This is the winner of the Independent foreign fiction prize. ”A wonderful novel. Wise & generous to a fault of all our human failings & frailties”. (Lloyd Jones, author of Mister Pip). A Dutch woman rents a remote farm in rural Wales. She says her name is Emilie. She has left her husb&, having confessed to an affair. In Amsterdam, her stunned husband forms a strange partnership with a detective who agrees to help him trace her. They board the ferry to Hull on Christmas Eve. Back on the farm, a young man out walking with his dog injures himself & stays the night, then ends up staying longer. Yet something is deeply wrong. Does he know what he is getting himself into? & what will happen when her husband & the detective arrive? ...

Willard is a tormented veteran of the carnage in the South Pacific who can`t save his beautiful wife, Charlotte, from a slow death by cancer no matter how much sacrificial blood he pours on his `prayer log`. Carl & Sandy Henderson, a husb&-&-wife team of serial killers, trawl America`s highways searching for suitable models to photograph & exterminate. The spider-handling preacher Roy & his crippled virtuoso-guitar-playing sidekick are running from the law. & caught in the middle of all this is Arvin, Willard & Charlotte`s orphaned son, who grows up to be a good but also violent man in his own right. ...

LONGLISTED FOR THE ASPEN PRIZEOn the elite New England campus of Webster College, a student protest is underway. Initially supported by Webster`s first female president, the former activist Naomi Roth, the protest begins to grow & fester, attracting the media. Attention becomes focused on one charismatic student, a Palestinian immigrant named Omar, as rising tensions on the once-tranquil campus threaten to turn violent. Faced with an impossible & potentially tragic conflict, that now involves her own student daughter, Naomi must reconsider her responsibilities to Webster, & her own long held beliefs. ...

As the First World War reaches its final year, an illicit love affair is beginning between a sixteen-year-old boy & a young woman married to a soldier at the front. They meet secretly in her flat on the outskirts of Paris, in cornfields & on river banks. When she receives letters from her husb&, they burn them together. Intoxicated by passion, they cannot bear to end their affair, even when it causes a scandal among their friends & neighbours. Instead, they hurtle towards tragedy. Written in spare, haunting prose when Raymond Radiguet was still a teenager, this semi-autobiographical novel became an instant bestseller & its author was hailed as a genius before his tragic death at the age of twenty. Expressing all the anguish & joy of adolescence, it is a work of startling imagery & subtle beauty. This Penguin Modern Classics edition

Includes:: an introduction by Fay Weldon.

...

Raymond Radiguet wrote the highly scandalous Devil in the Flesh between the ages of sixteen & eighteen, following his own love affair with a married woman. At the time, in post WWI France, the book created a stir comparable to that of Lady Chatterley`s Lover Francois, the adolescent narrator, meets Marthe in Paris at the start of the First World War when her husband is away at the Front. They fall in love with each other. Their passion leads to a tragic climax four years later when Marthe passes off their love child as her husband`s legitimate child even though everyone knows the truth. The themes of freedom, family & passion against a background of war & honour in The Devil in the Flesh created a scandal at the time of publication, which was also the year of the author`s death. ...

How do high mountain ranges form on the face of the Earth? This question has intrigued some of the greatest philosophers & scientists, going back as far as the ancient Greeks. Devil in the Mountain is the story of one scientist, author Simon Lamb, & his quest for the key to this great geological mystery. Lamb & a small team of geologists have spent much of the last decade exploring the rugged Bolivian Andes, the second highest mountain range on Earth
- a region rocked by earthquakes & violent volcanic eruptions. The author's account is both travelogue & detective story, describing how he & his colleagues have pursued a trail of clues in the mountains, hidden beneath the rocky landscape. Here, the local silver miners strive to appease the spirit they call Tio
- the devil in the mountain. Traveling through Bolivia's back roads, the team has to cope with the extremes of the environment, & survive in a country on the verge of civil war. But the backdrop to all these adventures is the bigger story of the Earth & how geologists have gone about uncovering its secrets. We follow the tracks of the dinosaurs, who never saw the Andes but left their mark on the shores of a vast inland sea that covered this part of South America more than sixty-five million years ago, long before the mountains existed. & we learn how to find long lost rivers that once flowed through the landscape, how continents are twisted & torn apart, & where volcanoes come from. By the end of their journey, Lamb & his team turn up extraordinary evidence pointing not only to the fundamental instability of the Earth's surface, but also to unexpected & profound links in the workings of our planet.

...

The Chicago World`s Fair of 1893 & its amazing ` White City` was one of the wonders of the world. This is the incredible story of its realization, & of the two men whose fates it linked: one was an architect, the other a serial killer. The architect was Daniel H. Burnham, the driving force behind the White City, the massive, visionary landscape of white buildings set in a wonderland of canals & gardens. The killer was H. H. Holmes, a handsome doctor with striking blue eyes. He used the attraction of the great fair
- & his own devilish charms
- to lure scores of young women to their deaths. While Burnham overcame politics, infighting, personality clashes & Chicago`s infamous weather to transform the swamps of Jackson Park into the greatest show on Earther, Holmes built his own edifice just west of the fairground. He called it the World`s Fair Hotel. In reality it was a torture palace, a gas chamber, a crematorium. These two disparate but driven men toegther with a remarkable supporting cast of colourful characters, including as Buffalo Bill, George Ferris, Thomas Edison & some of the 27 million others who converged on the dazzling spectacle of the White City, are brought to life in this mesmerizing, murderous tale of the legendary Fair that transformed America & set it on course for the twentieth century.

...

It is 1792 & a group of English gentlemen is recruiting settlers for a new world. Anti-slavers, they foresee the shining vision of a free colony in Africa where all races & classes can live together in harmony. More than a hundred men, women & children set sail from London bound for Muranda, an island off the west coat of Africa. To lead them, they have Sir George Whitcroft; to sail their ship, the gallant Captain Coupland; Dr Owen to treat their ills; the Reverend Tolchard to guide their spiritual lives; & Caspar Jeavons, a young aristocratic poet, to record their exploits. When they l&, Muranda seems a paradise. Fruit hangs from the trees, the waters swarm with fish, the local king is friendly. Some begin to work. Others prefer to laze & swim, to drink & dance at night. But then the tropical rains begin & beat relentlessly down, fever strikes arbitrarily, & violence reveals itself in this brave new world... ...

An intimate & moving portrait of a family combined with an account of the events which swept through Africa in the post-independence period. Aminatta Forna`s intensely personal history is a passionate & vivid account of an African childhood
- of an idyll that became a nightmare. As a child she witnessed the upheavals of post-colonial Africa, the bitterness of exile in Britain & the terrible consequences of her dissident father`s stand against tyranny. Mohamed Forna, a man of unimpeachable integrity & great charisma, was a new star in the political firmament Sierra Leone as the country faced its future as a fledgling democracy. Always a political firebr&, he was one of the first black students to come to Britain after the war. In Aberdeen he stole the heart of Aminatta`s mother, to the dismay of her Presbyterian parents, & returned with her to Sierra Leone. But the new ways of Western parliamentary democracy were tearing old Africa apart, giving rise only to dictatorships & corruption of hitherto undreamed-of magnitude. It was not long before Aminatta`s father languished in jail as a prisoner of conscience, & there was worse to come. Aminatta`s search for the truth that shaped both her childhood & the nation`s destiny begins among the country`s elite & takes her into the heart of rebel territory. Determined to break the silence surrounding her father`s fate, she ultimately uncovered a conspiracy that penetrated the highest reaches of government & forced the nation`s politicians & judiciary to confront their guilt.
...

In 1979, journalist Zuhair al-Jezairy fled Iraq & certain death after openly defying Saddam`s regime. Twenty-five years later he is back, & cautiously celebrating. He joins ”al Mada”, & is Editor-in-Chief when the newspaper breaks the Oil-for-Food scandal. He leaves to start his own documentary film company & travels throughout Iraq, from the Marshlands of the South, to Tikrit, Najaf, & the Northern region of Kurdistan. He sees the country emerge from thirty-five years of totalitarianism & documents the violence & bloodshed, as well as the many brave & extraordinary people he meets. Giving first-hand accounts of the looting of Baghdad & his encounters with ordinary Iraqis all over the country, this is an elegiac & inspirational account of Iraq after Saddam. ...