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. ...

In an unspecified setting, the stream-of-consciousness narrative of this cult novel traces the fortunes of a group of anarchists in revolt against a military-fascist capitalist opposition. The protagonist is photojournalist Chris, whose camera lens becomes the device through which the plot is cleverly unravelled. In Dambudzo Marechera's second experimental novel, he parodies African nationalist & racial identifications as part of an argument that notions of an 'essential African identity' were often invoked to authorise a number of totalitarian regimes across Africa. Such irreverent, avant-garde literature was criticised upon publication in Zimbabwe in 1980, & Black Sunlight was banned on charges of ' Euromodernism' & as a challenge to the concept of nation-building in the newly independent country. ...

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

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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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` Elisa said Yes & I said Yes. We said Yes in all the European languages. Yes. We said yes we said yes, yes to vague but powerful things, we said yes to hope which has to be vague, we said yes to love which is always blind, we smiled & said yes without blinking.` (`A Better Way to Live`) ----------- 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, a bird mimics an old-fashioned telephone; in adl&, 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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John Harper lies awake at night in an isolated hut on an Indonesian isl&, listening to the rain on the roof & believing his life may be in danger. But he is less afraid of what is going to happen than of something he`s already done. In a local town, he meets Rita, a woman with her own troubled history. They begin an affair
- but can he allow himself to get involved when he knows this might put her at risk? Moving between Europe during the cold war, California & the Civil Rights struggle, & Indonesia during the massacres of 1965 & the decades of military dictatorship that follow, Black Water is an epic novel that explores some of the darkest events of recent world history through the story of one troubled man. Black Water confirms Louise Doughty`s position as one of our most important contemporary novelists. She writes with fierce intelligence & a fine-tuned sense of moral ambiguity that makes her fiction resonate in the reader`s mind long after the final page has been turned.
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