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When it comes to love, things are not always what they seem. In contemporary Lagos, a young boy may pose as a woman online, and a maid may be suspected of sleeping with her employer and yet still become a young wife’s confidante. Men and women can be objects of fantasy, the subject of beery soliloquies. They can be trophies or status symbols. Or they can be overwhelming in their need.

In these wide-ranging stories, A. Igoni Barrett roams the streets with people from all stations of life. A man with acute halitosis navigates the chaos of the Lagos bus system. A minor policeman, full of the authority and corruption of his uniform, beats his wife. A family’s fortunes fall from love and wealth to infidelity and poverty as poor choices unfurl over three generations. With humor and tenderness, Barrett introduces us to an utterly modern Nigeria, where desire is a means to an end, and love is a power as real as money.

A rogue ex-cop from the Irish Garda manipulates a transfer to work for the NYPD in an exchange program. However, it turns out that the cop is really a serial killer wanted for murder in Ireland, and now, New York City.<

After the screen of a run-down drive-in movie theater collapses and kills four people, the daughter of one of the victims asks private investigator Cal Weaver to look into a recent break-in at her father’s house. Cal discovers a hidden basement room where it’s clear that salacious activities have taken place — as well as evidence of missing DVDs. But his investigation soon becomes more complicated when he realizes it may not be discs the thief was actually interested in...

Meanwhile, Detective Barry Duckworth is still trying to solve two murders — one of which is three years old — he believes are connected, since each featured a similar distinctive wound.

As the lies begin to unravel, Cal is headed straight into the heart of a dark secret as his search uncovers more startling truths about Promise Falls. And when yet another murder happens, Cal and Barry are both driven to pursue their investigations, no matter where they lead. Evil deeds long thought buried are about to haunt the residents of this town — as the sins of the past and present collide with terrifying results.

A quiet tour de force, Chris Bachelder's Abbott Awaits transforms the ordinary into the extraordinary, startlingly depicting the intense and poignant challenges of a vulnerable, imaginative father as he lives his everyday American existence.

In Abbott we see a modern-day Sisyphus: he is the exhausted father of a lively two-year old, the ruminative husband of a pregnant insomniac, and the confused owner of a terrified dog. Confronted by a flooded basement, a broken refrigerator, a urine-soaked carpet, and a literal snake in the woodpile, Abbott endures the beauty and hopelessness of each moment, often while contemplating evolutionary history, altruism, or the passage of time.

An expectant father and university teacher on summer break, Abbott tackles the agonizing chores of each day, laboring for peace in his household and struggling to keep his daughter clean and happy, all while staving off a fear of failure as a parent, and even as a human being. As he cleans car seats, forgets to apply sun block, clips his dog's nails, dresses his daughter out of season, and makes unsuccessful furniture-buying trips with his wife, his mind plays out an unrelenting series of paradoxical reflections. Abbott's pensive self-doubt comes to a head one day in late June as he cleans vomited raspberries out of his daughter's car seat and realizes: "The following propositions are both true: (A) Abbott would not, given the opportunity, change one significant element of his life, but (B) Abbott cannot stand his life."

Composed of small moments of domestic wonder and terror, Abbott Awaits is a charming story of misadventure, anxiety, and the everyday battles and triumphs of parenthood.

A slyly profound and startlingly original novel about the psyche of the American male, The Throwback Special marks the return of one of the most acclaimed literary voices of his generation.

Here is the absorbing story of twenty-two men who gather every fall to painstakingly reenact what ESPN called “the most shocking play in NFL history” and the Washington Redskins dubbed the “Throwback Special”: the November 1985 play in which the Redskins’ Joe Theismann had his leg horribly broken by Lawrence Taylor of the New York Giants live on .

With wit and great empathy, Chris Bachelder introduces us to Charles, a psychologist whose expertise is in high demand; George, a garrulous public librarian; Fat Michael, envied and despised by the others for being exquisitely fit; Jeff, a recently divorced man who has become a theorist of marriage; and many more. Over the course of a weekend, the men reveal their secret hopes, fears, and passions as they choose roles, spend a long night of the soul preparing for the play, and finally enact their bizarre ritual for what may be the last time. Along the way, mishaps, misunderstandings, and grievances pile up, and the comforting traditions holding the group together threaten to give way.

How much should you let in and how much should you give away?

Feverish and forthright, Pond is an absorbing chronicle of a solitudinous life told by an unnamed woman living on the cusp of a coastal town. The physical world depicted in these stories is unsettling yet intimately familiar and soon takes on a life of its own. Captivated by the stellar charms of seclusion but restless with desire, the woman’s relationship with her surroundings becomes boundless and increasingly bewildering. Claire-Louise Bennett’s startlingly original first collection is by turns darkly funny and deeply moving.

This is the sixth story about Martin H. Ehrengraf, diminutive attorney who represents criminal defendants on a contingency basis. In earlier appearances, the little lawyer has quoted William Blake, Winthrop Mackworth Praed, Thomas Hood, and Andrew Marvell, so it’s clear that he sees poetry as a sacred calling.

However vile the crime, however damning the evidence, Ehrengraf knows with utter certainty that young William Telliford is innocent. And nothing can keep him from establishing that innocence beyond dispute.

Then again, circumstances alter cases, don’t they?

Convicted murderer Melvin Mars is counting down the last hours before his execution — for the violent killing of his parents twenty years earlier — when he’s granted an unexpected reprieve. Another man has confessed to the crime.

Amos Decker, newly hired on an FBI special task force, takes an interest in Mars’ case after discovering the striking similarities to his own life: Both men were talented football players with promising careers cut short by tragedy. Both men’s families were brutally murdered. And in both cases, another suspect came forward, years after the killing, to confess to the crime. A suspect who may or may not have been telling the truth.

The confession has the potential to make Melvin Mars — guilty or not — a free man. Who wants Mars out of prison? And why now?

But when a member of Decker’s team disappears, it becomes clear that something much larger — and more sinister — than just one convicted criminal’s life hangs in the balance. Decker will need all of his extraordinary brainpower to stop an innocent man from being executed.

The Ehrengraf Alternative is the seventh of ten stories about the little lawyer whose resourcefulness on behalf of an innocent client is unparalleled.

It seems to me that a couple of real-life cases inspired this story, but I find I can’t call them to mind; the story seems to have outlived its inspiration. Ehrengraf would probably quote Hippocrates. “Ars longa, vita brevis,” he would remark, smiling his little smile.

Jamie Waterman discovered the cliff dwelling on Mars, and the fact that an intelligent race lived on the red planet sixty-five million years ago, only to be driven into extinction by the crash of a giant meteor. Now the exploration of Mars is itself under threat of extinction, as the ultraconservative New Morality movement gains control of the U.S. government and cuts off all funding for the Mars program.Meanwhile, Carter Carleton, an anthropologist who was driven from his university post by unproven charges of rape, has started to dig up the remains of a Martian village. Science and politics clash on two worlds as Jamie desperately tries to save the Mars program and uncover who the vanished Martians were.<

Markus Lee reist in den Herbstferien in die Normandie, um für ein Hamburger Kunstmagazin Brücken zu zeichnen, die bei der Landung der Alliierten im Sommer 1944 eine entscheidende Rolle spielten. Lee nimmt seinen fünfzehnjährigen Neffen Jesse mit, dessen bester Freund mit seiner Familie in Nordfrankreich ein verlassenes Strandhotel hütet. Überschattet wird die Reise von der Trauer um Jesses Mutter Ira, deren Suizid der Bruder und der Sohn jeder für sich verwinden müssen. In der verwunschenen Atmosphäre des Hotels L’Angleterre entwickelt sich der geplante einwöchige Aufenthalt zu einer monatelangen Auszeit, die nicht nur für Markus Lee einen Wendepunkt im Leben markiert.

NIE MEHR NACHT erzählt schonungslos und ergreifend von der Befreiung Frankreichs, bei der zahllose junge Männer umkamen, die kaum älter als Jesse waren. Dem Zeichner aber ist es zunehmend unmöglich, die Verheerungen des Krieges künstlerisch darzustellen. Doch beinahe noch schwerer fällt es ihm, den Tod der geliebten Schwester zu vergessen. Denn während ein dramatisches Kapitel europäischer Geschichte auf unheimliche Weise in ihm auflebt, stellt sich Markus Lee einem Trauma der eigenen Jugend und Abgründen seiner Familie.

Titel der Originalausgabe: Республика ШКИД.

Übersetzung aus dem Russischen von Lieselotte Remane.

One of the most acclaimed and powerful novels of modern Turkey is set across Europe, but retains the Turkish-Kurdish conflict at its heart A mixture of thriller, love story, political, and psycho-philosophical novel, this is a sobering, coruscating introduction to the potentially explosive situation that exists between the Kurds and the Turkish state. A bestselling author suffering from writer's block witnesses the accidental shooting of a young Kurdish woman who loses the baby she is carrying. He becomes involved with her and the two families caught in the fallout of the Turkish-Kurdish conflict, eventually finding a true understanding of the situation and rediscovering his own creativity with a new moral certainty, stripped of any ideology or prejudice. But there are many gripping perspectives to this vital and ultimately uplifting story from one of Turkey's most acclaimed writers, now translated into English for the first time.<

Thomas Bernhard is “one of the masters of contemporary European fiction” (George Steiner); “one of the century’s most gifted writers” (); “a virtuoso of rancor and rage” (). And although he is favorably compared with Franz Kafka, Samuel Beckett, and Robert Musil, it is only in recent years that he has gained a devoted cult following in America.

A powerful, compact novella, provides a perfect introduction to the absurd, dark, and uncommonly comic world of Bernhard, showing a preoccupation with themes — illness and madness, isolation, tragic friendships — that would obsess Bernhard throughout his career. records the conversations of the unnamed narrator and his friend Oehler while they walk, discussing anything that comes to mind but always circling back to their mutual friend Karrer, who has gone irrevocably mad. Perhaps the most overtly philosophical work in Bernhard’s highly philosophical oeuvre, provides a penetrating meditation on the impossibility of truly thinking.

Welcome to Appleseed, Massachusetts, where stories grow in soil, sentences are kept as pets, and pianos change your point of view. chronicles one family's arrival in the small town and the narrator's rich, vivid childhood — driving to the local flea market with his father and sister, causing trouble at school, pedaling through the neighborhood on his Bicycle Built for Two. When a curious infestation causes a blight in the soil, though, the local economy sours and the narrator's family is torn apart. His mother joins a flying militia known as The Mothers; his father takes an all-consuming job; his sister runs away for a better life elsewhere. Who will save Appleseed? Will it be the Memory of Johnny Appleseed? The Mothers? The narrator himself?

Heartbreaking, funny, and wildly-imaginative, is a tour-de-force unlike anything you've ever read before. Fans of Karen Russell and Italo Calvino will love Christopher Boucher's new novel, a follow-up to his acclaimed 2011 debut . You'll root for the narrator and his pet sentence, laugh at their absurd predicaments, and cheer for the family at the core of this drama that, despite every obstacle, fights to stay together.