Winner of the 2011 Arthur Ellis Award for Best First Crime NovelIn Middle East lore the Debba is a mythical Arab hyena that can turn into a man who lures Jewish children away from their families to teach them the language of the beasts. To the Arabs he is a heroic national symbol; to the Jews he is a terrorist. To David Starkman, “The Debba” is a controversial play, written by his father the war hero, and performed only once, in Haifa in 1946, causing a massive rio...

Winner of the I. J. Siegel Award for Jewish FictionContaining Stories Featured in Best American Short Stories and Pushcart Prize Stories XXThe Israeli-Palestinian conflict has shaped the consciousness of a generation, but never before has it been brought to life in such vivid and telling prose. Part Tim O’Brien and part Bernard Malamud, Avner Mandelman’s Talking to the Enemy ranges from boisterously entertaining tales of domestic sq...

Pushcart Prize winner Avner Mandelman was the inaugural recipient of the Sophie Brody Medal for outstanding achievement in Jewish literature. In The Debba, David Starkman leaves Canada and returns to Israel after his war hero father, Isser, is murdered. Once there, David learns of an unusual request in his father's will. Isser had long-ago written a controversial play about the Debba, a mythical hyena and heroic symbol of the Arabs. It was performed once, causing a riot. Now, Isser's will ...

Shadow Country is Peter Matthiessen’s reimagining of the legend of E. J. Watson, the Everglades sugarcane planter and notorious outlaw of the wild Florida frontier. Vividly capturing the American hinterlands at the turn of the twentieth century, it traces the story of Watson through eyewitness perspectives as he drives himself relentlessly toward his own violent end at the hands of neighbors who mostly admired him.Shadow Country traverses strange landscapes and fr...

His holiday with his family has just begun, but a phone call sends Martin Beck packing off to Budapest, where a boorish journalist has vanished without a trace. With the aid of the coolly efficient local police, who do business while soaking at the public baths, Beck must troll about in the Eastern Europe underworld for a man nobody knows—while he is at the risk of vanishing along with his quarry.The Man Who Went Up in Smoke gives us the dedicated Beck at his most engaging...

When the body of a brutally beaten woman is found on the beach in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, Detective Osama Ibrahim dreads investigating another unsolvable murder—chillingly common in a city where the veils of conservative Islam keep women as anonymous in life as the victim is in death.But Katya, one of the few females in the coroner's office, is determined to identify the woman and find her killer. Aided by her friend Nayir, she soon discovers that the victim was a young, controversia...

Gunvald Larsson sits carefully observing the dingy Stockholm apartment of a man under police surveillance. He looks at his watch: nine minutes past eleven in the evening. At that same moment, the house explodes, killing at least three people. Chief Inspector Martin Beck and his men don’t suspect arson or murder until they discover a peculiar circumstance linking the explosion to a suicide committed that same day. The dead man left a note consisting of just two words: Martin Beck.Th...

From the internationally best-selling author of The History of Love comes this stunning novel. Great House follows the multiple owners of one writing desk and how the desk shapes their lives. A young novelist inherited the desk from a poet taken by Pinochet's police. Then the desk is stolen from her by the poet's supposed daughter. In its drawers, another man discovers a long-kept secret about his wife. And a Jerusalem antiques dealer uses the desk in his family's study, which was devastat...

Laos, 1975. The Communist Pathet Lao has taken over this former French colony. Dr. Siri Paiboun, a seventy-two-year-old Paris-trained doctor, is appointed national coroner. Although he has no training for the job, there is no one else: the rest of the educated class have fled.He is expected to come up with the answers the party wants, but crafty and charming Dr. Siri is immune to bureaucratic pressure. At his age, he reasons, what can they do to him? And he knows he cannot fail the...

The iconic visionary returns with his first new novel since the New York Times bestseller Spook Country.Whatever you do, because you are an artist, will bring you to the next thing of your own...When she sang for The Curfew, Hollis Henry's face was known worldwide. She still runs into people who remember the poster. Unfortunately, in the post-crash economy, cult memorabilia doesn't pay the rent, and right now she's a journalist in...

Historical espionage at its finest by the New York Times bestselling author of The Foreign Correspondent , Alan Furst.The bestselling author of The Spies of Warsaw returns with a stunning new WWII-era novel of intrigue, danger, and love set in Balkan Greece. Master of espionage fiction Alan Furst transports us to the port city of Salonika, Macedonia in 1940. A novel full of intrigue, passion, and the fierce pride of resistance, and peopled wit...

Talented novelist Kim Echlin pens this "powerful, transcendent love story" (Publishers Weekly) about two young lovers torn apart by political turmoil. Anne meets Serey-a Cambodian refugee-in MontrEal when she is just 16 years old. But when the Cambodian border opens up for only a short time, Serey returns to find his family. For years Anne hears no news, so she finally travels to the devastated country herself in search of answers.