The driver’s seat
£5.99Lise is driven to distraction by her office job so, leaving everything, she flies south on holiday. But what is she looking for? Infinity and eternity attend Lise’s last terrible day in an unnamed southern city.
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Closely watched trains
£5.99‘Closely Watched Trains’, which became the award-winning Jiri Menzel film of the Prague Spring, is a classic of postwar literature which justifies Hrabal’s reputation as one of the best Czech writers of today.
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Secretary
£5.99A writer engulfed by a new obsession, an occasional sex-worker, a runaway, a teenager entering the workplace: these four tales of desire and dislocation explore the rough edges of relationships and the inner lives of women negotiating their precarious place in the world. In these coolly compelling and quietly devastating stories, Gaitskill evokes with razor-sharp precision the pleasure, pain, fear and longing that haunt modern life.
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The lady bandit
£5.99Priests with shotguns, scheming lovers and a necrophiliac gravedigger haunt the fables of Emilia Pardo Bazán, the formidable Spanish aristocrat, intellectual and feminist. These stories paint a rich and variegated image of Old Spain – sometimes tender, often provocative, always entertaining. But if you decide to visit, beware the Lady Bandit, whose strong, rough hands might grab your neck, and squeeze and squeeze and squeeze.
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Strange news from another planet
£5.99Of course, very few people go through the gate and abandon the beautiful phenomenon of the outside world for the interior reality that they intuit. A visitor to a zoo discovers he can understand the animals talking, a young man turns into a mountain and a bird guides a boy to another planet in this selection of dream-like and visionary fairy tales from the great German-Swiss master.
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The maverick pig
£5.99Razor-sharp, pugnacious and blackly funny, Wang Xiaobo’s essays established him as one of China’s most popular – and subversive – writers. From the political power of silence to the irrepressible spirit of a pig he met while working in a commune, these reflections on life and literature in the shadow of the Cultural Revolution provide a rare glimpse of a fearless satirical genius.
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The dreaming child
£5.99Gothic, expansive and truly spellbinding, Karen Blixen’s short stories offer incisive psychological portraits and imaginative visions of war, longing and tender love. Here, an orphan boy creates an elaborate fantasy of a life of grandeur, a feudal lord sets a peasant woman a deadly task, and a young woman resists against her captors, in the midst of conflict.
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The escape of Arsène Lupin
£5.99‘When I decide to escape I shall want nobody’s assistance.’ In this collection, we meet Arsène Lupin, a brilliant, alluring master of disguise – or, as some would have it, a notorious criminal. We follow him on a series of high-stakes adventures, from ingenious heists of invaluable paintings to daring escapes, each one showcasing his intellect, charm, and extraordinary ability to stay one step ahead of the law.
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Lady L
£5.99In the heart of the English countryside, surrounded by irritatingly polite relatives and hopeless sycophants, Lady L. is celebrating her eightieth birthday. But as the guests disperse, she feels the undeniable pull of a mysterious pavilion in the lush grounds, and the terrible secret she buried there many years ago.
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The chimes
£5.99Trotty Veck, an elderly porter, has read so many newspaper reports about crime and immorality that he believes the working classes are irredeemable. But, on New Year’s Eve, summoned to the church tower by a mysterious chiming, Trotty witnesses his own death, and is taken on a ghostly journey that will force him to reassess his conviction. One of Dickens’ ‘Christmas stories’, ‘The Chimes’ is charming and surprising manifesto for empathy for our fellow man.
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Night owls
£5.99‘I decided that my trip had evidently been in vain, since nothing of interest could possibly occur on this visit. I was mistaken.’ Condemned to sleeplessness by the chatter permeating his guesthouse room, a forlorn traveller turns his ear to the riotous tale spun by the garrulous, meddlesome, inane and utterly unprincipled Márya Martynovna next door. Her exuberant deformations of morality and language scandalized Tsarist society, and she remains one of Russian literature’s most uproarious anti-heroes.
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Thousand cranes
£5.99Kikuji has been invited to a tea ceremony by a mistress of his dead father, only to find that the mistress’ rival and successor is also present. He falls for her, with devastating consequences. By 1949 Yasunari Kawabata, the first Japanese author to win the Nobel Prize for Literature, felt that the tradition of the tea ceremony had been degraded. In this delicate novella he uses the ceremony as a powerful vehicle for loneliness, yearning and loss of history.