Not for sale in the Czech Republic and the Slovak Republic! Written between 1954 and 1957 and treating events from the Stalinist era of Czechoslovakia's postwar Communist regime, "Midway on Our Life's Journey" flew in the face of the reigning aesth...

Not for sale in Estonia! "The Pig is the Sun..." So begins Oskar Panizza's outrageously heretical and massively erudite essay on the pig, originally published in 1900 in his journal Zurich Discussions. Moving from the Rig Veda to the Edda to Ovid,...

Mairtin O Cadhain's irresistible and infamous novel "The Dirty Dust" is consistently ranked as the most important prose work in modern Irish, yet no translation for English-language readers has ever before been published. Alan Titley's vigorous new t...

"Papi's there, around any corner", says the eight-year-old girl at the heart of "Papi".But you can't sit down and wait for him cuz that's a longer and more painful death". Living in Santo Domingo, she waits for her father to come back from the United...

A woman obsessed with reality TV encounters a sorority girl who has embarked on a very personal scavenger hunt. A man unexpectedly discovers that his father – a seemingly rational man – believes, seriously, in lake monsters. A woman whose husband has...

"Born too late to see the war and too early to forget it". So writes Reiner Schurmann in "Origins", a startlingly personal account of life as a young man from postwar Germany in the 1960s. Schurmann's semi-autobiographical protagonist is incapable of...

"We're living in a sensitive age, Cuke, and I'm not altogether sure you're fully attuned to it". So says Irish-American politician Frank Skeffington – a cynical, corrupt 1950s mayor, and also an old-school gentleman who looks after the constituents o...

Novelist Zakes Mda has made a name for himself as a key chronicler of the new, post-apartheid South Africa, casting a satirical eye on its claims of political unity, its rising black middle class, and other aspects of its complicated, multiracial soc...

Werner Braunig was once regarded as the great hope of East German literature – until an extract from "Rummelplatz" was read before the East German censorship authorities in 1965, and fierce opposition summarily sealed its fate. The novel's sin? It pa...

One of the hallmarks of French author Patrick Modiano's writing is a singular ability to revisit particular motifs and episodes, infusing each telling with new detail and emotional nuance. In this evocative novel the internationally acclaimed author...