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WINNER OF THE MISHIMA YUKIO PRIZEA WORLD LITERATURE TODAY NOTABLE BOOK 2023 An ordinary housewife finds herself haunted by visions of a mushroom cloud and abruptly leaves her husband and son to travel alone to the city of Nagasaki, where she soon begins an affair with a young half-Russian, half-Japanese man. Inspired by Marguerite Duras's screenplay for “Hiroshima, Mon Amour,” this novel is a further demonstration of Kashimada's distinctive literary style and technique and her commitment to plumbing the depths of her characters'psychology. Dealing with the travails and traumas of history, with gendered identity, with the tension between private and public selves, Love at Six Thousand Degrees is a distinctive and intriguing novel by one of Japan's most unique contemporary authors.

'Captivating and entertaining.'—Sololibri'Alan Gillot tells the universal story of a new beginning.'—La Repubblica'A novel that shows how when life comes knocking, it cannot be ignored.'—ThrillerNord Antoine is a script doctor: a high-flying consultant hired to cut the script of a movie before it's green-lighted. Called to a film set on the Côte d'Azur, he casually cancels the role young hopeful Emma was cast in. When she confronts him, her words – and actions – impart a few home-truths. Antoine chases after Emma to apologise. Little does he know that from then on, he won't be able to return to his old colourless life. At Emma's side, Antoine embarks on an unexpected journey through a provincial France he's never seen before, right into the bizarre, exciting world of her eccentric family and the itinerant theatre company she belongs to. A love story and a road movie, this charming tale proclaims the need to overcome our fears and reach out to others.

A widowed Italian farm woman finds unlikely companionship and startling self-discovery in a novel “as immediate and spellbinding as a two-character play” (La Stampa).A Tuscan through and through, Nives didn't cry when she found her husband of fifty years dead in the pig pen. Nor did she cry at the funeral. But when loneliness sets in—and she brings her favorite chicken inside for company—she is shocked to discover that her new companion is a more than adequate replacement.Then one day, the chicken goes stiff in front of the tv, and Nives must call the town veterinarian, Loriano Bottai. What follows is a phone call that seems to last a lifetime, a phone call that becomes a novel. Their conversation veers from the chicken to the past—to the life they once shared, the secrets they never had the courage to reveal, wounds that never healed.Shortlisted for the 2022 Italian Prose in Translation Award, Nives reverberates with stories of love lost, of abandonment, of silent and heart-breaking nostalgia, of joy, laughter, and despair.

A sensuous Frenchwoman transforms the life and world of an introverted Spanish widower for better or worse in this “moving” debut novel (RTS, France).Across the Galician countryside, where there are just as many rain-soaked days as not, villagers face hardships armed with hope and solidarity. Tomás is a successful farmer in this small village, but he's not happy. His days are busy with work. His nights are a drunken spiral into self-pity and despair. A widower plagued with guilt, his life has been tarnished by tragedy that has pushed him into isolation and loneliness. All of that changes when he sees Suiza.Warm-hearted and sensual, Suiza lands in the village en route to visit the sea. Her innocently provocative manner disturbs the tranquility of this town. Like all the men who meet her, Tomás is immediately crazy about her. What is initially a simple carnal desire will gradually transform into love and offer the possibility of personal transformation as well.Praise for Suiza“A perfect capsule of everything I love in a novel: beauty, darkness, humor; it covers the whole range of human emotions, and lays them bare under the sun of Galicia. I shall add that it's pretty intense, so maybe not for everyone.” —Jean-Baptiste Andrea“Immersive and disturbing.... This rough-edged anti–fairy tale is not for the faint of heart.” —Publishers Weekly

A MOST ANTICIPATED BOOK OF FALL 2021 Following the international success of Ties and the National Book Award-shortlisted Trick, Domenico Starnone gives readers another searing portrait of human relationships and human folly. Pietro and Teresa's love affair is tempestuous and passionate. After yet another terrible argument, she gets an idea: they should tell each other something they've never told another person, something they're too ashamed to tell anyone. They will hear the other's confessions without judgment and with love in their hearts. In this way, Teresa thinks, they will remain united forever, more intimately connected than ever. A few days after sharing their shameful secrets, they break up. Not long after, Pietro meets Nadia, falls in love, and proposes. But the shadow of the secret he confessed to Teresa haunts him, and Teresa herself periodically reappears, standing at the crossroads, it seems, of every major moment in his life. Or is it he who seeks her out? Starnone is a master storyteller and a novelist of the highest order. His gaze is trained unwaveringly on the fault lines in our public personas and the complexities of our private selves. Trust asks how much we are willing to bend to show the world our best side, knowing full well that when we are at our most vulnerable we are also at our most dangerous.

FROM THE AUTHOR OF THE INTERNATIONAL BOOKER LONGLISTED AND WINNER OF THE STREGA PRIZE THE HOUSE ON VIA GEMITO A FINANCIAL TIMES BOOK OF THE WEEK'What is most thrilling about Trust is its overwhelming sense of unease... the selves we'make'for ourselves and others may be the most dangerous of the stories we tell.'—Times Literary Supplement'Compelling… One of Italy's most accomplished novelists.'—The Guardian'Starnone packs a huge amount into a small compass.'—The Sunday Times Pietro and Teresa's love affair is tempestuous and passionate. After yet another terrible argument, she gets an idea: they should tell each other something they've never told another person, something they're too ashamed to tell anyone. In this way, Teresa thinks, they will remain intimately connected forever. A few days after sharing their shameful secrets, they break up. Not long after, Pietro meets Nadia, falls in love, and proposes. But the shadow of the secret he confessed to Teresa haunts him, and Teresa herself periodically reappears, standing at the crossroads of every major moment in his life. Or is it he who seeks her out? Trust asks how much we are willing to bend to show the world our best side, knowing full well that when we are at our most vulnerable, we are also at our most dangerous.

Winner of the 2015 International Prize for Arabic Fiction, the most important literary prize in the Arab world, The Italian tells an emblematic story of the shipwreck of the Arab Springs. In Tunisia at the turn of the 80s and 90s, an era of great tensions and political and social changes, the story of a revolutionary love and dream destined to succumb in the clash with the harsh reality of a country in which repression, malpractice and general degradation crush the ambitions and dreams of the individual. At his father's funeral, to the great consternation of all present, Abdel Nasser beats the imam who is celebrating the funeral rite. The narrator, a childhood friend of the protagonist, retraces the story of Abdel Nasser from his days as a free and rebellious adolescent spirit to the leader of a student movement and then affirmed journalist. Those were crucial years in Tunisia, with great tensions and changes coming up: the growth of Islamism fighting against the strong repression by the government. Against this background full of revolutionary ferments, struggles against Islamists and demonstrations against state power stands the tormented love story between Abdel Nasser and Zeina, a brilliant and beautiful philosophy student who dreams of a career in academia. The dreams of Zeina and Abdel Nasser will unfortunately end up being wrecked under the ruthless gears of a corrupt and male chauvinist society, in which values are only a facade, ending up crushing the individuality, hopes, and aspirations of individuals. Abdel Nasser's transformation from a young idealist with high hopes to a successful, but disillusioned and tired journalist is masterfully narrated in a stream of stories, digressions and flashbacks in which the narrative tension is always high.

“An ambiguous relationship is turned inside out in this intensely vivid novel... Kerninon's novel charms and unsettles to an equal degree.” —Kirkus Reviews Winner of the 2018 Fénéon Literary Prize Helen and Franck, both born into high-ranking diplomatic families, meet in Rome as high-school students and immediately detect in each other the wounded child hidden beneath their gilded social status. Their relationship becomes a dangerous, explosive mix of love and friendship. Immediately after Helen's graduation, they leave their past and family behind to move in together in her apartment in Amsterdam. While Helen immerses herself in her studies and embarks on a promising academic career, Frank, after a few difficult years, makes a spectacular debut on the Dutch Art scene with his first paintings. Helen remains faithfully by his side during his rise to fame, overseeing the domestic details of his life in apparent total self-abnegation. Are introverted Helen and flamboyant Franck who they really appear to be? Are they victims or monsters? Kerninon's English language debut, full of masterfully orchestrated twists and turns, leaves these simple distinctions behind, and progresses into far more fascinating terrain. “Julia Kerninon offers up a hypersensitive novel, with chiseled sentences and a melancholy tone. I adored this uncommon love.” —Elle “Complex and evocative... [A] portrait of the inequalities inherent in each relationship, and the emotional burden that is often placed on women in order to keep these relationships afloat.” —Châtelaine “Kerninon's perceptive unfolding of Helen's pains in elegant prose makes for a poignant portrait of buried frustrations. Readers looking for a slow burn will enjoy this tragic novel.” —Publishers Weekly

The creation of a greatest hits album gives a musician the chance to reflect on her storied life as a daughter, mother, singer, and lover.The beloved singer-songwriter Cass Wheeler has abandoned retirement for one last chapter in her musical career. She assembles an album of greatest hits—the songs that mean the most to her, songs that she wrote during the brightest and darkest times in her life.Each chapter springs from one of these songs. Told in tandem with the lyrics, this irresistible novel moves skillfully across episodes of a fascinating and sometimes tragic life—from Cass's lonely childhood, through her freewheeling rise to fame, to first love and loss.Laura Barnett's clear-eyed writing vividly depicts the British and US music scene of the ‘70s, with its mistakes and magic, and the lives that pass through it. By the time Cass has selected the final song, she is confronted with one last choice: whether she can find the strength within herself to open her heart once more.Greatest Hits is an enchanting novel that will capture and delight anyone who has discovered the rewards of music, or who has found strength and meaning in art.Perfect for fans of Daisy Jones & the SixPraise for Greatest Hits“This engaging, emotionally charged novel about music, motherhood and mental illness deserves to be a hit.” —The Observer (UK)“There is nothing here that hasn't been covered in the more candid memoirs and autobiographies of stars from the 1960s and 1970s. But Barnett's portrait is unusually perceptive, a mixture of evocative detail and sharp reportage that feels fresh to read. To her credit, too, she scrapes away the gloss to draw out a nuanced and honest account of the loneliness that plagues her singer.... Barnett pulls off the novel and its collaboration with pizzazz, turning it into a feat, not a gimmick.” —The Times (UK)“Unusually perceptive, a mixture of evocative detail and sharp reportage that feels fresh to read.” —The Sunday Times (UK)

The Whitbread Award–winning author of the Old Filth trilogy captures a moment in time for three young women on the cusp of adulthood. Yorkshire, 1946. The end of the war has changed the world again, and, emboldened by this new dawning, Hetty Fallows, Una Vane, and Lieselotte Klein seize the opportunities with enthusiasm. Hetty, desperate to escape the grasp of her critical mother, books a solo holiday to the Lake District under the pretext of completing her Oxford summer coursework. Una, the daughter of a disconcertingly cheery hairdresser, entertains a romantically inclined young man from the wrong side of the tracks and the left-side of politics. Meanwhile, Lieselotte, the mysterious Jewish refugee from Germany, leaves the Quaker family who had rescued her, to test herself in London. Although strikingly different from one another, these young women share the common goal of adventure and release from their middle-class surroundings through romance and education. “Gardam's lean, fast-paced prose is at turns hugely funny and deeply moving.... [Her] characters are acutely and compassionately observed.” —Atlantic Monthly “Quirky, enchanting... with lively, laugh-out loud elan.” —The Baltimore Sun “Splendid... Gardam's style is perfect.” —The New York Times Book Review “With winning charm and wit... Gardam frames her story in dozens of crisp, brief scenes featuring deliciously dizzy conversation.” —Kirkus Reviews (starred review) “Ebullient, humorous, and wise, this is a novel to savor.” —Booklist “The portrait of postwar England as conventions crumble and the country is rebuilt is terrific.” —Publishers Weekly

A “fierce literary thriller” about an exiled woman confronting her past as a prisoner of a repressive theocracy (Kirkus Reviews). She was known as “Bait 455,” the most famous prisoner in a ruthless theological republic. He was one of the colonels closest to the supreme commander. When they meet, years later, far from their country of birth, a strange, equivocal relationship develops between them. Both their shared past of suffering and old romantic passions come rushing back—accompanied by recollections of the perverse logic of violence that dominated the dictatorship under which they lived. French Iranian author Fariba Hachtroudi's prize-winning, “tightly plotted” novel “packs complex emotions in a small space, tackling difficult and essential questions about power and our responsibilities to one another” (Kirkus Reviews). “The story leaves us chilled by the tyrannical culture that created this macabre bond. But at the end, it's just as much a tale of the capacity of love.” —Minneapolis Star-Tribune “Timeless in its meditations on totalitarianism and the toll it takes on even those who physically escape its clutches.” —Shelf Awareness (starred review)

PEN Award Finalist: “A sense of longing suffuses Tseng's sexy, sad debut novel” about a librarian obsessed with a teenage boy (Kirkus Reviews).Books may be Mayumi Saito's greatest love and her one source of true pleasure. Forty-one years old, disenchanted wife and dutiful mother, Mayumi's work as a librarian on a small island off the coast of New England feeds her passion for reading and provides her with many occasions for wry observations on human nature, but it does little to remedy the mundaneness of her life. That is, until the day she issues a library card to a shy seventeen-year-old boy and swiftly succumbs to a sexual obsession that subverts the way she sees the library, her family, the island she lives on, and ultimately herself.“Jennifer Tseng delivers an elegant exploration of passion and its consequences while casting her observant eye on motherhood, memory, exile, and female friendship. Carnal, witty, and slyly crafted, Mayumi and the Sea of Happiness is a sizzling fuse of a novel, with an explosion bigger and better than anything you can imagine.” —Sara Levine, author of Treasure Island!!!“An uncannily apt elucidation of the way sadness can leave a person adrift, and how love can make even a very isolated person feel, momentarily, perhaps delusionally, less alone.” —Elle

“A searingly vivid portrayal of the depths of human emotions—from the first glow of young love to the deeper strength of middle-aged commitment” (Kirkus Reviews).In the “exquisitely written” The Pathless Sky, Chaitali Sen conjures a world in which a nation's political turmoil, its secret history, and growing social unrest turn life into a fragile and capricious thing and love into a necessary refuge to be defended at all costs (The Rumpus). A world not unlike the one we live in.Though they fell in love in college, life has conspired to keep John and Mariam apart for years. But a day comes when, across a great distance, both realize they have always loved each other. During the intervening years, however, the troubles in their country have reached a critical impasse. Government crimes have been white-washed, personal liberty is deeply compromised, a resistance movement has emerged from the underground to take the fight for freedom to the streets, and the government militia employs increasingly draconian measures in an attempt to maintain control. When Mariam is implicated in the latest spell of anti-government actions and arrested without appeal, the consequences of her and John's love will prove potentially dire for both.“The Pathless Sky centers on a couple, John and Mariam, and the subtle ways history and status complicate their relationship. Just as couples in the US might be discovering new tensions from their disparate reactions to whatever's happening next in the White House, John and Mariam struggle with how their reaction to their country affects their experience of each other.” —BuzzFeed News, “10 Books That Challenge Our Political Landscape by Inventing New Ones”

A third-generation Greek American visits his ancestral homeland, and discovers a century of family secrets, in this “hauntingly poignant” novel (World Literature Today).From the burning quay at Smyrna to present-day Manhattan, the Argyriou family has been pursued by disaster. In the 1922 Greco-Turkish War, little Frosso and her sister Erasmia flee as Turkish soldiers descend on their village. Orphaned and destitute, the two girls have only each other to rely on as they scrape together a life in the immigrant slums around Athens.Eighteen years later, Europe is stewing and Erasmia is offered a chance for a new life in America by her fiancé. Compelled to leave by the impending war, Erasmia boards the ship New Greece with a heavy heart, but before the ship reaches harbor her grief takes hold and Erasmia throws herself into the ocean—leading her fiancé to marry her surviving sister instead.Now Erasmia's great-nephew, who has never seen Greece, will journey to the crisis-ridden country in the twenty-first century to uncover the shadowy past of the Argyriou family—in this atmospheric and psychologically complex novel that explores the blurred line between history and memory.

Life is an often-confusing mixture of heartache and hilarity, or so prove Seth Greenland's appealing characters in this tenderly comedic story of modern love. Imbued with Greenland's signature wit, I Regret Everything confronts the oceanic uncertainty of what it means to be young and alive. Jeremy Best, a Manhattan-based trusts and estates lawyer, has a second life as the poet Jinx Bell. To his boss's daughter, Spaulding, Jeremy, at 33, is at first, already halfway to dead. When Spaulding, an aspiring 19-year-old writer, discovers Mr. Best's alter writerly ego, the two become bound by a devotion to poetry. Their budding relationship offers them the possibility of enduring love, or the threat of tragic loss. A skilled wordsmith with a talent for telling humor, Greenland creates fully realized characters, people that come to understand themselves as complex renderings of the human condition—at its often best, and sometimes worst. I Regret Everything explores happiness and heartache with a healthy dose of skepticism, and an understanding that the reality of love encompasses life, death, iambic pentameter, regret, trusts and estates.

Three friends meet weekly to commiserate over romantic disasters in “a marvelous novel—light, funny and genuine, while still being quite emotional” (Kirkus Reviews). Every Thursday night at seven o'clock, three men meet in Paris. Each man's life, story, and situation is as different from the others'as can be. What unites them is heartache. Trouble, that is, with women. The meetings are held in a spirit of openness and tolerance. In an almost religious silence each man confesses while the others listen. Philippe is a philosopher of repute. Since the woman he considered to be his perfect mate left him, he's been dating one of the world's most famous models in an effort to forget. Denis has been working as a waiter for years. Women have lost interest in him entirely and he is in a deep funk because of it. But one day a mysterious woman with a suitcase appears on his doorstep and moves into his living room without explanation, throwing his life into turmoil. Yves is a husband who, after having discovered his wife's betrayal, refuses to honor any and all forms of faithfulness. He is spending a lifetime's worth of savings in search of pleasure. In The Thursday Night Men, Tonino Benacquista gives readers a variety of unexpected and amusing perspectives on romance, the relationship between the sexes, and male friendships.

“Why must pleasure always have a price? And why must one always pay for sensual delight with the loss of original lightness?” Amélie is a young language teacher living in Tokyo. When she succumbs to the attentions of her one and only student—the shy, wealthy, and oh-so-Japanese Rinri—the lovers-to-be find themselves swept along by an affair that is as unusual as it is tender. This is a new kind of love story that pits a woman's desire for companionship against her strong sense of individual identity. In its exploration of contemporary themes—the confidence of independence, the possibility of love as a form of limitation—Tokyo Fiancée foregoes conventions to create a compelling image of love for the contemporary woman, an anti-Prince-Charming story that is an antidote to traditional romantic fables. The author brings humor, intelligence, and a refreshing honesty to this highly autobiographical work. Her storytelling appeals to those who feel that their own immediate and personal sense of love is seldom adequately represented in popular fiction. This splendid novel offers readers a quietly revolutionary vision of romantic love.