Literary Fiction Political

Hisako Onoda, world famous cellist, refuses to fly. And so she travels to Europe as a passenger on a tanker bound through the Panama Canal. But Panama is a country whose politics are as volatile as the local freedom fighters. When Hisako's ship is captured, it is not long before the atmostphere is as flammable as an oxy-acetylene torch, and the tension as sharp as the spike on the cello....

On a remote island in the Aegean, Jacqueline is living alone in a cave accessible only at low tide. With nothing to protect her from the elements, and with the fabric between herself and the world around her increasingly frayed, she is permeated by sensory experiences of remarkable intensity: the need for shade in the relentless heat of the sun-baked island; hunger and the occasional bliss of release from it; the exquisite pleasure of diving into the sea. The pressing physical realities of the moment provide a deeper relief: the euphoric obliteration of memory and, with it, the unspeakable violence she has seen and from which she has miraculously escaped.

In one story we follow a group of starving, near-feral Eurasian refugees on a harrowing quest for survival; in the other we follow Pontus Beg, a policeman from a small border town on the steppe, as he investigates the death of a rabbi, one of the town's two remaining Jews. What follows is a gripping saga in which the two stories race toward each other, and Beg will be shaken to his core by what each one reveals about man's dark nature and the possibility - or impossibility - of his own redemption.

This is the story of five marriages and one gun. A British couple wonders at the unknowable city beyond their guarded compound while they build walls between themselves. An American suspects his new home is having an insidious effect on his "African queen" and their young daughter. An enthusiastic young intellectual follows his wife to the city and finds only disillusion. An intelligence officer loses a crucial piece of evidence. It will cost him his marriage, his girlfriend, and maybe his life.

Layla James, a recent graduate and budding photographer, never knew anything about her father except that he named her for the iconic song by Eric Clapton. Her mother - steeped in a political activism that Layla rejects - kept their past shrouded in secrecy, and when she dies of cancer, she leaves only an enigmatic letter - the first in a series that will lead Layla through a cross-country network of '60s radicals and closer to the bombshell at the heart of her parents' past.

Set in a fictitious post-colonial African nation, the discovery of the body of a drowned prostitute leads to an exploration of the conflict between an individual and the modern African state. A gripping study of truth, silence, and the abuse of power. A young woman runs into the sea and drowns. The last man who spoke to her, a curious individual known as Bukuru, is asked to account for her suicide. His shocking revelations land him in court.

In a darkened cell, a brutally deposed dictator lies crippled - deprived of his power, his freedom and his eyes. On the edge of utter despair, his only companion is the young boy who brings him his meagre rations, a mere child who fears his own shadow. But to one who has held and lost the highest power, one thing alone is crystal clear: even emperors were mere children once. Ten years later the new ruler's son watches uneasily over his father's empire.

She is a painter. He is a poet. Their art bridges time.

It is 1978. Merle is in her first year at the Corcoran School of Art, catapulted from her impoverished Appalachian upbringing into a sophisticated, dissipated art scene. It is also 1870. The teenage poet Arthur Rimbaud is on the verge of breaking through to the images and voice that will make his name. The meshed power of words and art thins the boundaries between the present and the past—and allows these two troubled, brilliant artists to enter each other’s worlds.

Timely and unique, Jia is the first novel about present-day North Korea to be published in the West. It is easily a YA crossover novel as Jia follows the adventures of an orphaned young woman, Jia in the 1970s and 1980s - bitterly tumultuous times for North Korea and China. Jia has the grace of a dancer but the misfortune of coming from a politically suspect family.

The year is 2002. Weekly news magazines dominate the political agenda in New York and Washington. A young journalist named Michael M. Hastings is an intern at The Magazine, wet behind the ears, the only one in the office who has actually read his coworkers' books. He will stop at nothing to turn his internship into a full-time position and has figured out just who to impress: Nishant Patel, the international editor, and Sanders Berman, managing editor - both vying for the job of editor-in-chief.

Set in Iran at the end of the 19th century in the Persian royal court of the Qajars, In the Palace of Flowers is an atmospheric historical novel about Jamila, an Abyssinian slave who stands at the funeral of a Persian nobleman, watching the rites with empty eyes. In that very moment, she realizes that her life will never be acknowledged or mourned with the same significance. The fear of being forgotten, of being irrelevant, sets her and Abimelech, a fellow Abyssinian slave and a eunuch, on a path to find meaning.

Twin sisters Bibike and Ariyike are enjoying a relatively comfortable life in Lagos in 1996. Then their mother loses her job due to political strife, and the family, facing poverty, is drawn into the New Church, an institution led by a charismatic pastor who is not shy about worshipping earthly wealth. Soon Bibike and Ariyike's father wagers the family home on a sure bet that evaporates like smoke.

1964. Ceylon is on the brink of change. But Kairo is at a loose end. School is closed, the government is in disarray, the press is under threat and the religious right are flexing their muscles. Kairo’s hard-working mother blows off steam at her cha-cha-cha classes; his Trotskyite father grumbles over the state of the nation between his secret flutters on horseraces in faraway England. All Kairo wants to do is hide in his room and flick over second-hand Westerns and superhero comics, or escape on his bicycle and daydream.

June 26, 1947. Headlines across America report that an aviator from Idaho witnessed nine pulsating lights flying over the Cascade Mountains at speeds surpassing any aircraft built by humankind. Days later, a desperate Chicago pool hustler, inspired by the news, hitchhikes west in a fever-dream search for a possible extraterrestrial sign. From those he inspires along the way to the Cascades comes a new community - “The Seekers” - devoted to creating a society where divisions of race, ethnicity, and sexuality are a thing of the past.

The Tashkent-born Russian-American literary critic, editor, essayist, and journalist Vladislav Davidzon has been covering post-Soviet Ukraine for the past ten years, a tumultuous time for that country and the surrounding world. In late 2015, a year and a half after the 2014 Revolution swept away the Moscow-leaning kleptocratic President Viktor Yanukovich, Davidzon and his wife founded a literary journal, The Odessa Review. This eagerly anticipated debut tells the real story of what happened in Ukraine from the keen and resilient perspective of an observer at its center.

Il romanzo narra la storia di Pablo, un giovanotto piccolo-borghese che trascorre tutto il suo tempo dietro il banco di un negozio dove si vendono tabacchi e alla sera suona la chitarra con gli amici. Pablo però si sente solo soprattutto dopo che l'amico Amelio ha avuto un grave incidente con la moto insieme a Linda, la sua ragazza, e non può più muovere le gambe.

Forester Gethin Thomas is struggling to make ends meet in his rural hometown in North Wales. Bright, charming, but unambitious, the thing that keeps him going is Ty Gwydr, a beautiful lakeside house that he keeps an eye on for absent English owners. The house has been empty for so long he's come to think of it as his own. That is until the owners decide to sell, sending Geth into freefall.

Who is Yahya Bas? Revolutionary poet, notorious jihadist, misbegotten son, self-styled idiot-boy. When the enigmatic Yahya finds himself languishing in a detention center after fleeing the conflict in Syria, he has many questions to face. What was he doing in the desert? Why did he betray his home country? What led him to write the incendiary verses that launched him into international infamy? Mister, his interrogator, wants answers. So Yahya resolves to tell his own story, in his own words, and on his own terms.

L'Impero che Marco Aurelio ha ereditato è giunto alla sua massima espansione e mantenere la pace che ha regnato sotto Antonino Pio è ormai impossibile: dopo la guerra contro i Parti, ora sono i Germani a minacciare Roma premendo da nord.Nel 167 d.C., l'Imperatore filosofo dà inizio alle guerre marcomanniche sotto auspici infausti e ben presto il suo progetto di stabilizzare i confini settentrionali si scontra con il leggendario furor teutonicus. Ma non è solo la spaventosa forza di quelle popolazioni a sfibrare le legioni romane.

The Mexican American War has ended, but in a California divided between two nations, Anglo squatters continue to antagonize citizens of Mexican descent by making claims on their land. Against this charged backdrop, the lives of the Alamar family - the rightful owners of a San Diego ranch - become politically, economically, and romantically entwined with a family of New England settlers, the Darrells. Inspired by experiences in her own life, Ruiz de Burton insightfully captured a troubling time in American history - a period of intense corruption, greed, racism, and classism.