Beyond the boundaries of the town of Gost, Croatia, an old house which has lain empty for years is showing signs of life: Laura and her teenage children have arrived. As Duro Kolak, a local handyman, helps with repairs to the old house, they uncover a mosaic and painstakingly restore it. But Gost is not all it seems; conflicts long past still suppurate beneath the scars.

Ernst Vogler is twenty-six-years old in 1938 when he is sent to Rome by his employer—the Third Reich's Sonderprojekte, which is collecting the great art of Europe and bringing it to Germany for the Führer. Vogler is to collect a famous classical Roman marble statue, The Discus Thrower, and get it to the German border, where it will be turned over to Gestapo custody. It is a simple, three-day job. Things start to go wrong almost immediately.The Italian twin brothers who hav...

For fans of Dave Eggers and Kelly Link, an exhilarating collection of stories that explores the mysterious, often dangerous forces that shape our lives—from censorship and terrorism to technology and online dating.Spanning centuries, continents, and a diverse set of characters, these alluringly strange stories are united by each character’s struggle with fate. In a secret, subterranean world beneath the prairie of the Old West, a homesteader risks her life in searc...

A smart, dark, and take-no-prisoners look at rape culture and the extremes to which ideology can go, The Red Word is a campus novel like no other. As her sophomore year begins, Karen enters into the back-to-school revelry—particularly at a fraternity called GBC. When she wakes up one morning on the lawn of Raghurst, a house of radical feminists, she gets a crash course in the state of feminist activism on campus. GBC is notorious, she learns, nicknamed "Gang Bang Central" and a pr...

**** As read on BBC Radio 4 Book at Bedtime ****Luke is a young playwright: intense, magnetic and hungry for experience. Fleeing a disastrous upbringing in the North East he arrives in London and shares a flat with Paul, an aspiring producer, and beautiful, fiery Leigh.The three of them set up a radical theatre company, their friendship forged in rehearsal rooms above pubs, candlelit power cuts, and smoky l...

We are our stories. We tell them to stay alive or keep alive those who only live now in the telling. In Faha, County Clare, everyone is a long story...Bedbound in her attic room beneath the falling rain, Plain Ruth Swain is in search of her father. To find him Ruthie must first trace the jutting jaw lines, narrow faces and gleamy skin of the Swains from the restless Reverend Swain, her great-grandfather, to her father, Virgil - via pole-vaulting, leaping salmon, poetry and the three...

In 1870, ten-year-old Adolph Korn was kidnapped by Indians. He thrived in the Comanches’ rough, nomadic existence, quickly becoming one of the tribe’s fiercest warriors. Forcibly returned to his parents after three years, Korn never adjusted to life in white society. He spent his last years living in a cave, all but forgotten by his family.Then Scott Zesch stumbled upon his great-great-great-uncle’s grave. Determined to understand how such a “good boy” could have become Indianized ...

From the #1 New York Times bestselling author of the smash bestseller Orphan Train, a stunning and atmospheric novel of friendship, passion, and art, inspired by Andrew Wyeth’s mysterious and iconic painting Christina’s World.""Later he told me that he’d been afraid to show me the painting. He thought I wouldn’t like the way he portrayed me: dragging myself across the field, fingers clutching dirt, my legs twisted behind. The arid moonscape of wheatgr...

Turn a betrayal inside out and you found its opposite, a secret and a bond. Perhaps that was what friendship came down to: a lifelong, affectionate mutual blackmail.Neil and Adam, two young men on the cusp of adulthood, meet one golden summer in California and, despite their different backgrounds, soon become best friends. Buton a camping trip in Yosemite they lead each other into wrongdoing that, years later, both will desperately regret.Their connection holds thr...

**A New York Times Notable Book for 2011One of The Economist's 2011 Books of the YearOne of NPR's 10 Best Novels of 2011From the National Book Award-winning author Denis Johnson** (Tree of Smoke) comes Train Dreams**, an epic in miniature, and one of Johnson's most evocative works of fiction.**Suffused with the history and landscapes of the American West—its...

It is early 1942 and Australia is in the midst of war. While working at a Japanese hospital in the port of Broome, Dr Ibaraki is arrested and sent to Loveday internment camp in a remote corner of South Australia. As tensions at the isolated camp escalate, the doctor's beliefs are thrown into question and he is forced to confront his past: the promise he made in Japan and its devastating consequences.

Originally published in 1965, The Painted Bird established Jerzy Kosinski as a major literary figure. Called by the Los Angeles Times “one of the most imposing novels of the decade,” it was eventually translated into more than thirty languages. A harrowing story that follows the wanderings of a boy abandoned by his parents during World War II, The Painted Bird is a dark masterpiece that examines the proximity of terror and savagery to innocence and love. It is th...