Originally written and pressed as Christmas cards for friends and family, An Unexpected Gift: Three Christmas Stories collects and presents three funny, tender, modern tales from Marcel Theroux. A hard-pressed barber gets an angelic last-minute customer, a struggling retailer finds un-looked for freedom, and a grieving anthropologist procures a new piece for her collection. These stories are beautifully crafted and underpinned with a wit, charm and light touch that provide perfect seasonal...

Nicholas Slopen has been dead for months. So when a man claiming to be Nicholas turns up to visit an old girlfriend, deception seems the only possible motive.Yet nothing can make him change his story.From the secure unit of a notorious psychiatric hospital, he begins to tell his tale: an account of attempted forgery that draws the reader towards an extraordinary truth - a metaphysical conspiracy that lies on the other side of madness and death.Strange Bodies

Where did Jesus go from the age of 12 to 30?The Secret Books is an epic adventure of a young man in the Crimea who is drawn out of his world by an eccentric female journalist, leading to a life as a Russian spy infiltrating anarchist circles and going undercover in British India where, seeking refuge from a confrontation with a British officer, he discovers a manuscript which holds the secret of Jesus' lost years.But is this gospel true?Marcel Theroux takes th...

Winner of the 2002 Somerset Maugham AwardDamien March is a disconsolate journalist working the nightshift at the BBC in London. He hasn't thought of his eccentric uncle for 20 years and so is shocked when he learns that he has inherited his uncle's ramshackle house on an isolated island off the coast of Cape Cod.Without a relationship compelling enough to keep him in his humdrum life, Damien decides to take off to the Cape.But his new future means confronting his fa...

'A compulsively readable tale, all the better for being set in one of the most secretive countries in the world. In The Sorcerer of Pyongyang, Marcel Theroux captures the extraordinary atmosphere of North Korean life with wit and insight' Michael PalinIn the most isolated country on earth, a chance discovery shapes a young man's destiny.Growing up amid the starvation and oppression of 1990s North Korea, 10-year-old Cho Jun-su stumb...

Every day I buckle on my guns and go out to patrol this dingy city.Out on the far northern border of a failed state, Makepeace patrols the ruins of a dying city and tries to keep its unruly inhabitants in check.Into this cold, isolated world comes evidence that life is flourishing elsewhere - a refugee from the vast emptiness of forest, whose existence inspires Makepeace to take to the road to reconnect with human society.What Makepeace fin...

'A compulsively readable tale, all the better for being set in one of the most secretive countries in the world. In The Sorcerer of Pyongyang, Marcel Theroux captures the extraordinary atmosphere of North Korean life with wit and insight' Michael PalinIn the most isolated country on earth, a chance discovery shapes a young man's destiny.Growing up amid the starvation and oppression of 1990s North Korea, 10-year-old Cho Jun-su stumb...

**From the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Overstory, an emotionally charged novel inspired by the myth of Orpheus."Bravo, Richard Powers, for hitting so many high notes with Orfeo and contributing to the fraction of books that really matter." —Heller McAlpin, NPR**In Orfeo, composer Peter Els opens the door one evening to find the police on his doorstep. His home microbiology lab—the latest experiment in his lifelong attempt to find music in...

In this shattering and iconic American novel, PEN prize-winning writer, Smith Henderson explores the complexities of freedom, community, grace, suspicion and anarchy, brilliantly depicting our nation's disquieting and violent contradictions.After trying to help Benjamin Pearl, an undernourished, nearly feral eleven-year-old boy living in the Montana wilderness, social worker Pete Snow comes face to face with the boy's profoundly disturbed father, Jeremiah. With courage and caution,...

Longlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2013.Shortlisted for the South Bank Sky Arts Awards 2014.Book of the Year in the Guardian, Spectator, Independent and Daily Mail.The Kills is an epic novel of crime and conspiracy.It starts with an explosion, a man on the run and the theft of over fifty million dollars. It moves from the Middle East to the Mediterranean, around mainland Europe vi...

A psychologically, morally complex novel of blood, crime, passion, and vengeance, set in Cuba and Ybor City, Florida, during World War II, in which Joe Coughlin must confront the cost of his criminal past and present.Ten years have passed since Joe Coughlin’s enemies killed his wife and destroyed his empire, and much has changed. Prohibition is dead, the world is at war again, and Joe’s son, Tomás, is growing up. Now, the former crime kingpin works as a consigliore...

A NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER AND NOW A MAJOR MOTION PICTURE FROM ALEX GARLAND, STARRING NATALIE PORTMAN AND OSCAR ISAACThe Southern Reach Trilogy begins with Annihilation, the Nebula Award-winning novel that "reads as if Verne or Wellsian adventurers exploring a mysterious island had warped through into a Kafkaesque nightmare world" (Kim Stanley Robinson).Area X has been cut off from the rest of the continent for decades. Nature has...