Nobel Laureates

Set in Southern Rhodesia under white rule, Doris Lessing's first novel is at once a riveting chronicle of human disintegration, a beautifully understated social critique, and a brilliant depiction of the quiet horror of one woman's struggle against a ruthless fate.Mary Turner is a self-confident, independent young woman who becomes the depressed, frustrated wife of an ineffectual, unsuccessful farmer. Little by little the ennui of years on the farm works its slow poison. Mary's despair progresses until the fateful arrival of Moses, an enigmatic, virile black servant. Locked in anguish, Mary and Moses—master and slave—are trapped in a web of mounting attraction and repulsion, until their psychic tension explodes with devastating consequences.

One Man’s Bible enhances the reputation of Nobel Prize–winning Gao Xingjian, whose first novel, Soul Mountain, was a national bestseller.One Man’s Bible is a fictionalized account of Gao Xingjian’s life under the oppressive totalitarian regime of Mao Tse-tung during the period of the Cultural Revolution and its aftermath.Whether in the “beehive” offices in Beijing or in isolated rural towns, daily life everywhere is riddled with paranoia and fear, as revolutionaries, counter-revolutionaries, and government propaganda turn citizens against one another.It is a place where a single sentence spoken ten years earlier can make one an enemy of the state.Gao evokes the spiritual torture of political and intellectual repression in graphic detail, including the heartbreaking betrayals he suffers in his relationships with women and men alike.One Man’s Bible is a profound meditation on the essence of writing, on exile, on the effects of political oppression on the human spirit, and how the human spirit can triumph.Endorsements“Courageous … One Man’s Bible is driven by the sweeping panorama of history and the suffering and reconciliation that underlie it.” — Washington Post Book World

Since 1982, J. M. Coetzee has been dazzling the literary world. After eight novels that have won, among other awards, two Booker Prizes, and most recently, the Nobel Prize, J. M. Coetzee has once again crafted an unusual and deeply affecting tale. Told through an ingenious series of formal addresses, Elizabeth Costello is, on the surface, the story of a woman's life as a mother, sister, lover, and writer. Yet it is also a profound and haunting meditation on the nature of storytelling.

On April 26, 1986, the worst nuclear reactor accident in history occurred in Chernobyl and contaminated as much as three quarters of Europe. Voices from Chernobyl is the first book to present personal accounts of the tragedy. Journalist Svetlana Alexievich interviewed hundreds of people affected by the meltdown—from innocent citizens to firefighters to those called in to clean up the disaster—and their stories reveal the fear, anger, and uncertainty with which they still live. Composed of interviews in monologue form, Voices from Chernobyl is a crucially important work of immense force, unforgettable in its emotional power and honesty.EndorsementsWritten by the winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature

Peter Handke tells the story of a woman determined to break with her husband and her past and to form a new life for herself. Marianne, a mother and hausfrau in her thirtieth year, begins to examine her life keeping house in the suburbs of a large industrial city in West Germany.

The only novel from Alice Munro — award-winning author of The Love of a Good Woman — is an insightful, honest book—"autobiographical in form but not in fact"—that chronicles a young girl's growing up in rural Ontario in the 1940s.Del Jordan lives out at the end of the Flats Road on her father's fox farm, where her most frequent companions are an eccentric bachelor who is a family friend and her rough younger brother. When she begins spending more time in town, she is surrounded by women — her mother, an agnostic, opinionated woman who sells encyclopedias to local farmers; her mother's boarder, the lusty Fern Dogherty; and her best friend, Naomi, with whom she shares the frustrations and unbridled glee of adolescence.Through these unwitting mentors and in her own encounters with sex, birth, and death, Del explores the dark and bright sides of womanhood. All along she remains a wise, witty observer and recorder of truths in small-town life. The result is a powerful, moving, and humorous demonstration of Alice Munro's unparalleled awareness of the lives of girls and women.

The maze of human memory—the ways in which we accommodate and alter it, deceive and deliver ourselves with it—is territory that Kazuo Ishiguro has made his own. In his previous novels, he has explored this inner world and its manifestations in the lives of his characters with rare inventiveness and subtlety, shrewd humor and insight. In When We Were Orphans, his first novel in five years, he returns to this terrain in a brilliantly realized story that illuminates the power of one's past to determine the present.Christopher Banks, an English boy born in early-twentieth-century Shanghai, is orphaned at age nine when his mother and father both vanish under suspicious circumstances. Sent to live in England, he grows up to become a renowned detective and, more than twenty years later, returns to Shanghai, where the Sino-Japanese War is raging, to solve the mystery of the disappearances.The story is straightforward. Its telling is remarkable. Christopher's voice is controlled, detailed, and detached, its precision unsurprising in someone who has devoted his life to the examination of details and the rigors of objective thought. But within the layers of his narrative is slowly revealed what he can't, or won't, see: that his memory, despite what he wants to believe, is not unaffected by his childhood tragedies; that his powers of perception, the heralded clarity of his vision, can be blinding as well as enlightening; and that the simplest desires—a child's for his parents, a man's for understanding—may give rise to the most complicated truths.A masterful combination of narrative control and soaring imagination, When We Were Orphans is Kazuo Ishiguro at his best.

In the mid-eighteenth century, as new ideas—and a new unrest—begin to sweep the Continent, a young Jew of mysterious origins arrives in a village in Poland. Before long, he has changed not only his name but his persona; visited by what seem to be ecstatic experiences, Jacob Frank casts a charismatic spell that attracts an increasingly fervent following. In the decade to come, Frank will traverse the Hapsburg and Ottoman empires with throngs of disciples in his thrall as he reinvents himself again and again, converts to Islam and then Catholicism, is pilloried as a heretic and revered as the Messiah, and wreaks havoc on the conventional order, Jewish and Christian alike, with scandalous rumors of his sect’s secret rituals and the spread of his increasingly iconoclastic beliefs. The story of Frank—a real historical figure around whom mystery and controversy swirl to this day—is the perfect canvas for the genius and unparalleled reach of Olga Tokarczuk. Narrated through the perspectives of his contemporaries—those who revere him, those who revile him, the friend who betrays him, the lone woman who sees him for what he is—The Books of Jacob captures a world on the cusp of precipitous change, searching for certainty and longing for transcendence.In a nod to books written in Hebrew, The Books of Jacob is paginated in reverse, beginning on p. 955 and ending on p. 1 – but read traditionally, front cover to back.

“I’d come from a long ways off and had started a long ways down. But now destiny was about to manifest itself. I felt like it was looking right at me and nobody else.”So writes Bob Dylan in Chronicles: Volume One, his remarkable book exploring critical junctures in his life and career. Through Dylan’s eyes and open mind, we see Greenwich Village, circa 1961, when he first arrives in Manhattan. Dylan’s New York is a magical city of possibilities—smoky, nightlong parties; literary awakenings; transient loves and unbreakable friendships. Elegiac observations are punctuated by jabs of memories, penetrating and tough. With the book’s side trips to New Orleans, Woodstock, Minnesota, and points west, Chronicles: Volume One is an intimate and intensely personal recollection of extraordinary times.By turns revealing, poetical, passionate, and witty, Chronicles: Volume One is a mesmerizing window on Bob Dylan’s thoughts and influences. Dylan’s voice is distinctively American: generous of spirit, engaged, fanciful, and rhythmic. Utilizing his unparalleled gifts of storytelling and the exquisite expressiveness that are the hallmarks of his music, Bob Dylan turns Chronicles: Volume One into a poignant reflection on life, and the people and places that helped shape the man and the art.The celebrated first memoir from arguably the most influential singer-songwriter in the country, Bob Dylan.EndorsementsWinner of the Nobel Prize in Literature

The Land of Green Plums is the story of a group of young people in Nicolae Ceausescu's Romania. Having left their impoverished villages for university in search of education and camaraderie but largely unprepared for urban life by their provincial childhoods, the youths quickly find their hopes dashed: the city, no less than the countryside, bears the mark of the dictator's corrosive touch. Eventually, the friends betray each other and themselves: as they do, we see the way the totalitarian state comes to inhabit every human realm and how everyone, even the strongest, must either bend to the oppressors or resist them and thereby perish.

The elegant, haunting story of the forgotten people and places of Paris from the reigning Nobel Laureate.Four narrators, a student from a café, a private detective hired by an aggrieved husband, the heroine herself and one of her lovers, construct a portrait of Jacqueline Delanque, otherwise known as Louki.The daughter of a single mother who works in the Moulin Rouge, Louki grows up in poverty in Montmartre. Her one attempt to escape her background fails when she is rejected from the Lycée Jules-Ferry. She meanders on through life, into a cocaine habit, and begins frequenting the Café Condé, whose regulars call her "Louki". She drifts into marriage with a real estate agency director, but finds no satisfaction with him or his friends and so makes the simple decision not to return to him one evening. She turns instead to a young man almost as aimless and adrift as she, but who perhaps loves her all the same.Ever-present through this story is the city of Paris, almost another character in her own right. This is the Paris of 'no-man's-lands', of lonely journeys on the last metro, or nocturnal walks along empty boulevards; of cafés where the lost youth wander in, searching for meaning, and the older generation sift through their memories of their own long-gone adolescence.

Orhan Pamuk was born in Istanbul and still lives in the family apartment building where his mother first held him in her arms. His portrait of his city is thus also a self-portrait, refracted by memory and the melancholy — or hüzün — that all Istanbullus share: the sadness that comes of living amid the ruins of a lost empire.With cinematic fluidity, Pamuk moves from his glamorous, unhappy parents to the gorgeous, decrepit mansions overlooking the Bosphorus; from the dawning of his self-consciousness to the writers and painters — both Turkish and foreign — who would shape his consciousness of his city.A shimmering evocation, by turns intimate and panoramic, of one of the world’s great cities, by its foremost writer. Like Joyce’s Dublin and Borges’ Buenos Aires, Pamuk’s Istanbul is a triumphant encounter of place and sensibility, beautifully written and immensely moving.

"No!" is the first word of this haunting novel. It is how a middle-aged Hungarian-Jewish writer answers an acquaintance who asks him if he has a child, and it is how he answered his wife years earlier when she told him that she wanted one. The loss, longing and regret that haunt the years between these two "No!"s give rise to one of the most eloquent meditations ever written on the Holocaust. As Kertész's narrator addresses the child he couldn't bear to bring into the world, he takes readers on a mesmerising, lyrical journey through his life, from his childhood to Auschwitz to his failed marriage.Endorsements"A fine and powerful piece of work… Dark, at times cryptic, and hugely energetic" — Irish Times

While he was still a little boy, Ilyas was stolen from his parents by the German colonial troops. After years away, fighting in a war against his own people, he returns to his village to find his parents gone, and his sister Afiya given away.Another young man returns at the same time. Hamza was not stolen for the war, but sold into it; he has grown up at the right hand of an officer whose protection has marked his life. With nothing but the clothes on his back, he seeks only work and security — and the love of the beautiful Afiya.As fate knots these young people together, as they live and work and fall in love, the shadow of a new war on another continent lengthens and darkens, ready to snatch them up and carry them away…

The contemporary Swedish poet Tomas Tranströmer is a recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature and has a prestigious worldwide reputation. Robert Bly, a longtime friend and confidant of Tranströmer's, as well as one of his first translators, has carefully chosen and translated the finest of Tranströmer's poems to create this cherished and invaluable collection.EndorsementsFrom the Winner of the 2011 Nobel Prize in Literature

Stripped of his possessions and executed as a result of Mao's Land Reform Movement in 1948, benevolent landowner Ximen Nao finds himself endlessly tortured in Hell before he is systematically reborn on Earth as each of the animals in the Chinese zodiac.

In 1963, Annie Ernaux, 23 and unattached, realizes she is pregnant. Shame arises in her like a plague: Understanding that her pregnancy will mark her and her family as social failures, she knows she cannot keep that child.This is the story, written forty years later, of a trauma Ernaux never overcame. In a France where abortion was illegal, she attempted, in vain, to self-administer the abortion with a knitting needle. Fearful and desperate, she finally located an abortionist, and ends up in a hospital emergency ward where she nearly dies.In Happening, Ernaux sifts through her memories and her journal entries dating from those days. Clearly, cleanly, she gleans the meanings of her experience.EndorsementsNow an award-winning film by Audrey DiwanWinner of the Golden Lion at the Venice International Film FestivalOfficial Selection of the Sundance Film Festival

Young Nour is a North African desert tribesman. It is 1909, and as the First World War looms, Nour's tribe — the Blue Men — are forced from their lands by French colonial invaders. Spurred on by thirst, hunger, and suffering, they seek guidance from a great spiritual leader. The holy man sends them even further from home, on an epic journey northward in the hope of finding a land in which they can again be free. Decades later, an orphaned descendant of the Blue Men — a girl called Lalla — is living in a shantytown on the coast of Morocco. Lalla has inherited both the pride and the resilience of her tribe, and she will need them as she makes a bid to escape her forced marriage to a wealthy older man. She flees to Marseille, where she experiences both the hardships of immigrant life as a hotel maid and the material prosperity of those who succeed when she becomes a successful model. And yet Lalla does not betray the legacy of her ancestors.

A man starts driving without knowing where he is going. He alternates between turning right and left, and ultimately finds himself stuck at the end of a forest road. It soon grows dark and begins to snow. But instead of searching for help, he ventures, foolishly, into the dark forest. Inevitably, the man gets lost, and as he grows cold and tired, he encounters a glowing being amid the obscurity.Strange, haunting and dreamlike. A Shining is the latest work of fiction by Jon Fosse.Endorsements“the Beckett of the twenty-first century” — Le MondeJon Fosse — National Book Award finalist

Mario Vargas Llosa's brilliant, multilayered novel is set in Lima, Peru, during the author's youth, where a young student named Marito is toiling away in the news department of a local radio station.His young life is disrupted by two arrivals. The first is his aunt Julia, recently divorced and thirteen years older, with whom he begins a secret affair. The second is a manic radio scriptwriter named Pedro Camacho, whose racy, vituperative soap operas are holding the city's listeners in thrall. Pedro chooses young Marito to be his confidant as he slowly goes insane.Interweaving the story of Marito's life with the ever-more-fevered tales of Pedro Camacho, Vargas Llosa's novel is hilarious, mischievous, and masterful.EndorsementsNamed one of the best books of the year — New York Times Book Review.

He was struck again and again by the wonder of being in his own house, the audacity of it: to walk in through his own front gate, to bar entry to whoever he wished, to close his doors and windows every night.Mr. Biswas has been told since the day of his birth that misfortune will follow him — and so it has. Meaning only to avoid punishment, he causes the death of his father and the dissolution of his family. Wanting simply to flirt with a beautiful woman, he ends up marrying her, and reluctantly relying on her domineering family for support. But in spite of endless setbacks, Mr. Biswas is determined to achieve independence, and so he begins his gruelling struggle to buy a home of his own.Heart-rending and darkly comic, it has been hailed as one of the twentieth century's finest novels, a classic that evokes a man's quest for autonomy against the backdrop of post-colonial Trinidad.EndorsementsA House for Mr. Biswas is Nobel Prize in Literature winner V. S. Naipaul's unforgettable masterpiece.'A work of great comic power qualified with firm and unsentimental compassion' — Anthony Burgess'A marvellous prose epic that matches the best nineteenth-century novels' — Newsweek

Already famous as the inspiration for the filmmaker Béla Tarr’s six-hour masterpiece, Satantango.The story of Satantango, spread over a couple of days of endless rain, focuses on the dozen remaining inhabitants of an unnamed isolated hamlet: failures stuck in the middle of nowhere.Schemes, crimes, infidelities, hopes of escape, and above all trust and its constant betrayal are Krasznahorkai’s meat.“You know,” Mrs. Schmidt, a pivotal character, tipsily confides, “dance is my one weakness.”Endorsements“At the center of Satantango is the eponymous drunken dance, referred to here sometimes as a tango and sometimes as a csardas. It takes place at the local inn where everyone is drunk... Their world is rough and ready, lost somewhere between the comic and the tragic, in one small insignificant corner of the cosmos. Theirs is the dance of death.” — George Szirtes

Yeong-hye and her husband are ordinary people — a dutiful wife and a mild-mannered office worker. One day, prompted by grotesque recurring nightmares, Yeong-hye decides to become a vegetarian. But in South Korea, where vegetarianism is almost unheard-of and societal mores are strictly obeyed, it is a shocking act of subversion.Yeong-hye's passive rebellion rapidly manifests in ever more bizarre and frightening forms, from sexual sadism to attempted suicide, and in increasingly erotic and unhinged artworks, as she spirals further into her fantasies.Disturbing and beautiful by turns, The Vegetarian is a revelatory novel about modern-day South Korea: a tale of shame, desire, and our faltering attempts to understand others.EndorsementsWinner of the International Booker Prize.A strange, painfully tender exploration of the brutality of desire indulged and the fatality of desire ignored... Exquisite — Eimear McBride