Tara Selter, the heroine of On the Calculation of Volume, has involuntarily stepped off the train of time: in her world, November eighteenth repeats itself endlessly. We meet Tara on her 122nd November 18th: she no longer experiences the changes of days, weeks, months, or seasons. She finds herself in a lonely new reality without being able to explain why: how is it that she wakes every morning into the same day, knowing to the exact second when the blackbird will burst into song and when the rain will begin? Will she ever be able to share her new life with her beloved and now chronically befuddled husband? And on top of her profound isolation and confusion, Tara takes in with pain how slight a difference she makes in the world. (As she puts it: “That’s how little the activities of one person matter on the eighteenth of November.”) Balle is hypnotic and masterful in her remixing of the endless recursive day, creating curious little folds of time and foreshadowings: her flashbacks light up inside the text like old flash bulbs. The first volume’s gravitational pull―a force inverse to its constriction―has the effect of a strong tranquilizer, but a drug under which your powers of observation only grow sharper and more acute. Give in to the book's logic (its minute movements, its thrilling shifts, its slant wit, its slowing of time) and its spell is utterly intoxicating. Solvej Balle’s seven-volume novel wrings enthralling and magical new dimensions from time and its hapless, mortal subjects. As one Danish reviewer beautifully put it, Balle’s fiction consists of writing that listens. “Reading her is like being caressed by language itself.”

A mysterious black crate arrives at an ISIS command centre in the heart of occupied Mosul, leaving the soldiers and their captives guessing at its contents... A refugee travels to a remote ‘Northern’ town to study race relations, only to discover one of its bridge-building initiatives is, in fact, a trap... Drifting from job to job in a corrupt, militia-run Baghdad, a young daydreamer is asked to spy on a protest movement he finds himself entirely sympathising with... The characters in Hassan Blasim’s latest collection all find themselves in impossible positions – from the ISIS cook working undercover to retrieve ancient manuscripts from a desecrated site, to the refugee in Northern Europe unable to process the devastating dislocation of exile. Violence, intolerance and insecurity stalk them at every turn. And yet, for all their trauma, Hassan’s stories – strung through with intrigue and absurdist humour – are somehow able to draw us in and help us appreciate the infinite complexity implicit in even the most black-and-white contexts. ‘Perhaps the best writer of Arabic fiction alive’ – The Guardian ‘Brilliant and disturbing... bitter, furious and unforgettable’– The Wall Street Journal on The Iraqi Christ

A bold tour-de-force about violence and money, love and desire, and a stand-off with the Devil himselfA woman meets a man on a train in Copenhagen and agrees to visit him in London. While she sits out a two-week Covid quarantine in his apartment, she begins to tell her story. Years ago and desperate for money, she sold herself to a stranger called T. He offered her a suitcase full of money and lavish gifts in exchange for total control of her body. In the bed between them lay a large kitchen knife and the promise of an iconic death.But at the last moment, she aborted the treacherous game and fled. Now in London, she reflects on the forces - financial and social - that led her to the brink of destruction, and wonders what it would take to believe in love again.Frank, intimate and dazzling entertaining, The Devil Book is a classic girl-meets-boy-meets-devil story. Taking us from Copenhagen to London to the inside of a mental institution, as well as a fancy apartment block, this unmissable stand-alone novel is the follow up to the critically-acclaimed Money to Burn.

Is it possible to love under capitalism? Maggie and Kurt are a couple struggling to hold their marriage together after their only daughter has left home. They live in a old farmhouse in Nyborg but somehow keep missing each other, unable to discuss the events that brought them together.Decades ago, a passenger ferry called the Scandinavian Star caught fire, killing hundreds of people. The event is still considered a national tragedy in Denmark and Norway. Years later, it was revealed not to be an accident, but the result of an insurance scam gone wrong.How is the Scandinavian Star disaster connected to Maggie and Kurt's relationship? How does money affect and infect our closest relationships? And is it ever possible to escape? Money to Burn is both a dazzling work of fiction and a true-crime investigation into the unshakeable hold of money, greed and desire on us all.

Visionary Oxford professor Ian Goldin and The Economist's Tom Lee-Devlin show why the city is where the battles of inequality, social division, pandemics and climate change must be faced. From centres of antiquity like Athens or Rome to modern metropolises like New York or Shanghai, cities throughout history have been the engines of human progress and the epicentres of our greatest achievements. Now, for the first time, more than half of humanity lives in cities, a share that continues to rise. In the developing world, cities are growing at a rate never seen before. In this book, Professor Goldin and Tom Lee-Devlin show why making our societies fairer, more cohesive and sustainable must start with our cities. Globalization and technological change have concentrated wealth into a small number of booming metropolises, leaving many smaller cities and towns behind and feeding populist resentment. Yet even within seemingly thriving cities like London or San Francisco, the gap between the haves and have-nots continues to widen and our retreat into online worlds tears away at our social fabric. Meanwhile, pandemics and climate change pose existential threats to our increasingly urban world. Professor Goldin and Tom Lee-Devlin combine the lessons of history with a deep understanding of the challenges confronting our world today to show why cities are at a crossroads – and hold our destinies in the balance.

From a brilliant young historian, a colorful journey through 7,000 years and twenty-six world cities that shows how urban living has been the spur and incubator to humankind's greatest innovations. In the two hundred millennia of our existence, nothing has shaped us more profoundly than the city. Historian Ben Wilson, author of bestselling and award-winning books on British history, now tells the grand, glorious story of how city living has allowed human culture to flourish. Beginning with Uruk, the world's first city, dating to 5000 BC and memorably portrayed in the Epic of Gilgamesh, he shows us that cities were never a necessity but that once they existed their density created such a blossoming of human endeavor--producing new professions, forms of art, worship, and trade--that they kick-started nothing less than civilization. Guiding readers through famous cities over 7,000 years, he reveals the innovations driven by each: civics in the agora of Athens, global trade in ninth-century Baghdad, finance in the coffeehouses of London, domestic comforts in the heart of Amsterdam, peacocking in Belle Epoque Paris. In the modern age, he studies the impact of verticality in New York City, the sprawl of L.A., and the eco-reimagining of twenty-first-century Shanghai. Lively, erudite, page turning, and irresistible, Metropolis is a grand tour of human achievement.

In a forgotten patch of French countryside, a woman is battling her demons embracing exclusion yet wanting to belong, craving freedom whilst feeling trapped, yearning for family life but at the same time wanting to burn the entire house down. Given surprising leeway by her family for her increasingly erratic behaviour, she nevertheless feels ever more stifled and repressed. Motherhood, womanhood, the banality of love, the terrors of desire, the inexplicable brutality of another person carrying your heart forever Die, My Love faces all this with a raw intensity. It's not a question of if a breaking point will be reached, but rather when and how violent a form will it take?

Quando il suo amico Mastro Ciliegia gli regala un pezzo di legno che piange e ride come un bambino, Geppetto non sta più nella pelle dalla felicità: lo trasformerà in un burattino eccezionale, che sappia ballare, tirare di scherma e fare i salti mortali! Ma Pinocchio, malgrado i consigli del Grillo parlante e della Fata dai capelli turchini, darà del filo da torcere al simpatico falegname e ne combinerà di cotte e di crude... Un grande classico della letteratura italiana, amato da grandi e piccini, che ha commosso e incantato i lettori di tutto il mondo. Pubblicato per la prima volta nel 1883, il libro è stato tradotto con successo in numerose lingue.

When Mr. Earnshaw, master of Wuthering Heights, returns from a trip with an unkempt orphan in tow, he announces that the child, Heathcliff, is now a member of the family. While young Catherine Earnshaw becomes close with Heathcliff, her older brother, Hindley, sinks into bitter resentment. As Catherine and Heathcliff mature, and their affection blossoms into desire, Hindley’s resentment boils over into hatred, setting the stage for a tragic drama whose aftermath will shake the foundations of their world.