IN RED
Magdalena Tulli
Translated from the Polish by Bill Johnston
In this latest groundbreaking novel, Magdalena Tulli creates a world that is unreal, yet strangely familiar and utterly convincing. Set in a mythical fourth partition of Poland, In Red is full of dreamlike descriptions of the town and its inhabitants; its power lies in Tulli's evocative, almost hallucinatory use of language.
Magdalena Tulli's other novels include Dreams and Stones and Moving Parts (Archipelago Books). Dreams and Stones won Poland's Koscielski Foundation Prize in 1995, while Moving Parts was nominated for the 2006 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. Flaw has been short-listed for the 2007 Nike Prize, Poland's most prestigious literary award. Tulli also works as a translator and has translated the works of Proust and Calvino into Polish. She lives in Warsaw.
Archipelago Books, paperback, 9781935744085 (July)
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SMUGGLED
Christina Shea
Sweeping from post-WWII rural Romania to the cosmopolitan Budapest of 1990, Christina Shea's Smuggled is the story of Eva Farkas, who loses her identity, quite literally, as a young child, when she is smuggled in a flour sack across the Hungarian border to escape the Nazis.
When five-year-old Eva is trafficked from Hungary to Romania at the end of the war, she arrives in the fictional border town of Crisu, a pocket of relative safety, where she is given the name Anca Balaj by her aunt and uncle, and instructed never to speak another word of Hungarian again. "Eva is dead," she is told. As the years pass, Anca proves an unquenchable spirit, full of passion and imagination, with a lust for life even when a backdrop of communist oppression threatens to derail her at every turn. Time is layered in this quest for self, culminating in the end of the Iron Curtain and Anca's reclaiming of the name her mother gave her. When she returns to Hungary in 1990, the country is changing as fast as the price of bread, and Eva meets Martin, an American teacher who rents the apartment opposite hers and cultivates a flock of pigeons on his balcony. As Eva and Martin's cross-cultural relationship deepens through their endeavor to rescue the boy downstairs from his abusive mother, Eva's lifelong search for family and identity comes full circle.
Read our review in this issue.
Black Cat, paperback, 9780802170866
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THE GLITTER SCENE
Monika Fagerholm
Translated from the Swedish by Katarina E. Tucker
Teenage Johanna lives with her aunt Solveig in a small house bordering the forest on the outskirts of a remote coastal town in Finland. She leads a lonely existence that is punctuated by visits to her privileged classmate, Ulla Bäckström, who lives in the nearby luxury gated community. It isn't until Ulla tells her the local lore about the American girl and the tragedy that took place more than thirty years before that Johanna begins to question how her parents fit into the story. She sets out to unravel her family history, the identity of her mother, and the dark secrets long buried with her father. In the process of opening closed doors, others in the community reflect back on the town's history, on their youth, and on the dreams that play in their minds. Soon a new story emerges, that stirs up Johanna's greatest fears, but ultimately leads to the answers she is searching for. The Glitter Scene is a riveting mystery that explores the roles of truth and myth, reality and fiction, and the repercussions of family secrets.
Other Press, paperback, 9781590513057
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THE CALLER
Karin Fossum
Translated from the Swedish by Kyle Semmel
One mild summer evening Lily and her husband are enjoying a meal while
their baby daughter sleeps peacefully in her pram beneath a maple tree. But
when Lily steps outside she is paralysed with terror. The child is bathed in blood. Inspector Sejer is called to the hospital to meet the family. Mercifully the baby is unharmed, but her parents are deeply shaken. Sejer spends the evening trying to comprehend why anyone would carry out such a sinister prank. Then, just before midnight, somebody rings his doorbell. The corridor is empty, but the caller has left a small grey envelope on the mat. From his living room window, the inspector watches a figure slip across the car park and disappear into the darkness. Inside the envelope Sejer finds a postcard bearing a short message: Hell begins now. This is the 8th book in the Inspector Sejer series.
Harvill Secker (UK), paperback, 9781846553936 (July)
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ALICE
Judith Hermann
Translated from the German by Margot Bettauer Dembo
This is a work of exceptional power and beauty from one of Europe's finest writers. When someone very close to you dies your whole life changes. Everything is different. Alice is the central figure in these five inter-connected narratives, which tell of her life at times of loss. Suddenly it is no longer possible to say what the person looked like, how he spoke, cursed, smiled, how he lived his life. Objects are left behind, books, letters, pictures and every now and again you think you can see them in a crowd. Judith Hermann tells of days of transition, of waiting, of holding on and letting go and of how clear and dazzling such days can sometimes be. Alice is a book of extraordinary power and great literary beauty from one of Europe's finest writers.
Judith Hermann was born in Berlin in 1970. She is the author of The Summer House, Later and Nothing but Ghosts, which have received a number of literary awards including the Kleist Prize. She lives and works in Berlin.
The Clerkenwell Press, paperback, 9781846685293 (August)
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FEAR NOT
Anne Holt
Translated from the Norwegian by Marlene Delargy
A drug addict dead in a basement, a young asylum seeker floating in the harbour, a high profile female bishop stabbed to death in the street. What is the connection? During a snowy Christmas season in Norway, criminal psychologist and profiler Inger Johanne Vik finds not only her husband and herself but also her autistic daughter drawn into the investigation of a number of disturbing deaths. Her husband, detective Yngvar Stubø, has been dispatched to Bergen to investigate the shocking Christmas Eve murder of a local female bishop. Meanwhile, in Oslo, dead bodies keep turning up, though the causes of death vary. Before long, Inger Johanne will incredulously discover something that will link them all. Anne Holt's Fear Not is a mesmerizing crime novel that raises questions about religion, human rights, and the very nature of love itself. Anne Holt has the courage to go beyond conventional crime writing and peppers the story with red-hot political issues.
Corvus, hardcover, 9781848876101
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DADDY'S WINGS
Milena Agus
Translated from the Italian by Brigid Maher
In Milena Agus' radiant Sardinia, Madame owns a piece of land by the sea which property developers are after. But Madame doesn't want to sell and therefore prevents her neighbours and other locals from cashing in. Even so, they can't help loving her for her generous and candid way of being.
A fourteen year old girl tells the story through an imagination that shapes reality: her missing father appears in the slight movements of the air (Daddy's wings), and sharp scenes of hardcore sex seem to take place in Madame's house at night. It is a comic and truculent story, fairytale-like and true—as are all Milena Agus' works. Most of all, it is the story of love affairs that go somewhat awry but still manage to go on, which is the most important thing.
Scribe Publications (AUS), paperback, 9781921640384 (August)
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UNTIL THY WRATH BE PAST
Asa Larsson
Translated from the Swedish by Laurie Thompson
As spring arrives in the far north of Sweden, a young woman's body surfaces through the breaking ice of the River Thorne. At the same time, visions of a shadowy figure haunt the dreams of Rebecka Martinsson, a prosecutor in nearby Karuna. Could the body belong to the ghost in her dreams? And where is the dead girl's boyfriend? Joining forces once again with Police Inspector Anna-Maria Mella, Rebecka finds herself drawn into an investigation that stirs up long-dormant rumors of a German supply plane that went missing in 1943—and of Nazi collaborators in the town, where shame and secrecy shroud the locals' memories of the war. And on the windswept shore of a frozen lake lurks a murderer who will kill again to keep the past buried forever beneath half a century's silent ice and snow. This is the 4th book in her Rebecka Martinsson series to be available in English.
Silver Oak, hardcover, 9781402787164 (August)
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