Literary Fiction Political

The Tashkent-born Russian-American literary critic, editor, essayist, and journalist Vladislav Davidzon has been covering post-Soviet Ukraine for the past ten years, a tumultuous time for that country and the surrounding world. In late 2015, a year and a half after the 2014 Revolution swept away the Moscow-leaning kleptocratic President Viktor Yanukovich, Davidzon and his wife founded a literary journal, The Odessa Review. This eagerly anticipated debut tells the real story of what happened in Ukraine from the keen and resilient perspective of an observer at its center.

Giugno 1981: a Vermicino il piccolo Alfredo Rampi è incastrato in un pozzo artesiano. Diciotto ore di diretta televisiva raccontano la sua fine e lo trasformano in un'icona mediatica - Alfredino. L'Italia non lo dimenticherà più. È l'alba di una nuova nazione, pronta a varare il suo decennio più patinato e contraddittorio, gli anni Ottanta. Percossi dalla Storia che stravolgerà l'Italia stessa e il mondo - la P2, la caduta del Muro, Tangentopoli, le guerre di Bush, la crisi - si muovono i protagonisti di questo libro.

What Alex, illegitimate daughter of an alcoholic novelist and an artist, has always wanted is family. At 15, she falls in love with a 27-year-old photographer, whom she will leave when she comes under the spell of Ted Neal, a charismatic activist on his way to Mississippi for 1964’s Freedom Summer. That fall, Ted organizes a collective that turns to the growing antiwar movement.

When a car-jacking in Johannesburg leads to the death of her colleague and lover, Zoe du Plessis, a palaeontologist of Afrikaner origin, is confronted with her family’s secret. As she heads for the Kalahari Desert in search of early human fossils, Zoe embarks on an inner journey into the sense of guilt haunting her people. Meaningful encounters with a San Bushman shaman, a legendary but troubled writer, a Zulu Border War veteran, and her ancestors’ diaries will reshape Zoe's sense of identity.

For decades, the Reverend Sammy Milton was a force in American politics. An outspoken leader of the Religious Right, Milton divided his time between evangelizing the lost and galvanizing conservative voters. His rhetoric was polarizing, his positions were divisive, and he garnered many enemies over the years. When news outlets carried word of his death, many openly expressed joy at his passing.

Una mujer acaba de perder a su marido y vela el cadáver durante la noche. Sobre la mesilla hay un libro - la Biblia - que la esposa hojea. Va leyendo los párrafos subrayados por el hombre que se ha ido para siempre. Una oleada de recuerdos le viene a la mente y empieza un lento, desordenado monólogo en el que la vida pugna por hacerse real otra vez. La pobre vida llena de errores y torpezas, de pequeños goces e incomprensiones. ¿Ha conocido Carmen alguna vez a Mario?

In the 99th district of a sprawling labour camp, the Author, Musician, Scholar, Theologian and Technician - and hundreds just like them - are undergoing Re-education, to restore their revolutionary zeal and credentials. In charge of this process is the Child, who delights in draconian rules, monitoring behaviour and confiscating treasured books. But when bad weather arrives, followed by the ‘three bitter years’, the intellectuals are abandoned by the regime and left on their own to survive.

La historia se inicia cuando, en el aniversario del gobierno, se atenta contra la vida de Viviana, presidente de la República de Faguas, líder y fundadora del Partido de Izquierda Erótica. Gioconda Belli, poeta y narradora nicaragüense, usa de su humor, ironía, valentía, imaginación, para relatar una historia en la que el realismo de la situación de América Latina y, particularmente América Central, es descrito con una precisión fotográfica. Es poesía en acción, ideología nueva y sueños, no exenta de amor, violencia y esperanza.

Nelson Algren was a renowned writer, known for his penetrating and influential social novels such as The Man with the Golden Arm and A Walk on the Wild Side. Originally published in 1935, Somebody in Boots was Algren’s first novel, based on his experiences living in Texas during the Great Depression. A wonderful companion to Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, this new edition of Somebody in Boots features an introduction by Colin Asher, the author of a biography of Algren.

Fred is the sole offspring of Lenny Snyder, the famous (or notorious) pied piper of the counterculture, and in middle age he hates being reminded of it. But neither can he ignore any longer his psychedelically bizarre childhood. From infancy, for instance, he was called Freedom (in fact his given name) not only by those who should have known him but also by members of the burgeoning movement led by his father, who happily exploited having his wife and his toddling, then walking and talking, and finally observant son in tow.

Antonio M. Lugo Olea supo encender la imaginación y la esperanza de millones de mexicanos ofreciendo una lucha frontal contra la corrupción, la impunidad y la delincuencia organizada. También prometió hacer lo posible por terminar con la pobreza, la marginación y la injusticia. Los ciudadanos, hartos de gobiernos de ineptos y ladrones, con su voto llevaron a AMLO a la presidencia del país. Por si fuera poco, su partido también consiguió una avasalladora mayoría en el Congreso, vital para apoyarlo en todos sus proyectos.

After surviving a car crash that left her widowed at 22, Kathleen has retreated to a remote corner of a state park, where she works flipping burgers for deer hunters and hikers. But when a stranger appears in the dead of winter, Kathleen is intrigued. He says he's a student visiting from Uzbekistan, and his worldliness fills her with curiosity about life beyond the valley. After a cautious friendship settles between them, the stranger confesses to a terrible crime in his home country, and Kathleen finds herself in the grip of a manhunt - and face-to-face with secrets of her own.

"Wenn Timur Vermes‘ Erstlingswerk böse, realistisch und komisch ist, so ist sein zweiter Geniestreich böser, realistischer und komischer." - Christoph Maria Herbst. Deutschland hat eine Obergrenze für Asylsuchende eingeführt, ganz Europa ist bis weit nach Nordafrika hinein abgeriegelt. Jenseits der Sahara entstehen riesige Lager, in denen Millionen von Flüchtlingen warten, warten, warten. So lange, dass man in derselben Zeit eigentlich auch zu Fuß gehen könnte, wäre das nicht der sichere Tod.

Ben Shippers doesn’t have much use for school, friends, or pretty much anyone except his smartass sister, but he does harbor a secret passion: Trash Mountain, the central feature of the noxious landfill next to his house, the fumes from which have made his sister ill. After a botched attempt to destroy Trash Mountain with a homemade firebomb, Ben begins a years-long infiltration operation that leads him to drop out of school to work alongside homeless trash-pickers, and then, eventually, intern at the very place he meant to destroy. Ben’s boss there is a charismatic would-be titan of sanitation.....

He was nine when the vines first wrapped themselves around him and burrowed into his skin. Now a college botany major, Jeremy is desperately looking for a way to listen to the plants and stave off their extinction. But when the grip of the vines becomes too intense and Health Services starts asking questions, he flees to Brooklyn, where fate puts him face to face with a group of climate-justice activists who assure him they have a plan to save the planet, and his plants....

When John Nelson abandoned his government job to join a scrappy band of activists, he didn't realize trying to save the world would be so hard. His ideals remain strong, but his optimism is wearing thin. Parts per Million, Julia Stoops' socially conscious, fast-paced debut novel, is set in Portland, Oregon, in 2002. As the trio dives into antiwar protests and investigates fraud at an elite university, Nelson falls in love with an unlikely houseguest, Deirdre, a photographer from Ireland - and a recovering addict.

When Rebecca Laurelson is forced to leave her post as a trauma surgeon in an east African field hospital, she arrives at her aunt’s house on the Indian Ocean and is taken into the heart of a family she has never met before. It’s a world of all-night beach parties and constant cocktail receptions, and within its languorous embrace her attraction for her much younger cousin grows. But these gilded lives and their fellow white Africans on the coast are under threat - Islamist terror attacks are on the rise and Rebecca knows more about this violence than she is prepared to reveal.

En el puerto de La Habana desembarca una mañana de principios de los años 50 un joven asturiano, Patricio, sin otro patrimonio que sus ganas de comerse el mundo y sin otro afán que dejar atrás una aldea aún envuelta en las sombras de una posguerra interminable.

Ulli is a young woman, half English and half German, squatting in a dismal, empty Berlin apartment one year after the war has ended. She's scraping together a living as an interpreter between Berlin-based GIs and the wide-eyed local girls eager to meet them. One night Ulli meets two American soldiers: Leo, handsome and ambitious and desperate to escape his small-town upbringing, and intellectual, asthmatic Isaac, whose refugee parents had fled Russia and then Paris for New York. Winter Kept Us Warm follows Ulli, Leo, and Isaac through the next six decades of their lives - from Berlin to postwar Manhattan, 1960s Los Angeles, and Morocco.

Set against a backdrop of the current political and cultural upheaval in the US and Eastern Europe, The Unmade World is a thoughtful, scope-y literary novel with a dose of suspense that moves from Poland to California to the Hudson Valley and back to Poland. It covers a decade in the lives of an American journalist and a Polish small businessman turned petty criminal and the wrenching aftermath of an accidental, tragic encounter between these two on a snowy night in 2006 on the outskirts of Krakow. The accident costs the lives of the American journalist Richard Brennan's wife and daughter, an event that colors the rest of his life. It also leads to a downward spiral for Bogdan Baranowsk, leaving emotional scars as he suffers the seemingly inevitable loss of his business, his home, and his wife.