AROUND THE WORLD IN 100 BOOKS

DENMARK

THE CHESTNUT MAN by SOREN SVEISTRUP: If you find one, he’s already
found you. A psychopath is terrorizing Copenhagen.

.

His calling card is a “chestnut man”—a handmade doll made of matchsticks and
two chestnuts—which he leaves at each bloody crime scene. Examining the
dolls, forensics makes a shocking discovery—a fingerprint belonging to a young
girl, a government minister’s daughter who had been kidnapped and murdered a
year ago.

.

A tragic coincidence—or something more twisted? To save innocent lives, a pair
of detectives must put aside their differences to piece together the Chestnut
Man’s gruesome clues.

.

Because it’s clear that the madman is on a mission that is far from over.

.

And no one is safe.

THREE DOG NIGHT by ELSBETH EGHOLM: It's the coldest winter in
memory as ex-convict Peter Boutrup moves to remote, rural Denmark to
start a new life.

But when a young woman goes missing on New Year's Eve and Peter
discovers the body of Ramses, an old acquaintance from prison, things
start to unravel.

Two days after the disappearance the body of a young girl is found in the
harbour - she is naked, attached to an anchor and her face has been torn
off. Is this the body of the missing woman and is it connected with Ramses'
murder? And could Peter's strange new neighbour, Felix, be involved?

Peter Boutrup just wants peace and quiet but he must accept that the truth
lies hidden in the past he is trying to forget.

OFTEN I AM HAPPY by JENS CHRISTIAN GRONDAHL: When Ellinor
addresses her best friend Anna, she does not expect a reply. Anna has been
dead for forty years, killed in the same skiing accident that claimed Henning:
Ellinor’s first husband and Anna’s lover.

Ellinor instead tells her that Georg has died – Georg who was once Anna’s,
but whom Ellinor came to love in her place, and whom she came to care for,
along with Anna’s two infant sons. Yet with Georg’s death Ellinor finds herself
able to cut the ties of her assumed life with surprising ease.

Returning to the area of Copenhagen where she grew up, away from the
adopted comfort of the home she shared with Georg, Ellinor finds herself
addressing her own history: her marriage to Henning, their seemingly
charmed friendship with the newly-wed Anna and Georg, right back to her
own mother's story – a story of
heart-breaking pride.

Because there are some secrets – both our own and of others – that we can
only share with the dead. Secrets that nonetheless shape who we are and
who we love.

ENGLAND

THE EYRE AFFAIR by JASPER FFORDE: There is another 1985, where
London's criminal gangs have moved into the lucrative literary market, and
Thursday Next is on the trail of the new crime wave's Mr Big.

.

Acheron Hades has been kidnapping characters from works of fiction and holding
them to ransom. Jane Eyre is gone. Missing.

.

Thursday sets out to find a way into the book to repair the damage. But solving
crimes against literature isn't easy when you also have to find time to halt the
Crimean War, persuade the man you love to marry you, and figure out who really
wrote Shakespeare's plays.

.

Perhaps today just isn't going to be Thursday's day. Join her on a truly
breath-taking adventure, and find out for yourself. Fiction will never be the same
again.

THE GUERNSEY LITERARY AND POTATO PEEL PIE SOCIETY by
MARY ANN SHAFFER & ANNIE BARROWS: To give them hope she must
tell their story.

It's 1946. The war is over, and Juliet Ashton has writer's block. But when she
receives a letter from Dawsey Adams of Guernsey – a total stranger living
halfway across the Channel, who has come across her name written in a
second hand book – she enters into a correspondence with him, and in time
with all the members of the extraordinary Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel
Pie Society.

Through their letters, the society tell Juliet about life on the island, their love
of books – and the long shadow cast by their time living under German
occupation. Drawn into their irresistible world, Juliet sets sail for the island,
changing her life forever.

SWING TIME by ZADIE SMITH: Two brown girls dream of being dancers
but only one, Tracey, has talent. The other has ideas: about rhythm and time,
about black bodies and black music, what constitutes a tribe, or makes a
person truly free. It's a close but complicated childhood friendship that ends
abruptly in their early twenties, never to be revisited, but never quite forgotten,
either.

Tracey makes it to the chorus line but struggles with adult life, while her friend
leaves the old neighbourhood behind, traveling the world as an assistant to a
famous singer, Aimee, observing close up how the one percent live.

But when Aimee develops grand philanthropic ambitions, the story moves
from London to West Africa, where diaspora tourists travel back in time to find
their roots, young men risk their lives to escape into a different future, the
women dance just like Tracey the same twists, the same shakes and the
origins of a profound inequality are not a matter of distant history, but a
present dance to the music of time.

ESTONIA

THE MAN WHO SPOKE SNAKISH by ANDRUS KIVIRAHK: Unfortunately
people and tribes degenerate. They lose their teeth, forget their language,
until finally they're bending meekly on the fields and cutting straw with a
scythe.

Leemut, a young boy growing up in the forest, is content living with his
hunter-gatherer family. But when incomprehensible outsiders arrive aboard
ships and settle nearby, with an intriguing new religion, the forest begins to
empty - people are moving to the village and breaking their backs tilling fields
to make bread. Meanwhile, Leemut and the last forest-dwelling humans
refuse to adapt: with bare-bottomed primates and their love of ancient
traditions, promiscuous bears, and a single giant louse, they live in shacks,
keep wolves, and speak to snakes.

APOTHECARY MELCHIOR AND THE MYSTERY OF ST OLAF’S
CHURCH by INDREK HARGLA: Apothecary Melchior is a divisive figure in
the town: respected for his arcane knowledge and scientific curiosity but also
feared for his mystical witchdoctor aura. When a mysterious murder occurs
in the castle, Melchior is called in to help find the killer and reveals a talent
for solving crime. But Tallinn has a serial killer in its midst, and Melchior is
tested to the limit in a plot with as many twists and turns as the turreted
castle itself. Melchior uncovers a mystery surrounding St Olaf's church and a
secret society that has been controlling the town for years, uncovering truths
about the town that may spell danger...

Indrek Hargla has created a unique character in detective and historical
fiction: a chemist turned-sleuth who battles ignorance and superstition - as
well as killers - in a beautiful setting and in a gripping and mysterious era of
history.

PURGE by SOFI OKSANEN: When Aliide Truu, an older woman living
alone in the Estonian countryside, finds a dishevelled girl huddled in her
front yard, she suppresses her misgivings and offers her shelter. Zara is a
young sex-trafficking victim on the run from her captors, but a photo she
carries with her soon makes it clear that her arrival at Aliide's home is no
coincidence. Survivors both, Aliide and Zara engage in a complex arithmetic
of suspicion and revelation to distil each other's motives; gradually, their
stories emerge, the culmination of a tragic family drama of rivalry, lust, and
loss that played out during the worst years of Estonia's Soviet occupation.

Sofi Oksanen establishes herself as one the most important voices of her
generation with this intricately woven tale, whose stakes are almost
unbearably high from the first page to the last. Purge is a fiercely compelling
and damning novel about the corrosive effects of shame, and of life in a time
and place where to survive is to be implicated.

FRANCE

THE DISAPPEARANCE OF ADELE BEDEAU by GRAEME MACRAE BUR-
NET: Manfred Baumann is a loner. Socially awkward and perpetually ill at ease,
he spends his evenings quietly drinking and surreptitiously observing Adele Be-
deau, the sullen but alluring waitress at a drab bistro in the unremarkable small
French town of Saint-Louis. One day, she simply vanishes into thin air and
Georges Gorski, a detective haunted by his failure to solve one of his first murder
cases, is called in to investigate the girl's disappearance. He sets his sights on
Manfred.

As Manfred cowers beneath Gorski's watchful eye, the dark secrets of his past
begin to catch up with him and his carefully crafted veneer of normalcy begins to
crack. Graeme Macrae Burnet's masterful play on literary form featuring an unreli-
able narrator makes for a grimly entertaining psychological thriller that questions
if it is possible--or even desirable--to know another man's mind.

THE LITTLE PARIS BOOKSHOP by NINA GEORGE: Monsieur Perdu calls
himself a literary apothecary. From his floating bookstore in a barge on the
Seine, he prescribes novels for the hardships of life. Using his intuitive feel
for the exact book a reader needs, Perdu mends broken hearts and souls.
The only person he can't seem to heal through literature is himself; he's still
haunted by heartbreak after his great love disappeared. She left him with
only a letter, which he has never opened.

After Perdu is finally tempted to read the letter, he hauls anchor and departs
on a mission to the south of France, hoping to make peace with his loss and
discover the end of the story. Joined by a bestselling but blocked author and
a lovelorn Italian chef, Perdu travels along the country’s rivers, dispensing
his wisdom and his books, showing that the literary world can take the
human soul on a journey to heal itself.

ALL THE LIGHT WE CANNOT SEE by ANTHONY DOERR: Marie-Laure
lives in Paris near the Museum of Natural History, where her father
works. When she is twelve, the Nazis occupy Paris and father and
daughter flee to the walled citadel of Saint-Malo, where Marie-Laure’s
reclusive great uncle lives in a tall house by the sea. With them they
carry what might be the museum’s most valuable and dangerous jewel.

In a mining town in Germany, Werner Pfennig, an orphan, grows up with
his younger sister, enchanted by a crude radio they find that brings them
news and stories from places they have never seen or imagined. Werner
becomes an expert at building and fixing these crucial new instruments
and is enlisted to use his talent to track down the resistance. Deftly
interweaving the lives of Marie-Laure and Werner, Doerr illuminates the
ways, against all odds, people try to be good to one another.

GERMANY

BLUE NIGHT by SIMONE BUCHHOLZ: After convicting a superior for corrup-
tion and shooting off a gangster’s crown jewels, the career of Hamburg’s most hard
-bitten state prosecutor, Chastity Riley, has taken a nose dive: she has been trans-
ferred to the tedium of witness protection to prevent her making any more trouble.
However, when she is assigned to the case of an anonymous man lying under po-
lice guard in hospital – almost every bone in his body broken, a finger cut off, and
refusing to speak in anything other than riddles – Chastity’s instinct for the big, ex-
citing case kicks in.

Using all her powers of persuasion, she soon gains her charge’s confidence, and
finds herself on the trail to Leipzig, a new ally, and a whole heap of lethal synthetic
drugs. When she discovers that a friend and former colleague is trying to bring
down Hamburg’s Albanian mafia kingpin single-handedly, it looks like Chas Riley’s
dull life on witness protection really has been short-lived…

STASI CHILD by DAVID YOUNG: 1975: When Oberleutnant Karin Muller is
called to investigate a teenage girl's body at the foot of the Berlin Wall, she
imagines she's seen it all before. But she soon realizes that this is a death
like no other before it - the girl was evidently trying to escape
from West Berlin.

As a member of the People's Police, Muller's power in East Germany only
stretches so far. The Ministry for State Security, the Stasi, assures her the
case is closed, all they need to know is the girl's name. Yet they strongly dis-
courage her from asking questions. The evidence doesn't add up, and it
soon becomes clear the crime scene has been staged. But this regime does
not tolerate curious minds, and it takes
Müller too long to realize that the trail she's been following may lead her dan-
gerously close to home.

THE VALLEY OF UNKNOWING by PHILIP SINGTON: In the twilight
years of Communist East Germany, Bruno Krug, author of a single world
-famous novel written twenty years earlier, falls for Theresa Aden, a
music student from the West. But Theresa has also caught the eye of a
cocky young scriptwriter who delights in satirizing Krug’s work.

Asked to appraise a mysterious manuscript, Bruno is disturbed to find
that the author is none other than his rival. Disconcertingly, the book is
good—very good. But there is hope for the older man: the unwelcome
masterpiece is dangerously political. Krug decides that if his affair with
Theresa is to prove more than a fling, he must employ a small deception.
But in the Workers’ and Peasants’ State, knowing the deceiver from the
deceived, the betrayer from the betrayed, isn’t just difficult: it can be a
matter of life and death.

GREECE

AFTERNOONS IN ITHAKA by SPIRI TSINTZIRAS: A charming memoir of
self-discovery, family, connection and the power of a tomato. 'I remember
crusty just-baked bread, rubbed with juicy tomato flesh, swimming in a puddle
of thick green olive oil. I am seven years old. I sit on a stool in my
grandmother's house. It is the height of summer in a seaside village in the
south of Greece. We little Aussies devour 'tomato sandwiches' as the family
chats and laughs and swats flies ...'

From the first heady taste of tomatoes on home-baked bread in her mother's
village in Petalidi, to sitting at a taverna some 30 years later in Ithaka with her
young family, Spiri Tsintziras goes on a culinary, creative and spiritual journey
that propels her back and forth between Europe and Australia. These
evocative, funny and poignant stories explore how food and culture, language
and music, and people and their stories help to create a sense of meaning
and identity.

THE HOUSE ON PARADISE STREET by SOFKA ZINOVIEFF: In 2008
Antigone Perifanis returns to her old family home in Athens after 60 years in
exile. She has come to attend the funeral of her only son, Nikitas, who was
born in prison, and whom she has not seen since she left him as a baby.
Nikitas had been distressed in the days before his death and, curious to find
out why, his English widow Maud starts to investigate his complicated past.

In so doing, she finds herself reigniting a bitter family feud, discovering a
heart-breaking story of a young mother caught up in the political tides of the
Greek Civil War and forced to make a terrible decision that would blight not
only her life but that of future generations.

WEDDING NIGHT by SOPHIE KINSELLA: Lottie just knows that her
boyfriend is going to propose during lunch at one of London’s fanciest
restaurants. But when his big question involves a trip abroad, not a trip down
the aisle, she’s completely crushed. So when Ben, an old flame, calls her
out of the blue and reminds Lottie of their pact to get married if they were
both still single at thirty, she jumps at the chance. No formal dates—just a
quick march to the altar and a honeymoon on Ikonos, the sun-drenched
Greek island where they first met years ago.

Their family and friends are horrified. Fliss, Lottie’s older sister, knows that
Lottie can be impulsive—but surely this is her worst decision yet. And Ben’s
colleague Lorcan fears that this hasty marriage will ruin his friend’s career.
To keep Lottie and Ben from making a terrible mistake, Fliss concocts an
elaborate scheme to sabotage their wedding night. As she and Lorcan jet off
to Ikonos in pursuit, Lottie and Ben are in for a honeymoon to remember, for
better . . . or worse.

ICELAND

SNOWBLIND by RAGNAR JONASSON: Siglufjörður: an idyllically quiet
fishing village in Northern Iceland, where no one locks their doors – accessible
only via a small mountain tunnel. Ari Thór Arason: a rookie policeman on his first
posting, far from his girlfriend in Reykjavik – with a past that he’s unable to leave
behind. When a young woman is found lying half-naked in the snow, bleeding
and unconscious, and a highly esteemed, elderly writer falls to his death in the
local theatre, Ari is dragged straight into the heart of a community where he can
trust no one, and secrets and lies are a way of life.

An avalanche and unremitting snowstorms close the mountain pass, and the
24-hour darkness threatens to push Ari over the edge, as curtains begin to
twitch, and his investigation becomes increasingly complex, chilling and
personal. Past plays tag with the present and the claustrophobic tension mounts,
while Ari is thrust ever deeper into his own darkness – blinded by snow, and with
a killer on the loose.

MISS ICELAND by AUDUR AVA OLAFSDOTTIR: Born in a remote part of
Iceland, and named after a volcano, Hekla always knew she wanted to be a
writer. She heads for Reyjkavik, with a Remington typewriter and a
manuscript hidden in her suitcase, hoping to make it in the nation of poets.

But this is the 1960s, and Hekla soon discovers that there's more demand
for a beauty queen than a woman writer in this conservative,
male-dominated world. Along with her friend Jón John, a gay man who
dreams of working in the theatre, she soon learns that she must conceal her
true self to have any hope of success.

But the world outside is changing, and Hekla knows she must escape to find
freedom abroad, whatever must be left behind.

A FIST OR A HEART by KRISTIN EIRIKSDOTTIR: Elín Jónsdóttir lives
an isolated existence in Reykjavík, Iceland, making props and
prosthetics for theatrical productions and Nordic crime flicks. In her early
seventies, she has recently become fascinated with another loner, Ellen
Álfsdóttir, a sensitive young playwright and illegitimate daughter of a
famous writer. The girl has aroused maternal feelings in Elín, but she has
also stirred discomfiting memories long packed away. Because their
paths have crossed before. One doesn’t remember. The other is about to
forget.

Soon they’ll discover all they have in common: difficult childhoods,
trauma, and being outliers who have found space to breathe in creative
expression. Yet the more Elín tries to connect with the young woman and
unbox painful memories, the more tenuous her grasp on reality
becomes.

IRELAND

THE GUEST LIST by LUCY FOLEY: On an island off the coast of Ireland, guests

gather to celebrate two people joining their lives together as one. The groom:
handsome and charming, a rising television star. The bride: smart and ambitious, a
magazine publisher. It’s a wedding for a magazine, or for a celebrity: the designer
dress, the remote location, the luxe party favours, the boutique whiskey. The cell
phone service may be spotty and the waves may be rough, but every detail has been
expertly planned and will be expertly executed.

.

But perfection is for plans, and people are all too human. As the champagne is
popped and the festivities begin, resentments and petty jealousies begin to mingle
with the reminiscences and well wishes. The groomsmen begin the drinking game
from their school days. The bridesmaid not-so-accidentally ruins her dress. The
bride’s oldest (male) friend gives an uncomfortably caring toast.

.

And then someone turns up dead. Who didn’t wish the happy couple well? And
perhaps more important, why?

WHEN ALL IS SAID by ANNE GRIFFIN: If you had to pick five people to
sum up your life, who would they be? If you were to raise a glass to each of
them, what would you say? And what would you learn about yourself, when
all is said and done?

This is the story of Maurice Hannigan, who, over the course of a Saturday
night in June, orders five different drinks at the Rainford House Hotel. With
each he toasts a person vital to him: his doomed older brother, his troubled
sister-in-law, his daughter of fifteen minutes, his son far off in America, and
his late, lamented wife. And through these people, the ones who left him
behind, he tells the story of his own life, with all its regrets and feuds, loves
and triumphs.

OH MY GOD, WHAT A COMPLETE AISLING by EMER MCLYSAGHT &
SARAH BREEN: Loves going out, but secretly scared of liquid eyeliner.
Happy to drink the bar dry, but will bring her own coaster if necessary.
Would rather die than miss a cooked hotel breakfast, but can calculate
the Points in a Snickers at fifty paces.

Aisling's the girl with a heart of gold, but a boyfriend who still hasn't made
a peep about their Big Day even after seven years.

But then a disastrous romantic getaway shows Aisling that it's time to
stop waiting around and leave John behind for the bright lights of Dublin.
After she's wailed her way through Adele's Greatest Hits, that is.

Between glamorous new flatmates, a scandal at work and finding herself
in a weird love square, Aisling is ready to take on the big city. So long as
she has her umbrella with her.

ITALY

THE UMBRIAN SUPPER CLUB by MARLENA DE BLASI: Luscious and
evocative, The Umbrian Supper Club recounts the stories of a small group of
Umbrian women who - sometimes with their men and, as often, without
them - gather in an old stone house in the hills above Orvieto to cook, to sit down
to a beautiful supper, to drink their beloved local wines. And to talk.

During the gathering, the preparation, the cooking and the eating, they recount
the memories and experiences of their gastronomic lives and, as much, of their
more personal histories. For a period of four years, it was Marlena de Blasi's task,
her pleasure, to cook for the Supper Club - to choose the elements for supper, to
plan the menu and, with the help of one or another of the women in the club, to
prepare the meal. What she learnt, what they cooked and ate and drank and how
they talked is the fundamental stuff of this book.

SET ME FREE by SALVATORE STRIANO: Sasà grew up in Naples. He
never went to school, and instead grew up with street violence and
bloodshed, becoming the leader of a gang of boys who became Camorristi
by the age of fourteen. At the age of thirty, he was in prison, his life all but
mapped out.

That’s when Shakespeare steps in. At Sasà’s most hopeless point, he is
persuaded to join the prison’s drama troupe. In Shakespeare’s Tempest,
Sasà stumbles on what he needs to explain the world which has defined his
own life.

THE MONSTER OF FLORENCE by DOUGLAS PRESTON & MARIO
SPEZI: In 2000, Douglas Preston fulfilled a dream to move his family to Italy.
Then he discovered that the olive grove in front of their 14th century farmhouse
had been the scene of the most infamous double-murders in Italian history,
committed by a serial killer known as the Monster of Florence. Preston,
intrigued, meets Italian investigative journalist Mario Spezi to learn more.

This is the true story of their search for—and identification of—the man they
believe committed the crimes, and their chilling interview with him. And then, in
a strange twist of fate, Preston and Spezi themselves become targets of the
police investigation. Preston has his phone tapped, is interrogated, and told to
leave the country. Spezi fares worse: he is thrown into Italy's grim Capanne
prison, accused of being the Monster of Florence himself. Like one of Preston's
thrillers, The Monster of Florence, tells a remarkable and harrowing story
involving murder, mutilation, and suicide—and at the center of it, Preston and
Spezi, caught in a bizarre prosecutorial vendetta.

NETHERLANDS

THE SECRET DIARY OF HENDRIK GROEN, 83 1/4 YEARS OLD by
HENDRIK GROEN: Technically speaking, Hendrik Groen is....elderly. But at age
83 1/4, this feisty, indomitable curmudgeon has no plans to go out quietly. Bored
of weak tea and potted geraniums, exasperated by the indignities of aging,
Hendrik has decided to rebel--on his own terms. He begins writing an exposé:
secretly recording the antics of day-to-day life in his retirement home, where he
refuses to take himself, or his fellow "inmates," too seriously.

.

With an eccentric group of friends he founds the wickedly anarchic Old-But-Not-
Dead Club--"Rule #3: No Whining Allowed"--and he and his best friend, Evert,
gleefully stir up trouble, enraging the home's humourless director and turning
themselves into unlikely heroes. And when a sweet and sassy widow moves in
next door, he polishes his shoes, grooms what's left of his hair, and determines to
savour every ounce of joy in the time he has left, with hilarious and tender conse-
quences.

THE DINNER by HERMAN KOCH: On a summer evening in Amsterdam,
two couples meet at a fashionable restaurant for dinner. At first, the
conversation is a gentle hum of polite small talk - the banality of work, the
latest movies they've seen. But behind the empty words, terrible things need
to be said, and with every forced smile and every new course, the knives are
being sharpened.

Each couple has a fifteen-year-old son. The two boys are united by their
accountability for a single horrific act - an act that has triggered a police
investigation and shattered the comfortable, insulated worlds of their fami-
lies. When the dinner reaches its culinary climax, the conversation finally
touches on their children. As civility and friendship disintegrate, each couple
shows just how far they are prepared to go to protect those they love.

CONFESSIONS OF AN UGLY STEPSISTER by GREGORY MAGUIRE:
We have all heard the story of Cinderella, the beautiful child cast out to
slave among the ashes. But what of her stepsisters, the homely pair
exiled into ignominy by the fame of their lovely sibling? What fate befell
those untouched by beauty ... and what curses accompanied Cinder-
ella's looks?

Set against the backdrop of seventeenth-century Holland, Confessions of
an Ugly Stepsister tells the story of Iris, an unlikely heroine who finds
herself swept from the lowly streets of Haarlem to a strange world of
wealth, artifice, and ambition. Iris's path quickly becomes intertwined with
that of Clara, the mysterious and unnaturally beautiful girl destined to
become her sister. While Clara retreats to the cinders of the family
hearth, Iris seeks out the shadowy secrets of her new household -- and
the treacherous truth of her former life.

POLAND

999: THE EXTRAORDINARY YOUNG WOMEN OF THE FIRST OFFICIAL
JEWISH TRANSPORT TO AUSCHWITZ by HEATHER DUNE MACADAM:
On March 25, 1942, nearly a thousand young, unmarried Jewish women,
many of them teenagers, boarded a train in Poprad, Slovakia. Believing they
were going to work in a factory for a few months, they were eager to report for
government service and left their parents’ homes wearing their best clothes
and confidently waving good-bye. Instead, the young women were sent to
Auschwitz. Only a few would survive.
Now acclaimed author Heather Dune Macadam reveals their stories, drawing
on extensive interviews with survivors, and consulting with historians,
witnesses, and relatives of those first deportees to create an important
addition to Holocaust literature and women’s history.

HOME IS NEARBY by MAGDALENA MCGUIRE: 1980: the beginning of
the Polish Crisis. Brought up in a small village, country-girl Ania arrives in
the university city of Wroclaw to pursue her career as a sculptor.

Here she falls in love with Dominik, an enigmatic writer at the centre of a
group of bohemians and avant-garde artists who throw wild parties.

When martial law is declared, their lives change overnight: military tanks ap-
pear on the street, curfews are introduced and the artists are driven
underground. Together, Ania and Dominik fight back, pushing against the
boundaries imposed by the authoritarian communist government. But at
what cost?

ANNA AND THE SWALLOW MAN by GAVRIEL SAVIT: Kraków, 1939,
is no place to grow up. There are a million marching soldiers and a
thousand barking dogs. And Anna Lania is just seven years old when the
Germans take her father and suddenly, she's alone.

Then she meets the Swallow Man. He is a mystery, strange and tall. And
like Anna's missing father, he has a gift for languages: Polish, Russian,
German, Yiddish, even Bird. When he summons a bright, beautiful
swallow down to his hand to stop her from crying, Anna is entranced.

Over the course of their travels together, Anna and the Swallow Man will
dodge bombs, tame soldiers, and even, despite their better judgement,
make a friend. But in a world gone mad, everything can prove
dangerous . . .

PORTUGAL

THE RETURN by DULCE MARIA CARDOSO: Luanda, 1975. The Angolan
War of Independence has been raging for at least a decade, but with the
collapse of the Salazar dictatorship, defeat for the Portuguese is now in sight.
Thousands of settlers are fleeing back to Portugal to escape the brutality of the
Angolan rebels.

Rui is fifteen years old. He has lived in Luanda all his life and has never even
visited the far-away homeland - although he has heard many stories. But now
his family are finally accepting that they too must return, and Rui is filled with a
mixture of excitement and dread at the prospect. But just as they are leaving for
the airport, his father is taken away by the rebels, and the family must leave
without him.

Not knowing if the father is alive or dead - or if they will ever find out what has
become of him, Rui, his mother and sister try to rebuild their lives in their new
home. This turns out to be a five star hotel in a quiet, seaside suburb of Lisbon,
where returnee families are crammed into luxurious rooms by the dozen.

NIGHT TRAIN TO LISBON by PASCAL MERCIER: Raimund Gregorius is
a Latin teacher at a Swiss college who one day—after a chance encounter
with a mysterious Portuguese woman—abandons his old life to start a new
one. He takes the night train to Lisbon and carries with him a book by
Amadeu de Prado, a (fictional) Portuguese doctor and essayist whose
writings explore the ideas of loneliness, mortality, death, friendship, love,
and loyalty.

Gregorius becomes obsessed by what he reads and restlessly struggles to
comprehend the life of the author. His investigations lead him all over the
city of Lisbon, as he speaks to those who were entangled in Prado’s life.
Gradually, the picture of an extraordinary man emerges—a doctor and poet
who rebelled against Salazar’s dictatorship.

THE HIGH MOUNTAINS OF PORTUGAL by YANN MARTEL: In Lisbon
in 1904, a young man named Tomás discovers an old journal. It hints at
the existence of an extraordinary artifact that—if he can find it—would
redefine history. Traveling in one of Europe’s earliest automobiles, he
sets out in search of this strange treasure.

Thirty-five years later, a Portuguese pathologist devoted to the murder
mysteries of Agatha Christie finds himself at the center of a mystery of
his own and drawn into the consequences of Tomás’s quest.

Fifty years on, a Canadian senator takes refuge in his ancestral village in
northern Portugal, grieving the loss of his beloved wife. But he arrives
with an unusual companion: a chimpanzee. And there the century-old
quest will come to an unexpected conclusion.

ROMANIA

LITTLE FINGERS by FILIP FLORIAN: In a little town in Romania, a mass
grave is discovered near the excavations of a Roman fort. Are the dead the
victims of a medieval plague or, perhaps, of a Communist firing squad? And
why are finger bones disappearing from the pit each night? Petrus, a young
archaeologist, decides to do some investigating of his own.

Meanwhile, an Orthodox monk in the surrounding mountains stumbles into
history when he becomes the father confessor of a partisan bent on bringing
down the government, one handmade grenade and one derailed train at a
time. Not to mention a team of Argentinean forensic anthropologists who
arrive in town in a cloud of rock music, shredded jeans, and tequila.

BLACK SEA TWILIGHT by DOMNICA RADULESCU: 1980s Romania: As
the sun sets on the magical shore of the Black Sea and casts its last rays
across the water, all Nora Teodoru can think about is pursuing her dream of
becoming an accomplished artist - and of her love for Gigi, her childhood
boyfriend from the Turkish part of town.

But storm clouds are gathering as life under Dictator Nicolae Ceausescu
becomes increasingly unbearable. His secret police are circling, never far
from the young couple's doors.

Nora and Gigi make plans to escape to Turkey. But nothing can prepare
them for the events that follow

PAINTER OF SILENCE by GEORGINA HARDING: Iasi, Romania, the
early 1950s. A nameless man is found on the steps of a hospital. Deaf
and mute, he is unable to communicate until a young nurse called Safta
brings paper and pencils with which he can draw. Slowly, painstakingly,
memories appear on the page.

The memories are Safta's also. For the man is Augustin, son of the cook
at the manor house which was Safta's family home. Born six months
apart, they grew up with a connection that bypassed words. But while
Augustin's world remained the same size Safta's expanded to embrace
languages, society - and a fleeting love, one long, hot summer.

But then came war, and in its wake a brutal Stalinist regime, and nothing
would remain the same.

RUSSIA

S.N.U.F.F. by VICTOR PELEVIN: Damilola Karpov is a pilot. Living in
Byzantium, a huge sky city floating above the land of Urkaine, he makes his
living as a drone pilot - capable of being a cameraman who records the
events unfolding in Urkaine or, with the weapons aboard his drone, of
making a newsworthy event happen for his employers: 'Big Byz Media'.

His recordings are known as S.N.U.F.F.: Special Newsreel/Universal
Feature Film.

S.N.U.F.F. is a superb post-apocalyptic novel, exploring the conflict between
the nation of Urkaine, its causes and its relationship with the city 'Big Byz'
above. Contrasting poverty and luxury, low and high technology, barbarity
and civilisation - while asking questions about the nature of war, the media,
entertainment and humanity.

DEAD MOUNTAIN: THE UNTOLD TRUE STORY OF THE DYATLOV
PASS INCIDENT by DONNIE EICHAR: In February 1959, a group of nine ex-

perienced hikers in the Russian Ural Mountains died mysteriously on an elevation
known as Dead Mountain. Eerie aspects of the incident—unexplained violent inju-
ries, signs that they cut open and fled the tent without proper clothing or shoes, a
strange final photograph taken by one of the hikers, and elevated levels of radiation
found on some of their clothes—have led to decades of speculation over what really
happened.

This gripping work of literary nonfiction delves into the mystery through unprece-
dented access to the hikers' own journals and photographs, rarely seen government
records, dozens of interviews, and the author's retracing of the hikers' fateful journey
in the Russian winter. A fascinating portrait of the young hikers in the Soviet era,
and a skilful interweaving of the hikers narrative, the investigators' efforts, and the
author's investigations, here for the first time is the real story of what happened that
night on Dead Mountain.

THE TSAR OF LOVE AND TECHNO by ANTHONY MARRA: This
stunning, exquisitely written collection introduces a cast of remarkable
characters whose lives intersect in ways both life-affirming and
heart-breaking. A 1930s Soviet censor painstakingly corrects offending
photographs, deep underneath Leningrad, bewitched by the image of a
disgraced prima ballerina. A chorus of women recount their stories and
those of their grandmothers, former gulag prisoners who settled their
Siberian mining town. Two pairs of brothers share a fierce, protective love.
Young men across the former USSR face violence at home and in the
military. And great sacrifices are made in the name of an oil landscape
unremarkable except for the almost incomprehensibly peaceful past it
depicts.

In stunning prose, with rich character portraits and a sense of history
reverberating into the present, The Tsar of Love and Techno is a captivating
work from one of our greatest new talents.

SCOTLAND

HIS BLOODY PROJECT by GRAEME MACRAE BURNET: The year is
1869. A brutal triple murder in a remote community in the Scottish Highlands
leads to the arrest of a young man by the name of Roderick Macrae.

A memoir written by the accused makes it clear that he is guilty, but it falls to the
country's finest legal and psychiatric minds to uncover what drove him to commit
such merciless acts of violence.

Was he mad? Only the persuasive powers of his advocate stand between
Macrae and the gallows.

Graeme Macrae Burnet tells an irresistible and original story about the provi-
sional nature of truth, even when the facts seem clear. His Bloody Project is a
mesmerising literary thriller set in an unforgiving landscape where the exercise
of power is arbitrary.

THERE’S ONLY ONE DANNY GARVEY by DAVID F. ROSS: Danny
Garvey was a sixteen-year old footballing prodigy. Professional clubs
clamoured to sign him, and a glittering future beckoned.

And yet, his early promise remained unfulfilled, and Danny is back home in
the tiny village of Barshaw to manage the struggling junior team he once
played for. What's more, he's hiding a secret about a tragic night, thirteen
years earlier, that changed the course of several lives. There's only one
Danny Garvey, they once chanted ... and that's the problem.

A story of irrational hopes and fevered dreams of unstoppable passion and
unflinching commitment in the face of defeat There's Only One Danny
Garvey is, above all, an unforgettable tale about finding hope and
redemption in the most unexpected of places.

THE OUTRUN by AMY LIPTROT: When Amy Liptrot returns to Orkney after
more than a decade away, she is drawn back to the Outrun on the sheep farm
where she grew up. Approaching the land that was once home, memories of her
childhood merge with the recent events that have set her on this journey.

Amy was shaped by the cycle of the seasons, birth and death on the farm, and
her father’s mental illness, which were as much a part of her childhood as the
wild, carefree existence on Orkney. But as she grew up, she longed to leave this
remote life. She moved to London and found herself in a hedonistic cycle.
Unable to control her drinking, alcohol gradually took over. Now thirty, she finds
herself washed up back home on Orkney, standing unstable at the cliff edge,
trying to come to terms with what happened to her in London.

Spending early mornings swimming in the bracingly cold sea, the days tracking
Orkney’s wildlife—puffins nesting on sea stacks, arctic terns swooping close
enough to feel their wings—and nights searching the sky for the Merry Dancers,
Amy slowly makes the journey toward recovery from addiction.

SWEDEN

A MAN CALLED OVE by FREDRIK BACKMAN: Meet Ove. He’s a
curmudgeon—the kind of man who points at people he dislikes as if they
were burglars caught outside his bedroom window. He has staunch
principles, strict routines, and a short fuse. People call him “the bitter
neighbour from hell.” But must Ove be bitter just because he doesn’t walk
around with a smile plastered to his face all the time?

Behind the cranky exterior there is a story and a sadness. So when one
November morning a chatty young couple with two chatty young daughters
move in next door and accidentally flatten Ove’s mailbox, it is the lead-in to a
comical and heart-warming tale of unkempt cats, unexpected friendship, and
the ancient art of backing up a U-Haul. All of which will change one cranky
old man and a local residents’ association to their very foundations.

LET THE RIGHT ONE IN by JOHN AJVIDE LINDQVIST : Oskar and Eli. In
very different ways, they were both victims. Which is why, against the odds,
they became friends. And how they came to depend on one another, for life
itself.

Oskar is a 12-year-old boy living with his mother on a dreary housing estate
at the city's edge. He dreams about his absentee father, gets bullied at
school, and wets himself when he's frightened.

Eli is the young girl who moves in next door. She doesn't go to school and
never leaves the flat by day. She is a 200-year-old vampire, forever frozen in
childhood, and condemned to live on a diet of fresh blood.

THE 100-YEAR-OLD MAN WHO CLIMBED OUT THE WINDOW AND
DISAPPEARED by JONAS JONASSON: It all starts on the
one-hundredth birthday of Allan Karlsson. Sitting quietly in his room in an
old people’s home, he is waiting for the party he-never-wanted-anyway
to begin. The Mayor is going to be there. The press is going to be there.
But, as it turns out, Allan is not… Slowly but surely Allan climbs out of his
bedroom window, into the flowerbed (in his
slippers) and makes his getaway.

And so begins his picaresque and unlikely journey involving criminals,
several murders, a suitcase full of cash, and incompetent police. As his
escapades unfold, we learn something of Allan’s earlier life in which –
remarkably – he helped to make the atom bomb, became friends with
American presidents, Russian tyrants, and Chinese leaders, and was a
participant behind the scenes in many key events of the twentieth
century.

UKRAINE

MIDNIGHT IN CHERNOBYL by ADAM HIGGINBOTHAM: April 25, 1986, in
Chernobyl, was a turning point in world history. The disaster not only changed
the world’s perception of nuclear power and the science that spawned it, but
also our understanding of the planet’s delicate ecology. With the images of the
abandoned homes and playgrounds beyond the barbed wire of the 30-kilometer
Exclusion Zone, the rusting graveyards of contaminated trucks and helicopters,
the farmland lashed with black rain, the event fixed for all time the notion of
radiation as an invisible killer.

Chernobyl was also a key event in the destruction of the Soviet Union, and, with
it, the United States’ victory in the Cold War. For Moscow, it was a political and
financial catastrophe as much as an environmental and scientific one. With a
total cost of 18 billion rubles—at the time equivalent to $18 billion—Chernobyl
bankrupted an already teetering economy and revealed to its population a state
built upon a pillar of lies.

VOROSHILOVGRAD by SERHIY ZHADAN: A city-dwelling executive
heads home to take over his brother's gas station after his mysterious
disappearance, but all he finds at home are mysteries and ghosts. The bleak
industrial landscape of now-war-torn eastern Ukraine sets the stage
for Voroshilovgrad, the Soviet era name of the Ukranian city of
Luhansk, mixing magical realism and exhilarating road novel in poetic,
powerful, and expressive prose.

Serhiy Zhadan, one of the key figureheads in contemporary Ukrainian
literature and the most famous poet in the country, has become the voice of
Ukraine's "Euro-Maidan" movement. He lives in Kharkiv, Ukraine.

MOONLIGHT IN ODESSA by JANET SKESLIEN CHARLES: Odessa,
Ukraine, is the humour capital of the former Soviet Union, but in an
upside-down world where waiters earn more than doctors and Odessans
depend on the Mafia for basics like phone service and medical supplies, no
one is laughing. After months of job hunting, Daria, a young engineer, finds a
plum position at a foreign firm as a secretary. But every plum has a pit. In this
case, it’s Mr. Harmon, who makes it clear that sleeping with him is job one.
Daria evades Harmon’s advances by recruiting her neighbour, the slippery
Olga, to be his mistress. But soon Olga sets her sights on Daria’s job.

Daria begins to moonlight as an interpreter at Soviet Unions(TM), a
matchmaking agency that organizes “socials” where lonely American men can
meet desperate Odessan women. Her grandmother wants Daria to leave
Ukraine for good and pushes her to marry one of the men she meets, but
Daria already has feelings for a local. She must choose between her world
and America, between Vlad, a sexy, irresponsible mobster, and Tristan, a
teacher nearly twice her age. Daria chooses security and America. Only it’s
not exactly what she thought it would be…



BELIZE

BELIZEAN NAIL SOUP by FELENE CAYETANO: Ten stories by nine writers
create a vivid image of the variety of people, landscapes and talent in Belize, the
tiny seaside Caribbean nation in Central America. The stories in Belizean Nail
Soup tell what the real Belize is about - its sights, sounds, smells, tastes and
textures.

Each story was conceived in the mind of a Belizean man or woman, mostly
educators, well aware of the challenge and importance of writing these stories for
the generations that will follow.

BUTTERFLY RANCH by RK SALTERS: Tristan Griffin is a household name

and the author of a universally popular detective series. For the past few years he
has lived in self-exile in a remote jungle lodge nestled in the Mayan hills of Southern
Belize, with his partner Hedda. Butterfly Ranch begins as he attempts suicide and
Hedda disappears. Altamont Stanbury, an old Kriol police constable posted to the
local backwater of San Antonio, rushes to the scene with his daughter Philomena,
the village nurse. Philomena saves Tristan but he remains unconscious. Altamont, a
bumbler and long-time reader of crime novels, launches a half-hearted search for
Hedda by radio but decides to remain at the lodge. In truth his reverence for Tristan
the writer consumes all else, and he becomes obsessed with the Griffin books he
finds at the lodge.

When Tristan comes to, he is distraught and at times delirious, haunted by
flashbacks of his uncompromising, cursed love for Hedda and the dark secret
behind her disappearance. His anger and increasingly erratic behaviour only find
respite in the presence of Altamont's innocent daughter. But he feels nothing but
spite for Altamont himself, and the relationship between the two threatens to have
fatal consequences for one or both.

SUMMER BY SUMMER by HEATHER BURCH: When Summer took a
job as a nanny for a couple vacationing in Belize, she imagined it would
be a fresh start before starting college in the fall. And while she adores
her charge, Josh, she can’t say the same for her employers’ oldest son,
Bray. He’s cocky, inconsiderate, and makes her feel she’s a chore he
has to put up with. In short, he’s everything she dislikes in a guy.

Bray had a plan for the summer: party, hang out with friends, and forget
all the responsibilities waiting for him back home. But every time he’s
forced to be around Summer, her dour, serious mood sets him off. Not to
mention she has a habit of picking up on what he already knows is wrong
with him.

Then the two find themselves on a dive trip gone wrong, stranded on a
remote island. As they focus on survival, their differences melt away, and
they find being together may be what both needed all along.

CANADA

MOON OF THE CRUSTED SNOW by WAUBGESHIG RICE: With winter
looming, a small northern Anishinaabe community goes dark. Cut off, people
become passive and confused. Panic builds as the food supply dwindles.
While the band council and a pocket of community members struggle to
maintain order, an unexpected visitor arrives, escaping the crumbling society
to the south. Soon after, others follow.

The community leadership loses its grip on power as the visitors manipulate
the tired and hungry to take control of the reserve. Tensions rise and, as the
months pass, so does the death toll due to sickness and despair. Frustrated
by the building chaos, a group of young friends and their families turn to the
land and Anishinaabe tradition in hopes of helping their community thrive
again. Guided through the chaos by an unlikely leader named Evan
Whitesky, they endeavour to restore order while grappling with a grave
decision.

THE BOAT PEOPLE by SHARON BALA: When a rusty cargo ship carrying
Mahindan and five hundred fellow refugees from Sri Lanka's bloody civil war
reaches Vancouver's shores, the young father thinks he and his six-year-old
son can finally start a new life. Instead, the group is thrown into a detention
processing center, with government officials and news headlines speculating
that among the "boat people" are members of a separatist militant organization
responsible for countless suicide attacks—and that these terrorists now pose a
threat to Canada's national security. As the refugees become subject to heavy
interrogation, Mahindan begins to fear that a desperate act taken in Sri Lanka
to fund their escape may now jeopardize his and his son's chance for asylum.

Told through the alternating perspectives of multiple narrators, The Boat
People is a spellbinding and timely novel that provokes a deeply
compassionate lens through which to view the current refugee crisis.

THE INNOCENTS by MICHAEL CRUMMEY: A brother and sister are
orphaned in an isolated cove on Newfoundland's northern coastline. Their
home is a stretch of rocky shore governed by the feral ocean, by a relentless
pendulum of abundance and murderous scarcity. Still children with only the
barest notion of the outside world, they have nothing but the family's boat
and the little knowledge passed on haphazardly by their mother and father to
keep them.

Muddling though the severe round of the seasons, through years of meagre
catches and storms and ravaging illness, it is their fierce loyalty to each
other that motivates and sustains them. But as seasons pass and they wade
deeper into the mystery of their own natures, even that loyalty will be tested.

The Innocents is richly imagined and compulsively readable, a riveting story
of hardship and survival, and an unflinching exploration of the bond between
brother and sister. By turns electrifying and heart-breaking, it is a testament
to the bounty and barbarity of the world, to the wonders and strangeness of
our individual selves.

CANADA

FROM THE ASHES by JESSE THISTLE: Abandoned by his parents as a
toddler, Jesse Thistle briefly found himself in the foster-care system with his
two brothers, cut off from all they had known. Eventually the children landed
in the home of their paternal grandparents, but their tough-love attitudes
meant conflicts became commonplace. And the ghost of Jesse’s drug-
addicted father haunted the halls of the house and the memories of every
family member. Struggling, Jesse succumbed to a self-destructive cycle of
drug and alcohol addiction and petty crime, spending more than a decade
on and off the streets, often homeless. One day, he finally realized he would
die unless he turned his life around.

In this heart-warming and heart-breaking memoir, Jesse Thistle writes
honestly and fearlessly about his painful experiences with abuse, uncovering
the truth about his parents, and how he found his way back into the circle of
his Indigenous culture and family through education.

WE HAVE ALWAYS BEEN HERE by SAMRA HABIB: Samra Habib has

spent most of her life searching for the safety to be herself. As an Ahmadi Muslim
growing up in Pakistan, she faced regular threats from Islamic extremists who
believed the small, dynamic sect to be blasphemous. From her parents, she
internalized the lesson that revealing her identity could put her in grave danger.

When her family came to Canada as refugees, Samra encountered a whole new
host of challenges: bullies, racism, the threat of poverty, and an arranged marriage.
Backed into a corner, her need for a safe space--in which to grow and nurture her
creative, feminist spirit--became dire. The men in her life wanted to police her, the
women in her life had only shown her the example of pious obedience, and her body
was a problem to be solved.

So begins an exploration of faith, art, love, and queer sexuality, a journey that takes
her to the far reaches of the globe to uncover a truth that was within her all along.

THE HOME FOR UNWANTED GIRLS by JOANNA GOODMAN: In 1950s
Quebec, French and English tolerate each other with precarious civility - much
like Maggie Hughes’ parents. Maggie’s English-speaking father has ambitions
for his daughter that don’t include marriage to the poor French boy on the next
farm over. But Maggie’s heart is captured by Gabriel Phénix. When she
becomes pregnant at fifteen, her parents force her to give baby Elodie up for
adoption and get her life ‘back on track’.
Elodie is raised in Quebec’s impoverished orphanage system. It’s a precarious
enough existence that takes a tragic turn when Elodie, along with thousands of
other orphans in Quebec, is declared mentally ill as the result of a new law that
provides more funding to psychiatric hospitals than to orphanages. Bright and
determined, Elodie withstands abysmal treatment at the nuns’ hands,
finally earning her freedom at seventeen, when she is thrust into an alien, often
unnerving world.
Maggie, married to a businessman eager to start a family, cannot forget the
daughter she was forced to abandon, and a chance reconnection with Gabriel
spurs a wrenching choice. As time passes, the stories of Maggie and Elodie
intertwine but never touch, until Maggie realizes she must take what she wants
from life and go in search of her long-lost daughter, finally reclaiming the truth
that has been denied them both

CUBA

NEXT YEAR IN HAVANA by CHANEL CLEETON: Havana, 1958. The
daughter of a sugar baron, nineteen-year-old Elisa Perez is part of Cuba's
highsociety, where she is largely sheltered from the country's growing politi-
cal unrest--until she embarks on a clandestine affair with a passionate revo-
lutionary...
Miami, 2017. Freelance writer Marisol Ferrera grew up hearing romantic sto-
ries of Cuba from her late grandmother Elisa, who was forced to flee with
her family during the revolution. Elisa's last wish was for Marisol to scatter
her ashes in the country of her birth.

Arriving in Havana, Marisol comes face-to-face with the contrast of Cuba's
tropical, timeless beauty and its perilous political climate. When more family
history comes to light and Marisol finds herself attracted to a man with se-
crets of his own, she'll need the lessons of her grandmother's past to help
her understand the true meaning of courage.

SLOW TRAIN TO GUANTANAMO by PETER MILLAR: Modern-day Cuba.
Disabled by an American blockade, with a Communist system that has
delivered atrocious standards of living, Cuba looks and feels like a nation at
the end of a long, hard war.

Award-winning journalist Peter Millar jumps aboard a railway system that was
once the pride of Latin America and is now a crippled casualty case to
undertake a railway odyssey the length of Cuba in the dying days of the Castro
regime. Starting in the ramshackle but romantic capital of Havana, once
dominated by the US mafia, he travels with ordinary Cubans, sharing
anecdotes, life stories and political opinions, to the far end of the island, where
it meets a more modern blot on American history, the Guantanamo naval base
and detention camp. Millar may not have all the answers but he asks the right
questions on an anarchic entertaining and often comic adventure.

BREATHE: STORIES FROM CUBA by LEILA SEGAL: Breathe is a
collection that explores the heart of Fidel Castro-era Cuba; an outsider's
look that is balanced by a weight of empathy to illuminate truths that lie
couched between the island's propaganda and the Western media's
portrayal.

Characters from Europe and the USA in Swimming, Taxi and Sabbatical
seem to want to hold on to the indulgences that their countries offer them,
while praising Cubans for the more abstemious lives they lead and seeking
to sample what the locals experience; in Siempre Luchando, I Never See
Them Cry and The Party, romantic liaisons strengthen or buckle under the
strain of the minute exploitations that result from the assumptions one
makes about the other; the seedy sexual aggression of Luca's Trip to
Havana is undercut by the subtle yet intense lust of Breathe; while Leaving
Cuba, with its closing image of Havana's night sky, is as eloquently
balanced a tale of the lives of everyday Cubans as you will read in a long
while - whichever path one takes, something is lost.

EL SALVADOR

TYRANT MEMORY by HORACIO CASTELLANOS MOYA: The tyrant of
Horacio Castellanos Moya’s ambitious new novel is the actual pro-Nazi
mystic Maximiliano Hernández Martínez — known as the Warlock — who
came to power in El Salvador in 1932. An attempted coup in April, 1944,
failed, but a general strike in May finally forced him out of office. Tyrant
Memory takes place during the month between the coup and the strike.
Its protagonist, Haydée Aragon, is a well-off woman, whose husband is a
political prisoner and whose son, Clemente, after prematurely announcing
the dictator’s death over national radio during the failed coup, is forced to
flee when the very much alive Warlock starts to ruthlessly hunt down his
enemies. The novel moves between Haydée’s political awakening in diary
entries and Clemente’s frantic and often hysterically comic efforts to escape
capture.

THE WEIGHT OF ALL THINGS by SANDRA BENITEZ: The last time
Nicols saw his mother, she was mortally wounded by gunfire that erupted in a
crowded plaza. Watching while her body is dragged away with other
victims, Nicols believes that his mother is still alive and vows to find her again.
Thus begins the young boys harrowing journey through his
war-ravaged country.

KILOMETER 99 by TYLER MCMAHON: Malia needs to leave El Salvador. A
surfer and aspiring engineer, she came to Central America as a Peace Corps
volunteer and fell in love with Ben. Malia's past year has been perfect: her
weeks spent building a much-needed aqueduct in the countryside, and her
weekends spent with Ben, surfing point-breaks in the nearby port city of La
Libertad. Suddenly, a major earthquake devastates the country and brings an
abrupt end to her work. Ben and Malia decide to move on.

Now free of obligations, they have an old car, a wad of cash, surfboards, and
rough plans for an epic trip through South America. Just as they're about to say
goodbye to their gritty and beloved Salvadoran beach town, a mysterious
American surfer known only as Pelochucho shows up—spouting grandiose
plans and persuading them to stay.

Days become weeks; documents go missing; money gets tight. Suddenly, Ben
and Malia can't leave. Caught between bizarre real estate offers, suspect drug
deals, and internal jealousies, this unlikely band of surfers, aid-workers, and
opportunists all struggle to find their way through a fallen world, in Kilometer
99 by Tyler McMahon.

GREENLAND

SEVEN GRAVES ONE WINTER by CHRISTOFFER PETERSEN: In the
remote Arctic community of Inussuk, seven graves are dug at the end of
each summer, before the ground freezes. As winter approaches, the
question is, will they be enough?

When Constable David Maratse is invalided off the force, he moves to a
remote Arctic island to live the life of a subsistence fisherman. But when
his long line hooks the body of a politician’s daughter, he finds himself
both prime suspect and lead investigator in Greenland’s most
sensational murder case.

COLD EARTH by SARAH MOSS: A team of six archaeologists from the
United States, England, and Scotland assembles at the beginning of the
Arctic summer to unearth traces of the lost Viking settlements in Greenland.
But as they sink into uneasy domesticity, there is news of an epidemic back
home, and their communications with the outside world fall away.
Facing a Greenland winter for which they are hopelessly ill-equipped, Nina,
Ruth, Catriona, Jim, Ben, and Yianni, knowing that their missives may never
reach their loved ones, write final letters home. These letters make up the
narrative of Cold Earth, with each section of the book composed of one
character’s first-person perspective in letter form.

In this exceptional and haunting debut novel, Moss weaves a rich tapestry of
personal narrative, history, love, grief, and naked survival.

THE GIRL WITHOUT SKIN by MADS PEDER NORDBO: When a
mummified Viking corpse is discovered in a crevasse out on the edge of
an ice sheet, journalist Matthew Cave is sent to cover the story. The next
day the mummy is gone, and the body of the policeman who was
keeping watch is found naked and flayed—exactly like the victims in a
gruesome series of murders that terrified the remote town of Nuuk in the
1970s.

As Matt investigates, he is shocked by the deprivation and brutal
violence the locals take for granted. Unable to trust the police, he begins
to suspect a cover-up. It’s only when he meets a young Inuit woman,
Tupaarnaq, convicted of killing her parents and two small sisters, that
Matt starts to realise how deep this story goes—and how much danger
he is in.

HAITI

CLAIRE OF THE SEA LIGHT by EDWIDGE DANTICAT: Claire Limyè

Lanmè - Claire of the Sea Light - is an enchanting child born into love and tragedy
in Ville Rose, Haiti. Claire's mother died in childbirth, and on each of her birthdays
Claire is taken by her father, Nozias, to visit her mother's grave. Nozias wonders if
he should give away his young daughter to a local shopkeeper, who lost a child of
her own, so that Claire can have a better life.

But on the night of Claire's seventh birthday, when at last he makes the wrenching
decision to do so, she disappears. As Nozias and others look for her, painful
secrets, haunting memories, and startling truths are unearthed among the
community of men and women whose individual stories connect to Claire, to her
parents, and to the town itself. Told with piercing lyricism and the economy of a
fable, Claire of the Sea Light is a tightly woven, breath-taking tapestry that
explores what it means to be a parent, child, neighbour, lover, and friend, while
revealing the mysterious bonds we share with the natural world and with one
another.

LOVE, ANGER, MADNESS by MARIE VIEUX-CHAUVET: In Love, Anger,

Madness, Marie Vieux-Chauvet offers three slices of life under an oppressive
regime.

In “Love,” Claire is the eldest of three sisters who occupy a single house. Her dark
skin and unmarried status make her a virtual servant to the rest of the family.
Consumed by an intense passion for her brother-in-law, she finds redemption in a
criminal act of rebellion.

In “Anger,” a middle-class family is ripped apart when twenty-year-old Rose is forced
to sleep with a repulsive soldier in order to prevent a government takeover of her
father’s land.

And in “Madness,” René, a young poet, finds himself trapped in a house for days
without food, obsessed with the souls of the dead, dreading the invasion of local
military thugs, and steeling himself for one final stand against authority.

HAITI: AFTER THE EARTHQUAKE by PAUL FARMER: On January 12,
2010 a massive earthquake laid waste to Port-au-Prince, Haiti, killing hundreds
of thousands of people. Within three days, Dr. Paul Farmer arrived in the Haitian
capital, along with a team of volunteers, to lend his services to the injured. In
this vivid narrative, Farmer describes the incredible suffering--and resilience--
that he encountered in Haiti.

Having worked in the country for nearly thirty years, he skilfully explores the
social issues that made Haiti so vulnerable to the earthquake--the very issues
that make it an "unnatural disaster." Complementing his account are stories
from other doctors, volunteers, and earthquake survivors.

Haiti After the Earthquake will both inform and inspire readers to stand with the
Haitian people against the profound economic and social injustices that formed
the fault line for this disaster.

HONDURAS

ENRIQUE’S JOURNEY by SONIA NAZARIO: Enrique’s Journey recounts
the unforgettable quest of a Honduran boy looking for his mother, eleven
years after she is forced to leave her starving family to find work in the
United States. Braving unimaginable peril, often clinging to the sides and
tops of freight trains, Enrique travels through hostile worlds full of thugs,
bandits, and corrupt cops. But he pushes forward, relying on his wit,
courage, hope, and the kindness of strangers.

As Isabel Allende writes: “This is a twenty-first-century Odyssey. If you are
going to read only one nonfiction book this year, it has to be this one.” Now
updated with a new Epilogue and Afterword, photos of Enrique and his
family, an author interview and more, this is a classic of contemporary
America.

THE LONG HONDURAN NIGHT by DANA FRANK: This powerful narrative
recounts the tumultuous time in Honduras that witnessed then-President
Manuel Zelaya deposed by a coup in June 2009, told through first-person
experiences and layered with deeper political analysis. It weaves together two
perspectives; first, the broad picture of Honduras since the coup,
including the coup itself, its continuation in two repressive regimes, and
secondly, the evolving Honduran resistance movement, and a new, broad
solidarity movement in the United States.

Although it is full of terrible things, this not a horror story: this narrative
directly counters mainstream media coverage that portrays Honduras as a pit
of unrelenting awfulness, in which powerless sobbing mothers cry over bodies
in the morgue. Rather, it’s about sobering challenges and the
inspiring collective strength with which people face them.

HAITI: AFTER THE EARTHQUAKE by PAUL FARMER: Since the days of
conquistador Hernán Cortés, rumors have circulated about a lost city of
immense wealth hidden somewhere in the Honduran interior, called the White
City or the Lost City of the Monkey God. Indigenous tribes speak of ancestors
who fled there to escape the Spanish invaders, and they warn that anyone who
enters this sacred city will fall ill and die. In 1940, swashbuckling journalist
Theodore Morde returned from the rainforest with hundreds of artifacts and an
electrifying story of having found the Lost City of the Monkey God-but then
committed suicide without revealing its location.

Three quarters of a century later, bestselling author Doug Preston joined a team
of scientists on a groundbreaking new quest. In 2012 he climbed aboard a
rickety, single-engine plane carrying the machine that would change everything:
lidar, a highly advanced, classified technology that could map the terrain under
the densest rainforest canopy. In an unexplored valley ringed by steep
mountains, that flight revealed the unmistakable image of a sprawling
metropolis, tantalizing evidence of not just an undiscovered city but an
enigmatic, lost civilization.

JAMAICA

A BRIEF HISTORY OF SEVEN KILLINGS by MARLON JAMES: On
December 3, 1976, just before the Jamaican general election and two days
before Bob Marley was to play the Smile Jamaica Concert, gunmen stormed his
house, machine guns blazing. The attack nearly killed the Reggae superstar, his
wife, and his manager, and injured several others. Marley would go on to
perform at the free concert on December 5, but he left the country the next day,
not to return for two years.

Deftly spanning decades and continents and peopled with a wide range of
characters—assassins, journalists, drug dealers, and even ghosts—A Brief
History of Seven Killings is the fictional exploration of that dangerous and
unstable time and its bloody aftermath, from the streets and slums of Kingston
in the 70s, to the crack wars in 80s New York, to a radically altered Jamaica in
the 90s. Brilliantly inventive and stunningly ambitious, this novel is a revealing
modern epic that will secure Marlon James’ place among the great literary
talents of his generation.

AUGUSTOWN by KEI MILLER: Ma Taffy may be blind but she sees
everything. So when her great-nephew Kaia comes home from school in
tears, what she senses sends a deep fear running through her. While they
wait for his mama to come home from work, Ma Taffy recalls the story of the
flying preacherman and a great thing that did not happen.

A poor suburban sprawl in the Jamaican heartland, Augustown is a place
where many things that should happen don’t, and plenty of things that
shouldn’t happen do. For the story of Kaia leads back to another momentous
day in Jamaican history, the birth of the Rastafari and the desire for a better
life.

HERE COMES THE SUN by NICOLE DENNIS-BENN: Capturing the
distinct rhythms of Jamaican life and dialect, Nicole Dennis-Benn pens a
tender hymn to a world hidden among pristine beaches and the wide
expanse of turquoise seas. At an opulent resort in Montego Bay, Margot
hustles to send her younger sister, Thandi, to school. Taught as a girl to
trade her sexuality for survival, Margot is ruthlessly determined to shield
Thandi from the same fate. When plans for a new hotel threaten their
village, Margot sees not only an opportunity for her own financial
independence but also perhaps a chance to admit a shocking secret: her
forbidden love for another woman.

As they face the impending destruction of their community, each woman
fighting to balance the burdens she shoulders with the freedom she
craves must confront long-hidden scars. From a much-heralded new
writer, Here Comes the Sun offers a dramatic glimpse into a vibrant,
passionate world most outsiders see simply as paradise.

MEXICO

THE MURMUR OF BEES by SOFIA SEGOVIA: From the day that old Nana
Reja found a baby abandoned under a bridge, the life of a small Mexican town
forever changed. Disfigured and covered in a blanket of bees, little Simonopio is
for some locals the stuff of superstition, a child kissed by the devil. But he is
welcomed by landowners Francisco and Beatriz Morales, who adopt him and
care for him as if he were their own. As he grows up, Simonopio becomes a
cause for wonder to the Morales family, because when the uncannily gifted child
closes his eyes, he can see what no one else can—visions of all that’s yet to
come, both beautiful and dangerous. Followed by his protective swarm of bees
and living to deliver his adoptive family from threats—both human and those of
nature—Simonopio’s purpose in Linares will, in time, be divined.

Set against the backdrop of the Mexican Revolution and the devastating
influenza of 1918, The Murmur of Bees captures both the fate of a country in
flux and the destiny of one family that has put their love, faith, and future in the
unbelievable.

I’LL SELL YOU A DOG by JUAN PABLO VILLALOBOS: Long before he was

the taco seller whose ‘Gringo Dog’ recipe made him famous throughout Mexico City,
our hero was an aspiring artist: an artist, that is, till his would-be girlfriend was stolen
by Diego Rivera, and his dreams snuffed out by his hypochondriac mother. Now our
hero is resident in a retirement home, where fending off boredom is far more gruelling
than making tacos. Plagued by the literary salon that bumps about his building’s lobby
and haunted by the self-pitying ghost of a neglected artist, Villalobos’s old man can’t
help but misbehave.
He antagonises his neighbours, tortures American missionaries with passages from
Adorno, flirts with the revolutionary greengrocer, and in short does everything that can
be done to fend off the boredom of retirement and old age . . . while still holding a
beer.
A delicious take-down of pretensions to cultural posterity, I’ll Sell You a Dog is a
comic novel whose absurd inventions, scurrilous antics and oddball characters are
vintage Villalobos.

HURRICANE SEASON by FERNANDA MELCHOR: The Witch is dead.
And the discovery of her corpse—by a group of children playing near the
irrigation canals—propels the whole village into an investigation of how
and why this murder occurred. Rumors and suspicions spread. As the
novel unfolds in a dazzling linguistic torrent, with each unreliable narrator
lingering on new details, new acts of depravity or brutality, Melchor
extracts some tiny shred of humanity from these characters that most
would write off as utterly irredeemable, forming a lasting portrait of a
damned Mexican village.

Like Roberto Bolano’s 2666 or Faulkner’s greatest novels, Hurricane
Season takes place in a world filled with mythology and violence—real
violence, the kind that seeps into the soil, poisoning everything around:
it’s a world that becomes more terrifying and more terrifyingly real the
deeper you explore it.

NICARAGUA

THE COUNTRY UNDER MY SKIN by GIOCONDA BELLI: Until her early

twenties, Gioconda Belli inhabited an upper-class cocoon: sheltered from the
poverty in Managua in a world of country clubs and debutante balls; educated
abroad; early marriage and motherhood. But in 1970, everything changed. Her
growing dissatisfaction with domestic life, and a blossoming awareness of the social
inequities in Nicaragua, led her to join the Sandinistas, then a burgeoning but still
hidden organization. She would be involved with them over the next twenty years at
the highest, and often most dangerous, levels.

Her memoir is both a revelatory insider's account of the Revolution and a vivid,
intensely felt story about coming of age under extraordinary circumstances. Belli
writes with both striking lyricism and candor about her personal and political lives:
about her family, her children, the men in her life; about her poetry; about the
dichotomies between her birth-right and the life she chose for herself; about the
failures and triumphs of the Revolution; about her current life, divided between
California (with her American husband and their children) and Nicaragua; and about
her sustained and sustaining passion for her country and its people.

THE LADIES OF MANAGUA by ELENI N. GAGE: When Maria Vazquez

returns to Nicaragua for her beloved grandfather's funeral, she brings with her a
mysterious package from her grandmother's past—and a secret of her own. And she
also carries the burden of her tense relationship with her mother Ninexin, once a
storied revolutionary, now a tireless government employee. Between Maria and
Ninexin lies a chasm created by the death of Maria’s father, who was killed during
the revolution when Maria was an infant, leaving her to be raised by her grandmother
Isabela as Ninexin worked to build the new Nicaragua.

As Ninexin tries to reach her daughter, and Maria wrestles with her expectations for
her romance with an older man, Isabela, the mourning widow, is lost in memories of
attending boarding school in 1950’s New Orleans, where she loved and lost almost
sixty years ago. When the three women come together to bid farewell to the man
who anchored their family, they are forced to confront their complicated, passionate
relationships with each other and with their country—and to reveal the secrets that
each of them have worked to conceal.

OF GIANTS AND OTHER MEN by CASPAR PEEK: Better to live a cow-
ard than die a hero.
These are the words of Tomás Delacorte’s mother, spoken from the
bitter dregs of her own life. It’s 1934 and Tomás is five years old when
his father’s ashes are delivered to their stately home in Leon, Nicaragua.
Avenging the murder becomes an obsession that follows Tomás into
manhood, his only consolation the comradery of his cousin and sworn
blood-brother, Fausto.

Steering away from politics and the factions of war, Tomás becomes a
doctor living a quiet life, while Fausto embraces his military career with a
passion that earns him the nickname Lieutenant Knife. The cousins
remain close…until Tomás falls in love. That day so long ago, when he
and Fausto mingled blood and pledged their destinies, will soon come
back to haunt them. Too late, they realize it is blood that binds them, and
blood that will ultimately tear them apart.

PANAMA

THE COUNTRY UNDER MY SKIN by GIOCONDA BELLI: The surprising,
magnificent story of a Panamanian government employee who, one day,
after a series of troubles, writes the celebrated masterwork of modern
Central American poetry.

Among other things, this novella is an ironic allegory of the poet’s vocation
and inspiration, the subtlety of artistic genius, and our need to give literature
an historic, national, psychological, and aesthetic context. But Aira goes
further still — converting the ironic allegory into a formidable parody of the
expectations that all narrative texts generate — by laying out the pathos of a
man who between one night and the following morning is touched by genius.
Once again Aira surprises us with his unclassifiable fiction: original and
enjoyable, worthy of many a thoughtful chuckle, Varamo invites the reader to
become an accomplice in the author’s irresistible game.

THE WORLD IN HALF by CRISTINA HENRIQUEZ: Miraflores has never
known her father, and until now, she's never thought that he wanted to know her.
She's long been aware that her mother had an affair with him while she was
stationed with her then-husband in Panama, and she's always assumed that her
pregnant mother came back to the United States alone with his consent. But
when Miraflores returns to the Chicago suburb where she grew up, to care for
her mother at a time of illness, she discovers that her mother and father had a
greater love than she ever thought possible and that her father had wanted her
more than she could have ever imagined.

In secret, Miraflores plots a trip to Panama, in search of the man whose love she
hopes can heal her mother, and whose presence she believes can help her find
the pieces of her own identity that she thought were irretrievably lost. What she
finds is unexpected, exhilarating, and holds the power to change the course of
her life completely.

ERASED by MARIXA LASSO: The Panama Canal set a new course for
the modern development of Central America. Cutting a convenient path
from the Atlantic to the Pacific oceans, it hastened the currents of trade and
migration that were already reshaping the Western hemisphere. Yet the
waterway was built at considerable cost to a way of life that had
characterized the region for centuries. In Erased, Marixa Lasso recovers
the history of the Panamanian cities and towns that once formed the
backbone of the republic.

Drawing on vast and previously untapped archival sources and personal
recollections, Lasso describes the canal's displacement of peasants,
homeowners, and shop owners, and chronicles the destruction of a
centuries-old commercial culture and environment. On completion of the
canal, the United States engineered a tropical idyll to replace the lost cities
and towns--a space miraculously cleansed of poverty, unemployment, and
people--which served as a convenient backdrop to the manicured suburbs
built exclusively for Americans.

USA: EAST

LOCK EVERY DOOR by RILEY SAGER (NEW YORK): They’ve offered

you a luxury apartment, rent free. THE CATCH: you may not live long enough to
enjoy it.

No visitors. No nights spent away from the apartment. No disturbing the other
residents. These are the only rules for Jules Larson's new job as apartment sitter
for an elusive resident of the Bartholomew, one of Manhattan's most high-profile
private buildings and home to the rich and famous.

Recently heartbroken and practically homeless, Jules readily accepts the terms,
ready to leave her past life behind.

Out of place among the extremely wealthy, Jules finds herself pulled toward other
apartment sitter Ingrid. But Ingrid confides that the Bartholomew is not what it
seems and the dark history hidden beneath its gleaming facade is starting to
frighten her. Jules brushes it off as a harmless ghost story - but the next day, her
new friend has vanished. And then Jules discovers that Ingrid is not the first
temporary resident to go missing…

Welcome to the Bartholomew…You may never leave.

THE RIVER AT NIGHT by ERICA FERENCIK (MAINE): Win Allen doesn't want
an adventure.

After a miserable divorce and the death of her beloved brother, she just wants to
spend some time with her three best friends, far away from her soul-crushing
job. But athletic, energetic Pia has other plans.

Plans for an adrenaline-raising, breath-taking, white-water rafting trip in the
Maine wilderness. Five thousand square miles of remote countryside. Just
mountains, rivers and fresh air.

No phone coverage. No people.

No help…

A HEAD FULL OF GHOSTS by PAUL TREMBLAY
(MASSACHUSETTS): The lives of the Barretts, a suburban New
England family, are torn apart when fourteen-year-old Marjorie begins to
display signs of acute schizophrenia. To her parents despair, the doctors
are unable to halt Marjorie's descent into madness.

As their stable home devolves into a house of horrors, they reluctantly
turn to a local Catholic priest for help, and soon find themselves the
unwitting stars of The Possession, a hit reality television show.

Fifteen years later, a bestselling writer interviews Marjorie's younger
sister, Merry. As she recalls the terrifying events that took place when
she was just eight years old, long-buried secrets and painful memories
begin to surface and a mind-bending tale of psychological horror is
unleashed.

USA: MIDWEST

THE DEVIL IN THE WHITE CITY by ERIK LARSON (CHICAGO): One

was an architect. The other a serial killer. This is the incredible story of these two
men and their realization of the Chicago World's Fair of 1893, and its amazing
'White City'; one of the wonders of the world.

The architect was Daniel H. Burnham, the driving force behind the White City,
the massive, visionary landscape of white buildings set in a wonderland of canals
and gardens. The killer was H. H. Holmes, a handsome doctor with striking blue
eyes. He used the attraction of the great fair - and his own devilish charms - to
lure scores of young women to their deaths.

While Burnham overcame politics, infighting, personality clashes and Chicago's
infamous weather to transform the swamps of Jackson Park into the greatest
show on Earth, Holmes built his own edifice just west of the fairground. He called
it the World's Fair Hotel. In reality it was a torture palace, a gas chamber, a
crematorium. These two disparate but driven men are brought to life in this
mesmerizing, murderous tale of the legendary Fair that transformed America and
set it on course for the twentieth century . . .

THE POISONED CITY by ANNA CLARK (FLINT, MICHIGAN): When the
people of Flint, Michigan, turned on their faucets in April 2014, the water
pouring out was poisoned with lead and other toxins.

Through a series of disastrous decisions, the state government had switched
the city's water supply to a source that corroded Flint's aging lead pipes.
Complaints about the foul-smelling water were dismissed: the residents of
Flint, mostly poor and African American, were not seen as credible, even in
matters of their own lives.

It took eighteen months of activism by city residents and a band of dogged
outsiders to force the state to admit that the water was poisonous. By that
time, twelve people had died and Flint's children had suffered irreparable
harm. The long battle for accountability and a humane response to this
man-made disaster has only just begun.

THE RECKLESS OATH WE MADE by BRYN GREENWOOD
(KANSAS): Zee is nobody's fairy tale princess. Almost six-foot, with a

redhead's temper and a shattered hip, she has a long list of worries:
never-ending bills, her beautiful, gullible sister, her five-year-old nephew, her
housebound mother, and her drug-dealing boss.

Zee may not be a princess, but Gentry is an actual knight, complete with sword,
armor, and a code of honor. Two years ago the voices he hears called him to be
Zee's champion. Both shy and autistic, he's barely spoken to her since, but he
has kept watch, ready to come to her aid.

When an abduction tears Zee's family apart, she turns to the last person she
ever imagined--Gentry--and sets in motion a chain of events that will not only
change both of their lives, but bind them to one another forever.

USA: SOUTHEAST

BOY’S LIFE by ROBERT MCCAMMON (ALABAMA): Boy’s Life is a
richly imagined, spellbinding portrait of the magical worldview of the
young—and of innocence lost.

Zephyr, Alabama, is an idyllic hometown for eleven-year-old Cory
Mackenson—a place where monsters swim the river deep and friends are
forever. Then, one cold spring morning, Cory and his father witness a car
plunge into a lake—and a desperate rescue attempt brings his father
face-to-face with a terrible, haunting vision of death.

As Cory struggles to understand his father’s pain, his eyes are slowly
opened to the forces of good and evil that surround him. From an ancient
mystic who can hear the dead and bewitch the living, to a violent clan of
moonshiners, Cory must confront the secrets that hide in the shadows of
his hometown—for his father’s sanity and his own life hang in the
balance…

THE PAST IS NEVER by TIFFANY QUAY TYSON (MISSISSIPPI): Siblings
Bert, Willet, and Pansy know better than to go swimming at the old rock
quarry. According to their father, it's the devil's place, a place that's been
cursed and forgotten. But Mississippi Delta summer days are scorching hot
and they can't resist cooling off in the dark, bottomless water. Until the day six
-year-old Pansy disappears. Not drowned, not lost . . . simply gone.

After years with no sign, no hope of ever finding Pansy alive, Bert and Willet
have tried to move on. But as surely as their mother died of a broken heart,
they can't let go. So when clues surface drawing them to the remote tip of
Florida, they drop everything and drive south. Deep in the murky depths of
the Florida Everglades they may find the answer to Pansy's mysterious
disappearance . . . but truth, like the past, is sometimes better left where it
lies.

BIG LIES IN A SMALL TOWN by DIANE CHAMBERLAIN (NORTH
CAROLINA): North Carolina, 2018: Morgan Christopher’s life has been
derailed. Taking the fall for a crime she did not commit, she finds herself
serving a three-year stint in the North Carolina Women’s Correctional
Centre. Her dream of a career in the arts is put on hold – until a
mysterious visitor makes her an offer that will see her released
immediately. Her assignment: restore an old post office mural in a sleepy
southern town. What she finds under the layers of grime is a painting
that tells the story of madness, violence and a conspiracy of small-town
secrets.

North Carolina, 1940: Anna Dale, an artist from New Jersey, wins a
national contest to paint a mural for the post office in Edenton, North
Carolina. Alone in the world and desperate for work, she accepts. But
what she doesn’t expect is to find herself immersed in a town where
prejudices run deep, where people are hiding secrets behind closed
doors and where the price for being different might just end in murder.

USA: SOUTHWEST

AN OCEAN OF MINUTES by THEA LIM (TEXAS): In this novel America
is in the grip of a deadly flu pandemic. When Frank catches the virus, his
girlfriend Polly will do whatever it takes to save him—even if it means
risking everything. When she finds out there’s a company that has invent-
ed time travel, she agrees to a radical contract: if she signs up for a
one-way-trip into the future to work as a bonded labour, the company will
pay for the life-saving treatment Frank needs. Polly promises to meet
Frank again in Galveston, Texas, where she will arrive in twelve years.

But when Polly is re-routed an extra five years into the future, Frank is
nowhere to be found. Alone in a transformed and divided America, with no
status and no money, Polly must navigate a new life and find a way to
locate Frank, to determine if he is alive, and if their love has endured.

THE CACTUS LEAGUE by EMILY NEMENS (ARIZONA): Jason
Goodyear is the star outfielder for the Los Angeles Lions, stationed with the
rest of his team in the punishingly hot Arizona desert for their annual spring
training. Handsome, famous, and talented, Goodyear is nonetheless coming
apart at the seams. And the coaches, writers, wives, girlfriends, petty crimi-
nals, and diehard fans following his every move are eager to find out why--as
they hide secrets of their own.

Humming with the energy of a ballpark before the first pitch, Emily
Nemens' The Cactus League unravels the tightly connected web of people
behind a seemingly linear game. Narrated by a sportscaster, Goodyear's story
is interspersed with tales of Michael Taylor, a batting coach trying to stay
relevant; Tamara Rowland, a resourceful spring-training paramour, looking for
one last catch; Herb Allison, a legendary sports agent grappling with his
decline; and a plethora of other richly drawn characters, all striving to be seen
as the season approaches. It's a journey that, like the Arizona desert, brims
with both possibility and destruction.

THE EDGE OF NOWHERE by C.H. ARMSTRONG (OKLAHOMA): The

year is 1992 and Victoria Hastings Harrison Greene—reviled matriarch of a
sprawling family—is dying.

After surviving the Oklahoma Dust Bowl and the Great Depression, Victoria
refuses to leave this earth before revealing the secrets she’s carried for
decades.

Once the child of a loving family during peaceful times, a shocking death
shattered her life. Victoria came face to face with the harshness of the world. As
the warm days of childhood receded to distant memory, Victoria learns to
survive.

No matter what it takes.

To keep her family alive in an Oklahoma blighted by dust storms and poverty,
Victoria makes choices—harsh ones, desperate ones. Ones that eventually
made her into the woman her grandchildren fear and whisper about. Ones that
kept them all alive. Hers is a tale of tragedy, love, murder, and above all, the
conviction to never stop fighting.

USA: WEST

THE PASSAGE by JUSTIN CRONIN (COLORADO): IT HAPPENED

FAST. THIRTY-TWO MINUTES FOR ONE WORLD TO DIE, ANOTHER TO BE
BORN.

First, the unthinkable: a security breach at a secret U.S. government facility
unleashes the monstrous product of a chilling military experiment. Then, the
unspeakable: a night of chaos and carnage gives way to sunrise on a nation, and
ultimately a world, forever altered. All that remains for the stunned survivors is the
long fight ahead and a future ruled by fear—of darkness, of death, of a fate far
worse.

As civilization swiftly crumbles into a primal landscape of predators and prey, two
people flee in search of sanctuary. FBI agent Brad Wolgast is a good man
haunted by what he's done in the line of duty. Six-year-old orphan Amy Harper
Bellafonte is a refugee from the doomed scientific project that has triggered
apocalypse. Wolgast is determined to protect her from the horror set loose by her
captors, but for Amy, escaping the bloody fallout is only the beginning of a much
longer odyssey—spanning miles and decades—toward the time an place where
she must finish what should never have begun.

MR. PENUMBRA’S 24-HOUR BOOKSTORE by ROBIN SLOAN
(CALIFORNIA): Recession has shuffled Clay Jannon out of his life as a
Web-design drone and serendipity coupled with sheer curiosity has landed
him a new job working the night shift at Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore.
And it doesn't take long for Clay to realize that the quiet, dusty book emporium
is even more curious than the name suggests.

There are only a few fanatically committed customers, but they never seem to
actually buy anything, instead they simply borrow impossibly obscure volumes
perched on dangerously high shelves, all according to some elaborate
arrangement with the eccentric proprietor. The store must be a front for
something larger, Clay concludes, and soon he has plugged in his laptop,
roped in his friends (and a cute girl who works for Google) and embarked on a
high-tech analysis of the customers' behaviour. What they discover is an
ancient secret that can only be solved by modern means, and a
global-conspiracy guarded by Mr. Penumbra himself...who has mysteriously
disappeared.

THE GOOD HOUSE by TANANARIVE DUE (WASHINGTON): The home
that belonged to Angela Toussaint's late grandmother is so beloved that
townspeople in Sacajawea, Washington, call it the Good House. But that all
changes one summer when an unexpected tragedy takes place behind its
closed doors . . . and the Toussaint's family history - and future - is dramatically
transformed. Angela has not returned to the Good House since her son, Corey,
died there two years ago.

But now, Angela is finally ready to return to her hometown and go beyond the
grave to unearth the truth about Corey's death. Could it be related to a terrifying
entity Angela's grandmother battled seven decades ago? And what about the
other senseless calamities that Sacajawea has seen in recent years? Has
Angela's grandmother, an African American woman reputed to have "powers"
put a curse on the entire community? A thrilling exploration of secrets, lies, and
divine inspiration, The Good House will haunt readers long after its chilling
conclusion.



AUSTRALIA

ASH MOUNTAIN by HELEN FITZGERALD: Fran hates Ash Mountain,
and she thought she’d escaped. But her father is ill, and needs care. Her
relationship is over, and she hates her dead-end job in the city, anyway.

She returns to her hometown to nurse her dying father, her distant
teenage daughter in tow for the weekends. There, in the sleepy town of
Ash Mountain, childhood memories prick at her fragile self-esteem, she
falls in love for the first time, and her demanding dad tests her patience,
all in the unbearable heat of an Australian summer.

As old friendships and rivalries are renewed, and new ones forged, Fran’s
tumultuous home life is the least of her worries, when old crimes rear their
heads and a devastating bushfire ravages the town and all of its
inhabitants…

THE HATE RACE by MAXINE BENEBA CLARKE:
'Against anything I had ever been told was possible, I was turning white.
On the surface of my skin, a miracle was quietly brewing . . .'

Suburban Australia. Sweltering heat. Three bedroom blonde-brick. Family
of five. Beat-up Ford Falcon. Vegemite on toast. Maxine Beneba Clarke's
life is just like all the other Aussie kids on her street.

Except for this one, glaring, inescapably obvious thing.

THE LIGHT BETWEEN OCEANS by M.L. STEDMAN: Australia, 1926. After
four harrowing years fighting on the Western Front, Tom Sherbourne returns
home to take a job as the lighthouse keeper on Janus Rock, nearly half a day's
journey from the coast. To this isolated island, where the supply boat comes
once a season and shore leaves are granted every other year at best, Tom
brings a young, bold, and loving wife, Isabel. Years later, after two miscarriages
and one stillbirth, the grieving Isabel hears a baby's cries on the wind. A boat
has washed up onshore carrying a dead man and a living baby.

Tom, whose records as a lighthouse keeper are meticulous and whose moral
principles have withstood a horrific war, wants to report the man and infant
immediately. But Isabel has taken the tiny baby to her breast. Against Tom's
judgment, they claim her as their own and name her Lucy. When she is two,
Tom and Isabel return to the mainland and are reminded that there are other
people in the world. Their choice has devastated one of them.

AUSTRALIA

THE NOWHERE CHILD by CHRISTIAN WHITE: A child was stolen
twenty years ago.
Little Sammy Went vanishes from her home in Manson, Kentucky – an
event that devastates her family and tears apart the town’s deeply
religious community.

And somehow that missing girl is you.
Kim Leamy, an Australian photographer, is approached by a stranger who
turns her world upside down – he claims she is the kidnapped Sammy and
that everything she knows about herself is based on a lie.

How far will you go to uncover the truth?
In search of answers, Kim returns to the remote town of Sammy’s
childhood to face up to the ghosts of her early life. But the deeper she digs
into her family background the more secrets she uncovers… And the
closer she gets to confronting the trauma of her dark and twisted past.

THE ARSONST by CHLOE HOOPER: On the scorching February day in
2009 that became known as Black Saturday, a man lit two fires in
Victoria’s Latrobe Valley, then sat on the roof of his house to watch the
inferno. In the Valley, where the rates of crime were the highest in the
state, more than thirty people were known to police as firebugs. But the
detectives soon found themselves on the trail of a man they didn’t know.

The Arsonist takes readers on the hunt for this man, and inside the strange
puzzle of his mind. It is also the story of fire in this country, and of a
community that owed its existence to that very element. The command of
fire has defined and sustained us as a species – understanding its abuse
will define our future.

A powerful real-life thriller written with Hooper’s trademark lyric detail and
nuance, The Arsonist is a reminder that in an age of fire, all of us are
gatekeepers.

ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF DIRT by RICK MORTON: Violence, treachery
and cruelty run through the generational veins of Rick Morton's family. A
horrific accident thrusts his mother and siblings into a world impossible for
them to navigate, a life of poverty and drug addiction

One Hundred Years of Dirt is an unflinching memoir in which the mother is
a hero who is never rewarded. It is a meditation on the anger, fear of others
and an obsession with real and imagined borders. Yet it is also a testimony
to the strength of familial love and endurance.

FIJI

KALYANA by RAJNI MALA KHELAWAN: Growing up in the Fiji Islands in
the late 1960s, Kalyana Mani Seth is an impressionable young girl suited to
the meaning of her name: blissful, blessed, the auspicious one. Her mother
educates Kalyana about her Indian heritage, vividly telling tales of
mischievous Krishna and powerful Mother Kali, and recounting her
grandparents’ migration to the tiny, British colony.

While the island nation celebrates its recently granted independence, new
stories of the feminist revolution in America are carried over the waves of the
Pacific to Kalyana’s ears: stories of women who live with men who are not
their husbands, who burn their bras, who are free to do as they please.
Strange as all this sounds, Kalyana hopes that she will be blessed with a
husband who allows her a similar sense of liberty.

But nothing prepares her for the trauma of womanhood and the cultural
ramifications of silence and shame, as her mother tells her there are some
family stories that should never be told.

PIECES OF HAPPINESS by ANNE OSTBY: I’ve planted my feet on Fijian
earth and I intend to stay here until the last sunset . Why don’t you join me?
Leave behind everything that didn’t work out!

When recently-widowed Kat writes to her four old school friends, inviting them
to live with her on a cocoa plantation in the South Pacific, they swap icy
pavements and TV dinners for a tropical breeze and an azure-blue ocean.
Leaving behind loneliness, dead-end jobs and marriages that have gone sour,
they settle into the Women’s House, surrounded by palms and cocoa trees;
and locals with the puzzling habit of exploding into laughter for no discernible
reason.

Each of the women has her issues to resolve, and secrets to keep. But
together the friends find a new purpose, starting a business making chocolate:
bittersweet, succulent pieces of happiness. As they embrace a new culture
that views ageing so differently from their own, will they learn to accept and
forgive: to discover the value of friendship, and a better way to live?

DEATH ON PARADISE ISLAND by B.M. ALLSOPP: A girl’s body is found
snagged on the coral reef at Fiji’s high-end Paradise Island resort, after fes-
tivities for a new marine reserve.

Detective Joe Horseman, his rugby career wrecked by a shattered knee, no
sooner lands at Suva airport after a year in the U.S. than he’s packed off to
investigate.

While Horseman is in two minds about his future, Sergeant Susila Singh is
ambitious and on her way up. To solve what seems an inexplicable death,
they must together drag to the surface secrets that have no place in para-
dise.

NAURU

THE UNDESIRABLES: INSIDE NAURU by MARK ISAACS: Queue
jumper, boat person, illegals. Asylum seekers are contentious front-page
news but obtaining information about Australia’s regional processing
centres is increasingly difficult. We learn only what the government wants
us to know.

Mark Isaacs worked for the Salvation Army inside the Nauru Detention
Centre soon after it re-opened in 2012. He provided humanitarian aid to
the men interned in the camp. What he saw there moved him to speak
out.

The Undesirables chronicles his time on Nauru detailing daily life and the
stories of the men held there; the self-harm, suicide attempts, and riots;
the rare moments of joy; the moments of deep despair.

OFFSHORE by MADELINE GLEESON: What has happened on Nauru
and Manus since Australia began its most recent offshore processing re-
gime in 2012?

This essential book provides a comprehensive and uncompromising over-
view of the first three years of offshore processing since it recommenced in
2012. It explains why offshore processing was re-established, what life is
like for asylum seekers and refugees on Nauru and Manus, what asylum
seekers, refugees and staff in the offshore detention centres have to say
about what goes on there, and why the truth has been so hard to find. In
doing so, it goes behind the rumours and allegations to reveal what is
known – and what still is not known – about Australia’s offshore detention
centres.

NAURU BURNING by MARK ISAACS: In Nauru Burning: An uprising and
its aftermath, Mark Isaacs goes behind the veil of secrecy around
Australia’s offshore immigration detention centres to reveal a climate of fear
and hopelessness, culminating in the riot and fire which destroyed much of
the Nauru regional processing centre in July 2013. The book reveals how
the tinderbox ignited and examines the investigation into who was
responsible. It is the story of the fight of the men in detention to prove their
innocence, and of the workers who tried to help them.

Ultimately, it is a comment on the lack of accountability and oversight for
service providers in the deliberately remote and closed environment of
Australia's offshore detention centres.

NEW ZEALAND

WHEN IT ALL WENT TO CUSTARD by DANIELLE HAWKINS: Odds of
saving marriage - slim. Farming expertise - patchy. Chances that it'll all be
okay in the end - actually pretty good …

I wasn't enjoying the afternoon of 23 February even before I learnt that my
husband was having an affair.

The news of Jenny's husband's infidelity comes as a nasty shock to the
part-time building control officer and full-time mother - even though, to her
surprise and embarrassment, her first reaction is relief rather than
anguish. What really hurts is her children's unhappiness at the break-up,
and the growing realisation that, alone, she may lose the family farm.

This is the story of the year after Jenny's old life falls apart; of family and
farming, pet lambs and geriatric dogs, choko-bearing tenants and
Springsteen-esque neighbours. And of getting a second chance at
happiness.

CEMETERY LAKE by PAUL CLEAVE: Cemetery Lake begins in a cold
and rainy graveyard, where Private Detective Theodore Tate is overseeing
an exhumation—a routine job for the weathered former cop. But when
doubts are raised about the identity of the body found in the coffin, the
case takes a sinister turn. Tate knows he should walk away and let his
former colleagues on the police force deal with it, but his strong sense of
justice intervenes.

Complicating matters are a few loose ends from Tate’s past. Even good
guys have secrets, and Tate thought his were dead and buried for good.
With time running out and a violent killer lurking, will he manage to stay
one step ahead of the police, or will his truth be unearthed?

THE LUMINARIES by ELEANOR CATTON: It is 1866, and young Walter
Moody has come to make his fortune upon the New Zealand goldfields. On
the stormy night of his arrival, he stumbles across a tense gathering of
twelve local men who have met in secret to discuss a series of unexplained
events: A wealthy man has vanished, a prostitute has tried to end her life,
and an enormous fortune has been discovered in the home of a luckless
drunk.

Moody is soon drawn into the mystery: a network of fates and fortunes that
is as complex and exquisitely ornate as the night sky. Richly evoking a
mid-nineteenth-century world of shipping, banking, and gold rush boom and
bust, The Luminaries is a brilliantly constructed, fiendishly clever ghost sto-
ry and a gripping page-turner.

PAPUA NEW GUINEA

SAVAGE HARVEST by CARL HOFFMAN: On November 21, 1961,
Michael C. Rockefeller, the twenty-three-year-old son of New York
governor Nelson Rockefeller, vanished off the coast of southwest New
Guinea when his boat capsized. He was on a collecting expedition for the
Museum of Primitive Art, and his partner—who stayed with the boat and
was later rescued—shared Michael's final words as he swam for help: "I
think I can make it."

Despite exhaustive searches, no trace of Michael was ever found. Soon
after his disappearance, rumors surfaced that he'd made it to shore,
where he was then killed and eaten by the local Asmat—a native tribe of
warriors whose complex culture was built around sacred, reciprocal
violence, headhunting, and ritual cannibalism. The Dutch government and
the Rockefeller family vehemently denied the story, and Michael's death
was officially ruled a drowning. But doubts lingered and sensational
stories circulated, fueling speculation and intrigue for decades. Now,
award-winning journalist Carl Hoffman reveals startling new evidence that
finally tells the full, astonishing story.

THE WHITE MARY by KIRA SALAK: Marika Vecera, an accomplished
war reporter, has dedicated her life to helping the world’s oppressed and
forgotten. When not on one of her dangerous assignments, she lives in
Boston, exploring a new relationship with Seb, a psychologist who offers
her glimpses of a better world.

Returning from a harrowing assignment in the Congo where she was
kidnapped by rebel soldiers, Marika learns that a man she has always
admired from afar, Pulitzer-winning war correspondent Robert Lewis, has
committed suicide. Stunned, she abandons her magazine work to write
Lewis’s biography, settling down with Seb as their intimacy grows. But
when Marika finds a curious letter from a missionary claiming to have seen
Lewis in the remote jungle of Papua New Guinea, she has to wonder,
What if Lewis isn’t dead?

PAPUA by PETER WATT: Two men, sworn enemies, come face to face on the
battlefields of France. When Jack Kelly, a captain in the Australian army, shows
compassion towards his prisoner Paul Mann, a brave and high-ranking German
officer, an unexpected bond is formed. But neither could imagine how their pasts
and futures would become inextricably linked by one place: Papua.

The Great War is finally over and both soldiers return to their once familiar lives,
only to find that in their absences events have changed their respective worlds
forever. In Sydney Jack is suddenly alone with a son he does not know and a
future filled with uncertainty, while the photograph of a beautiful German woman
he has never met fills his thoughts. Meanwhile the Germany that Paul had fought
for is vanishing under the influence of an ambitious young man named Adolph
Hitler, and he fears for the future of his family. A new beginning beckons them
both in a beautiful but dangerous land where rivers of gold are as legendary as
the fearless, cannibalistic tribes, and where fortunes can be made and lost as
quickly as a life. Papua.

SAMOA

THE SAMOAN PYRAMID by MAYA LYNCH: Since the 1800s rumours
have circulated about an ancient pyramid, built on an immense scale,
hidden deep in the jungles of Samoa. Evidence perhaps of a great
forgotten Pacific Empire. And yet there is no mention of the pyramid in the
entire pantheon of Samoan myth. Samoan society is steeped in tradition
but the local legends are silent on the subject of the pyramid.

When one woman digging into the archives discovers an outlier in the
dataset of Pacific history, it is the catalyst for an adventure that takes us
on a treasure hunt deep into the jungles of Samoa.

The Samoan Pyramid interweaves the spellbinding stories behind
archaeology’s centuries-long quest to find the forgotten pyramid with the
author's own journey into the jungles of Samoa as she unravels one of the
greatest archaeological mysteries of the Pacific.

COCONUT MILK by DAN TAULAPAPA MCMULLIN: Coconut Milk is a
fresh, new poetry collection that is a sensual homage to place, people, love,
and lust. The first collection by Samoan writer and painter Dan
Taulapapa McMullin, the poems evoke both intimate conversations and
provocative monologues that allow him to explore the complexities of being
a queer Samoan in the United States.

McMullin seamlessly flows between exposing the ironies of Tiki
kitsch–inspired cultural appropriation and intimate snapshots of Samoan
people and place. In doing so, he disrupts popular notions of a beautiful
Polynesia available for the taking, and carves out new avenues of meaning
for Pacific Islanders of Oceania. Throughout the collection, McMullin illus-
trates various manifestations of geopolitical, cultural, linguistic, and sexual
colonialism. His work illuminates the ongoing resistance to colonialism and
the remarkable resilience of Pacific Islanders and queer-identified peoples.

SCARLET LIES by LANI YOUNG: Sixteen years ago, Scarlet’s family sent her

away in disgrace. She’s been back once – with disastrous consequences. Now, her
little sister is getting married and Scarlet's headed home once more. Will this be the
reunion she's always longed for? Or will the lies of her childhood entangle her once
more in their beautiful embrace?

She has a nightmarish fear of flying and she’s escorting her sister’s wedding dress
through three different time zones. He’s the tall, dark and handsome stranger that
gets in her way… What happens when Scarlet has to go home to be bridesmaid to
her least favourite little sister, (who loves to remind everyone she’s a former beauty
queen EVERY OTHER MINUTE?) Can she survive three weeks of tropical heat and
mosquitos, droves of busybody relatives all wanting to tell her WHY she’s still single
as she endures the wedding from hell? Six hundred guests, three wedding dresses,
twenty-four cake tiers, fifteen bridesmaids, a mother on a mission to makeover her
daughter who ‘lacks ambition,’ and ONE deliciously divine man who alternately
renders her speechless then drives her to outrage - all add up to a recipe for disaster.
Or does it?

SOLOMON ISLANDS

DEVIL-DEVIL by G.W. KENT: It's not easy being Ben Kella. As a
sergeant in the Solomon Islands Police Force, as well as an aofia, a
hereditary spiritual peacekeeper of the Lau people, he is viewed with
distrust by both the indigenous islanders and the British colonial
authorities.

In the past few days he has been cursed by a magic man, stumbled
across evidence of a cargo cult uprising, and failed to find an American
anthropologist who had been scouring the mountains for a priceless
pornographic icon.

Then, at a mission station, Kella discovers an independent and rebellious
young American nun, Sister Conchita, secretly trying to bury a skeleton.
The unlikely pair of Kella and Conchita are forced to team up to solve a
series of murders that tie into all these other strange goings-on.

ISLANDS OF DESTINY by JOHN PRADOS: Historians traditionally refer to
the Battle of Midway as the point when Allied forces gained the advantage
over the Japanese. In Islands of Destiny, Prados points out that the Japanese
forces quickly regained strength after Midway and continued their assault
undaunted. Taking this surprising fact as the start of his inquiry, he began to
investigate how and when the Pacific tide turned in the Allies’ favor. His search
led him to the decisive battles and strategic maneuvers in the fight for the
Solomon Islands.

Beginning with the invasion of Guadalcanal in August 1942, the Solomons
became a hotly contested battleground for over a year, culminating in the
isolation of Rabaul by the Allies. As military forces fought over the strategically
important islands, a secret war of intelligence was also being waged. For a
total picture of the conflict, Prados integrates blow-by-blow action on the
ground with the code breaking, aerial reconnaissance, secret spy posts, and
submarine scouting that were vital to the Allied effort.

TULAGI HOTEL by HEIKKI HIETALA: The War is over, but for Marine pilot
Jack McGuire, it's only just begun.

Unable to adjust to post-war life, he buys a surplus Navy seaplane and heads
for a small island which had been occupied by the Japanese in 1942. He sets
up a colonial-style hotel on the island over which he used to fight.

But his past soon catches up with him. A parade of war veterans float through
the hotel, sending Jack hurtling back into dogfights over the Solomon Islands,
as the story of his wartime life unfolds. Then, out of the Pacific blue, he sees
the widow of his former wingman Don Wheeler, who was shot down in action.
No-one even knew that womanizing fighter pilot Don had a wife, and her
arrival sends Jack's life into turmoil.

TASMANIA

TO NAME THOSE LOST by ROHAN WILSON: A powerful, suspenseful
tale about a father and son in search of one another, this prize-winning
novel based on real-life events is a classic western story of vengeance
and redemption set against the sweeping, merciless grandeur of the
Australian frontier.

It is the summer of 1874. Launceston, a colonial outpost on the southern
Australian island of Tasmania, hovers on the brink of anarchy, teeming
with revolutionaries, convicts, drunks, crooked cops, and poor strugglers
looking for a break. Outlaw Thomas Toosey races to this dangerous
bedlam to find his motherless twelve-year-old son before the city swallows
the child whole, but he is pursued by more than just the law. Hindering his
progress at every turn is a man to whom he owes a terrible debt: the
vengeful Irishman Fitheal Finn, whose hooded companion hides a
grotesque secret.

WHEN THE NIGHT COMES by FAVEL PARRETT: Longlisted for the
prestigious Miles Franklin Award, this “moving account of the depth of
ordinary lives” (Library Journal, starred review) tells of a young Tasmanian
girl and a Danish sailor in their search for meaning and whose brief
encounter leaves a lasting impact on both.

Isla is a lonely girl who moves to Hobart with her mother and brother to try
to better their lives. It’s not really working until they meet Bo, a crewman on
an Antarctic supply ship, the Nella Dan, who shares stories about his
adventures with them—his travels, bird watching, his home in Denmark,
and life on board the ship. Isla is struggling to learn what truly matters and
who to trust, while this modern Viking is searching to understand his past
and to find a place in this world for himself. Though their time together is
short, it is enough to change the course of both their lives.

BRUNY by HEATHER ROSE: How far would your government go?

A right-wing US president has withdrawn America from the Middle East and
the UN. Daesh has a thoroughfare to the sea and China is Australia's newest
ally. When a bomb goes off in remote Tasmania, Astrid Coleman agrees to
return home to help her brother before an upcoming election. But this is no
simple task. Her brother and sister are on either side of politics, the
community is full of conspiracy theories, and her father is quoting
Shakespeare. Only on Bruny does the world seem sane.

Until Astrid discovers how far the government is willing to go.

Bruny is a searing, subversive, brilliant novel about family, love, loyalty and
the new world order



ARGENTINA

BETTY BOO by CLAUDIA PINEIRO: When a renowned Buenos Aires
industrialist is found dead at his home in an exclusive gated community
called La Maravillosa, the novelist Nurit Iscar (once nicknamed Betty Boo
owing to a resemblance to the cartoon character Betty Boop) is contracted
by a former lover, the editor of a national newspaper, to cover the story.
Nurit teams up with the paper's veteran, but now demoted, crime reporter.
Soon they realize that they are falling in love, which complicates matters
deliciously.

The murder is no random crime but one in a series that goes to the heart
of the establishment. Five members of the Argentine industrial and
political elite, who all went to the same boarding-school, have died in
apparently innocent circumstances. The Maravillosa murder is just the last
in the series and those in power in Argentina are not about to allow all this
brought to light. Too much is at stake.

THE ONE BEFORE by JUAN JOSE SAER: The One Before is a triptych of

sorts, consisting of a series of short pieces—called "Arguments"—and two longer
stories—"Half-Erased" and "The One Before"—all of which revolve around the
ideas of exile and memory.

Many of the characters who populate Juan José Saer's other novels appear here,
including Tomatis, Ángel Leto, and Washington Noriega (who appear in La
Grande, Scars, and The Sixty-Five Years of Washington, all of which are available
from Open Letter). Saer's typical themes are on display in this collection as well,
as is his idiosyncratic blend of philosophical ruminations and precise storytelling.

From the story of the two characters who decide to bury a message in a bottle that
simply says "MESSAGE," to Pigeon Garay's attempt to avoid the rising tides and
escape Argentina for Europe, The One Before evocatively introduces readers to
Saer's world and gives the already indoctrinated new material about their favourite
characters.

HUNTING EICHMANN by NEAL BASCOMB: When the Allies stormed
Berlin in the last days of the Third Reich, Adolf Eichmann shed his SS
uniform and vanished. Following his escape from two American POW
camps, his retreat into the mountains and out of Europe, and his path to an
anonymous life in Buenos Aires, his pursuers are a bulldog West German
prosecutor, a blind Argentinean Jew and his beautiful daughter, and a
budding, ragtag spy agency called the Mossad, whose operatives have
their own scores to settle (and whose rare surveillance photographs are
published here for the first time).

The capture of Eichmann and the efforts by Israeli agents to secret him out
of Argentina to stand trial is the stunning conclusion to this thrilling
historical account, told with the kind of pulse-pounding detail that rivals
anything you'd find in great spy fiction.

BOLIVIA

AFFECTIONS by RODRIGO HASBUN: A haunting novel about an
unusual family’s breakdown—set in South America during the time of Che
Guevara and based on the life of Third Reich cinematographer Hans
Ertl—from the literary star Jonathan Safran Foer calls, “a great writer.”

Inspired by real events, Affections is the story of the eccentric, fascinating
Ertl clan, headed by the egocentric and extraordinary Hans, once the
cameraman for the Nazi propagandist Leni Riefenstahl. Shortly after the
end of World War II, Hans and his family flee to Bolivia to start over.
There, the ever-restless Hans decides to embark on an expedition in
search of the fabled lost Inca city of Paitití, enlisting two of his daughters
to join him on his outlandish quest into the depths of the Amazon, with
disastrous consequences.

JUNGLE by YOSSI GHINSBERG: Four travellers meet in Bolivia and set
off into the heart of the Amazon rainforest, but what begins as a dream
adventure quickly deteriorates into a dangerous nightmare, and after
weeks of wandering in the dense undergrowth, the four backpackers split
up into two groups.

But when a terrible rafting accident separates him from his partner, Yossi
is forced to survive for weeks alone against one of the wildest backdrops
on the planet. Stranded without a knife, map, or survival training, he must
improvise shelter and forage for wild fruit to survive. As his feet begin to rot
during raging storms, as he loses all sense of direction, and as he begins
to lose all hope, he wonders whether he will make it out of the jungle alive.

THE FIVE HUNDRED YEAR REBELLION by BENJAMIN DANGL: After
centuries of colonial domination and a twentieth century riddled with
dictatorships, indigenous peoples in Bolivia embarked upon a social and
political struggle that would change the country forever. As part of that project
activists took control of their own history, starting in the 1960s by reaching
back to oral traditions and then forward to new forms of print and broadcast
media.

This book tells the fascinating story of how indigenous Bolivians recovered and
popularized histories of past rebellions, political models, and leaders, using
them to build movements for rights, land, autonomy, and political power.
Drawing from rich archival sources and the author’s lively interviews with
indigenous leaders and activist-historians, The Five Hundred Year Rebellion
describes how movements tapped into centuries-old veins of oral history and
memory to produce manifestos, booklets, and radio programs on histories of
resistance, wielding them as tools to expand their struggles and radically
transform society.

BRAZIL

THE SUN ON MY HEAD by GEOVANI MARTINS: In thirteen short
stories, The Sun on My Head announces the arrival of something rare.
Geovani Martins' first book gravitates around the young lives of boys from
Rio's favelas who not only have to deal with the anguish and difficulties
inherent to their age, but must also struggle with the violence, ubiquitous
drug culture and racial oppression involved in growing up on the less
favoured side of the 'Broken City'.

Shot through with the rhythms and slang of neighbourhood dialect, each
story reveals the texture of life in the slums: a group of teenagers going to
the beach under heavy military police presence, or children's games sent
into a spin by the appearance of a revolver.

WAYS TO DISAPPEAR by IDRA NOVEY: Deep in gambling debt, the
celebrated Brazilian writer Beatriz Yagoda is last seen holding a suitcase
and a cigar and climbing into an almond tree. She abruptly vanishes.

In snowy Pittsburgh, her American translator Emma hears the news and,
against the wishes of her boyfriend and Beatriz's two grown children, flies
immediately to Brazil. There, in the sticky, sugary heat of Rio, Emma and
her author's children conspire to solve the mystery of Yagoda's curious
disappearance and staunch the colorful demands of her various
outstanding affairs: the rapacious loan shark with a zeal for severing body
parts, and the washed-up and disillusioned editor who launched Yagoda's
career years earlier.

DANCING WITH THE DEVIL IN THE CITY OF GOD by JULIANA
BARBASSA: Rio has always aspired to the pantheon of global capitals, and
under the spotlight of the 2014 World Cup and the 2016 Olympic Games it
seems that its moment has come. But in order to prepare itself for the world
stage, Rio must vanquish the entrenched problems that Barbassa recalls
from her childhood. Turning this beautiful but deeply flawed place into a
predictable, pristine showcase of the best that Brazil has to offer in just a
few years is a tall order—and with the whole world watching, the stakes
couldn't be higher.

With a cast of larger-than-life characters who are driving this fast-moving
juggernaut or who risk getting caught in its gears, this kaleidoscopic portrait
of Rio introduces the reader to the people who make up this city of
extremes, revealing their aspirations and their grit, their violence, their
hungers and their splendour, and shedding light on the future of this city
they are building together.

CHILE

BY NIGHT IN CHILE by ROBERTO BOLAÑO: During the course of a
single night, Father Sebastian Urrutia Lacroix, a Chilean priest, who is a
member of Opus Dei, a literary critic and a mediocre poet, relives some of
the crucial events of his life. He believes he is dying and in his feverish
delirium various characters, both real and imaginary, appear to him as icy
monsters, as if in sequences from a horror film.

Thus we are given glimpses of the great poet Pablo Neruda, the German
writer Ernst Junger, General Pinochet, whom Father Lacroix instructs in
Marxist doctrine, as well as various members of the Chilean intelligentsia
whose lives, during a period of political turbulence, have touched upon his.

DEEP DOWN DARK by HECTOR TOBAR: When the San José mine
collapsed outside of Copiapó, Chile, in August 2010, it trapped thirty-three
miners beneath thousands of feet of rock for a record-breaking sixty-nine
days. Across the globe, we sat riveted to television and computer screens as
journalists flocked to the Atacama desert. While we saw what transpired above
ground during the gruelling and protracted rescue, the story of the miners’
experiences below the earth’s surface—and the lives that led them there—
hasn’t been heard until now.

In Deep Down Dark, a master work by a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist,
Héctor Tobar gains exclusive access to the miners and their stories. The result
is a miraculous and emotionally textured account of the thirty-three men who
came to think of the San José mine as a kind of coffin, as a “cave” inflicting
constant and thundering aural torment, and as a church where they sought
redemption through prayer while the world watched from above. It offers an
understanding of the families and personal histories that brought “los 33” to
the mine, and the mystical and spiritual elements that surrounded working in
such a dangerous place.

THE RHYTHM OF MEMORY by ALYSON RICHMAN: Octavio Ribeiro
loves truth, beauty, literature, and above all else, his wife Salomé. As a
student in Chile, he courted her with the words of great poets, and she fell
in love with his fierce intelligence and uncompromising passion. Then a
sudden coup brings a brutal military dictatorship into power, and puts
anyone who resists in grave danger.

Salomé begs Octavio to put his family’s safety first, rather than speak
against the new regime. When he refuses, it’s Salomé who pays the price.

Belatedly awake to the reality of their danger, Octavio finds political asylum
for the family in Sweden. But for Salomé, the path back to love is fraught
with painful secrets, and the knowledge that they can never go home
again.