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A Spectator / New Statesman / Daily Telegraph / Guardian / Times Literary Supplement / Observer Book of the Year SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2016 MAN BOOKER PRIZE Winner of the 2016 Gordon Burn Prize Nine men. Each of them at a different stage of life, each of them away from home, and each of them striving – in the suburbs of Prague, beside a Belgian motorway, in a cheap Cypriot hotel – to understand just what it means to be alive, here and now. Tracing an arc from the spring of youth to the winter...

'An incredible gem of a novel, based on a true story. I loved it’ LAURA BARNETT, bestselling author of THE VERSIONS OF US 'Powerful' Mail on Sunday 'Poignant, uplifting, tender, affectionate' Daily Express 'Tenderly uplifting' Good Housekeeping 'Tenderly humorous. Vital and enjoyable' The Australian 'Dramatic, compassionate and deeply moving.' Jennifer Clement, author of award-winning novel PRAYERS FOR THE STOLEN 'A magnificent novel, tonally flawless, its humour defiant in the face of...

Meet Gilbert and Moira - the strangest couple to ever marry for each other's money. Living in New York in 1991 is Gilbert Selwyn, a young man possessed of boundless charm and an allergy to employment, who has devised a plan to wring a nice pile of loot from his mother's newest (and obscenely wealthy) husband. The scheme, simply put, is to get married for the gifts. But Gilbert, who's gay, needs a fiancee... Enter Moira Finch, a demonically conniving young woman whose own mother, having recently...

Originally published in 1951, this novel tells of a young girl living with her deeply religious grandparents in pre-war Vyborg-before it became part of the Soviet Union. Leena hates school, loves music and rain, and wanders through the town in a state of childish enchantment. “Like a spruce cone, a child falls into a world where logical disorder replaces magical order, and there you are-in trouble, we’ll agree.” The world she inhabits features multiple layers of reality, and this is reflected in...

Junior Bender, Los Angeles burglar and off-the-books detective to the felonious, is reminded that rock and roll will never die (no matter how fervently he wishes some of it would) when Hollywood's most dangerous geriatric mobster, Irwin Dressler, retains Junior's investigative services to solve a rather unharmonious problem. Four of Dressler's old gangster colleagues have put together a national tour of once-popular rock bands they own a piece of: three nights of concerts by guys (and a fe...

'Angus Wilson is one of the most enjoyable novelists of the 20th century... Anglo-Saxon Attitudes (1956) analyses a wide range of British society in a complicated plot that offers all the pleasures of detective fiction combined with a steady and humane insight.' Margaret DrabbleFirst published in 1956, Anglo-Saxon Attitudes draws upon perhaps the most famous archaeological hoax in history: the 'Piltdown Man', finally exposed in 1953. The novel's protagonist is Gerald Middleton, professor of earl...

Two cultures. One man and one woman. One moment in time. Cultures collide when Okichi, a beautiful geisha, is sent to work for the American envoy in Japan. Age and pride meet youth and grace. How will she survive in a home where no one speaks her language, where she understands nothing and she must submit to a strange barbarian's will?

In her second volume of short stories, which follows the hugely successful 'Encounters', Barbara Erskine has created a compelling world of love, betrayal, suspense and grief. A biographer investigating a tragic death hears voices from the past drawing her towards the truth… A nineteenth century parson’s daughter is caught up in the excitement and romance of a smuggling intrigue… A young boy from a deprived background finds his own haven in the wastelands of the inne...

As Bergen PI Varg Veum investigates two different cases, it becomes clear that they are uncannily similar to harrowing events that took place thirty-six years earlier… A gripping instalment of the award-winning Varg Veum series, by one of the fathers of Nordic Noir. Bergen Private Investigator Varg Veum is perplexed when two wildly different cases cross his desk at the same time. A lawyer, anxious to protect her privacy, asks Varg to find her sister, who has disappeared with her husband, seeming...

A junkie looking for one last fix in a town full of ghosts . This is a ghost story. A junkie has gone to El Zapotal to die – to rent a room in this crumbling backwater, melt into one last fix, and not come back. For someone so ready to no longer be alive, though, he can’t stop clinging to the past. His old dog, Kid, who he abandoned. His love, Valerie, who he introduced to drugs. There’s no such thing as a good memory. El Zapotal doesn’t want him either. The people aren’t welcoming, the street...

Former Little League champion Kimitake 'Clyde' Koba finds strength in the belief that he is the reincarnation of Marilyn Monroe as he struggles to escape the ghost of his brother and his alcoholic father. Born on Yom Kippur, teen prodigy Raphael Dweck has been told his whole life that he has a special purpose in God's plan. The only problem is, he can't shake off his doubts, his urges, or the trail of trouble and ruin that follow in his wake. A decade later, Raphael and 'Marilyn' find each oth...