A man is making a crude leather mask with an iron spike fixed in the middle of the forehead. It is a 'death mask', once used by Icelandic farmers to slaughter calves, & he has revenge in mind. Meanwhile, a school reunion has left Sigurdur Oli unhappy with life in the police force. While Iceland is enjoying an economic boom, his relationship is on the rocks & soon even his position in the CID is compromised after he agrees to visit a couple of blackmailers as a favour to a friend, & walks in just as a woman is beaten unconscious. When she dies, Sigurdur Oli has a murder investigation on his hands. Moving from the villas of Reykjavik's banking elite to a sordid basement flat, Black Skies is a superb story of greed, pride & murder from one of Europe's most successful crime writers. ...

Detective Sigurdur Oli is in trouble. After a school reunion exposes the chasm between his life & those of his much more successful contemporaries, leaving him bitter & resentful, one of his old friends asks him to pay an unofficial visit to a couple of blackmailers. He readily agrees, only to arrive to find one of the pair lying in a pool of blood. When the victim dies in hospital, Sigurdur Oli is faced with investigating a murder without revealing his own reasons for being present at the murder scene. Moving from the villas of Reykjavik`s banking elite to a sordid basement flat, Black Skies is a superb story of greed, pride & murder from one of Europe`s most successful crime writers. ...

1977. Poised between the secular values of socialism & the conservatism of a tenuously balanced government, Istanbul is a fractured city haunted by demons of its own making. Along with thousands of other left-wing activists, Oak`s interest in politics leads him to join the annual May Day rallies. There he encounters Zuhal, a fearless girl with a gun. As battles rage between nationalists & socialists, Oak witnesses the violent suppression of dissident minorities by his fellow citizens. The bewitching Zuhal begins to shape his ideals, bringing him face to face with disillusionment, & death. ...

` When I first lived in Ukraine, I was preoccupied with its ideas of the past & future. Once Maidan started, there was nothing but the present; every hour held the possibility of transformation, & of terrible violence...` After leaving university in 2004, Sophie Pinkham moved to Siberia to volunteer for the Red Cross, tackling the rising AIDS crisis by folding origami tulips. Over the next decade, she travelled & worked across the post-Soviet world, from Lake Baikal to the Black Sea, at a time when the young countries of the region were struggling to define their new identities. Black Square is a multidimensional portrait of a period of tumultuous change, & of a generation that came of age after the fall of the USSR, only to see protestors shot on Kiev`s main square, Crimea annexed by Russia, & a bitter war in eastern Ukraine. We meet a charismatic doctor fighting the AIDS epidemic even as he struggles with his own drug addiction; an iconoclastic artist with a penchant for public nudity; & a Russian-Jewish clarinettist agitating for Ukrainian liberation. With a deep knowledge of the literature & legends of the region, & a keen outsider`s eye for the dark absurdities of post-Soviet society, Black Square delivers an indelible impression of a region, & a world, on the brink. ...

A prize-winning author`s magical realist fable about greed & corruption in Venezuela, Black Sugar gives a fascinating view of the country`s social & economic development throughout the twentieth century through the story of a family of sugarcane growers. It tells of buried treasure & the legendary privateer Henry Morgan. ...

January, 1982. Thirteen-year-old Jason Taylor
- covert stammerer & reluctant poet
- anticipates a stultifying year in his backwater

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A tale of the cruelties that took place during the 1947 partition of India, ” Black Taj” is a tragic story about young love s struggle to cross the Indian caste divide. An only child, Simi grows up comfortably in the city of Atmapuri enjoying certainty in her future ahead. Then, unexpectedly, everything changes. Her city, overtaken by the riots that have periodically gripped India since Britain s abrupt withdrawal, is threatening to fall apart along the lines of religion, caste, & community. Shortly before turning twenty-five, Simi meets a wonderful young man. Although he was also raised in Atmapuri, his caste means that he is in many ways from a different world. Without warning, Simi faces difficult new choices but when the past is always present, it can be hard to break free. Against a backdrop of monsoons & heat waves, shanty towns & expensive bungalows, love & tradition, & religious conflict & social upheaval, Simi s life will change forever.” ...

A black porter publicly whips a white Englishman in the hall of a Gloucestershire manor house. A Moroccan woman is baptised in a London church. Henry VIII dispatches a Mauritanian diver to salvage lost treasures from the Mary Rose. From long-forgotten records emerge the remarkable stories of Africans who lived free in Tudor Engl&... They were present at some of the defining moments of the age. They were christened, married & buried by the Church. They were paid wages like any other Tudors. The untold stories of the Black Tudors, dazzlingly brought to life by Kaufmann, will transform how we see this most intriguing period of history. ...

Shortlisted for the Wolfson History Prize 2018A Book of the Year for the Evening Standard & the Observer A black porter publicly whips a white Englishman in the hall of a Gloucestershire manor house. A Moroccan woman is baptised in a London church. Henry VIII dispatches a Mauritanian diver to salvage lost treasures from the Mary Rose. From long-forgotten records emerge the remarkable stories of Africans who lived free in Tudor Engl&... They were present at some of the defining moments of the age. They were christened, married & buried by the Church. They were paid wages like any other Tudors. The untold stories of the Black Tudors, dazzlingly brought to life by Kaufmann, will transform how we see this most intriguing period of history. ...

` Kissing you is like new paint & old pain. It is like coffee & car alarms & a dim stairway & a stain & it`s like smoke.` (` Placing a Call`) How does love change us? & how do we change ourselves for love
- or for lack of it? Ten stories by acclaimed author Deborah Levy explore these delicate, impossible questions. In Vienna, an icy woman seduces a broken man; in London gardens, birds sing in computer start-up sounds; in ad-l&, a sleek copywriter becomes a kind of shaman. These are twenty-first century lives dissected with razor-sharp humour & curiosity, stories about what it means to live & love, together & alone.
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