"Gone, finito, The End, I say. A father who puts an end to it all before he wears down the whole family deserves more praise than damnation". Two sisters travel to Sofia – in a convoy of luxury limousines arranged by a fellow Bulgarian exile – to...

With subtle, bemused humor and an unerring eye for human frailty, Michel Layaz writes about the hidden tensions within families, the awkwardness of adolescence, and the drama of intimacy between friends and lovers. His fifth novel, "My Mother's Tears...

In Jack London's lifetime, "Burning Daylight" was one of his best-selling books, yet it has been largely out of print for decades. Now the novel is being brought back for a new generation of readers to discover. The story features one of London's mos...

Imagine trying to tell someone something about yourself and your desires for which there are no words. What if the mere attempt at expression was bound to misfire, to efface the truth of that ineluctable something? In "Someone", Michael Lucey conside...

Two fathers with two daughters: Martin, professor of German, writes but is studying Earth Sciences at MIT; Tariq, a doctor in Baghdad and Muna, is studying the archaeology of a region that is seen as the cradle of civilization. These two parallel rel...

How, in 1930, did Alfred Wegener, the son of minister from Berlin, find himself in the most isolated spot on earth, attempting to survive an unthinkably cold winter in the middle of Greenland? In "All the Land", Jo Lendle sets out to chronicle Wegene...

Norway. The 1800s. Endre must to take over the family farm from his father – his father, who swings the sickle and sharpens the scythe, and says this is the only way in which rocks and stones and mounts and waves can still be ours. But Endre is stran...

What does it mean to have an emotional response to poetry and music? And, just as important but considered less often, what does it mean not to have such a response? What happens when lyric utterances – which should invite consolation, revelation, an...

Jenny Lewis has produced a versatile and inventive retelling of "Gilgamesh" which brings alive a story that is as resonant today as it was when first composed in Mesopotamia (modern Iraq) four millennia ago. In 2012 she was awarded a Hawthornden Fell...

Of the many charges laid against contemporary literary scholars, one of the most common – and perhaps the most wounding – is that they simply don't love books. And while the most obvious response is that, no, actually the profession of literary studi...