Literary Fiction Political

A phenomenally unusual three-way murder mystery. With a murder at its heart, Roberto Bolano’s The Skating Rink is, among other things, a crime novel. Murder seems to have exerted a fascination for the endlessly talented Bolano, who in his last interview, according to The Observer, "declared, in all apparent seriousness, that what he would most like to have been was a homicide detective." Set in the seaside town of Z, north of Barcelona, The Skating Rink is told in short, suspenseful chapters by three male narrators, and revolves around a beautiful figure skating champion, Nuria Mart.

In a town at the foot of the northern Highlands, life goes on as always, but people are in a state of shock: A bank has been robbed, a sure sign of the Westernization of this backward Balkan land. Meanwhile, other strange events - such as the marriage of a girl and a snake - confirm that ancient legends still prevail. People are flocking from far and wide to search for a tunnel to the Secret State Archives, said to house records of crimes they may have committed. Some even claim the ghosts of former dictators Hoxha, Brezhnev, and Ulbricht - not to mention Oedipus - have been seen there....

This Accident of Being Lost is the knife-sharp new collection of stories and songs from award-winning Nishnaabeg storyteller and writer Leanne Betasamosake Simpson. These visionary pieces build upon Simpson's powerful use of the fragment as a tool for intervention in her critically acclaimed collection Islands of Decolonial Love. Provocateur and poet, she continually rebirths a decolonized reality, one that circles in and out of time and resists dominant narratives or comfortable categorization.

This astute, entertaining literary thriller features Helena Marsh, an art authenticator hot on the trail of an extorted painting in Budapest, skirting the law to return it to its rightful heir. When wealthy octogenarian Geza Marton hires art expert Marsh to buy back his family's Titian painting, she flies to Budapest to close what she expects will be a reasonably simple sale. But nothing is ever simple in this beautiful, flawed city where corruption abounds. Helena discovers that there are multiple bidders for the painting, including some dangerous Slavs.

Au début des années 1920, le comte Alexandre Ilitch Rostov, aristocrate impénitent aux manières aussi désuètes qu'irrésistibles, est condamné par un tribunal bolchévique à vivre en résidence surveillée dans le luxueux hôtel Metropol de Moscou. Acceptant joyeusement son sort, le sémillant comte Rostov hante les couloirs, salons feutrés, restaurants et salles de réception de l'hôtel, et noue des liens avec le personnel de sa prison dorée, des diplomates étrangers de passage, une belle actrice inaccessible - ou presque -, et côtoie les nouveaux maîtres de la Russie soviétique.

When Molly, home alone with her two young children, hears footsteps in the living room, she tries to convince herself it’s the sleep deprivation. She’s been hearing things these days. Startling at loud noises. Imagining the worst-case scenario. It’s what mothers do, she knows. But then the footsteps come again, and she catches a glimpse of movement. Suddenly Molly finds herself face-to-face with an intruder who knows far too much about her and her family. As she attempts to protect those she loves most, Molly must also acknowledge her own frailty.

Elena McMahon walks off the presidential campaign she has been covering for a major newspaper to do a favor for her father. Elena's father does deals. And it is while acting as his agent in one such deal - a deal that shortly goes spectacularly wrong - that she finds herself on an island where tourism has been superseded by arms dealing, covert action, and assassination. The Last Thing He Wanted is a tour de force - persuasive in its detail, dazzling in its ambiguities, enchanting in its style.

Set in the 1970s in a run-down, rainy, industrial town, Jo Nesbo's Macbeth centers around a police force struggling to shed an incessant drug problem. Duncan, chief of police, is idealistic and visionary, a dream to the townspeople but a nightmare for criminals. The drug trade is ruled by two drug lords, one of whom - a master of manipulation named Hecate - has connections with the highest in power and plans to use them to get his way.

In a Balkan country mending from war, Natalia, a young doctor, is compelled to unravel the mysterious circumstances surrounding her beloved grandfather’s recent death. Searching for clues, she turns to his worn copy of The Jungle Book and the stories he told her of his encounters over the years with “the deathless man.” But most extraordinary of all is the story her grandfather never told her - the legend of the tiger’s wife.

After a showdown with the notorious Yemeni terrorist known as The Panther, John Corey has left the Anti-Terrorist Task Force and returned home to New York City, taking a job with the Diplomatic Surveillance Group. Although Corey's new assignment with the DSG - surveilling Russian diplomats working at the UN Mission - is thought to be "a quiet end", he is more than happy to be out from under the thumb of the FBI and free from the bureaucracy of office life.

Special agent Jericho Quinn is a wanted man. Suspected of murder and marked for death by a network of conspirators embedded in the White House, Quinn knows he has to get out of the country--fast--before a team of contract killers find him and his daughter. To set things right at home, he'll have to take a nonstop flight from Anchorage, Alaska, to Vladivostok, Russia, aboard a massive Airbus A380. But soon after takeoff, it becomes apparent that Quinn and his daughter picked the wrong plane.

The dilemma of the outsider in an alien society, and the gap in understanding between cultures, recurrent themes of Paul Bowles’s writings, are dramatized with brutal honesty in this novel set in Fez, Morocco, during that country’s 1954 nationalist uprising. Totally relevant to today’s political situation in the Middle East and elsewhere, richly descriptive of its setting, and uncompromising in its characterizations, The Spider’s House is perhaps Bowles’s best, most beautifully subtle novel.

Inez Victor knows that the major casualty of the political life is memory. But the people around Inez have made careers out of losing track. Her senator husband wants to forget the failure of his last bid for the presidency. Her husband's handler would like the press to forget that Inez's father is a murderer. And, in 1975, the year in which much of this bitterly funny novel is set, America is doing its best to lose track of its one-time client, the lethally hemorrhaging republic of South Vietnam.

Avril 1975, Saïgon est en plein chaos. À l'abri d'une villa, entre deux whiskies, un général de l'armée du Sud Vietnam et son capitaine dressent la liste de ceux qui pourront quitter le pays par les derniers avions. Mais ce que le général ignore, c'est que son capitaine est un agent double au service des communistes. Arrivé en Californie, tandis que le général et ses compatriotes exilés tentent de recréer un petit bout de Vietnam sous le soleil de L.A., notre homme observe et rend des comptes dans des lettres codées à son meilleur ami resté au pays.

Historia de un amor imposible, Las batallas en el desierto es un magistral audiolibro que involucra otros aspectos como la corrupción social y política, el inicio del Mexico moderno y la desaparición del país tradicional, y el rescate de las memorias individuales y colectivas de una ciudad a la que José Emilio Pacheco ama profundamente, pero recrea sin nostalgia y denuncia de manera implacable.

In “the Trump satire we’ve been waiting for” (The Washington Post), award-winning and best-selling author of Thank You for Smoking delivers a hilarious and whipsmart fake memoir by Herb Nutterman - Donald Trump’s seventh chief of staff - who has written the ultimate tell-all about Trump and Russia.

In Caracas, Venezuela, Adelaida Falcon stands over an open grave. Alone, except for harried undertakers, she buries her mother - the only family Adelaida has ever known. Numb with grief, Adelaida returns to the apartment they shared. Outside the window that she tapes shut every night - to prevent the tear gas raining down on protesters in the streets from seeping in. When looters masquerading as revolutionaries take over her apartment, Adelaida resists and is beaten up. It is the beginning of a fight for survival in a country that has disintegrated into violence and anarchy.

A tense and nerve-shattering classic from the highly acclaimed master of action and suspense. A rolling for Knox. is how the journalists describe the Presidential motorcade as it enters San Francisco across the Golden Gate. Even the ever-watchful FBI believe it is impregnable - as it has to be with the President and two Arab potentates aboard. But halfway across the bridge the unthinkable happens. Before the eyes of the world a master criminal pulls off the most spectacular kidnapping in modern times....

Go, Went, Gone is the masterful new novel by the acclaimed German writer Jenny Erpenbeck, “one of the most significant German-language novelists of her generation” (The Millions). The novel tells the tale of Richard, a retired classics professor who lives in Berlin. His wife has died, and he lives a routine existence until one day he spies some African refugees staging a hunger strike in Alexanderplatz. Curiosity turns to compassion and an inner transformation, as he visits their shelter, interviews them, and becomes embroiled in their harrowing fates.

Taking us from Afghanistan in the final days of its monarchy to the present, The Kite Runner is the unforgettable and beautifully told story of the friendship between two boys, Amir and Hassan, growing up in Kabul. Their intertwined lives, and their fates, reflect the eventual tragedy of the world around them. When Amir and his father flee the country for a new life in California, Amir thinks that he has escaped his past. And yet he cannot leave the memory of Hassan behind him.