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International International Literature Literature Penguin Book of Spanish Short Stories
The East Indian
Brinda Charry
Various authors
Penguin
$27
This exciting new collection celebrates the Spanish short story, from its modern origins in the 19th century to the remarkable work being written today. It blends hidden gems and old favourites, surprising new voices and giants of Spain’s literary culture, from Emilia Pardo Bazán and Leopoldo Alas, through Mercè Rodoreda and Manuel Rivas, to Javier Marías. Brimming with romance, horror, history, farce, strangeness and beauty, and showcasing alluring hairdressers, war defectors, vampiric mothers, and talismanic mandrake roots, the daring and entertaining assortment of tales in The Penguin Book of Spanish Short Stories will be a treasure trove for readers.
Scribe
$33
Bad Summer People
Emma Rosenblum
The Ghost Theatre Mat Osman
Bloomsbury
$33
Named book of the year by The Evening Standard, The Observer and The Times, Matt Osman’s magical Elizabethan tale tells the story of Shay, a messenger girl and trainer of hawks, and Nonesuch, the dark star of the city’s fabled child theatre scene. Together they create The Ghost Theatre: a troupe staging magical plays in London’s hidden corners. As their hallucinatory performances incite rebellion among the city’s outcasts, the pair’s relationship sparks and burns against a backdrop of the plague and a London in flames. The Ghost Theatre is a beautifully written story of rebellion and magic, of mysticism and broken love in the streets of Elizabethan London.
The Wind Knows My Name
Isabel Allende
Bloomsbury
$35
Samuel Adler is five years old when his father disappears during Kristallnacht and his mother sends him alone to England, away from danger in Austria. Eight decades later, Anita Diaz and her mother board another train, fleeing looming danger in El Salvador, but the pair become separated and Anita finds herself alone in the Nogales camp. Intertwining past and present, The Wind Knows My Name tells the tale of these two unforgettable characters, both in search of family and home. It is a testament to the sacrifices that parents make, and a love letter to the children who survive the most unfathomable dangers.
Among the settlers, slaves and indentured servants that make the treacherous journey across the Atlantic to the New World in the early 1600s – for some, an exciting opportunity, for others, a brutal abduction – there is also Tony, the first Indian to set foot on American soil. East Indian follows Tony from his homeland on the Coromandel Coast of India to London, where the orphaned teenager is kidnapped and bound to servitude on a Virginia plantation. The East Indian is a Dickensian-style yarn about family, friendship, and finding oneself in the seeds of a new world.
Penguin
$33
Outsiders aren’t welcome on the island where the same families have been holidaying for years. There are the Weinsteins, the Metzners, the Grobels, and the unlucky-inlove Rachel Woolf. Then Robert arrives, the handsome new tennis coach, who some people are going out of their way to make very welcome … But then a body is found face-down beneath the boardwalk. None of them would claim to be a good person, but who among them is capable of murder?
The Bee Sting Paul Murray
Penguin
$33
The Barnes family is in trouble, on the verge of fracturing and in a crisis with roots that stretch deep into the past. When the moment of reckoning finally arrives, all four of them must decide how far they’re willing to go to save the family, and whether there’s still time to give their story a happy ending … From the author of Skippy Dies comes a dazzlingly intricate and poignant tragicomedy about family, fortune, and the struggle to be a good man at the end of the world.
The Happy Couple Naoise Dolan
Hachette
$33
Naoise Dolan, author of the runaway sensation Exciting Times, returns with a novel about four characters, linked by the wedding they are all set to attend. Will it be the happiest day of their lives? The beginning of the lives they have always imagined? Or the end of them? As the wedding approaches and these four lives intersect, each character will find themselves looking for a path to their happily ever after.