Short Reads

New Year’s Eve. The last day of the last year of human existence.A high-ranking minister criss-crosses the city with blood on his hands, a dying necrophile attempts to go clean before God, and a traumatized nurse is pressured into keeping a powerful secret. With undisguised glee, a nameless narrator unravels these twisted tales of moral turmoil, all of which are brought to an abrupt close by a cataclysmic collision of time and space. What will remain on New Year’s Day? In a cabin in the Alps, the last people on earth – a musicologist and her young daughter – search for a five-hundred-year-old musical score that might explain the catastrophe. Outside the cabin, hidden in shadow, a sinister figure waits for them to accept their fate.With dark humour and remorselessness reminiscent of Thomas Bernhard and Pier Paolo Pasolini, Anomaly is an exhilarating, provocative carnival of a novel, from one of Europe’s most distinctive literary voices.

The first thing Vanessa Carvin does when she arrives on the island is change her name. To the locals, she is Willow Hale, a solitary outsider escaping Dublin to live a hermetic existence in a small cottage, not a notorious woman on the run from her past.But scandals follow like hunting dogs. And she has some questions of her own to answer. If her ex-husband is really the monster everyone says he is, then how complicit was she in his crimes?Escaping her old life might seem like a good idea but the choices she has made throughout her marriage have consequences. Here, on the island, Vanessa must reflect on what she did — and did not do. Only then can she discover whether she is worthy of finding peace at all.

Ellis and Michael are twelve-year-old boys when they first become friends, and for a long time it is just the two of them, cycling the streets of Oxford, teaching themselves how to swim, discovering poetry, and dodging the fists of overbearing fathers. And then one day this closest of friendships grows into something more.But then we fast-forward a decade or so, to find that Ellis is married to Annie, and Michael is nowhere in sight. Which leads to the question: What happened in the years between?With beautiful prose and characters that are so real they jump off the page, Tin Man is a love letter to human kindness and friendship, and to loss and living.This is almost a love story. But it’s not as simple as that.

It’s a black Karoo night and a young woman covered in blood is running along a deserted dust track. Siena must reach Seekoegat Primary School, the only safe place she knows, but it’s a long way to run — a three-day ride on a donkey cart.As Siena runs, her story, and the story of her two friends, comes alive. Growing up with her in the margins was Boetie, neglected and wild, and Kriekie, whose mother worked the N1 truck-stops. When they meet again as grown-ups, the three must relive the devastating events that set them each on a new path.

In this brilliantly focused and haunting portrait of the people, the politics, the land, and the poetry of Nicaragua, Salman Rushdie brings to the forefront the palpable human facts of a country in the midst of revolution.Rushdie went to Nicaragua in 1986. What he discovered was overwhelming: a land of difficult, often beautiful contradictions, of strange heroes and warrior-poets. Rushdie came to know an enormous range of people, from the foreign minister — a priest — to the midwife who kept a pet cow in her living room.His perceptions always heightened by his sensitivity and his unique flair for language, in The Jaguar Smile, Rushdie brings us the true Nicaragua, where nothing is simple, everything is contested, and life-or-death struggles are an everyday occurrence.

Begun in 1959 by a twenty-two-year-old Hunter S. Thompson, The Rum Diary is a tangled love story of jealousy, treachery, and violent, alcoholic lust in the Caribbean boomtown of San Juan, Puerto Rico, in the late 1950s. The narrator, freelance journalist Paul Kemp, is irresistibly drawn to a sexy, mysterious woman and is soon thrust into a world where corruption and get-rich-quick schemes rule, and anything (including murder) is permissible.

First published in 1963 under the pen name Catherine Aydy, The Colour of Rain is Emma Tennant's first novel. It recounts episodes in the lives of a group of privileged, empty people. It is a soap opera of childish adults, moving from one diversion to the next, pretending to be civilised. But their constructed world is fragile; it might be self-supporting, but it is obvious how easily it can break or dissolve.Told largely through dialogue and in a brittle prose that reflects the lives of its characters, this is an intriguing novel. It records a very exciting time in British history — when children stopped dressing like their parents, when music influenced an entire generation — the incredible cultural phenomenon of the 1960s.

Maurice Allington has reached middle age and is haunted by death. As he says, “I honestly can’t see why everybody who isn’t a child, everybody who’s theoretically old enough to have understood what death means, doesn’t spend all his time thinking about it. It’s a pretty arresting thought.” He also happens to own and run a country inn that is haunted. The Green Man opens as Maurice’s father drops dead (had he seen something in the room?) and continues as friends and family convene for the funeral.Maurice’s problems are many and increasing: How to deal with his own declining health? How to reach out to a teenage daughter who watches TV all the time? How to get his best friend’s wife in the sack? How to find another drink? (And another.) And then there is always death.The Green Man is a ghost story that hits a live nerve, a very black comedy with an uncannily happy ending: in other words, Kingsley Amis at his best.

Searing and profound, suffused with beauty, sorrow, and longing, the stories in The Thing Around Your Neck map, with Adichie's signature emotional wisdom, the collision of two cultures and the deeply human struggle to reconcile them.Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie burst onto the literary scene, and in her most intimate and seamlessly crafted work to date, she turns her penetrating eye on not only Nigeria but America, in twelve dazzling stories that explore the ties that bind men and women, parents and children, Africa and the United States.In "A Private Experience," a medical student hides from a violent riot with a poor Muslim woman whose dignity and faith force her to confront the realities and fears she's been pushing away. In "Tomorrow Is Too Far," a woman unlocks the devastating secret that surrounds her brother's death. The young mother at the center of "Imitation" finds her comfortable life in Philadelphia threatened when she learns that her husband has moved his mistress into their Lagos home. And the title story depicts the choking loneliness of a Nigerian girl who moves to an America that turns out to be nothing like the country she expected; though falling in love brings her desires nearly within reach, a death in her homeland forces her to reexamine them.These stories map, with Adichie's signature emotional wisdom, the collision of two cultures and the deeply human struggle to reconcile them. The Thing Around Your Neck is a resounding confirmation of the prodigious literary powers of one of our most essential writers.Endorsements'The twenty-first-century daughter of Chinua Achebe.' — The Washington Post

In The Consolations of the Forest, Sylvain Tesson exiles himself to a wooden cabin on Siberia’s Lake Baikal, a full day’s hike from any neighbor, with his thoughts, his books, a couple of dogs, and many bottles of vodka for company. Writing from February to July, he shares his deep appreciation for the harsh but beautiful land, the resilient men and women who populate it, and the bizarre and tragic history that has given Siberia an almost mythological place in the imagination. Rich with observation, introspection, and the good humor necessary to laugh at his own folly, Tesson’s memoir is about the ultimate freedom of owning your own time. By recording his impressions in the face of silence, his struggles in a hostile environment, his hopes, doubts, and moments of pure joy in communion with nature, Tesson makes a decidedly out-of-the-ordinary experience relatable.A meditation on escaping the chaos of modern life and rediscovering the luxury of solitude.As long as there is a cabin deep in the woods, nothing is completely lost.EndorsementsWinner of the Prix Médicis for nonfiction

Few stories are as widely read and as universally cherished by children and adults alike as 'The Little Prince'.Howard, an acclaimed poet and one of the preeminent translators of our time, has excelled in bringing the English text as close as possible to the French, in language, style, and, most important, spirit.Author: Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, the "Winged Poet," was born in Lyon, France, in 1900. At twenty-six he became a pilot and was a pioneer of commercial aviation; he flew in the Spanish Civil War and World War II. His writings include The Little Prince, Wind, Sand and Stars, Night Flight, Southern Mail, and Airman's Odyssey. In 1944, while flying a reconnaissance mission for his French air squadron, he disappeared over the Mediterranean.Translator: Richard Howard is the author of eleven books of poetry, including 'Untitled Subjects', which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1970, and Trappings. He has translated more than 150 works from the French.

During the hot, dry summer of 1988, in a forgotten neighborhood known as the riverside, seventeen-year-old Shinogaki Toma is entangled in a desperate struggle against what he believes to be his fate to become his sadistic father. Consumed by a fear that he will harm his girlfriend, Toma’s downward spiral into depression and instability becomes increasingly intense. Toma’s mother left his father long ago and now lives nearby as a fishmonger. Using the hook that replaced the hand she lost during wartime bombings, she guts the eels Toma catches in the sewage-filled river for his father to eat. Things come to a head when Kotoko, his father’s live-in girlfriend, becomes pregnant and makes the decision to leave the riverside for a better life.Translated from Japanese by Kalau Almony.EndorsementsWinner of the Akutagawa Prize.Adapted into a film by Shinji Aoyama — Cannes Film Festival winner.

An undocumented woman answers a job posting only to find herself held hostage. A group of outcasts obsess over boys drowned while surfing. An unhappy couple finds themselves trapped in a terrifying maze.With scalpel-like precision, Ampuero considers the price paid by those on the margins so that the elite might lounge comfortably, believing themselves safe in their homes. Simultaneously terrifying and exquisite, Human Sacrifices is “tropical gothic” at its finest—decay and oppression underlie our humid and hostile world, where working-class women and children are consistently the weakest links in a capitalist economy. Against this backdrop of corrosion and rot, these twelve stories contemplate the nature of exploitation and abuse, illuminating the realities of those society consumes for its own pitiless ends.

Considered the most important work of modern Iranian literature, The Blind Owl is a haunting tale of loss and spiritual degradation. Replete with potent symbolism and terrifying surrealistic imagery, Sadegh Hedayat's masterpiece details a young man's despair after losing a mysterious lover. As the author gradually drifts into frenzy and madness, the reader becomes caught in the sandstorm of Hedayat's bleak vision of the human condition. The Blind Owl, which has been translated into many foreign languages, has often been compared to the writing of Edgar Allan Poe.

'I planted a dog rose. Then I found a curious piece of driftwood and used this, and one of the necklaces of holey stones on the wall, to stake the rose. The garden had begun. I saw it as a therapy and a pharmacopoeia.'In 1986 artist and filmmaker Derek Jarman bought Prospect Cottage, a Victorian fisherman's hut on the desert sands of Dungeness. It was to be a home and refuge for Jarman throughout his HIV diagnosis, and it would provide the stage for one of his most enduring, if transitory, projects — his garden. Conceived as a 'pharmacopoeia' — an ever-evolving circle of stones, plants and flotsam sculptures all built and grown in spite of the bracing winds and arid shingle, it remains today a site of fascination and wonder.Pharmacopoeia brings together the best of Derek Jarman's writing on nature, gardening and Prospect Cottage. Told through journal entries, poems and fragments of prose, it paints a portrait of Jarman's personal and artistic reliance on the space Dungeness offered him, and shows the cycle of the years spent there in one moving collage.Endorsements'[Derek] made of this wee house, his wooden tent pitched in the wilderness, an artwork — and out of its shingle skirts, an ingenious garden — now internationally recognised. But, first and foremost, the cottage was always a living thing, a practical toolbox for his work' — Tilda Swinton, from her Foreword

“All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.” A farm is taken over by its overworked, mistreated animals. With flaming idealism and stirring slogans, they set out to create a paradise of progress, justice, and equality. Thus the stage is set for one of the most telling satiric fables ever penned—a razor-edged fairy tale for grown-ups that records the evolution from revolution against tyranny to a totalitarianism just as terrible.When Animal Farm was first published, Stalinist Russia was seen as its target. Today it is devastatingly clear that wherever and whenever freedom is attacked, under whatever banner, the cutting clarity and savage comedy of George Orwell’s masterpiece have a meaning and message still ferociously fresh.

Barcelona, 1957. It is Christmas, and Daniel Sempere and his wife Bea have much to celebrate. They have a beautiful new baby son named Julian, and their close friend Fermín Romero de Torres is about to be wed. But their joy is eclipsed when a mysterious stranger visits the Sempere bookshop and threatens to divulge a terrible secret that has been buried for two decades in the city's dark past. His appearance plunges Fermín and Daniel into a dangerous adventure that will take them back to the 1940s and the dark early days of Franco's dictatorship. The terrifying events of that time launch them on a journey fraught with jealousy, suspicion, vengeance, and lies, a search for the truth that will put into peril everything they love and ultimately transform their lives.Full of intrigue and emotion, The Prisoner of Heaven is a majestic novel in which the threads of The Shadow of the Wind and The Angel's Game converge under the spell of literature and bring us toward the enigma at the heart of the Cemetery of Forgotten Books, a collection of lost treasures known only to a few initiates and at the very core of Carlos Ruiz Zafón's enchanting fictional world.

A prominent Viennese psychiatrist before the war, Viktor Frankl was uniquely able to observe the way that both he and others in Auschwitz coped (or didn't) with the experience. He noticed that it was the men who comforted others and who gave away their last piece of bread who survived the longest — and who offered proof that everything can be taken away from us except the ability to choose our attitude in any given set of circumstances. The sort of person the concentration camp prisoner became was the result of an inner decision and not of camp influences alone. Frankl came to believe man's deepest desire is to search for meaning and purpose. This outstanding work offers us all a way to transcend suffering and find significance in the art of living.Endorsements'A book to read, to cherish, to debate, and one that will ultimately keep the memories of the victims alive' — John Boyne, author of The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas

‘The world is this house’, says Clara while she is trying to protect her beloved ones from the world – yes, that one outside their house walls – which seems to threaten them more and more. Clara entrenches herself with her father and her daughter Flor in a dark apartment that inevitably crumbles on them. The roof becomes their last recess of freedom. A caged bird is the only witness of Clara’s fear and resistance against those she thinks are trying to destroy her.‘Are threats and pain external or inside our own bodies? Where is violence’s root? What are we afraid of? Is there a possibility of finding a roof where we can finally breathe? What are our umbilical cords?’ Fernanda Trías does not answer these questions – impossible for anyone – about instinct, civilization and taboos; instead she gives them shape and dives deep into them with a grotesque, forceful vision written with agility and a Kafkaesque sense of humour.Rooftop is a claustrophobic novel about freedom, and also about fear, violence, motherhood and loss.

This is a letter from a son to a mother who cannot read. Written when the speaker, Little Dog, is in his late twenties, the letter unearths a family's history that began before he was born. It tells of Vietnam, of the lasting impact of war, and of his family's struggle to forge a new future. And it serves as a doorway into parts of Little Dog's life his mother has never known - episodes of bewilderment, fear and passion - all the while moving closer to an unforgettable revelation.Brilliant, heartbreaking and highly original, Ocean Vuong's debut novel is a shattering portrait of a family, and a testament to the redemptive power of storytelling.

Two young people meet at a pub in South East London. Both are Black British, both won scholarships to private schools where they struggled to belong, both are now artists — he a photographer, she a dancer — trying to make their mark in a city that by turns celebrates and rejects them. Tentatively, tenderly, they fall in love. But two people who seem destined to be together can still be torn apart by fear and violence.At once an achingly beautiful love story and a potent insight into race and masculinity, Open Water asks what it means to be a person in a world that sees you only as a Black body, to be vulnerable when you are only respected for strength, to find safety in love, only to lose it.

In this tour de force of psychological unease — now a major motion picture starring Charlotte Gainsbourg and Sinead Cusack — McEwan excavates the ruins of childhood and uncovers things that most adults have spent a lifetime forgetting or denying.Endorsements"Possesses the suspense and chilling impact of Lord of the Flies." — Washington Post Book World.

'The story of the negro in America is the story of America ... it is not a very pretty story'James Baldwin's breakthrough essay collection made him the voice of his generation. These essays range over Harlem in the 1940s, movies, novels, his preacher father, and his experiences of Paris; they capture the complexity of Black life at the dawn of the civil rights movement with effervescent wit and prophetic wisdom.Endorsements'A classic ... In a divided America, James Baldwin's fiery critiques reverberate anew' — Washington Post'Edgy and provocative, entertainingly satirical' — Robert McCrum, Guardian'Cemented his reputation as a cultural seer ... Notes of a Native Son endures as his defining work, and his greatest' — Time

Innocent Erendira and Other Stories is a collection of short stories from the Nobel Prize winner and author of One Hundred Years of Solitude and Love in the Time of Cholera, Gabriel Garcia Marquez."Erendira was bathing her grandmother when the wind of misfortune began to blow"While her grotesque and demanding grandmother retires to bed, Erendira still has floors to wash, sheets to iron, and a peacock to feed. The never-ending chores leave the young girl so exhausted that she collapses into bed with the candle still glowing on a nearby table — and is fast asleep when it topples over...Eight hundred and seventy-two thousand, three hundred and fifteen pesos, her grandmother calculates, is the amount that Eréndira must repay for the loss of the house. As she is dragged by her grandmother from town to town and hawked to soldiers, smugglers and traders, Erendira feels herself dying. Can the love of a virgin save the young whore from her hell?Endorsements"It becomes more and more fun to read. It shows what 'fabulous' really means" — Time Out"Marquez writes in this lyrical, magical language that no one else can do" — Salman Rushdie"One of this century's most evocative writers" — Anne Tyler

A mother comes to visit her daughter in the hospital after not having seen her for many years. Her unexpected visit forces Lucy to confront her past, uncovering long-buried memories of a profoundly impoverished childhood, and her present, as the facade of her new life in New York begins to crumble, awakening her to the reality of her faltering marriage and her unsteady journey towards becoming a writer. From Lucy's hospital bed, we are drawn ever more deeply into the emotional complexity of family life, the inescapable power of the past, and the memories — however painful — that bind a family together.