Alphonse Daudet (1840-1897) was one of the most popular nineteenth-century French novelists, whose work radiated humour & good cheer. What few except those close to him knew was that for his entire adult life he suffered from syphilis, a disease both unmentionable & incurable at the time. What even fewer knew was that for the last dozen years of his life he kept an intimate notebook in which he recorded the inevitable development & terrifying effects of the disease. He described the often alarming treatments he took in the desperate attempt to defeat the disease, & wrote with comic zest about life in the spa-towns to which he was sent for a cure.

Even for a time when we are more openly confessional about illness, Daudet remains exemplary & instructive, both in his lucid self-examination & in his amused stoicism. In the Land of Pain was first published by Daudet's widow in 1931. Julian Barnes brings us the first English translation of this surprising, touching, & at times brutal masterpiece.

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In 1912, six months after Scott & his men came to grief in Antarctica, the Russian navigator Valerian Albanov embarked on an expedition that would prove even more disastrous. In search of new Arctic hunting grounds, Albanov's ship, the Saint Anna, was frozen fast in the pack ice of the treacherous Kara Sea
- a misfortune grievously compounded by an incompetent commander, the absence of crucial nautical charts, insufficient fuel, & inadequate provisions that left the crew weak & debilitated by scurvy. For nearly a year & a half, the twenty-five men & one woman aboard the Saint Anna endured terrible hardships & danger as the icebound ship drifted helplessly north. Convinced that the Saint Anna would never free herself from the ice, Albanov & thirteen crewmen left the ship in January 1914, hauling makeshift sledges & kayaks behind them across the frozen sea, hoping to reach the distant coast of Franz Josef L&. With only a shockingly inaccurate map to guide him, Albanov led his men on a 235-mile journey of continuous peril, enduring blizzards, disintegrating ice floes, attacks by polar bears & walrus, starvation, sickness, snowblindness, & mutiny. That any of the team survived is a wonder. That Albanov kept a diary of his ninety-day ordeal
- a story that Jon Krakauer calls an 'astounding, utterly compelling book', & David Roberts calls 'as lean & taut as a good thriller'
- is nearly miraculous. First published in Russia in 1917, Albanov's narrative is here translated into English for the first time. Haunting, suspenseful, & told with gripping detail, In the Land of White Death can now rightfully take its place among the classic writings of Nansen, Scott, Cherry-Garrard & Shackleton.


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In 1912, six months after Scott & his men came to grief in Antarctica, the Russian navigator Valerian Albanov embarked on an expedition that would prove even more disastrous. In search of new Arctic hunting grounds, Albanov's ship, the Saint Anna, was frozen fast in the pack ice of the treacherous Kara Sea
- a misfortune grievously compounded by an incompetent commander, the absence of crucial nautical charts, insufficient fuel, & inadequate provisions that left the crew weak & debilitated by scurvy. For nearly a year & a half, the twenty-five men & one woman aboard the Saint Anna endured terrible hardships & danger as the icebound ship drifted helplessly north. Convinced that the Saint Anna would never free herself from the ice, Albanov & thirteen crewmen left the ship in January 1914, hauling makeshift sledges & kayaks behind them across the frozen sea, hoping to reach the distant coast of Franz Josef L&. With only a shockingly inaccurate map to guide him, Albanov led his men on a 235-mile journey of continuous peril, enduring blizzards, disintegrating ice floes, attacks by polar bears & walrus, starvation, sickness, snowblindness, & mutiny. That any of the team survived is a wonder. That Albanov kept a diary of his ninety-day ordeal
- a story that Jon Krakauer calls an 'astounding, utterly compelling book', & David Roberts calls 'as lean & taut as a good thriller'
- is nearly miraculous. First published in Russia in 1917, Albanov's narrative is here translated into English for the first time. Haunting, suspenseful, & told with gripping detail, In the Land of White Death can now rightfully take its place among the classic writings of Nansen, Scott, Cherry-Garrard & Shackleton.


...

Charlotte is out in the woods on her own one day when something mysterious happens
- she walks along a row of stones laid like
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Ha Jin has been compared to the late Issac Babel for his spare evocation of ordinary lives caught up in the flux of vast social movements. Winner of the Hemingway/PEN Award for first fiction for his story collection Under the Red Flag, Ha Jin is a writer of stark power, simple beauty & poignant irony. His themes of personal honour in the face of political rectitude are carried forward here in his first novel, In the Pond, a close, unsentimental depiction of life in a small factory town; the manoeuvring, posturing, petty jealousies & injustices of an ordinary man who tangles with the party bosses. ...