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£20.00
One evening, Toño Azpilcueta, a Peruvian folk music journalist, witnesses a performance that changes his life. Toño becomes obsessed with hearing the virtuoso guitarist Lalo Molfino play again, but the next he hears, Molfino is dead. So begins a quest to uncover the story of this unforgettable musician. Toño tracks down the priest who rescued Molfino from a rubbish heap and raised him, the musicians who played with him and the girl who claimed to love him. Toño decides that he will write a book that will not only immortalize the hero of the Creole vals but will establish the music he loved as a unifying symbol for his fractured country. But the more Toño writes, the more he struggles to keep control of his story. As his savings dwindle and his paranoia rises, it becomes clear that writing a masterpiece is more complicated and consuming than he had realised.
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£14.99
Moving on from a traumatic experience, Yoohee has opened up her own Plant Shop to start afresh. Rows of plants, meticulously arranged like soldiers, thrive under her green fingers; sunlight filters through the windows at just the right angle making every leaf shimmer with health. It is a plant-lovers’ sanctuary, where peperomias and marigolds bloom, while the air itself is like an elixir of peace. Yoohee welcomes her customers, eager to share her tips, while scolding anyone attempting to caress an unfurling bloom, let alone snap off a stem. But as night falls, the soothing atmosphere transforms as Yoohee takes her shovel and hoe, and vanishes into her moonlit garden. In the shadows, she scatters the remains of the day – some finely ground powder and occasionally, the bloody remnants of an unfortunate encounter. Just as Yoohee thinks the past is buried, a young and determined police inspector comes knocking.
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£12.99
Two men venture through strange landscapes towards unknowable destinations. Paul, a feted designer, wanders the echoing corridors of a server farm in Norway – before, in a sudden blackout, he seems to vanish. In another time and space, a wounded stranger wakes in a forest, watched over by a young girl who helps him flee to an icebound settlement where perhaps he will find safety.
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£18.99
When Irène joins the International Tracing Service, she becomes consumed by a singular obsession: returning the belongings confiscated from concentration camp prisoners to their families. A faded cloth doll. A medallion. An embroidered handkerchief. Each object holds a story – and behind each one, a life waiting to be pieced back together. As Irène traces the owners through fragments of evidence, she reconstructs their final days and discovers that even in the darkest chapter of history, humanity endured.
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£9.99
In the wake of some unfathomable war, a woman wanders the forest, forbidden from ever leaving its strange depths. As part of her rigid schooling, a teenage girl is barred from questioning the dogma she is taught to believe. Locked in a loveless marriage, a young woman satisfies her husband’s desires, twice-weekly, as directed – until she begins to pursue her own.
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£9.99
Two sisters must find their way in a world designed to confine them. Marcelle is the elder sister, a woman whose ambitions focus on becoming the companion of a ‘man of genius’. Marguerite is the younger sister, a girl whose sanity depends on breaking free of the oppressive expectations of society. Both end up focusing their attentions on the same disappointing man.
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£9.99
The life of a poet becomes a parable of hunger, hope, and the price of beauty. Yi Sang, born into poverty, dreams of becoming a poet. His gift with words leads him down a path of wandering, hunger, and rejection – yet also moments of transcendent vision. Drawing on the real life of nineteenth-century poet Kim Byeong-yeon, Yi Mun-yol creates a work that is at once historical fiction, fable, and a meditation on the burden of art itself.
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£9.99
Two decades after Portuguese novelist and Nobel Laureate José Saramago shocked the religious world with ‘The Gospel According to Jesus Christ’, he did it again with ‘Cain’, a satire of the Old Testament. Written in the last years of Saramago’s life, it tackles many of the moral and logical non-sequiturs created by a wilful God.
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£9.99
One of Cinema’s great masters revisits his childhood – and the end of his parent’s marriage – in a novella of awakening. Over the course of one summer, eight-year-old Pu Bergman realises that his parents are no longer in love. Surrounded by the quiet idyll of the Swedish countryside, with its ponds, rivers and woods, the daily chaos of the family’s ramshackle summer home threatens to end the bright, brilliant haze of Pu’s childhood world.
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£9.99
Go is a game of strategy which is simple in its fundamentals yet infinitely complex in its execution. This fictional account of a match played between a revered and invincible master and a younger, more progressive, challenger captures the moment in which the traditions of imperial Japan met the onslaught of the 20th century.
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£9.99
A magical, mystical novella about the art and power of storytelling, this is Italo Calvino’s miniature masterpiece. A group of travellers chance to meet, first in a castle, then in a tavern. Their powers of speech have been magically taken from them. Instead, they have only tarot cards with which to tell their tales. What follows is an exquisite interlinking of narratives, and a fantastic, surreal and chaotic history of all human consciousness.
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£9.99
From Japan’s most famous, classic novelist comes a remarkable gem of wit, irony, and feline observation. A stray kitten, catapulted to literary fame loudly observes the world of Meiji Japan in all its absurdity. But he’s not the only cat in the neighbourhood, and as he rallies against the stupidity of human habit, he grows closer to the sophisticated Miss Calico – but he can’t hide his own inadequacies for long.
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£9.99
An intimate, magical novel about one enduring church in a rural Icelandic valley – an ode to a quiet way of life now lost to time forever. The resting place of legendary Viking warrior Egil Skallagrímsson’s skull, Mosfell Church is a lonely, country church, fated to be destroyed. But as the plans to destroy it take shape, stories, myth and folklore abound in one magical last attempt to leave Mosfell standing.
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£12.99
Can you leave your parents behind? Can you slam the door, walk down the stairs, and decide never to see them again? Can you ever escape the grip of your origins? A son asks himself these questions as he celebrates a bittersweet anniversary: it is a decade since he saw his parents. Now he finally feels able to tell their story. This is his lucid portrait of a family devastated by a father’s violence and the woman who silently accepts him; of an airless relationship, unsettled only by the ringing of a telephone, a visiting classmate or a friend who is soon rejected. And it is the story of how a son is possessed by the irrepressible desire to be free: to be himself, to live his own life, to open up to others without fear of reprisals.
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£9.99
Camille loves Alain, but Alain loves his cat, whom he has had from childhood, more than he could love any woman.
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£9.99
From dragons and unicorns to beings born only in Borges’s labyrinthine mind, this extraordinary compendium blurs the line between scholarship and fantasy. At once encyclopaedia and storybook, it reveals Borges’s genius for turning knowledge into wonder.
Les Tuniques bleues 42/Qui veut la peau du general 
