A slender novel of epic power, Orbital  deftly snapshots one day in the lives of six women and men hurtling through space—not towards the moon or the vast unknown, but around our planet. Selected for one of the last space station missions of its kind before the program is dismantled, these astronauts and cosmonauts—from America, Russia, Italy, Britain, and Japan—have left their lives behind to travel at a speed of over seventeen thousand miles an hour as the earth reels below. We glimpse moments of their earthly lives through brief communications with family, their photos and talismans; we watch them whip up dehydrated meals, float in gravity-free sleep, and exercise in regimented routines to prevent atrophying muscles; we witness them form bonds that will stand between them and utter solitude. Most of all, we are with them as they behold and record their silent blue planet. Their experiences of sixteen sunrises and sunsets and the bright, blinking constellations of the galaxy are at once breathtakingly awesome and surprisingly intimate. So are the marks of civilization far below, encrusted on the planet on which we live.  Profound, contemplative and gorgeous, Orbital is an eloquent meditation on space and a moving elegy to our humanity, environment, and planet.

A debut linked story collection of gritty, streetwise, and wickedly funny fiction from Mexico. Life’s a bitch. That’s why you gotta rattle her cage, even if she’s foaming at the mouth. In the linked stories of Reservoir Bitches, thirteen Mexican women prod the bitch that is Life as they fight, sew, skirt, cheat, cry, and lie their way through their tangled circumstances. From the all-powerful daughter of a cartel boss to the victim of transfemicide, from a houseful of spinster seamstresses to a socialite who supports her politician husband by faking Indigenous roots, these women spit on their own reduction and invent new ways to survive, telling their stories in bold, unapologetic voices. At once social critique and black comedy, Reservoir Bitches is a raucous debut from one of Mexico’s most thrilling new writers.

A debut linked story collection of gritty, streetwise, and wickedly funny fiction from Mexico. Life’s a bitch. That’s why you gotta rattle her cage, even if she’s foaming at the mouth. In the linked stories of Reservoir Bitches, thirteen Mexican women prod the bitch that is Life as they fight, sew, skirt, cheat, cry, and lie their way through their tangled circumstances. From the all-powerful daughter of a cartel boss to the victim of transfemicide, from a houseful of spinster seamstresses to a socialite who supports her politician husband by faking Indigenous roots, these women spit on their own reduction and invent new ways to survive, telling their stories in bold, unapologetic voices. At once social critique and black comedy, Reservoir Bitches is a raucous debut from one of Mexico’s most thrilling new writers.

A slender novel of epic power, Orbital  deftly snapshots one day in the lives of six women and men hurtling through space—not towards the moon or the vast unknown, but around our planet. Selected for one of the last space station missions of its kind before the program is dismantled, these astronauts and cosmonauts—from America, Russia, Italy, Britain, and Japan—have left their lives behind to travel at a speed of over seventeen thousand miles an hour as the earth reels below. We glimpse moments of their earthly lives through brief communications with family, their photos and talismans; we watch them whip up dehydrated meals, float in gravity-free sleep, and exercise in regimented routines to prevent atrophying muscles; we witness them form bonds that will stand between them and utter solitude. Most of all, we are with them as they behold and record their silent blue planet. Their experiences of sixteen sunrises and sunsets and the bright, blinking constellations of the galaxy are at once breathtakingly awesome and surprisingly intimate. So are the marks of civilization far below, encrusted on the planet on which we live.  Profound, contemplative and gorgeous, Orbital is an eloquent meditation on space and a moving elegy to our humanity, environment, and planet.

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.”

When it was built in the 1950s, nothing symbolised Cyprus entering the modern world like the Ledra Palace Hotel. In Constantia Soteriou’s jewel of a novel, the ambitions and shortcomings of the island’s turbulent twentieth century are played out by its occupants. Among them we meet the king in exile who needs to drown his sorrows with a drink disguised to look like tea; the porter who, amidst the English roses of the hotel's gardens, secretly plants a rose from his village to make his rosebud infusions with; the UN officer who drinks lemonade to deal with the heat and the lies; and the cleaning lady who always carries her holy water with her. They are reluctant actors in history, evocatively captured in this moving, personal, and highly original portrait of civil strife and division.

With a foreword by Jhumpa Lahiri, Quaderno Proibito is a classic domestic novel by the Italian-Cuban feminist writer Alba de Céspedes, whose work inspired contemporary writers like Elena Ferrante. In this modern translation by acclaimed Elena Ferrante translator Ann Goldstein, Forbidden Notebook centers the inner life of a dissatisfied housewife living in postwar Rome. Valeria Cossati never suspected how unhappy she had become with the shabby gentility of her bourgeois life—until she begins to jot down her thoughts and feelings in a little black book she keeps hidden in a closet. This new secret activity leads her to scrutinize herself and her life more closely, and she soon realizes that her individuality is being stifled by her devotion and sense of duty toward her husband, daughter, and son. As the conflicts between parents and children, husband and wife, and friends and lovers intensify, what goes on behind the Cossatis’ facade of middle-class respectability gradually comes to light, tearing the family’s fragile fabric apart. An exquisitely crafted portrayal of domestic life, Forbidden Notebook recognizes the universality of human aspirations.

An NYRB Classics Original Three Summers is the story of three sisters growing up in the countryside near Athens before the Second World War. Living in a big old house surrounded by a beautiful garden are Maria, the oldest sister, as sexually bold as she is eager to settle down and have a family of her own; beautiful but distant Infanta; and dreamy and rebellious Katerina, through whose eyes the story is mostly observed. Over three summers, the girls share and keep secrets, fall in and out of love, try to figure out their parents and other members of the tribe of adults, take note of the weird ways of friends and neighbors, worry about and wonder who they are. Karen Van Dyck’s translation captures all the light and warmth of this modern Greek classic.

With her final novel, Villette, Charlotte Brontë reached the height of her artistic power. First published in 1853, Villette is Brontë's most accomplished and deeply felt work, eclipsing even Jane Eyre in critical acclaim. Her narrator, the autobiographical Lucy Snowe, flees England and a tragic past to become an instructor in a French boarding school in the town of Villette. There she unexpectedly confronts her feelings of love and longing as she witnesses the fitful romance between Dr. John, a handsome young Englishman, and Ginerva Fanshawe, a beautiful coquette. The first pain brings others, and with them comes the heartache Lucy has tried so long to escape. Yet in spite of adversity and disappointment, Lucy Snowe survives to recount the unstinting vision of a turbulent life's journey - a journey that is one of the most insightful fictional studies of a woman's consciousness in English literature.

Abigail, the story of a headstrong teenager growing up during World War II, is the most beloved of Magda Szabó’s books in her native Hungary. Gina is the only child of a general, a widower who has long been happy to spoil his bright and willful daughter. Gina is devastated when the general tells her that he must go away on a mission and that he will be sending her to boarding school in the country. She is even more aghast at the grim religious institution to which she soon finds herself consigned. She fights with her fellow students, she rebels against her teachers, finds herself completely ostracized, and runs away. Caught and brought back, there is nothing for Gina to do except entrust her fate to the legendary Abigail, as the classical statue of a woman with an urn that stands on the school’s grounds has come to be called. If you’re in trouble, it’s said, leave a message with Abigail and help will be on the way. And for Gina, who is in much deeper trouble than she could possibly suspect, a life-changing adventure is only beginning. There is something of Jane Austen in this story of the deceptiveness of appearances; fans of J.K. Rowling are sure to enjoy Szabó’s picture of irreverent students, eccentric teachers, and boarding-school life. Above all, however, Abigail is a thrilling tale of suspense.

Spanning twenty years and one life-altering summer in Croatia, Slanting Towards the Sea is at once an unforgettable love story and a powerful exploration of what it means to come of age in a country younger than oneself.Ivona divorced the love of her life, Vlaho, a decade ago. They met as students at the turn of the new millennium, when democratic Croatia was alive with hope and promise. But the challenges of living in a burgeoning country extinguished Ivona’s dreams one after another—and a devastating secret forced her to set him free. Now Vlaho is remarried and a proud father of two, while Ivona’s life has taken a downward turn. In her thirties, she has returned to her childhood home to care for her ailing father. Bewildered by life’s disappointments, she finds solace in reconnecting with Vlaho and is welcomed into his family by his spirited new wife, Marina. But when a new man enters Ivona’s life, the carefully cultivated dynamic between the three is disrupted, forcing a reckoning for all involved. Set against the mesmerizing Croatian coastline, Slanting Towards the Sea is a cinematic, emotionally searing debut about the fragile nature of potential and the transcendence of love.

In this third Neapolitan novel, Elena and Lila, the two girls whom readers first met in My Brilliant Friend, have become women. Lila married at sixteen and has a young son; she has left her abusive husband and now works as a common laborer. Elena has left the neighborhood, earned her college degree, and published a successful novel, all of which have opened the doors to a world of learned interlocutors and richly furnished salons. Both women have pushed against the walls of a prison that would have seen them living a life of misery, ignorance, and submission. They are afloat on the great sea of opportunities that opened up during the nineteen-seventies. Yet they are still very much bound to each other by a strong, unbreakable bond.

No one’s ever told Eleanor that life should be better than fine. Meet Eleanor Oliphant: She struggles with appropriate social skills and tends to say exactly what she’s thinking. Nothing is missing in her carefully timetabled life of avoiding social interactions, where weekends are punctuated by frozen pizza, vodka, and phone chats with Mummy. But everything changes when Eleanor meets Raymond, the bumbling and deeply unhygienic IT guy from her office. When she and Raymond together save Sammy, an elderly gentleman who has fallen on the sidewalk, the three become the kinds of friends who rescue one another from the lives of isolation they have each been living. And it is Raymond’s big heart that will ultimately help Eleanor find the way to repair her own profoundly damaged one. Soon to be a major motion picture produced by Reese Witherspoon, Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine is the smart, warm, and uplifting story of an out-of-the-ordinary heroine whose deadpan weirdness and unconscious wit make for an irresistible journey as she realizes. . . The only way to survive is to open your heart.

The international bestseller with over half a million copies sold, for fans of Convenience Store Woman and The Kamogawa Food Detectives. Welcome to Tenderness! A quaint seaside town in Kitakyushu, Mojiko is full of hidden delights. And one unexpected treasure is the 24/7 convenience store, Tenderness. Sure, it’s a bit odd that the incredibly handsome manager has his own fan club. And perhaps the customers are somewhat eccentric, if not entertaining. But there’s a warmth about the store that draws you in. The truth is, Tenderness is different. Operating only in Kyushu, Tenderness stands firm and proud by its motto “Caring for People, Caring for You”, no matter the cause. And for Mitsuhiko, dishing out delicious food is simply the appetizer to his unsolicited but hearty wisdom on the town’s shenanigans. An international bestseller with over half a million copies sold between Japan and South Korea, The Convenience Store by The Sea tells the delightfully quirky and heartfelt stories of the store’s customers and employees, offering us all a unique recipe for a good, fulfilling life.

For fans of The Travelling Cat Chronicles, The Cat Who Saved Books and She and Her Cat, discover the Japanese bestseller that celebrates the healing power of cats. A cat a day keeps the doctor away ... On the top floor of an old building at the end of a cobbled alley in Kyoto lies the Kokoro Clinic for the Soul. Only a select few - those who feel genuine emotional turmoil - can find it. The mysterious centre offers a unique treatment for its troubled patients: it prescribes cats as medication. Get ready to fall in love: - Bee, an eight-year-old female, mixed breed helps a young man deal with the anxiety of a corporate sales job he despises; - Margot, muscly like a lightweight boxer, helps Koga a family man and callcentre worker with severe insomnia; - Koyuki, an exquisite white cat brings closure to Megumi a young mother whose own parents forced her to abandon an adored rescue kitten; - Tank and Tangerine bring peace to a high-flying handbag designer Tomoko, as she learns to let go of her perfectionism and be kinder to herself; - Mimita, the Scottish Fold kitten helps a broken-hearted young Geisha to stop blaming herself for the cat she lost years ago; Follow how each cat brings joy, hope and self-discovery to the human who is lucky enough to have them in this utterly charming, vibrant celebration of the healing power of cats. Containing five exquisite cat line-drawings, discover the inspirational story that has become an international sensation.

We take journeys to explore exotic new places and to return to the comforts of home, to visit old acquaintances and to make new friends. But the most important journey is the one that shows us how to follow our hearts... An instant international bestseller and indie bestseller, The Travelling Cat Chronicles has charmed readers around the world. With simple yet descriptive prose, this novel gives voice to Nana the cat and his owner, Satoru, as they take to the road on a journey with no other purpose than to visit three of Satoru's longtime friends. Or so Nana is led to believe... With his crooked tail—a sign of good fortune—and adventurous spirit, Nana is the perfect companion for the man who took him in as a stray. And as they travel in a silver van across Japan, with its ever-changing scenery and seasons, they will learn the true meaning of courage and gratitude, of loyalty and love.