, "First Person Singular." Occasionally, a narrator who may or may not be Haruki himself is present, as in "The Yakult Swallows Poetry Collection." Is it memoir or fiction? The reader decides. The stories touch beautifully on love and loss, childhood and death . . . all with a signature Murakami twist.
Publisher: n/a
|
9780385696142
|
Hardcover
Earthlings
By Murata, Sayaka
An otherworldly coming-of-age tale of a woman who believes she is an alien, from the author of the international sensation Convenience Store Woman.. Sayaka Muratas Convenience Store Woman was one of the most unusual and refreshing bestsellers of recent years, depicting the life of a thirty-six-year-old clerk in a Tokyo convenience store. Now, in Earthlings, Sayaka Murata pushes at the boundaries of our ideas of social conformity in this brilliantly imaginative, intense, and absolutely unforgettable novel.. As a child, Natsuki doesnt fit in with her family. Her parents favor her sister, and her best friend is a plush toy hedgehog named Piyyut, who talks to her. He tells her that he has come from the planet Popinpobopia on a special quest to help her save the Earth. One summer, on vacation with her family and her cousin Yuu in her grandparents ramshackle wooden house in the mountains of Nagano, Natsuki decides that she must be an alien, which would explain why she cant seem to fit in like everyone else. Later, as a grown woman, living a quiet life with her asexual husband, Natsuki is still pursued by dark shadows from her childhood, and decides to flee the "baby factory" of society for good, searching for answers about the vast and frightening mysteries of the universe - answers only Natsuki has the power to uncover.. Dreamlike, sometimes shocking, and always strange and wonderful, Earthlings asks what it means to be happy in a stifling world, and cements Sayaka Muratas status as a master chronicler of the outsider experience and our own uncanny universe.. Praise for Earthlings. A New York Times Book Review Editors Choice Named a Best Book of the Year by the New York Times, TIME and Literary Hub Named a Most Anticipated Book by the New York Times, TIME, USA Today, Entertainment Weekly, the Guardian, Vulture, Wired, Literary Hub, Bustle, PopSugar, and Refinery29. "Intimate, deadpan, and unflinchingly unhinged. . . . Exceptionally fun. . . . Amid all the hedgehog and alien talk is a novel that asks how happiness and freedom can be possible inside a stiflingly anxious world, and its answers, while grotesque, are worth reading." - Wired. "If youre in the mood for weird, Sayaka Murata is always a reliable place to turn. . . . [Earthlings] centers on Natsuki, a character whose story begins in childhood with her cousin in the mountains and spirals ever more darkly (and bizarrely) into adulthood and its many strange reckonings. This is a story thats best not to spoil, but it will get into your head." - Seattle Times. "Its the books visceral, grim savagery, and those final shocking pages, that makes this such a vital, powerful novel. . . . Earthlings is the sort of challenging, confronting fiction that wakes you up with a jolt and leaves a lasting impression." - Locus
Publisher: n/a
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9780802157003
|
Hardcover
The Cat Who Saved Books
By Natsukawa, Sosuke
Bookish high school student Rintaro Natsuki is about to close the secondhand bookstore he inherited from his beloved bookworm grandfather. Then, a talking cat named Tiger appears with an unusual request. The feline asks for - or rather, demands - the teenager's help in saving books with him. The world is full of lonely books left unread and unloved, and Tiger and Rintaro must liberate them from their neglectful owners. Their mission sends this odd couple on an amazing journey, where they enter different mazes to set books free. Through their travels, Tiger and Rintaro meet a man who leaves his books to perish on a bookshelf, an unwitting book torturer who cuts the pages of books into snippets to help people speed read, and a publishing drone who only wants to create bestsellers.
Publisher: n/a
|
9780063095724
|
Book
The Memory Police
By Ogawa, Yoko
A haunting Orwellian novel about the terrors of state surveillance, from the acclaimed author of The Housekeeper and the Professor.On an unnamed island off an unnamed coast, objects are disappearing: first hats, then ribbons, birds, roses - until things become much more serious. Most of the island's inhabitants are oblivious to these changes, while those few imbued with the power to recall the lost objects live in fear of the draconian Memory Police, who are committed to ensuring that what has disappeared remains forgotten.When a young woman who is struggling to maintain her career as a novelist discovers that her editor is in danger from the Memory Police, she concocts a plan to hide him beneath her floorboards. As fear and loss close in around them, they cling to her wiring as the last way of preserving the past.A surreal, provocative fable about the power of memory and the trauma of loss, The Memory Police is a stunning new work from one of the most exciting contemporary authors writing in any language.
Publisher: n/a
|
9781101870600
|
Hardcover
Frankenstein in Baghdad
By Saadawi, Ahmed
A prizewinning novel of literary horror from war-torn Iraq - and the debut in English of "Baghdad's new literary star" (The New York Times) From the rubble-strewn streets of U.S.-occupied Baghdad, Hadi - a scavenger and an oddball fixture at a local caf - collects human body parts and stitches them together to create a corpse. His goal, he claims, is for the government to recognize the parts as people and to give them proper burial. But when the corpse goes missing, a wave of eerie murders sweeps the city, and reports stream in of a horrendous-looking criminal who, though shot, cannot be killed. Hadi soon realizes he's created a monster, one that needs human flesh to survive - first from the guilty, and then from anyone in its path. An extraordinary achievement, at once horrific and blackly humorous, Frankenstein in Baghdad captures the surreal reality of contemporary Baghdad.
Publisher: n/a
|
9780143128793
|
Paperback
Fever Dream
By Schweblin, Samanta
"Samanta Schweblin's electric story reads like a Fever Dream." - Vanity Fair"Genius." - Jia Tolentino, The New Yorker A young woman named Amanda lies dying in a rural hospital clinic. A boy named David sits beside her. She's not his mother. He's not her child. Together, they tell a haunting story of broken souls, toxins, and the power and desperation of family. Fever Dream is a nightmare come to life, a ghost story for the real world, a love story and a cautionary tale. One of the freshest new voices to come out of the Spanish language and translated into English for the first time, Samanta Schweblin creates an aura of strange psychological menace and otherworldly reality in this absorbing, unsettling, taut novel.
Publisher: n/a
|
9780399184598
|
Print book
The Remainder
By Zeran, Alia Trabucco
Felipe and Iquela, two young friends in modern day Santiago, live in the legacy of Chile's dictatorship. Felipe prowls the streets counting dead bodies real and imagined, aspiring to a perfect number that might offer closure. Iquela and Paloma, an old acquaintance from Iquela's childhood, search for a way to reconcile their fragile lives with their parents' violent militant past. The body of Paloma's mother gets lost in transit, sending the three on a pisco-fueled journey up the cordillera as they confront the pain that stretches across generations.
Publisher: n/a
|
9781566895507
|
Paperback
The Frightened Ones
By Wannous, Dima
In her therapist's waiting room in Damascus, Suleima meets a strange and reticent man named Naseem, and they soon begin a tense affair. But when Naseem, a writer, flees Syria for Germany, he sends Suleima the unfinished manuscript of his novel. To Suleima's surprise, she and the novel's protagonist are uncannily similar. As she reads, Suleima's past overwhelms her and she has no idea what to trust--Naseem's pages, her own memory, or nothing at all? Narrated in alternating chapters by Suleima and the mysterious woman portrayed in Naseem's novel, The Frightened Ones is a boundary-blurring, radical examination of the effects of oppression on one's sense of identity, the effects of collective trauma, and a moving window into life inside Assad's Syria.
Celestial Bodies
By Alharthi, Jokha
Winner of the 2019 Man Booker International PrizeIn the village of al-Awafi in Oman, we encounter three sisters: Mayya, who marries after a heartbreak; Asma, who marries from a sense of duty; and Khawla, who chooses to refuse all offers and await a reunion with the man she loves, who has emigrated to Canada.These three women and their families, their losses and loves, unspool beautifully against a backdrop of a rapidly changing Oman, a country evolving from a traditional, slave-owning society into its complex present. Through the sisters, we glimpse a society in all its degrees, from the very poorest of the local slave families to those making money through the advent of new wealth.The first novel originally written in Arabic to ever win the Man Booker International Prize, and the first book by a female Omani author to be translated into English, Celestial Bodies marks the arrival in the United States of a major international writer.
Violeta
By Allende, Isabel
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.Through her father's prescience, the family will come through that crisis unscathed, only to face a new one as the Great Depression transforms the genteel city life she has known. Her family loses everything and is forced to retreat to a wild and beautiful but remote part of the country. There, she will come of age, and her first suitor will come calling.She tells her story in the form of a letter to someone she loves above all others, recounting times of devastating heartbreak and passionate affairs, poverty and wealth, terrible loss and immense joy.
Love in a Fallen City
By Chang, Eileen
A New York Review Books Original"[A] giant of modern Chinese literature" -The New York Times"With language as sharp as a knife edge, Eileen Chang cut open a huge divide in Chinese culture, between the classical patriarchy and our troubled modernity. She was one of the very few able truly to connect that divide, just as her heroines often disappeared inside it. She is the fallen angel of Chinese literature, and now, with these excellent new translations, English readers can discover why she is so revered by Chinese readers everywhere." -Ang LeeEileen Chang is one of the great writers of twentieth-century China, where she enjoys a passionate following both on the mainland and in Taiwan. At the heart of Chang's achievement is her short fiction - tales of love, longing, and the shifting and endlessly treacherous shoals of family life.
The End of Days
By Erpenbeck, Jenny
Winner of the Presigious Hans Fallada Prize and a bestseller in Europe, The End of Days offers a unique view on twentieth-century German history.The End of Days, by acclaimed German writer Jenny Erpenbeck, consists essentially of five “books,” each leading to a different death of an unnamed woman protagonist. How could it all have gone differently? the narrator asks in the intermezzos between. The first chapter begins with the death of a baby in the early twentieth-century Hapsburg Empire. In the next chapter, the same girl grows up in Vienna, but her strange relationship with a boy leads to another death. In the next scenario, she survives adolescence and moves to Russia with her husband. Both are dedicated Communists, but our heroine is sent to a labor camp.
A Family Lexicon
By Ginzburg, Natalia
"Natalia Ginzburg, one of Italy's great writers, introduced A Family Lexicon, her most celebrated work, with an unusual disclaimer: "The places, events and people are all real. I have invented nothing. Every time that I have found myself inventing something in accordance with my old habits as a novelist, I have felt impelled at once to destroy everything thus invented." A Family Lexicon re-creates with extraordinary objectivity the small world of a family enduring some of the most difficult years of the twentieth century, the period from the rise of Mussolini through World War II (Ginzburg's first husband, who was a member of the resistance, was killed by the Nazis) and its immediate aftermath. Every family has its store of phrases and sayings by which it maintains its sense of what it means to be a family. Such sayings and stories lie at the heart of a great novel about family and history"--
Swallowing Mercury
By Grzegorzewska, Wioletta
"Enchantingly elliptical fiction debut that sparkles with a gem-like quality." - The Guardian"Shines with a surreal and unsettling vigour. As an award-winning poet, Greg writes with a lyricism that brings alive the charms and dangers of Wiola's life." - The Financial Times"Both magical and sinister, a memoir and a fairy tale and, like Wiola, completely captivating." - The Irish NewsWhile political change hums in the background, Wiola looks back on her youth in a close-knit agricultural community in 1980s Poland: the superstitions of the village women, rumored visits from the Pope, and the locked room in the dressmaker's house. In prose that sparkles with the comedy of daily life, Wioletta Greg's debut animates the strange wonders of growing up.
Vagabonds
By Jingfang, Hao
A century after the Martian war of independence, a group of kids are sent to Earth as delegates from Mars, but when they return home, they are caught between the two worlds, unable to reconcile the beauty and culture of Mars with their experiences on Earth in this spellbinding novel from Hugo Award-winning author Hao Jingfang. This genre-bending novel is set on Earth in the wake of a second civil war ... not between two factions in one nation, but two factions in one solar system: Mars and Earth. In an attempt to repair increasing tensions, the colonies of Mars send a group of young people to live on Earth to help reconcile humanity. But the group finds itself with no real home, no friends, and fractured allegiances as they struggle to find a sense of community and identity, trapped between two worlds. Fans of Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go and Naomi Alderman's The Power will fall in love with this novel about lost innocence, an uncertain future, and never feeling at home, no matter where you are in the universe. Translated by Ken Liu, bestselling author of The Paper Menagerie and translator of Cixin Liu's The Three-Body Problem, Vagabonds is the first novel from Hao Jingfang, the first Chinese woman to ever win the esteemed Hugo Award.
The Vegetarian
By Han, Kang
WINNER OF THE INTERNATIONAL BOOKER PRIZE * "[Han] Kang viscerally explores the limits of what a human brain and body can endure, and the strange beauty that can be found in even the most extreme forms of renunciation." - Entertainment Weekly "Ferocious." - The New York Times Book Review (Ten Best Books of the Year) "Both terrifying and terrific." - Lauren Groff"Provocative [and] shocking." - The Washington PostBefore the nightmares began, Yeong-hye and her husband lived an ordinary, controlled life. But the dreams - invasive images of blood and brutality - torture her, driving Yeong-hye to purge her mind and renounce eating meat altogether. Its a small act of independence, but it interrupts her marriage and sets into motion an increasingly grotesque chain of events at home. As her husband, her brother-in-law and sister each fight to reassert their control, Yeong-hye obsessively defends the choice thats become sacred to her. Soon their attempts turn desperate, subjecting first her mind, and then her body, to ever more intrusive and perverse violations, sending Yeong-hye spiraling into a dangerous, bizarre estrangement, not only from those closest to her, but also from herself. Celebrated by critics around the world, The Vegetarian is a darkly allegorical, Kafka-esque tale of power, obsession, and one womans struggle to break free from the violence both without and within her. One of the Best Books of the Year - BuzzFeed, Entertainment Weekly, Wall Street Journal, Time, Elle, The Economist, HuffPost, Slate, Bustle, The St. Louis Dispatch, Electric Literature, Publishers Weekly
First Person Singular
By Murakami, Haruki
The eight masterful stories in this new collection are all told in the first person by a classic Murakami narrator, a lonely man. Some of them (like "With the Beatles," "Cream" and "On a Stone Pillow") are nostalgic looks back at youth. Others are set in adulthood--"Charlie Parker Plays Bossa Nova," "Carnaval," "Confessions of a Shinagawa Monkey" and the title story, "First Person Singular." Occasionally, a narrator who may or may not be Haruki himself is present, as in "The Yakult Swallows Poetry Collection." Is it memoir or fiction? The reader decides. The stories touch beautifully on love and loss, childhood and death . . . all with a signature Murakami twist.
Earthlings
By Murata, Sayaka
An otherworldly coming-of-age tale of a woman who believes she is an alien, from the author of the international sensation Convenience Store Woman.. Sayaka Muratas Convenience Store Woman was one of the most unusual and refreshing bestsellers of recent years, depicting the life of a thirty-six-year-old clerk in a Tokyo convenience store. Now, in Earthlings, Sayaka Murata pushes at the boundaries of our ideas of social conformity in this brilliantly imaginative, intense, and absolutely unforgettable novel.. As a child, Natsuki doesnt fit in with her family. Her parents favor her sister, and her best friend is a plush toy hedgehog named Piyyut, who talks to her. He tells her that he has come from the planet Popinpobopia on a special quest to help her save the Earth. One summer, on vacation with her family and her cousin Yuu in her grandparents ramshackle wooden house in the mountains of Nagano, Natsuki decides that she must be an alien, which would explain why she cant seem to fit in like everyone else. Later, as a grown woman, living a quiet life with her asexual husband, Natsuki is still pursued by dark shadows from her childhood, and decides to flee the "baby factory" of society for good, searching for answers about the vast and frightening mysteries of the universe - answers only Natsuki has the power to uncover.. Dreamlike, sometimes shocking, and always strange and wonderful, Earthlings asks what it means to be happy in a stifling world, and cements Sayaka Muratas status as a master chronicler of the outsider experience and our own uncanny universe.. Praise for Earthlings. A New York Times Book Review Editors Choice Named a Best Book of the Year by the New York Times, TIME and Literary Hub Named a Most Anticipated Book by the New York Times, TIME, USA Today, Entertainment Weekly, the Guardian, Vulture, Wired, Literary Hub, Bustle, PopSugar, and Refinery29. "Intimate, deadpan, and unflinchingly unhinged. . . . Exceptionally fun. . . . Amid all the hedgehog and alien talk is a novel that asks how happiness and freedom can be possible inside a stiflingly anxious world, and its answers, while grotesque, are worth reading." - Wired. "If youre in the mood for weird, Sayaka Murata is always a reliable place to turn. . . . [Earthlings] centers on Natsuki, a character whose story begins in childhood with her cousin in the mountains and spirals ever more darkly (and bizarrely) into adulthood and its many strange reckonings. This is a story thats best not to spoil, but it will get into your head." - Seattle Times. "Its the books visceral, grim savagery, and those final shocking pages, that makes this such a vital, powerful novel. . . . Earthlings is the sort of challenging, confronting fiction that wakes you up with a jolt and leaves a lasting impression." - Locus
The Cat Who Saved Books
By Natsukawa, Sosuke
Bookish high school student Rintaro Natsuki is about to close the secondhand bookstore he inherited from his beloved bookworm grandfather. Then, a talking cat named Tiger appears with an unusual request. The feline asks for - or rather, demands - the teenager's help in saving books with him. The world is full of lonely books left unread and unloved, and Tiger and Rintaro must liberate them from their neglectful owners. Their mission sends this odd couple on an amazing journey, where they enter different mazes to set books free. Through their travels, Tiger and Rintaro meet a man who leaves his books to perish on a bookshelf, an unwitting book torturer who cuts the pages of books into snippets to help people speed read, and a publishing drone who only wants to create bestsellers.
The Memory Police
By Ogawa, Yoko
A haunting Orwellian novel about the terrors of state surveillance, from the acclaimed author of The Housekeeper and the Professor.On an unnamed island off an unnamed coast, objects are disappearing: first hats, then ribbons, birds, roses - until things become much more serious. Most of the island's inhabitants are oblivious to these changes, while those few imbued with the power to recall the lost objects live in fear of the draconian Memory Police, who are committed to ensuring that what has disappeared remains forgotten.When a young woman who is struggling to maintain her career as a novelist discovers that her editor is in danger from the Memory Police, she concocts a plan to hide him beneath her floorboards. As fear and loss close in around them, they cling to her wiring as the last way of preserving the past.A surreal, provocative fable about the power of memory and the trauma of loss, The Memory Police is a stunning new work from one of the most exciting contemporary authors writing in any language.
Frankenstein in Baghdad
By Saadawi, Ahmed
A prizewinning novel of literary horror from war-torn Iraq - and the debut in English of "Baghdad's new literary star" (The New York Times) From the rubble-strewn streets of U.S.-occupied Baghdad, Hadi - a scavenger and an oddball fixture at a local caf - collects human body parts and stitches them together to create a corpse. His goal, he claims, is for the government to recognize the parts as people and to give them proper burial. But when the corpse goes missing, a wave of eerie murders sweeps the city, and reports stream in of a horrendous-looking criminal who, though shot, cannot be killed. Hadi soon realizes he's created a monster, one that needs human flesh to survive - first from the guilty, and then from anyone in its path. An extraordinary achievement, at once horrific and blackly humorous, Frankenstein in Baghdad captures the surreal reality of contemporary Baghdad.
Fever Dream
By Schweblin, Samanta
"Samanta Schweblin's electric story reads like a Fever Dream." - Vanity Fair"Genius." - Jia Tolentino, The New Yorker A young woman named Amanda lies dying in a rural hospital clinic. A boy named David sits beside her. She's not his mother. He's not her child. Together, they tell a haunting story of broken souls, toxins, and the power and desperation of family. Fever Dream is a nightmare come to life, a ghost story for the real world, a love story and a cautionary tale. One of the freshest new voices to come out of the Spanish language and translated into English for the first time, Samanta Schweblin creates an aura of strange psychological menace and otherworldly reality in this absorbing, unsettling, taut novel.
The Remainder
By Zeran, Alia Trabucco
Felipe and Iquela, two young friends in modern day Santiago, live in the legacy of Chile's dictatorship. Felipe prowls the streets counting dead bodies real and imagined, aspiring to a perfect number that might offer closure. Iquela and Paloma, an old acquaintance from Iquela's childhood, search for a way to reconcile their fragile lives with their parents' violent militant past. The body of Paloma's mother gets lost in transit, sending the three on a pisco-fueled journey up the cordillera as they confront the pain that stretches across generations.
The Frightened Ones
By Wannous, Dima
In her therapist's waiting room in Damascus, Suleima meets a strange and reticent man named Naseem, and they soon begin a tense affair. But when Naseem, a writer, flees Syria for Germany, he sends Suleima the unfinished manuscript of his novel. To Suleima's surprise, she and the novel's protagonist are uncannily similar. As she reads, Suleima's past overwhelms her and she has no idea what to trust--Naseem's pages, her own memory, or nothing at all? Narrated in alternating chapters by Suleima and the mysterious woman portrayed in Naseem's novel, The Frightened Ones is a boundary-blurring, radical examination of the effects of oppression on one's sense of identity, the effects of collective trauma, and a moving window into life inside Assad's Syria.