A young girl clings fiercely to the damaged love of her mother—a taciturn farmworker cast out by her family and scorned by her village after giving birth out of wedlock—in this devastating and lyrically rendered novel from a French-Italian maverick.Marie lives with her mother, Genie, in a ramshackle house by a willow-lined river in rural France, among farms, vineyards, and wheatfields. Her grandparents’ house is nearby, beyond a hill of white sand overrun by foxes, but she and her mother are not welcome there. Every morning, Genie walks to the neighboring farms and houses to do what work there is to be done—pruning vines, husking corn, feeding livestock, making sausages and preserves. When farmers and villagers greet the woman, she says nothing, and keeps walking.Once, she was lighthearted, a lovely girl from one of the best families in the valley; but now they all call her “Crazy Genie.” While her mother works, Marie waits at the edge of the fields, or in the corners of dark kitchens, yearning for her mother to turn from her work and notice her; longing for the moment when they will be back in their lonely house by the river.  “I wanted to love her every minute of my life, so that she would want me,” Marie thinks. “I followed her everywhere. She would ‘Get out of my hair.’ But me, I wanted to love her, to always be near her.”Crazy Genie, told in Marie’s ingenuous, straightforward voice—first as a child and later as hopeful, emotionally wounded young woman—is the second novel by the French author Inès Cagnati, who grew up in poverty in rural France in the 1940s, the child of Italian immigrant agricultural workers. Rich in observation, color and detail, and devastating in its portrayal of a child’s unconditional love and of society’s callous prejudices, Crazy Genie won the Prix des Deux Magots in 1977. Her first novel, Free Day, won the Prix Roger Nimier in 1973. Together these books cement Cagnati’s astonishing power as a writer to convey the experience of people literature has overlooked, awakening compassion and giving a voice to the voiceless.

What does it mean to lose yourself – and is that something you should be aiming for? A young woman with little interest in games takes up a job in Frankfurt at a famous gaming company, naively set on reinvention. On her morning commute, in the familiar clutches of tedium and self-loathing, she encounters a nice-eyed stranger who returns her forgotten umbrella and finds herself catapulted into a dizzying, year-long whirlwind of obsession – not just with this endlessly attractive spectre, but also with the feverish karaoke trips from which she draws the ultimate solace. With astonishing existential acuity, Polly Barton's formidable debut novel renders the paradoxes of modern life in all its complexity, in deliriously self-conscious prose that is at once propulsive, titillating and bitingly funny. Echoing with the sounds of Whitney Houston and The Cure, reaching for the sublime in dark, sweaty boxes, What Am I, A Deer? is an exhilarating exploration of authenticity, fantasy, romance and intoxication. 

'Such a compelling account of a small but significant dark corner of history... Profound, angry, and tender all at once' VIRGINIA FEITO, author of Victorian Psycho and Mrs March'A meticulously researched and sensitively rendered portrait of a community of women' ERIN KEANE, author of Notes on the Myths That Made Me'Hope Reese has sleuthed out a riveting, remarkable true story that raises questions like the best dystopian fiction' PEGGY ORENSTEIN, author of Girls & Sex'A moving story of desperation, violence and survival' HELEN LEWIS, author of Difficult Women'A feat of investigative reporting . . . This book proves that our past is present' ELIZABETH FLOCK, New Yorker writer and author of The Furies'Enthralling . . . A fascinating read' STEPHANIE COONTZ, author of Marriage, a History'Hugely well-researched - an intriguing (and thoughtful) antidote to stereotypes about gendered violence.' GINA RIPPON, author of The Gendered BrainThe dark history of a poisonous sisterhoodThe women of Nagyrév are desperate. They're abused by their husbands. They are feeding their newborns to livestock.At the turn of the 20th century, in the village of Nagyrév, Hungary, midwife Zsuzsanna Fazekas was more than a caretaker - she was a confidante. She helped poor women give birth; she assisted them with abortions; and she listened. Their stories were the husbands who drank, who beat them, who made their lives unbearable.In response, Auntie Zsuzsi asked one "Why bother with them?"Her solution was arsenic. Soon, women began slipping this concoction, made by dissolving flypaper in water, into their husbands' porridge, stews, and brandy. And over the next twenty years, the quiet village became the epicenter of one of the deadliest poisoning epidemics of the 20th century - according to some estimates, up to 300 people in the region were murdered.Why did they do it? How did these murders spin out of control? How did these women get away with their crimes for two decades?In The Women Are Not Fine , journalist Hope Reese pieces together archival newspapers, court documents, police records, and the vital work of historians, sociologists, and psychologists, diving deep into the truth behind this extraordinary event. Her findings serve as a stark when women in a community are pushed to the brink, the consequences reverberate through history. The Women Are Not Fine is more than a true crime story. It's a timely, haunting exploration of what happens when women's suffering goes unanswered.

One Ring to rule them all, One Ring to find them, One Ring to bring them all and in the darkness bind them. In ancient times the Rings of Power were crafted by the Elven-smiths, and Sauron, the Dark Lord, forged the One Ring, filling it with his own power so that he could rule all others. But the One Ring was taken from him, and though he sought it throughout Middle-earth, it remained lost to him. After many ages it fell into the hands of Bilbo Baggins, as told in The Hobbit. In a sleepy village in the Shire, young Frodo Baggins finds himself faced with an immense task, as his elderly cousin Bilbo entrusts the Ring to his care. Frodo must leave his home and make a perilous journey across Middle-earth to the Cracks of Doom, there to destroy the Ring and foil the Dark Lord in his evil purpose.

Co-winner of the 2022 Novel Prize, this incredible life-after-death novel asks us to consider how much of our memory, of our bodies, of the world as we know it ― how much of what we love can we lose before we are lost? And then what happens?  This third perspective on myself is disconcerting.  The heroine of the spare and haunting It Lasts Forever and Then It’s Over  is voraciously alive in the afterlife. Adrift yet keenly aware, she notes every bizarre detail of her new reality. And even if she has forgotten her name and much of what connects her to her humanity, she remembers with an implacable and nearly unbearable longing the place where she knew herself and was known―where she loved and was loved. Traveling across the landscapes of time and of space, heading always west, and carrying a dead but laconically opinionated crow in her chest, our undead narrator encounters and loses parts of her body and her self in one terrifying, hilarious, and heartbreaking situation after another.  A bracing writer of great nerve and verve, Anne de Marcken bends reality (and the reader’s mind) with throwaway assurance. It Lasts Forever and Then It’s Over plumbs mortality and how it changes everything, except possibly love. Delivering a near-Beckettian whopping to the reader’s imagination, this is one of the sharpest and funniest novels of recent years, a tale for our dispossessed times.

Co-winner of the 2022 Novel Prize, this incredible life-after-death novel asks us to consider how much of our memory, of our bodies, of the world as we know it ― how much of what we love can we lose before we are lost? And then what happens?  This third perspective on myself is disconcerting.  The heroine of the spare and haunting It Lasts Forever and Then It’s Over  is voraciously alive in the afterlife. Adrift yet keenly aware, she notes every bizarre detail of her new reality. And even if she has forgotten her name and much of what connects her to her humanity, she remembers with an implacable and nearly unbearable longing the place where she knew herself and was known―where she loved and was loved. Traveling across the landscapes of time and of space, heading always west, and carrying a dead but laconically opinionated crow in her chest, our undead narrator encounters and loses parts of her body and her self in one terrifying, hilarious, and heartbreaking situation after another.  A bracing writer of great nerve and verve, Anne de Marcken bends reality (and the reader’s mind) with throwaway assurance. It Lasts Forever and Then It’s Over plumbs mortality and how it changes everything, except possibly love. Delivering a near-Beckettian whopping to the reader’s imagination, this is one of the sharpest and funniest novels of recent years, a tale for our dispossessed times.

'Such a compelling account of a small but significant dark corner of history... Profound, angry, and tender all at once' VIRGINIA FEITO, author of Victorian Psycho and Mrs March'A meticulously researched and sensitively rendered portrait of a community of women' ERIN KEANE, author of Notes on the Myths That Made Me'Hope Reese has sleuthed out a riveting, remarkable true story that raises questions like the best dystopian fiction' PEGGY ORENSTEIN, author of Girls & Sex'A moving story of desperation, violence and survival' HELEN LEWIS, author of Difficult Women'A feat of investigative reporting . . . This book proves that our past is present' ELIZABETH FLOCK, New Yorker writer and author of The Furies'Enthralling . . . A fascinating read' STEPHANIE COONTZ, author of Marriage, a History'Hugely well-researched - an intriguing (and thoughtful) antidote to stereotypes about gendered violence.' GINA RIPPON, author of The Gendered BrainThe dark history of a poisonous sisterhoodThe women of Nagyrév are desperate. They're abused by their husbands. They are feeding their newborns to livestock.At the turn of the 20th century, in the village of Nagyrév, Hungary, midwife Zsuzsanna Fazekas was more than a caretaker - she was a confidante. She helped poor women give birth; she assisted them with abortions; and she listened. Their stories were the husbands who drank, who beat them, who made their lives unbearable.In response, Auntie Zsuzsi asked one "Why bother with them?"Her solution was arsenic. Soon, women began slipping this concoction, made by dissolving flypaper in water, into their husbands' porridge, stews, and brandy. And over the next twenty years, the quiet village became the epicenter of one of the deadliest poisoning epidemics of the 20th century - according to some estimates, up to 300 people in the region were murdered.Why did they do it? How did these murders spin out of control? How did these women get away with their crimes for two decades?In The Women Are Not Fine , journalist Hope Reese pieces together archival newspapers, court documents, police records, and the vital work of historians, sociologists, and psychologists, diving deep into the truth behind this extraordinary event. Her findings serve as a stark when women in a community are pushed to the brink, the consequences reverberate through history. The Women Are Not Fine is more than a true crime story. It's a timely, haunting exploration of what happens when women's suffering goes unanswered.

'How did I so unwittingly transform the joy of living into the great luxury of being alive?' Between 1967 and 1977, Clarice Lispector wrote weekly dispatches from her desk in Rio for the Jornal de Brasil. Already famous for her revolutionary, interior, metaphysical novels, in her Chronicles she turns her attention to the everyday, turning the material of her life into profound, touching and funny, tiny revelations. Observing the world around her, small encounters like hearing tales of the lost loves of a taxi driver, or the bitterness lurking beneath the prettiness of an old friend, become an exposition of the currents and foibles that define our lives. Everything from the meaning of cosmonauts to the new ideas, writers and artists that populate the sparkling international world of the sixties and seventies are considered and transformed into jewels of insight, delight and devastation. Sincere and playful, exhilarating and contemplative, Too Much of Life: Complete Chronicles opens up a new way of seeing the world.