"A funny, fast-paced, and poignant take on Franco-African history, as told through the eyes of three African security guards in Paris. All over the city, they are watching: Black men paid to stand guard, invisible among the wealthy flâneurs and yet the only ones who truly see. From Les Grands Moulins to a Sephora on the Champs-Élysées, Ferdinand, Ossiri, and Kassoum find their way as undocumented workers amidst political infighting and the ever-changing...

"No-one can be alone on an island . . . But Ingrid is alone on Barrøy, the island that bears her name, and the war of her childhood has been replaced by a new, more terrible present: Norway is under the Nazi boot. When the bodies from a bombed battleship begin to wash up on the shore, Ingrid can't know that one will be alive, and warm enough to erase a lifetime of loneliness - nor can she imagine what suffering she will endure in protecting her lover,...

"In a crumbling apartment block in Luanda, Angola, impoverished families hoard memories to survive a corrupt regime. Odonato-nostalgic for the days of socialism-searches for his son whose life as a petty criminal he laments. As his hope drains away, Odonato's flesh becomes transparent and his body increasingly weightless. Transparent City confirms Ondjaki as one of Africa's major writers."--

"Love in late capitalism: Ivana Sajko takes us to the frontlines of a war waged between kitchen and bedroom. He, an unemployed Dante scholar, trying to change the world and write a novel. She, once a passable actress with a vaguely rewarding theater job, now a stay-at-home mom. He is delirious with dreams of grandeur; she is on edge, a detonator bomb with a dirty laundry trigger. The rent is late, the neighbor caviling, the government astoundingly...

"Covering the entire arc of Couto's career, this collection displays the Mozambican author's inventiveness, sensitivity, and social range with greater richness than any previous collection, including early stories that reflect the harshness of life under Portuguese colonialism; magical tales of rural Africa; and contemporary fables of the slipperiness of race and gender, environmental disaster and the clash between the countryside and the city. The...

"A writer's wrenching, no-holds-barred confession about his experiences with bipolar disorder. Thomas Melle, a successful young novelist and playwright, suddenly sells off his library without knowing why he's doing it. His personal life disintegrates as his behaviour becomes more irrational. Drunken frenzies, wild imaginings, fantasies about sex with stars, broken relationships, professional scandals, scuffles with the police, and enforced stays on...

A spellbinding saga about the inhabitants and inheritors of one rural community, by one of Iceland's most beloved novelists.

A man comes to awareness in a cold church in the Icelandic countryside, not knowing who he is, why he's there or how he arrived, with a stranger staring mockingly from a few pews back. Startled by the man's cryptic questions, he leaves—and plunges into a history spanning centuries, a past pressed into

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"Mia Couto, winner of the Neustadt International Prize, and a finalist for the Man Booker International Prize, first became famous as a writer of enchanting short stories. In Rain and Other Stories, one of his most appealing collections, here available in English for the first time, the borders that separate people melt as a poor African country emerges from sixteen years of civil war and assumes its identity as an independent nation. In these playful,...