Generation GDR
£22.00A gripping account of East Germany in the late ’70s and early ’80s, and of one man’s fated struggle for freedom.
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Türkiye
£14.99From Thracian borders with Bulgaria to a sparkling Aegean coast, Julian Sayarer cycles across Anatolian hills towards the Black Sea, Kurdish southeast and the Armenian frontiers. Whereas books on Türkiye – renamed on the eve of its first century – often root themselves in history, romanticism, religion or civilisational terms, Sayarer brings to life this living, breathing community of peoples and place at the meeting point of Asia, Africa and Europe; a mid-point not only of East and West, but of all the unfurled globe. The result is a love letter to a country and its neighbours, but one that gives a clear-eyed view of Türkiye and its place in a changing world.
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And the stones cry out
£10.99This is the story of a child with black eyes that float in and out of focus, a child soft and round, with translucent, blue-veined legs unable to hold his weight. This is the story of his place in the Cévennes house where he was born, overlooked by swaying trees and craggy mountains. This is the story of his siblings: the eldest who spends his days cheek-to-cheek with his baby brother, attuned to the rushing, buzzing, whistling sounds that connect him to the outside world; the sister who rejects him and resents him for consuming the attention of her parents and brother, for turning her family upside down; and the youngest, whose life unfolds in the shadow of what his brother’s might have been. This is the story of the ancient stones embedded in the courtyard walls, devoted witnesses to the children’s lives, who watch over them and tell their tale.
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The stolen heart
£20.00Samson Kolechko has been assigned a most perplexing case – though it is mostly perplexing because it’s hard to understand why selling the meat of one’s own pig constitutes a crime. But apparently it does, and at the insistence of the Chekist secret police officer assigned to ‘reinforce’ the Lybid police station, Samson does his diligent – if diffident – best. Yet no sooner has he got started than his live-in fiancée Nadezhda is abducted by striking railway workers who object to the census she’s carrying out. And when you factor in a mysterious thief in the police station itself, a deadly tram accident that may have been pre-meditated, and the potential reappearance of the culprit in the case of the silver bone, it’s no wonder the ‘meat case’ takes a back seat. But it is in the pursuit of that petty-fogging, seemingly mundane matter that Samson’s fate lies – and Nadezhda’s too, for the two are inextricably entwined.
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Farewell dinner for a spy
£9.991949: William Catesby returns to London in disgrace, accused of murdering a ‘double-dipper’ the Americans believed to be one of their own. His left-wing sympathies have him singled out as a traitor. Henry Bone throws him a lifeline, sending him to Marseille, ostensibly to report on dockers’ strikes and keep tabs on the errant wife of a British diplomat. But there’s a catch. For his cover story, he’s demobbed from the service and tricked out as writer researching a book on the Resistance.
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Oromay
£20.00Ethiopia, 1982. After a decade of conflict, the government is determined to quash the Eritrean insurgency once and for all. As head of propaganda, it’s Tsegaye’s job to keep the people onside. When the Red Star Campaign lands him in Asmara, Tsegaye is swept up in the city’s nightlife, the bars and coffeehouses buzzing with spies and government agents. But even as Tsegaye begins to fall in love with Asmara – and with bold, dazzling, enigmatic Fiammetta – his misgivings about the campaign grow, and soon his loyalties will be tested to their limit. Tsegaye is confronted with the horror of war when the army attacks the insurgents’ mountain stronghold, and encounters betrayals that shake his faith in both the regime and human nature. A masterpiece of Ethiopian literature, ‘Oromay’ is a thrilling political satire and a turbulent tale of love and war.
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The silver bone
£9.99Kyiv, 1919. The Soviets control the city, but White armies menace them from the West. No man trusts his neighbour and any spark of resistance may ignite into open rebellion. When Samson Kolechko’s father is murdered, his last act is to save his son from a falling Cossack sabre. Deprived of his right ear instead of his head, Samson is left an orphan, with only his father’s collection of abacuses for company. Until, that is, his flat is requisitioned by two Red Army soldiers, whose secret plans Samson is somehow able to overhear with uncanny clarity. Eager to thwart them, he stumbles into a world of murder and intrigue that will either be the making of him – or finish what the Cossack started.
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Yeonnam-Dong’s Smiley Laundromat
£16.99Yeonnam-Dong’s Smiley Laundromat is a place where the extraordinary stories of ordinary residents unfold. Situated at the heart of rapidly gentrifying district of Seoul, it’s a haven of peace and reflection for many locals. And when a notebook is left behind there, it becomes a place that brings people together. One by one, customers start jotting down candid diary entries, opening their hearts and inviting acts of kindness from neighbours who were once just faces in the crowd. But there is a darker story behind the notebook, and before long the laundromat’s regulars are teaming up to solve the mystery and put the world to rights.
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Fatal gambit
£20.00Claire Lidman died fourteen years ago. So why does she appear in the background of a recent holiday snap taken in Venice? Her husband brings the anomaly to Hans Rekke and Micaela Vargas. Initial scepticism gives way to cautious belief, but Rekke is falling apart again and Vargas has her own problems. Her gangster brother is threatening to silence her if she doesn’t get off his case. Meanwhile, Rekke’s daughter Julia has a new boyfriend she’s determined to keep secret. He sees something in her she can’t see herself, but there are hints of a darker side. Most troubling of all, Rekke is hearing whispers of a name he hasn’t heard for years. A rival from his youth whose restless evil links all the threads in this incipient case. The pieces are laid and he’s already one move ahead. The name of the game is revenge.
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Ada’s realm
£10.99Where is Ada? In a small village in West Africa, in what will one day become Ghana, Ada gives birth again, and again the baby does not live. As she grieves the loss of her child, Portuguese traders become the first white men to arrive in the village, an event that will bear terrible repercussions for Ada and her kin. When is Ada? Centuries later, Ada will become the mathematical genius Ada Lovelace; Ada, a prisoner forced into prostitution in a Nazi concentration camp; and Ada, a young, pregnant Ghanaian woman with a new British passport who arrives in Berlin in 2019 for a fresh start. Who is Ada? Ada is not one woman, but many, and she is all women – she revolves in orbits, looping from one century and from one place to the next. And so, she experiences the hardship but also the joy of womanhood: she is a victim, she offers resistance, and she fights for her independence.
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Before the queen falls asleep
£10.99Born a girl to parents who expected a boy, Jihad grows up treated like the eldest son, wearing boy’s clothing and sharing the financial burden of head of the household with her father. Now middle-aged, each night Jihad tells her daughter a story from her life. As Malika prepares to leave home to attend university abroad, her mother revisits the past of their Palestinian family, tenderly describing their life in exile in Kuwait and her own experiences of love and loss as she grows up. Huzama Habayeb weaves a richly observed and affectionate portrait of a Palestinian family displaced from their homeland, exploring with humour and poise the love and betrayal that pursues Jihad and her family from Kuwait to Jordan to Dubai.
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The silver bone
£20.00Kyiv, 1919. The Soviets control the city, but White armies menace them from the West. No man trusts his neighbour and any spark of resistance may ignite into open rebellion. When Samson Kolechko’s father is murdered, his last act is to save his son from a falling Cossack sabre. Deprived of his right ear instead of his head, Samson is left an orphan, with only his father’s collection of abacuses for company. Until, that is, his flat is requisitioned by two Red Army soldiers, whose secret plans Samson is somehow able to overhear with uncanny clarity. Eager to thwart them, he stumbles into a world of murder and intrigue that will either be the making of him – or finish what the Cossack started.