Taiwan Travelogue
4.390 kr.Disguised as a translation of a rediscovered text by a Japanese writer, Taiwan Travelogue is a bittersweet story of love between two women, nested in an artful exploration of language, history and power. Set in May 1938, the young novelist Aoyama Chizuko sails from Japan to Taiwan where her interpreter proffers tantalising glimpses of island life and helps her to taste as much of cuisine as her larger-than-life appetite can bear.
Lázár
4.690 kr.The Lazars have ruled their Hungarian lands for generations.
In their ancient castle by the edge of a forest that compels all who enter it to madness, they succumb to every vice and live only to satiate their desires. But the old order is crumbling, and the days of the Habsburg Monarchy are numbered. When Lajos von Lazar inherits, they at last have a baron who can reignite the old splendours, but not even his abilities are proof against the ravages of war and occupation.
It will fall to his children – a boy who talks to shadows and a girl who eschews her blue blood – to find a way to stand against oppression and take the first faltering steps towards freedom.
A sweeping epic, taking the reader from the beginning of the twentieth century to the Hungarian National Uprising of 1956, Lazar would be a phenomenal achievement for a writer of any age. With its air of timeless wisdom, it reads like rediscovered classic, making it all the more remarkable that it was written when the author was just twenty-one years old.
Translated from the German by Jamie Bulloch
The Director
3.690 kr.An artist’s life, a pact with the devil, a novel about the dangerous illusions of the silver screen.
G.W. Pabst, one of cinema’s greatest, perhaps the greatest director of his era: when the Nazis seized power he was filming in France, to escape the horrors of the new Germany he flees to Hollywood. But under the blinding California sun, the world-famous director suddenly looks like a nobody. Not even Greta Garbo, who he made famous, can help him. And thus, almost through no fault of his own, he finds himself back in his homeland of Austria, which is now called Ostmark. The returning family is confronted with the barbaric nature of the regime. But Goebbels, the minister of propaganda in Berlin, wants the film genius, he won’t take no for an answer and makes big promises. While Pabst still believes that he will be able to resist these advances, that he will not submit to any dictatorship other than art, he has already taken the first steps into a hopeless entanglement.
Daniel Kehlmann’s novel about art and power, beauty and barbarism is a triumph.
The Director shows what literature is capable of.
On the Calculation of Volume IV
3.990 kr.It feels as though we have each been walking along our own path in the same forest. And now, we have found our way to a clearing and suddenly we see that we share not only the clearing but the forest too. You think it begins when you meet, but in fact, our stories were already entwined.
Heart The Lover
3.490 kr.Our narrator understands good love stories – their secrets, their highs and free falls. But her greatest love story, the one she lived, never followed the rules.
She was in her senior year of college when star students Sam and Yash swept her into an intoxicating world of academic fervour, rapid-fire banter and raucous card games. Their lives became quickly intertwined – with friendship but also with unpredictable passions and the intimations of first love.
Decades later, she is a successful writer, living a comfortable life with her husband and children, when a surprise visit brings the past crashing into the present, forcing her to confront the decisions and deceptions of her youth.
Written with the precision of poetry and the emotional tide of an epic, Heart the Lover is a celebration of literature and the life-long echoes of young love. This is King at her very best, affirming her as a masterful chronicler of the human experience and one of the finest novelists at work today.
Light and Thread
3.990 kr.In this light-filled and multi-faceted book, her first since being awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, Han Kang draws together the threads of her work and life, tracing the connections between her interior and exterior worlds through a sequence of essays, poems, photographs and diaries.
A book of reflections, of words and light, it has at its heart the tiny, north-facing courtyard garden at her home, cultivated solely through the reflected sunlight of the mirrors which she must move throughout the day, as the earth turns on its axis.
In a poem written at eight years old, Han Kang imagined a ‘gold thread’ of connection – an idea which she explores here with luminous attention, beginning with her Nobel Lecture. She writes of the wonder of following the thread we call language into the depths of other hearts, and her profound sense of an electric current which joins writer and reader.
Both intimate and illuminating, Light and Thread is a book for all readers of Han Kang’s unique body of work.
We Do Not Part
3.490 kr.Beginning one morning in December, We Do Not Part traces the path of Kyungha as she travels from the city of Seoul into the forests of Jeju Island, to the home of her old friend Inseon. Hospitalized following an accident, Inseon has begged Kyungha to hasten there to feed her beloved pet bird, who will otherwise die.
Kyungha takes the first plane to Jeju, but a snowstorm hits the island the moment she arrives, plunging her into a world of white. Beset by icy wind and snow squalls, she wonders if she will arrive in time to save the bird – or even survive the terrible cold which envelops her with every step. As night falls, she struggles her way to Inseon’s house, unaware as yet of the descent into darkness which awaits her.
There, the long-buried story of Inseon’s family surges into light, in dreams and memories passed from mother to daughter, and in a painstakingly assembled archive documenting a terrible massacre on the island seventy years before.
We Do Not Part is a hymn to friendship, a eulogy to the imagination and above all an indictment against forgetting.
London Falling
5.990 kr.In 2019, a London teenager, Zac Brettler, mysteriously fell to his death from a luxury apartment building on the banks of the Thames. When his grieving parents began their desperate quest to understand how their son had died, they made a terrible discovery: Zac had been leading a fantasy life, posing as the son of a wealthy Russian oligarch.
In his inimitably gripping and forensic prose, Baillie Gifford Prize winner and New Yorker writer Patrick Radden Keefe follows Zac’s parents on a dark journey to find out what brought Zac to the balcony that night – and how a teenager’s world of make-believe drew him into the city’s terrifying underworld.
London Falling is at once a devastating family tragedy, a riveting story of greed, power and deception, and an indictment of the culture that has transformed London into a haven for the malignant forces that have come to influence us all.’
London Falling (kilja)
4.990 kr.In 2019, a London teenager, Zac Brettler, mysteriously fell to his death from a luxury apartment building on the banks of the Thames. When his grieving parents began their desperate quest to understand how their son had died, they made a terrible discovery: Zac had been leading a fantasy life, posing as the son of a wealthy Russian oligarch.
In his inimitably gripping and forensic prose, Baillie Gifford Prize winner and New Yorker writer Patrick Radden Keefe follows Zac’s parents on a dark journey to find out what brought Zac to the balcony that night – and how a teenager’s world of make-believe drew him into the city’s terrifying underworld.
London Falling is at once a devastating family tragedy, a riveting story of greed, power and deception, and an indictment of the culture that has transformed London into a haven for the malignant forces that have come to influence us all.’
Flesh
3.490 kr.Through chance, luck and choice, one man’s life takes him from a modest apartment in Hungary to the elite society of London…
Fifteen-year-old István lives with his mother in a quiet apartment complex in Hungary. New to the town and shy, he becomes isolated, with his neighbour – a married woman – as his only companion. When a clandestine relationship begins between them, his life spirals out of control.
As the years pass, István moves from the army to the circles of London’s elite. His competing impulses for love, intimacy, status and wealth win him unimaginable riches, until they threaten to undo him completely.
The Correspondent
4.990 kr.In her letters to family and friends we come to know the life of Sybil Van Antwerp: stubborn, cantankerous, opinionated, always steadfast in her belief in the power of the written word.
But as the clock begins to tick for Sybil, the need for a few post-scripts to the life she’s led becomes apparent. Fixing her difficult relationship with her children. Taking a final chance at romance. Atoning for an old legal case which has come back to haunt her. And finally, reckoning with a devastating loss that she has spent the last thirty years holding close to her chest.
The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida
990 kr.Colombo, 1990. Maali Almeida, war photographer, gambler and closet queen, has woken up dead in what seems like a celestial visa office. His dismembered body is sinking in the serene Beira lake and he has no idea who killed him.
At a time where scores are settled by death squads, suicide bombers and hired goons, the list of suspects is depressingly long, as the ghouls and ghosts with grudges who cluster round can attest. But even in the afterlife, time is running out for Maali. He has seven moons to try and contact the man and woman he loves most and lead them to a hidden cache of photos that will rock Sri Lanka.
Ten years after his prizewinning novel Chinaman established him as one of Sri Lanka’s foremost authors, Shehan Karunatilaka is back with a mordantly funny, searing satire. The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida is a state-of-the-nation epic that proves yet again that the best fiction offers the ultimate truth.
The Warrior’s Princess
1.290 kr.The powerful timeslip novel from the worldwide bestselling author of Lady of Hay
When Jess is attacked by someone she once trusted, she flees to her sister’s house in the Welsh borders to recuperate. There, she is disturbed by the cries of a mysterious child.
Two thousand years before, the same valley is the site of a great battle between Caratacus, king of the Brtitish tribes, and the invading Romans. The proud king is captured and taken as a prisoner to Rome with his wife and daughter, the princess Eigon.
Jess is inexorably drawn to investigate Eigon’s story, and as the Welsh cottage is no longer a peaceful sanctuary she decides to visit Rome. There lie the connections that will reveal Eigon’s astonishing life – and which threaten to reawaken Jess’s own tormentor…
Vegur allrar veraldar (kilja)
4.690 kr.Haustið 1479 kemur kona norður yfir Kjöl og teymir hest undir gömlum manni. Skáldið Sveinn döggskór Þórðarson er kominn í Reynistaðarklaustur til að deyja. Þó ekki fyrr en hann hefur skrásett sannleikann um atburðina í Rifi, þegar Englendingar drápu Björn Þorleifsson, hirðstjóra konungs á Íslandi. Vígið kveikti ófriðarbál innanlands og utan, og kona Björns, Ólöf ríka Loftsdóttir, hefndi bónda síns svo grimmilega að sögur hafa gengið um það allar götur síðan.
En hvað af því er satt og hvað er logið, og hverjum leyfist að segja söguna?
Löngu síðar, á tímum samfélagsmiðla og örbylgjupizza, reynir sagnfræðingurinn Eyjólfur Úlfsson að endurheimta akademískan orðstír sinn eftir að hafa óvart eyðilagt ómetanlegt fornrit. Þær hrakfarir leiða hann til Kaupmannahafnar, þar sem hann rekur sig eftir ólíkindalegri slóð handrita og miðaldaklæða í átt að sannleikanum um atburðina í Rifi.
Fimmtánda öldin er öldin sem týndist í Íslandssögunni, þegar þjóðin lenti skyndilega í hringiðu evrópskra stjórnmála og viðskiptahagsmuna. Hér stíga helstu persónur hennar ljóslifandi fram: riddarar og sjóræningjar, konungar, hirðstjórar og höfðingjar, en líka fólkið sem þjónaði þeim og reyndi að ávinna sér frelsi og frið á vægðarlausum upplausnartímum.
Vegur allrar veraldar skálkasaga er sjálfstætt framhald Hamingju þessa heims riddarasögu, sem kom út 2022 og hlaut tilnefningu til Íslensku bókmenntaverðlaunanna.
Huldukonan (kilja)
4.690 kr.Konurnar í Lohr fjölskyldunni skilja ekki að Sigvaldi þeirra, með alla sína augljósu mannkosti, hafi aldrei gengið út. Ennfremur fá þær ekki skilið þá fráleitu ákvörðun hans að gerast einsetumaður í eyðivík. Þær eru raunar hættar að hnýsast í hagi Sigvalda, því í hvert skipti verður augnaráð hans átakanlega tregafullt.
Dag einn birtist Sigvaldi á dyraþrepi móður sinnar með mánaðargamla stúlku í fanginu og neitar að svara því hver sé móðir barnsins. Konurnar í fjölskyldunni hefja sína eigin rannsókn á málinu og smám saman hrannast sönnunargögnin upp: saga Lohr ættarinnar, þjóðsögurnar í Dýrleifarvík, leyndardómur um týnt barn og móður sem hvarf, undarlegir draumar, óvenjuleg hegðun Sigvalda og dulmagn hamranna í hlíðinni.
