From the author of The Italian Teacher, this acclaimed debut novel set in Rome follows the topsy-turvy lives of the denizens of an English language newspaper.

NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY 
Janet Maslin, The New York Times • The Economist • NPR • Slate • The Christian Science Monitor • Financial Times • The Plain Dealer • Minneapolis Star Tribune • St. Louis Post-Dispatch • The Kansas City Star • The Globe and Mail • Publishers Weekly
 
Look in the back of the book for a conversation between Tom Rachman and Malcolm Gladwell

Fifty years and many changes have ensued since the paper was founded by an enigmatic millionaire, and now, amid the stained carpeting and dingy office furniture, the staff’s personal dramas seem far more important than the daily headlines. Kathleen, the imperious editor in chief, is smarting from a betrayal in her open marriage; Arthur, the lazy obituary writer, is transformed by a personal tragedy; Abby, the embattled financial officer, discovers that her job cuts and her love life are intertwined in a most unexpected way. Out in the field, a veteran Paris freelancer goes to desperate lengths for his next byline, while the new Cairo stringer is mercilessly manipulated by an outrageous war correspondent with an outsize ego. And in the shadows is the isolated young publisher who pays more attention to his prized basset hound, Schopenhauer, than to the fate of his family’s quirky newspaper.

As the era of print news gives way to the Internet age and this imperfect crew stumbles toward an uncertain future, the paper’s rich history is revealed, including the surprising truth about its founder’s intentions.

Spirited, moving, and highly original, The Imperfectionists will establish Tom Rachman as one of our most perceptive, assured literary talents.

In Fruitful, Roiphe tells the intimate, turbulent, compelling story of raising her own children in the gap between motherhood and feminism - and makes an eloquent plea for a new agenda. Roiphe s life is a perfect microcosm of change in the American family over the past thirty years. Married and a mother in her early twenties, she soon became a divorced single parent, raising her young daughter on her own. Remarriage and new motherhood brought great joy but also the complications of combining families and raising stepchildren. With heartbreaking candor, she details the difficult adaptations and painful rebellions that haunt a parent's conscience. Through it all, Roiphe keenly felt feminism's discomfort with the question of motherhood. Allowing the conservative right to co-opt the issue of family, feminism has sometimes overlooked the very real emotional and economic needs of mother just trying to make it through the day. Here, Roiphe crafts a unique pro-feminist/pro-family position that calls for fruitful dialogue on quality childcare, on including men as full partners in parenting, on defining family in ways that allow everyone to thrive.

Alice, a young editor working in New York, meets Ezra Blazer, a famous, much older writer, and they begin an affair. Yet with nearly fifty years between them, what draws them together, and how does it work. In its provocative, playful, and at times creepy depiction of their relationship, Asymmetry illuminates the attractions of knowledge, of intellectual prowess, of self-assurance; and those of youth, of flowering, of naivety and intellectual promise. Interrupting and interacting with their story is that of Amar, an Iraqi-American economist held at Heathrow on his way to visit his brother in Kurdistan, whose detention gives him cause to reflect on the course of his life. Asymmetry is an extraordinary study of the power plays between young and old, West and Middle East, luck and talent, fairness and injustice, and the personal and the political. It is also an inventive, utterly contemporary and dazzling debut that will charm, delight and disarm.

"This novel centres around eight hours in the life of the Author (unnamed), a man in his forties, a literary celebrity, who is in Tel Aviv on a stifling hot night to give a reading. Bored, he looks for distraction - and finds copy. In his head he conjures up the life stories of the people he meets, not least Ricky, an equally bored but seductive waitress. Later, even as the reading from his new book is underway, and the obligatory inane questions have come and gone ('Why do you write?' 'What is it like to be famous?' 'Do you write with a pen or on a computer?'), he weaves stories round the audience and the panel." "Afterwards, the Author invites the professional reader who took part for a drink before walking her home; but she lives opposite and declines, and he wanders off into the dark. Later he returns, climbs the many flights of stairs to her flat, where she lives alone with her cat ... Or does he? The reader never quite knows where reality ends and invention begins in this --

With Leap, Terry Tempest Williams, award-winning author of Refuge, offers a sustained meditation on passion, faith, and creativity-based upon her transcendental encounter with Hieronymus Bosch's medieval masterpiece The Garden of Delights.

Williams examines this vibrant landscape with unprecedented acuity, recognizing parallels between the artist's prophetic vision and her own personal experiences as a Mormon and a naturalist. Searing in its spiritual, intellectual, and emotional courage, Williams's divine journey enables her to realize the full extent of her faith and through her exquisite imagination opens our eyes to the splendor of the world.

All the stories in Tales of the Night take place on the night of the 19th March 1929. All show different facets of love -love as violence, love as redemption, as suffering, as wisdom. Each has as a theme a particular discipline- mathematics, dance, law, visual arts, medicine, drama and astronomy. A young mathematician is led to an understanding of Europe's 19th century Scramble for Africa by a meeting with a fellow train passenger who reveals himself to be Joseph Conrad. A respected judge confesses his love for a young homosexual who he has convicted of immorality. A small, insular town is ravaged by a smallpox epidemic. Set in the Congo, on a small sailing boat off Lisbon, in the Baltic archipelago and in the author's native Denmark, these intricate and surprising stories, powerfully but wonderfully influenced by the work of Karen Blixen, amount to a rich and rewarding book.

Introduction and Notes by David Blair. University of Kent at Canterbury.

It is 1757. Across north-eastern America the armies of Britain and France struggle for ascendancy. Their conflict, however, overlays older struggles between nations of native Americans for possession of the same lands and between the native peoples and white colonisers. Through these layers of conflict Cooper threads a thrilling narrative, in which Cora and Alice Munro, daughters of a British commander on the front line of the colonial war, attempt to join their father. Thwarted by Magua, the sinister 'Indian runner', they find help in the person of Hawkeye, the white woodsman, and his companions, the Mohican Chingachgook and Uncas, his son, the last of his tribe.

Cooper's novel is full of vivid incident- pursuits through wild terrain, skirmishes, treachery and brutality- but reflects also on the interaction between the colonists and the native peoples. Through the character of Hawkeye, Cooper raises lasting questions about the practises of the American frontier and the eclipse of the indigenous cultures.

Radin's timeless critique of anthropological theory and methods from a humanistic perspective provides an overall assessment of the field of ethnology, its shortcomings, errors, and misdirections.

'No person can be blamed for refusing to read another word of what promises to be a mere imposition upon his credulity.' Julian West, a feckless aristocrat living in fin-de-siècle Boston, plunges into a deep hypnotic sleep in 1887 and wakes up in the year 2000. America has been turned into a rigorously centralized democratic society in which everything is controlled by a humane and efficient state. In little more than a hundred years the horrors of nineteenth-century capitalism have been all but forgotten. The squalid slums of Boston have been replaced by broad streets, and technological inventions have transformed people's everyday lives. Exiled from the past, West excitedly settles into the ideal society of the future, while still fearing that he has dreamt up his experiences as a time traveller. Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward (1888) is a thunderous indictment of industrial capitalism and a resplendent vision of life in a socialist utopia. Matthew Beaumont's lively edition explores the political and psychological peculiarities of this celebrated utopian fiction. ABOUT THE SERIES: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the widest range of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, helpful notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.

This is a masterly narrative history of the Seven Years War, in which the British decisively eliminated French power north of the Caribbean, and yet also managed to ignite the slow-burning fuse of the American Revolution.Fred Anderson observes how the war displaced native peoples from their previously central role in an American diplomatic system; how it gave American colonists their first encounters with real live Englishmen; and how Americans were consequently emboldened to rally against the men who were once their masters. Anderson offers a wholly engrossing account of the conflict, interweaving the stories of kings and officers with those of traders, Native Americans, and colonial peoples.

A young woman, assisted by a once famous classical composer, investigates the identity of a fantastically popular but mysteriously incognito rock-and-roll star.

Whilst Sara pores over ancient texts in the Vatican reading room, a brutal murder is taking place in a nearby church. Then suddenly a crazed man enters the Vatican carrying a bloodied bag. He walks up to Sara's desk. He has something he would like her to see. Soon Sara is linked to a series of murders.

A compulsive novel about a young woman hijacked by her own ambition and the blind love of two obsessive men.

A female patient has escaped from a Massachusetts federal mental institition. Before she fled she left some encoded clues about mind control, eugenics and CIA drug trials. The investigating officers fear that they have stumbled into something far more dangerous than the usual missing person scenario.

A writer's circle in Chichester is delighted when a publisher agrees to address one of their meetings, but when that same publisher turns up dead they find themselves and their unpublished ambitions under close police scrutiny.

It is winter, 1991. Inspector Kurt Wallander's team at the Ystad police station face a new challenge: two corpses, frozen together in a gruesome embrace, have been washed ashore on the remote Swedish coastline. The dead men were Eastern European criminals, but what looks like a gangland hit takes on a much more sinister aspect when Wallander travels across the Baltic Sea to Latvia, a nation in the throws of the massive upheaval that will lead to its independence from the Soviet Union. Wallander is thrown into an icy, alien world of police surveillance, veiled threats and lies, coming to understand what it is to live in a nation in which democracy is still a dream. Only his dogged, almost subconscious desire to see justice done will lead him to the shadowy figures he pursues.

One frozen January morning at 5 a.m., Inspector Wallander responds to what he expects is a routine call out. When he reaches the isolated farmhouse he discovers a bloodbath. An old man has been tortured and beaten to death, his wife lies barely alive beside hs shattered body, victims of violence beyond reason. The woman supplies Wallander with his only clue: the perpetrators may have been foreign. When this is leaked to the press, racial hatred is unleashed.Kurt Wallander is a senior police officer at Ystad, a small town in the wind-lashed Swedish province of Skane. His life is a shambles. His wife has left him, his daughter refuses to speak to him, even his ageing father barely tolerates him. He works tirelessly, eats badly and drinks the nights away in a lonely, neglected flat. But now winter closes its grip on Ystad, and Wallandar, his tenacious efforts closely monitored by the tough minded (and disarmingly attractive) district attorney Anette Brolin, must forget his trouble, and throw himself into a battle against time and xenophobia.

The execution-style murder of a Swedish housewife looks like a simple case even though there is no obvious suspect. But then Wallander learns of a determined stalker, and soon enough, the cops catch up with him. But when his alibi turns out to be airtight, they realize that what seemed a simple crime of passion is actually far more complex—and dangerous. The search for the truth behind the killing eventually uncovers an assassination plot, and Wallander soon finds himself in a tangle with both the secret police and a ruthless foreign agent. 

In the Baliem Valley in central New Guinea lived a Stone Age tribe which survived into the 20th century - the Kurelu. Matthiessen joined the Harvard-Peabody Expedition of 1961 which set out to study the tribe as unobtrusively as possible, living among the Kurelu for two seasons. The result was this account, not of the expedition but of a lost culture: the Kurelu's timeless rhythms of work and play, or warriorship, feasting and funerals.

Everyone is always telling Stone Barrington that he's too smart to be a cop, but it's pure luck that places him on the streets in the dead of night, just in time to witness the horrifying incident that turns his life inside out. Suddenly he is on the front page of every New York newspaper, and his life is hopelessly entwined in the increasingly shocking life (and perhaps death) of Sasha Nijinsky, the country's hottest and most beautiful television anchorwoman. No matter where he turns, the case is waiting for him, haunting his nights and turning his days into a living hell. Stone finds himself caught in a perilous web of unspeakable crimes, dangerous friends, and sexual depravity that has throughout it one common thread: Sasha.

Meet Charlie. An everyday bloke. Good news is, he has a job. Bad news is, it's in a photo kiosk. He whiles away the hours with his rather eccentric colleague George. But appearances can be deceptive. You see, there is one line of work where taking the world at face value can be very foolish indeed. Where trusting someone -- anyone -- is the most dangerous thing you can do. The truth is, Charlie and George have not been very honest with each other. The truth is, this isn't their number one career choice. Their real jobs are a hell of a lot more dangerous. It's time to come clean. But the truth could very well kill them...

Rose`s early life was full of tragedy. Her father disappeared one night, presumed drowned and her twin brother died when he was only ten, on a bike that had been his cherished birthday present. No wonder that she depends on her husband, Michael. He is the only certainty in her life, and provides the love and stability that her own family background lacked. All Rose asks of Michael is complete fidelity, and when she has cause to doubt him she devises a terrible revenge. Michael has planned an anniversary trip to Venice for the two of them. But as they ride in gondolas, dine on delicious seafood and wander the sights of this most romantic of cities, Rose, racked with secret jealousy, is making plans. By the time they return, Michael will have become seriously ill - although not so ill that he cannot recognize the fact that something truly dreadful has happened to him. In this chilling novel Gillian White explores the most destructive of human weaknesses - jealousy.

Richard Gardner lives in the commuter village of Haverscot, with his troublesome wife and stepsons. He strikes up a friendship with the new occupant of The Willows , and is drawn into crime and violence - caused by someone with a deadly intention.