Here are attempts at human connection, both depraved & sublime, & the grinding struggle to survive against the crushing realities of the Soviet system: in Among Friends, a doting mother commits an atrocious act against her beloved son in an attempt to secure his future; The Time: Night examines the suicide of the great Russian poetess Anna Andreevna with heartbreaking clarity; while in Chocolates with Liqueur the struggle for ownership of an apartment between a nurse & a madman turns murderous. With the satirical eye of Cindy Sherman, the psychological perceptiveness of Dostoevsky, & the bleak absurdities of Beckett, Petrushevskaya blends macabre spectacle with transformative moments of grace & shows just why she is Russia`s preeminent contemporary fiction writer. One of Russia`s best living writers.. .her tales inhabit a borderline between this world & the next
- The New York Times Ludmilla Petrushevskaya was born in Moscow in 1938 & is the only indisputable canonical writer currently writing in Russian today. She is the author of more than fifteen collections of prose, among them this short novel The Time: Night, shortlisted for the Russian Booker Prize in 1992, & Svoi Krug, a modern classic about 1980s Soviet intelligentsia. Petrushevskaya is equally important as a playwright: since the 1980s her numerous plays have been staged by the best Russian theater companies. In 2002, Petrushevskaya received Russia`s most prestigious prize, The Triumph, for lifetime achievement. She lives in Moscow.
...

A woman finds herself filling a pit in the forest in the middle of the night; a family lock each other in their bedrooms to battle a strange plague; a wizard punishes two beautiful ballerinas by turning them into one hugely fat circus performer; a colonel is warned not to lift the veil from his dead wife`s face; &, a distraught father brings his daughter back to life by eating human hearts in his dreams. In these blackly comic tales of revenge, disturbing deaths & haunting melancholy, Ludmilla Petrushevskaya blends miracles & madness in the darkest of modern fairy tales. ...

Royal history as you`ve never seen it before
- in limericks! Six times Henry Tudor got wed, Unhappy with how his wives bred,
...

`THERE THERE drops on us like a thunderclap; the big, booming, explosive sound of 21st century literature finally announcing itself. Essential.`-Marlon James, author of A Brief History of Seven Killings`A gripping deep dive into urban indigenous community in California: an astonishing literary debut!`-Margaret Atwood, via Twitter` Welcome to a brilliant & generous artist who has already enlarged the landscape of American fiction. THERE THERE is a comic vision haunted by profound sadness. Tommy Orange is a new writer with an old heart.`-Louise Erdrich` Groundbreaking. Extraordinary. Tommy Orange has written a tense, prismatic book with inexorable momentum.` --Janet Maslin, New York Times`THERE THERE has so much jangling energy & brings so much news from a distinct corner of American life that it`s a revelation.` --Dwight Garner, New York Times` Masterful. White-hot. A devastating debut novel.` Washington Post Jacquie Red Feather & her sister Opal grew up together, relying on each other during their unsettled childhood. As adults they were driven apart, but Jacquie is newly sober & trying to make it back to the family she left behind. That`s why she is there. Dene is there because he has been collecting stories to honour his uncle`s death. Edwin is looking for his true father. Opal came to watch her boy Orvil dance. All of them are connected by bonds they may not yet underst&. All of them are there for the cultural celebration that is the Big Oakland Powwow. But Tony Loneman is also there. & Tony has come to the Powwow with darker intentions.` There There is a propulsive, groundbreaking novel, polyphonic & multigenerational, weaving together an array of contemporary Native American voices into a singularly dynamic & original meta-narrative about violence & recovery, about family & loss, about identity & power.` Derek Palacio ...

The defining experience of Chinua Achebe`s life was the Nigerian civil war, also known as the Biafran War. For more than forty years Achebe was silent on those terrible years, until he produced this towering reckoning with one of modern Africa`s most fateful events. A marriage of history, remembrance, poetry & vivid first-hand observation, There Was a Country is a work of wisdom & compassion from one of the great voices of our age. ...

A Lincolnshire village on a glorious summer`s morning in 1940. Following Dunkirk, the fate of the whole war will soon rest with the RAF & their desperate effort to win the Battle of Britain. If they fail, Hitler`s next step will be invasion. And as the scene comes to life before us over the next six months, this shadow of war will not disappear. From the pub to the church, struggling single mother to the lady of the manor, the paper boy to a traumatised bomb disposal volunteer, this superb jewel of a novel portrays a community of people & weaves together their stories with passion, betrayal, intrigue & suspense. There Was a Time is a triumph of the storyteller`s art. ...

There is a young fellow named Mick Who`s adapted the old limerick To cover, with mirth The whole history of Earth & what made its characters tick. There Was An Old Geezer Called Caesar is 100 lively & humorous limericks that take us back to before the beginning of time itself & right up until yesterday evening when you were probably making your dinner. Covering everyone`s favourite history lessons (and a few suprising ones too!), Mick Twister has cleverly raided the tomes of the past, picked at the bones of the world`s greatest figures, moments & events & condensed the most complex of human activities into five funny rib-tickling lines for your amusement. Who ever said that history was boring, had clearly never read this book! Word count: 15, 000 ...

There was an old giant who swallowed a clock. He had such a shock when he swallowed that clock! But then he swallows his knitting to muffle the clock, & swallows some moths to munch through his knitting! Will he ever stop? With a riotous rhyming text from Becky Davies (The Three Little Pugs & the Big Bad Cat & Old Mac Dino had a Farm) this hilarious retelling of the classic nursery rhyme, There was an Old Lady Who Swallowed a Fly, is brought to life with peep-through pages & quirky illustrations from Elina Ellis. ...

A rolling stone may gather no moss, but it d oes gather some funny stories. Read about Nigel Barley takin g a monkey to the movies in Cameroon, Donna Marazzo trying t o use a high-tech Italian toilet, & Richard Sterling eatin g fried bugs in Burma. ' ...

Nobel-prize winner Francois Mauriac`s masterpiece is Therese Desqueyroux, the story of a complex woman trapped by provincial life. First published in 1927, this astonishing & daring novel has echoes of Madame Bovary & has recently been made into a ravishing film starring Amelie actress Audrey Tautou. Therese Desqueyroux walks free from court, acquitted of trying to poison her husb&. Everyone knew she`d tried to do it, but family honour was more important than the truth. As she travels home to the gloomy forests of Argelouse, Therese looks back over the marriage that brought her nothing but stifling darkness, & wonders, has she really escaped punishment or is it only just about to begin? Francois Mauriac was born in Bordeaux in 1885. He left his university studies to devote himself to writing, & published a collection of poems, Les Mains jointes (Clasped Hands), in 1909. He married in 1913 & the following year was mobilized to serve in the First World War with the Auxilliary Medical Squad in Thessalonica. Mauriac`s major literary breakthrough came in 1922 with a novel called Le Baiser au lepreux (A Kiss for the Leper). His most famous work, Therese Desqueroux, appeared in 1927 & has been made into a film twice: first in 1962, with Emmanuelle Riva in the lead role, & more recently in 2012, in a version starring Audrey Tautou. In 1933 Mauriac was elected a Member of the French Academy & in 1952 he received the Nobel Prize for Literature. He died in Paris in 1970. ”A great novel.. .the brilliance of its structure & the elegance of its prose never fail to take my breath away”. (Beryl Bainbridge). ...