Prétextat Tach, Nobel laureate and one of the world's most renowned contemporary novelists, has only two months to live. He has been living in seclusion for years, refusing interviews and public appearances. But as news of his impending death leaks, intrepid journalists from all over the world flock to his home in the hope of getting an interview with the elusive Tach. Five journalists finally gain entry, but one after the other they discover that, far from being the literary luminary they imagined, Tach has become an obese misogynist, a petulant bigot, an embittered, disgusting madman. The world's most famous author turns out to be the worst misanthrope imaginable.

Nina, the fifth journalist to interview with Tach, will call his bluff and beat him at his own game. As Nina's questions fly and the author's biting responses arrive, Tach will be led to a final, definitive confrontation with the demons of his past.

Amélie Nothomb is one of Europe's most successful and controversial authors. She wrote Hygiene and the Assassin, her first published novel, when she was only twenty-five. Winner of the Fournier and René Fallet prizes, it is now published in English for the first time.

Rudolf leaves his comfortable origins in Delft by ship for Java to help run the family's estates there. He moves from plantation to plantation, attempting to understand the ways of the local peoples, their version of Islam and their relationship to their land. On a visit to the capital, Jakarta, he falls in love with a teenage girl, Jenny, who he courts surreptitiously via his sister, with grave consequences for the reality of their relationships. Eventually they marry, and make a hard colonist-couple's life theirs, bear, lose and raise children, before Jenny on her visit to the home country discovers all the comforts of which she has been deprived in Java. Back at the plantation homestead, as the back-breaking work of establishing and maintaining business takes its toll on Rudolf, Jenny becomes estranged from him, and the bitter resentments of relatives eat at her until a terrible solution is achieved.

Caterina Albert i Paradís (1869-1966) began her career with a scandal. Her dramatic monologue "The Infanticide," narrated by a young woman, won prizes and garnered the attention of the Catalan literary world, but its harsh theme drew outrage when the drama's anonymous author was revealed to be a woman. In the tradition of George Eliot, George Sand, and other controversial women authors, Albert assumed a man's name, Víctor Catalá. She continued to write unflinching narratives, mostly in Catalan, of the people and life around her, producing a body of work still enlisted today to help the Catalan language resist the dominance and encroachment of peninsular Spanish. Albert shares with her contemporaries Anton Chekhov and Emilia Pardo Bazán an intense interest in the psychological development of characters and in narrative strategies, and the short stories collected here highlight her range of style and grasp of human nature.

The title story of this collection, "An Awkward Age", spins the tale of a boy growing into adolescence, who appears to have been taken over by a colony of ants. His diary, initially expressed in the barely literate tones of a young child, becomes more accomplished and assured as the protagonist matures, and eventually begins to give way to the voice of the ruler of the anthill. Starobinets' style is flexible and direct, commendably unpretentious, and convincing. Despite the self-evident strangeness of the stories, their recognizably modern Russian settings and their exploration of relationships renders them an insightful take on the contemporary condition of man—in Russia and further afield.

Anna Starobinets is a young Russian journalist. This first book was nominated for the National Bestseller prestigious Russian prize as a manuscript—even before it was published.

Natalia Ginzburg (1916-1991) is today recognized as one of the foremost woman writers to emerge from twentieth-century Italy. The Complete Short Stories of Natalia Ginzburg brings together in English translation for the first time the eight short stories that Ginzburg wrote between 1933 and 1965.

These early works are significant in the context of Ginzburg's wider repertoire. The key themes and ideas occurring therein would come to characterize much of her later work, particularly in terms of her exploration of the difficulties implicit in developing and sustaining meaningful human relationships. Her short stories also provide intriguing insight into the development of her trademark literary style. Including an introduction by the translator and extensive contributions from Alan Bullock, Emeritus Professor of Italian at the University of Leeds, The Complete Short Stories of Natalia Ginzburg encourages a deeper understanding of Ginzburg's life's work and compliments those other collections and individual works which are already widely available in English.