My Fellow Skin is a beautiful, affectionate novel told from the point of view of an impressionable young boy. The novel opens before the boy can talk, and we follow Anton’s first, tentative steps on the path to adulthood. He gradually begins to grasp an understanding of time and death, and when he goes to school he falls in love for the first time – not with the schoolgirls his peers are interested in, but with his classmate, Willem. A gentle, protective relationship develops betw...

A wonderful, balanced novel about how the remains of the past reverberate in the present, Shutterspeed sensitively and delicately describes the powerful emotions which lie just beneath the surface of the unruffled sheen of village life. Joris’ father died young, and his mother moved to Spain, so he has lived with his aunt and uncle since early childhood. He is quiet and introverted, and his aunt and uncle fear that he harbours a deep resentment for the loss of his parents. The gen...

'What makes me saddest, is the double silence of her being. Language has packed its bags and jumped over the railing of the capsizing ship, but there is also another silence in her or around her. I can no longer hear the music of her soul.'One day, the author's mother no longer remembers the word for 'book'. This seemingly innocuous moment of distraction is the first sign of the slow disintegration of her mind.As Alzheimer's disease sets in and language increasingly escapes ...

Best Translated Fiction of the Year, The IndependentThis stunning historical fiction novel about the magnitude and impact of World War I—told through the written memories of an elderly Belgian woman—has “the footprint of Proust . . . on every page” (Financial Times)As a girl, Helena is sent to her uncle’s country house just before the Great War, and from here she witnesses scenes of indescribable horror. But it is also whe...

In this collection of essays, ten leading writers from different countries consider the conflicts that have informed their own literary lives. 1914-Goodbye to All That borrows its title from Robert Graves's "bitter leave-taking of England" in which he writes not only of the First World War but the questions it raised: how to live, how to live with each other, and how to write.Interpreting this title as broadly and ambiguously as Graves intended, these essays mark the War's centenary...

Colm Tóibín’s New York Times bestselling novel—also an acclaimed film starring Saoirse Ronan and Jim Broadbent nominated for four Academy Awards including Best Picture—is “a moving, deeply satisfying read” (Entertainment Weekly) about a young Irish immigrant in Brooklyn in the early 1950s.“One of the most unforgettable characters in contemporary literature” (Pittsburgh Post-Gazette), Eilis Lacey has come of age in small-town Ireland in th...

**NOBEL PRIZE WINNER • From the acclaimed, bestselling author of The Remains of the Day comes “a Gothic tour de force" (The New York Times) with an extraordinary twist—a moving, suspenseful, beautifully atmospheric modern classic.One of The New York Times’s 10 Best Books of the 21st Century • A Kirkus Reviews Best Fiction Book of the Century • A Los Angeles Times Best Fiction Book of the Last 30 Years**As children, Kathy, Ruth, a...

What if you could live again and again, until you got it right?On a cold and snowy night in 1910, Ursula Todd is born to an English banker and his wife. She dies before she can draw her first breath. On that same cold and snowy night, Ursula Todd is born, lets out a lusty wail, and embarks upon a life that will be, to say the least, unusual. For as she grows, she also dies, repeatedly, in a variety of ways, while the young century marches on towards its second cataclysmic ...

WINNER OF THE VICTORIAN PREMIER'S LITERARY AWARDS C.J. DENNIS PRIZE FOR POETRYSHORTLISTED FOR THE 2011 WESTERN AUSTRALIAN PREMIER'S BOOK AWARDSDisarming, warm, and always accessible, Cate Kennedy’s poems make ordinary experiences glow. Everything that suffuses her well-loved prose is here: compassion, insight, lyrical precision, and the clear, minimalist eye that reveals how life can turn on a single moment. Musing on the undercurrents and ...

A spellbinding short story collection by one of Austria's most critically acclaimed authors.A man becomes obsessed with observing his neighbours. A large family gathers for Christmas only to wait for the one member who never turns up. An old woman lures a man into her house where he finds dolls resembling himself as a boy. Mesmerizing and haunting stories about loss of identity in the modern world.Why Peirene chose to publish this book: 'I love Kafka and here we have a Kafk...

A moving short story. Set in the grim world of early Sixties Ireland, it tells the harrowing story of a boy making his way to school. Beware - this is not for the fainthearted!

A fiercely beautiful novel about one woman's struggle to reclaim a life shattered by betrayal from the 2018 winner of the PEN/Nabokov Award for Achievement in International Literature.One night, in the dead of winter, a mysterious stranger arrives in the small Irish town of Cloonoila. Broodingly handsome, worldly, and charismatic, Dr. Vladimir Dragan is a poet, a self-proclaimed holistic healer, and a welcome disruption to the monotony of village life. Before long,...