In Manuela Draeger's poetic 'post-exotic' novel, a group of young leftists trapped in a burning building after one year's Bolcho Pride parade plunge back into their childhood memories, trading them with each other as their lives are engulfed in flames. They remember Granny Holgolde's stories of the elephant Marta Ashkarot as she travels through the Bardo, to find her home and be reincarnated again and again. They remember the Soviet folk singer Lyudmila...

"Le Divorce meets The Elegance of the Hedgehog in this hilariously entertaining mega-bestseller from France - When her chronically unemployed husband runs off to start a crocodile farm in Kenya with his mistress, Joséphine Cortès is left in an unhappy state of affairs. The mother of two--confident, beautiful teenage Hortense and shy, babyish Zoé--is forced to maintain a stable family life while making ends meet on her meager salary as a medieval...

When headhunter Fabrice Valantine faces a smoking ban at work, he decides to undergo hypnotherapy to help kick the habit. At first the treatment is a success but, as the stresses of daily life begin to overwhelm him, he can't help lighting up again. To his great distress, he finds that smoking no longer offers him the ecstatic release it once did. Until, that is, he stumbles across a criminal way to recapture that intense nicotine joy...

"International Booker-nominated satirist GauZ' returns with a panoramic journey into the colonization of the African interior. In an attempt to avoid life as a factory worker, Dabilly, a young white man in late nineteenth-century France, seeks colonial adventure in Africa. Still mourning the recent deaths of his parents, he joins a beleaguered French general trying to set up trading routes on the Ivory coast which, in 1880, is still untouched by colonization....

The Tears is, at one level, a novel about the turbulent lives of twins, the sons of Charlemagne's daughter Bertha. The studious and scholarly Nithard succeeds his father Angilbert as lay abbot of the Abbey of Saint Riquier in Normandy and accompanies his cousin the emperor Charles the Bald on his military campaigns. His twin brother Hartnid strikes out boldly for more exotic parts-including, eventually, Baghdad-in a seemingly deranged quest to track...