Born with a congenital muscle disorder, Shaka spends her days in her room in a care home outside Tokyo, relying on an electric wheelchair to get around and a ventilator to breathe. But if Shaka’s physical life is limited, her quick, mischievous mind has no boundaries: She takes e-learning courses on her iPad, publishes explicit fantasies on websites, and anonymously troll-tweets to see if anyone is paying attention (“In another life, I’d like to work as a high-class prostitute”). One day, she tweets into the void an offer of an enormous sum of money for a sperm donor.

During a scorching summer in 1920s Provence, a young journalist, Joseph Adelaide, turns up at the farmhouse of reclusive artist Edouard Tartuffe, hoping to write an article about him. There, he meets Ettie, Tartuffe’s niece, who appears to do everything for her uncle—from cooking and cleaning to catering to his maniacal moods. Joseph is beguiled by where he finds himself, not just by this foreign place or Tartuffe himself, but by Ettie, who watches everything so quietly from the periphery.

In the summer of 1983, twenty-year-old Nick Guest moves into an attic room in the Notting Hill home of the Feddens: conservative Member of Parliament Gerald, his wealthy wife Rachel, and their two children, Toby—whom Nick had idolized at Oxford—and Catherine, who is highly critical of her family's assumptions and ambitions. As the boom years of the eighties unfold, Nick, an innocent in the world of politics and money, finds his life altered by the rising fortunes of this glamorous family.

Two people meet for lunch in a Manhattan restaurant. She’s an accomplished actress in rehearsals for an upcoming premiere. He’s attractive, troubling, young—young enough to be her son. Who is he to her, and who is she to him? In this compulsively readable, brilliantly constructed novel, two competing narratives unspool, rewriting our understanding of the roles we play every day–partner, parent, creator, muse–and the truths every performance masks, especially from those who think they know us most intimately.

It started out like any other morning for the Fact Checker. The piece, “Mandeville/Green,” didn’t raise any red flags. There were more pressing stories that week—it being 2004 New York City and all. “Mandeville/Green” was a light, breezy look at a local farm called New Egypt, whose Ramapo tomatoes were quickly becoming the summer’s hottest produce. At first glance, the story seemed straightforward, but one line made the Fact Checker pause: a stray quote from a New Egypt volunteer named Sylvia making a cryptic reference to “nefarious business” at the farmer’s market.

Cape Town, 2028. The land cracks from a years-long drought, the nearby mountains threaten to burn, and the queue for the water trucks grows ever longer. In her crumbling corner of a public housing complex, Deidre van Deventer receives a call from the South African police. Her family home, recently reclaimed by the government, has become the scene of a criminal investigation. The remains of several bodies have just been unearthed from her land, after decades underground.

In J. L. Carr's deeply charged poetic novel, Tom Birkin, a veteran of the Great War and a broken marriage, arrives in the remote Yorkshire village of Oxgodby where he is to restore a recently discovered medieval mural in the local church. Living in the bell tower, surrounded by the resplendent countryside of high summer, and laboring each day to uncover an anonymous painter's depiction of the apocalypse, Birkin finds that he himself has been restored to a new, and hopeful, attachment to life.

In 1902, a radical vegetarian and nudist from Nuremberg named August Engelhardt set sail for what was then called the Bismarck Archipelago. His destination: the island Kabakon. His goal: to found a colony based on worship of the sun and coconuts. His malnourished body was found on the beach on Kabakon in 1919; he was 43 years old. Christian Kracht's Imperium uses the outlandish details of Engelhardt's life to craft a fable about the allure of extremism and its fundamental foolishness.

Based on Cartarescu's own role as a high school teacher, Solenoid begins with the mundane details of a diarist's life and quickly spirals into a philosophical account of life, history, philosophy, and mathematics. One character asks another: when you rush into the burning building, will you save the newborn or the artwork? On a broad scale, the novel's investigations of other universes, dimensions, and timelines reconcile the realms of life and art.

This extraordinary Strega Prize-winning novel confirms Domenico Starnone's reputation as one of Italy's greatest living writers. Told against the backdrop of Naples in the 1960s, a city that itself becomes a vivid character in this lush, atmospheric novel, The House on Via Gemito is a masterpiece of Italian fiction.

The first year of November eighteenth is coming to a close, and Tara Selter has returned to her hotel room in Paris, the place where it all began. As if perched at the edge of a precipice, she readies herself to leap into November nineteenth. Book II of Solvej Balle’s astounding seven-part series On the Calculation of Volume beautifully expands on the speculative premise of Book I, drawing us further into the maze of time, where space yawns open, as if suddenly gaining a new dimension, extending into ever more fined-grained textures.

Y es que las protagonistas de Perras de reserva comparten las dificultades y peligros implicados en el mero hecho de nacer mujeres, y los enfrentan con los recursos que la vida les ofrece, obligadas a formular sus propias categorías para situar la frontera entre el bien y el mal. Y nos cuentan sus vidas siempre en primera persona, haciéndonos parte íntima de su forma de habitar el mundo, con un lenguaje sumamente oral y coloquial, casi siempre cargado de una fuerte dosis de humor negro.

It's 1986, and "beautiful, radical ideas" are in the air. The narrator of Theory & Practice, a young woman originally from Sri Lanka, arrives in Melbourne for graduate school to research the novels of Virginia Woolf. In the bohemian neighborhood of St. Kilda she meets artists, activists, students—and Kit. He claims to be in a "deconstructed relationship." They become lovers, and the narrator's feminism comes up against her jealousy. Meanwhile, an entry in Woolf's diary upends what the narrator knows about her literary idol, and throws her own work into disarray.

An uncertain near-future. A story of new boundaries drawn between people daily. A not-very brave new world. Add two children. And a horse. From a Scottish word meaning a transient moment, a shock, a faint glimpse, Gliff explores how and why we endeavour to make a mark on the world. In a time when western industry wants to reduce us to algorithms and data—something easily categorizable and predictable—Smith shows us why our humanity, our individual complexities, matter more than ever.

Yiyun Li’s remarkable, defiant work of radical acceptance as she considers the loss of her son James. Things in Nature Merely Grow is a testament to Li’s indomitable spirit.

Born with a congenital muscle disorder, Shaka spends her days in her room in a care home outside Tokyo, relying on an electric wheelchair to get around and a ventilator to breathe. But if Shaka’s physical life is limited, her quick, mischievous mind has no boundaries: She takes e-learning courses on her iPad, publishes explicit fantasies on websites, and anonymously troll-tweets to see if anyone is paying attention (“In another life, I’d like to work as a high-class prostitute”). One day, she tweets into the void an offer of an enormous sum of money for a sperm donor.

Based on Cartarescu's own role as a high school teacher, Solenoid begins with the mundane details of a diarist's life and quickly spirals into a philosophical account of life, history, philosophy, and mathematics. One character asks another: when you rush into the burning building, will you save the newborn or the artwork? On a broad scale, the novel's investigations of other universes, dimensions, and timelines reconcile the realms of life and art.

"I'll see you in twenty-five years." Laura Palmer. "Also, ich musste wieder auf ein paar Tage nach Zürich. Es war ganz schrecklich. Aus Nervosität darüber hatte ich mich das gesamte verlängerte Wochenende über so unwohl gefühlt, dass ich unter starker Verstopfung litt. Dazu muss ich sagen, dass ich vor einem Vierteljahrhundert eine Geschichte geschrieben hatte, die ich aus irgendeinem Grund, der mir nun nicht mehr einfällt, 'Faserland' genannt hatte. Es endet in Zürich, sozusagen auf dem Zürichsee, relativ traumatisch."

In 1902, a radical vegetarian and nudist from Nuremberg named August Engelhardt set sail for what was then called the Bismarck Archipelago. His destination: the island Kabakon. His goal: to found a colony based on worship of the sun and coconuts. His malnourished body was found on the beach on Kabakon in 1919; he was 43 years old. Christian Kracht's Imperium uses the outlandish details of Engelhardt's life to craft a fable about the allure of extremism and its fundamental foolishness.

Jenny Erpenbeck’s much anticipated new novel Kairos is a complicated love story set amidst swirling, cataclysmic events as the GDR collapses and an old world evaporates.

A Naked Singularity tells the story of Casi, a child of Colombian immigrants who lives in Brooklyn and works in Manhattan as a public defender - one who, tellingly, has never lost a trial. Never. In the book we hear what happens when his sense of justice and even his sense of self begin to crack - and how his world then slowly devolves. It's a huge, ambitious novel clearly in the vein of DeLillo, Foster Wallace, Pynchon, and even Melville, and it's told in a distinct, frequently hilarious voice, with a striking human empathy at its center.

In Berlin, Germany, in the early 1930s, the acclaimed Swiss film director Emil Nägeli receives the assignment of a lifetime: travel to Japan and make a film to establish the dominance of Adolf Hitler's Nazi empire once and for all. But his handlers are unaware Nägeli has colluded with the Jewish film critics to pursue an alternative objective - to create a monumental, modernist, allegorical spectacle to warn the world of the horror to come.

The Alpenrose is a mountain resort nestled in Austria's scenic landscape among historic churches and castles. It is a vacation idyll that attracts tourists from all over Europe. It is also a mass burial site. Amid the snow-topped peaks and panoramic vistas, ghosts haunt the forest: Edgar Gstranz, a young skier who died in a car crash; Gudrun Bichler, a philosophy student who committed suicide in her bathtub; and Karin Frenzel, a widow who (perhaps) died in a bus accident.

Y es que las protagonistas de Perras de reserva comparten las dificultades y peligros implicados en el mero hecho de nacer mujeres, y los enfrentan con los recursos que la vida les ofrece, obligadas a formular sus propias categorías para situar la frontera entre el bien y el mal. Y nos cuentan sus vidas siempre en primera persona, haciéndonos parte íntima de su forma de habitar el mundo, con un lenguaje sumamente oral y coloquial, casi siempre cargado de una fuerte dosis de humor negro.

A masterpiece of the surreal that influenced a generation of writers in Latin America, Pedro Páramo is the otherworldly tale of one man’s quest for his lost father. That man swears to his dying mother that he will find the father he has never met—Pedro Páramo—but when he reaches the town of Comala, he finds it haunted by memories and hallucinations. There emerges the tragic tale of Páramo himself, and the town whose every corner holds the taint of his rotten soul.

Tutti vorrebbero la vita di Anna e Tom. Un lavoro creativo senza troppi vincoli; un appartamento a Berlino luminoso e pieno di piante; una passione per il cibo e la politica progressista; una relazione aperta alla sperimentazione sessuale, alle serate che finiscono la mattina tardi. Una quotidianità limpida e seducente come una timeline di fotografie scattate con cura. Ma fuori campo cresce un’insoddisfazione profonda quanto difficile da mettere a fuoco. Il lavoro diventa ripetitivo. Gli amici tornano in patria. Il tentativo di impegno politico si spegne in uno slancio generico.

Satantango, the novel that inspired Béla Tarr’s classic film, is proof that the devil has all the good times. Set in an isolated hamlet, the novel unfolds over the course of a few rain-soaked days. Only a dozen inhabitants remain in the bleak village, rank with the stench of failed schemes, betrayals, failure, infidelity, sudden hopes, and aborted dreams. “Their world,” in the words of the translator George Szirtes is “rough and ready, lost somewhere between the cosmic and tragic, in one small insignificant corner of the cosmos. Theirs is the dance of death.”

On the island of Sicily amid the Peloponnesian War, the Syracusans have figured out what to do with the surviving Athenians who had the gall to invade their city: they’ve herded the sorry prisoners of war into a rock quarry and left them to rot. Looking for a way to pass the time, Lampo and Gelon, two unemployed potters with a soft spot for poetry and drink, head down into the quarry to feed the Athenians if, and only if, they can manage a few choice lines from their great playwright Euripides. Before long, the two mates hatch a plan to direct a full-blown production of Medea.

Meet the Valiat family. In Iran, they were somebodies. In America, they’re nobodies. First there is Elizabeth, the regal matriarch with the famously large nose, who remained in Tehran despite the revolution. She lives alone but is sometimes visited by Niaz, her Islamic-law-breaking granddaughter, who takes her partying with a side of purpose and yet manages to survive. Elizabeth’s daughters wound up in America: Shirin, a charismatic and flamboyantly high-flying event planner in Houston, who considers herself the family’s future, and Seema, a dreamy idealist turned housewife.

One morning in 1519, conquistador Hernán Cortés enters the city of Tenochtitlan – today's Mexico City. Later that day, he will meet the emperor Moctezuma in a collision of two worlds, two empires, two languages, two possible futures.