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Wild Woman is an anti-love story, set against a background of economic hardship. Told through the undiluted language of thought and mania, the twists and turns of internal dialogue are brought alive by a narrator determined to find her true voice. It is a warning against letting life slip through one’s fingers and a call for personal liberation and authenticity.Wild Woman is set in 1970s Croatia, interchanging between the capital, Zagreb, and the seaside towns of Rijeka and Pula on the Adriatic coast. This is a story about an everywoman from a poor family, with a retied invalid father and a mother who always protects the interests of men. The story begins with a love affair between two students of literature, who bond through shared experiences and rush into the romantic dream of marriage. However, what at first seems idyllic to a young woman in love soon becomes a nightmare as she finds herself the victim of an unscrupulous, lazy womanizer whom she must support financially and who often disappears without explanation, leaving her alone in unfamiliar surroundings. To free herself from him, she must free herself from the “prisons” imposed on her by her family, her community and tradition. She must go wild.

The book contains eleven dramatic and often horrifying stories, each describing the life of a different prisoner in the camps and prisons of communist Albania. The prisoners adapt, endure, and generally survive, all in different ways. They may conform, rebel, construct alternative realities of the imagination, cultivate hope, cling to memories of lost love, or devisenincreasingly strange and surreal strategies of resistance. The characters inndifferent stories are linked to one another, and in their human relationships create a total picture of a secret and terrifying world. In the prisoners’ back stories, the anecdotes they tell, and their political discussions, the book also reaches out beyond the walls and barbed wire to give the reader a panoramic picture of life in totalitarian Albania.

In a small town on the Adriatic coast, a local detective is content to sacrifice truth for the sake of telling his clients the stories they want to hear. The Coming reads at first like a traditional detective novel, then suddenly changes form with the advent of snow in mid-summer. When the town library burns down under mysterious circumstances, the detective's long-lost son begins to get involved in the investigations from afar. He takes the reader on excursions into history and recounts the life of Fra Dolcino, a medieval heretic who announced the return of the Messiah and Sabbatai Zevi, a Renaissance cabalist who maintained that he himself was the Messiah. Somehow the answers may lie in the missing manuscript, 'The Book of The Coming', but the unsolved mysteries of both past and present, as well as the ever encroaching environmental anomalies, seem to be leading to an apocalypse... "The Coming is an explosive mixture on three levels: a hard-boiled investigation, the story of an impending global catastrophe, and the description of daily life in a small Balkan city. Imagine Dashiell Hammett meeting Umberto Eco, and both of them meeting Orhan Pamuk! If there is justice in the world, Nikolaidis' novel should become a bestseller bigger than the novels of James Patterson or John Grisham. And since there is no justice in the world, let us hope that a divine caprice will nonetheless make this insanely readable page-turner a mega success." Slavoj ŽižekAndrej Nikolaidis is a contemporary writer from one of Europe's newest and smallest states: Montenegro. He is also a polemical journalist whose writing is fundamental to the process of democratic dialogue in the region. He has written three novels and was awarded the European Prize for Literature 2011.This book is also available as a eBook. Buy it from Amazon here.

Our Daily Bread charmingly weaves together the customs, rituals, anecdotes, legends and sayings that tell the story of bread, from Mesopotamia, through Egypt, to the Far East, ancient Greece, ancient Rome, and the New World. Matvejević shows how bread is depicted in literature and art (with beautiful illustrations) and examines especially closely the role of bread in the major world religions, drawing from the Bible, Talmud and Quran, but also at various apocryphal texts.In his seventh and last chapter, his narrative moves to the personal, explaining what motivated him to write this book; the lean years of his childhood during World War II and his father’s detention in a German concentration camp. Warning about the pending threat of hunger in the “developed world,” the book fittingly ends with a quote from the Russian anarchist Pyotr Kropotkin: “The question of bread must take precedence over all other questions.”

Quiet Flows the Una is the story a man trying to overcome the personal trauma caused by the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina between 1992 and 1995. Through an induced trance, the main character of the novel takes the reader through three time periods: the hero’s childhood before the war, the battle lines during the war, and his attempt to continue with normal life in a post-conflict society. Through poetic, meditative prose, Šehić attempts to reconstruct the life of a man who is bipolar in nature; being both a veteran and a poet. At times, he manages to pick up the pieces of his life, but at other times it escapes him. With the help of his memories, he uses his mind and strength to look for a way out of the maze in which he is confined, acting as both archivist and chronicler of the past - roles that allow him the opportunity to rebuild everything again. In parallel to this story, the book’s passages on the city next to the river Una take on mythical and dreamlike dimensions. Here, the novel expands into a poetic description of nature, seasons, flora and fauna, as well as childhood memories not yet tainted by all that will happen after 1992. Quiet Flows the Una is a book is dedicated to people who believe in the power and beauty of life in the face of death and mass destruction.

With this collection of brutal and heart-wrenching stories, the Bosnian writer Faruk Šehić secured his reputation as one of the greatest writers to emerge from the region. A war veteran and a poet, Faruk Šehić combines beauty and horror to seduce and surprise the reader.

My Rivers is a poetic event in four cycles: The Loire, The Spree, The Drina and the Beyond the Rivers. The collection brings together twenty-five poems which utilize different poetic forms, although the style is never overly strict in form, as Šehić always wants this work to be as clear and understandable as possible. Often hard-hitting and even brutal at times, these works rest on the themes of post-war reality and the culture of remembrance in a wider context, along with the tragedy of the Bosnian war seen through larger conflicts and the greater tragedies of the two world wars. The book seeks catharsis, to the extent to which it is possible in a post-conflict society like Bosnia, along with finding solace in the universal themes of intimacy, love, freedom.

Why would people trouble themselves with the facts, when fiction is so much more enticing?Designed as a historical novel, The Masochist forges an intimate portrait of a young, tenacious woman who, in uncertain times at the end of the 19th century, chose an uncertain path – the only path that could lead her to freedom. On Christmas Eve 1874, Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, whom history would remember as the most famous masochist, left his home in Bruck an der Mur in Austria for the unknown. The novel surmises he didn’t come back alone, but brought with him a new family member: a tiny red-haired girl he found in the forests around Lemberg/ Lviv. The Masochist is the memoir of Nadezhda Moser, the woman this little girl becomes, a fictional character who forces her way among the historical figures of the time.This is a pseudo-autobiographical novel that returns post-postmodernism to modernism and offers an intimate portrayal of the limits of women's desire and freedom against the backdrop of ethnic, class and gender tensions of an empire that hasn't yet perceived its decline had already begun.

A young man is found lying unconscious on the outskirts of Bucharest. No one knows who he is and everyone has a different theory about how he got there. Within the pages of this charming book, the stories of a variety of characters unfold, each closely interwoven with the next, and outlining the features of what ultimately turns out to be the most important and most powerful character of all: the city of Bucharest itself. The plot of Life Begins on Friday takes place during the last 13 days of 1897 and culminates in a beautiful tableau of the future as imagined by the characters we have come to know and love. We might even say that it is we who inhabit their future, and so too does Dan Creţu, alias Dan Kretzu, the present-day journalist hurled back in time by some mysterious process for just long enough to allow us a wonderful glimpse into a remote, almost forgotten world.Parvulescus' book is a magical tale full of enchanting characters who can carry the reader to another time....

''The poems carry deep inside Paler's unique tenderness and reflection – short descriptions of feelings, thoughts or moments of our life. In all these short poems, sometimes only into a verse...I found again the main and constant topics which enriched my mind...I found definitions of tears and cries, of departures, of love, of regret, or of obsession. I found definitions of illusion, of maturity, of dignity, of balance, of silence, of loneliness, of ego....'' Mariana Ganea, Romanian-Insider''The poetry reads as though an individual, the poet, is going through a process of examination, attempting to define his relation to the world and to himself, to define not just how he fits in, but if and why. Therefore making this a very introspective collection of poetry, but one that will have you smiling at that collection of words placed in that "best order" & then the awareness of a deeper thought process will seep into your mind – that this collection of beautiful, clever introspective poetry, is not merely one individual's exploration of self, but that it relates to you, us, all of us.'' Gary Moon, The Parrish LanternOctavian Paler was a poet, novelist, essayist, journalist and former politician. He was born on July 2, 1926, into a peasant family in Lisa, Romania and attended the Faculty of Letters and Philosophy and the Law School of Bucharest (1945-1949). During his long career, he worked as an editor for the cultural section of the Romanian Radio Broadcasting Company (1949-1964), Agerpres correspondent in Rome (September-December 1964), General Manager of the Romanian Television (1965-1968), Vice-President of the Radio Broadcasting Company and coordinator of the literary and music sections (1968-1970), editor-in-chief with "România liberă" newspaper (1970-1983) and starting from 1990, honorary director of the newspaper.

Welcome to the world of Hedgemond the Hunter, a brave and stubborn little hedgehog. Down in the wild woods he proudly tends his beloved house, but there are some animals who just can’t understand what the fuss is about! Find out just how Hedgemond proves to the grumpy bear and the greedy boar that there truly is no place like home.Hedgehog’s House is a story about caring for your natural habitat. Set in the unspoilt environment of the forest, we find the wild creatures arguing about what home means: is it simply a place we should take for granted, or is it something to be cherished and protected? Despite the persuasions of charming Miss Fox and the jeers of the angry wolf, Hedgemond steadfastly proves that his home is his castle, reminding us all that we each need to care for the places we live.

A local journalist sends a distant relative to report on the war in Iraq, while he stays at home to sort out his love life and his professional career - all to varying degrees of success. As time goes on, things begin to unravel and he ends up having to fake his missing cousin's reports while struggling to hold on to his actress girlfriend. Our Man in Iraq is a take on the Iraqi conflict from the other side of Europe, where politics and nepotism collide and the confusing aftereffects of the recent Yugoslav wars mix with the joys and trials of modern life.With an introduction by Tim Judah of The Economist.'Robert Perisic is a light bright with intelligence and twinkling with irony, flashing us the news that postwar Croatia not only endures but matters.' Jonathan Franzen'Robert Perisic depicts, with acerbic wit, a class of urban elites who are trying to reconcile their nineties rebellion with the reality of present-day Croatia. . . . The characters' snide remarks could easily sound cynical but the novel has a levity informed by the sense of social fluidity that comes with democracy.' The New YorkerThis book is also available as a eBook. Buy it from Amazon here.

Sal, the protagonist of Sun Alley, is an exceptionally intelligent twelve-year-old boy, experiencing his first love. One summer afternoon, on his way to see his girlfriend Emi, he is caught in a rain shower and shelters in the hallway of a block of flats. Led by a strong odour, he goes down into the basement, where he comes upon the corpse of a young and very beautiful woman. Little by little, Sal will attempt to discover the mystery of this body and, at the same time, will pursue in his amorous relationship with Emi; a strange liaison which unfolds in parallel with the adulterous affair of an adult couple whose path Sal repeatedly crosses.As his love story with Emi evolves, Sal tries his best to hide it, not only from the cynical eyes of his friends in the neighbourhood, but also from his parents – whose intervention might well shatter his bliss – thereby developing a veritably adulterous mindset that can also be observed in the adult couple. The connections between adults and the two children, on the one hand, and the dead body discovered by Sal on the other, are far deeper and more complicated than they may at first seem. Sun Alley is a novel about the roots of adultery and the destiny of an exceptional young boy who, thanks to his gifts, has the power to see his own future in his mind's eye.This book is also available as a eBook. Buy it from Amazon here.

'A Handful of Sand' is a love story and an ode to lost opportunity. Written as a duet for two narrators, we hear both the male and female voice trying to tell us their tale. Steeped in the social context of contemporary Croatia, its themes are vast: parenthood, loneliness, unhappy love, the absence of faith, the struggle for life.

Appalling and tragic, Ognjen Spahic's exceptional short novel animates the misery of Ceasescu's Romania and its inglorious fall with a metaphor fully up to the task: leprosy. Gerhard Henrik Armauer Hansen was a Norwegian scientist who isolated the Mycobacterium leprae in 1873 and his 'children' are the tragic sufferers of this ghastly disease. In Spahic's novel, it's 1989 and a dozen of them are confined to the last leper house in Europe, an under-equipped facility located in a miserable corner of South Eastern Romania overlooking a toxic fertilizer factory. Here our nameless narrator shares a room with fellow-sufferer Robert W. Duncan, an American intelligence officer whose career was ruined after he was captured by Communists in Berlin. But Duncan still has a few contacts in the shadowlands, notably 'Mr Smooth' who has it in his power to liberate the two men by supplying passports and helping them out of the country. Blending Romania's turbulent 1989 revolution with a lyrical fiction that both shocks and enthrals, Montenegrin author Ognjen Spahic offers an allegorical page to Southeastern Europe's intriguing scrapbook. In 'Hansen's Children', the downfall of Nicolae Ceausescu's repressive control is witnessed from behind the walls of Europe's sole leper-colony. Powerless against forces beyond the leprosarium, the rebellious political change seen across the country influences and erodes the camp's brittle harmony.

The collection Fairground Magician brings together stories about love fulfilled and unfulfilled, about things that are visible in the everyday world and values that are perceptible only at exceptional moments. The narration moves from apparent realism to other genres; from crime fiction or thriller to erotic prose. Memories, intimations and premonitions are infused in these stories with a tranquillity that accepts what fate brings, even when efforts are made to change it, as in the stories Pockets Full of Stones or Nosedive.Lengold uses eroticism as a natural ingredient of human life, as an integrated tension consisting of two inseparable aspects – body and soul – energising stories like Love Me Tender, Zugzwang, Wanderings, and Aurora Borealis. In Fairground Magician, Lengold is a lucid observer of minute details and subtle emotional shifts. In stories like It Could Have Been Me, Shadow, or Ophelia, Get Thee to a Nunnery, she manages to leap over the wall between the bodily surface and the human interior in a very distinctive way. No matter how common are the situations she depicts - whether it be broken marriages, unfulfilled expectations or the motives of forlorn lovers - Lengold is constantly searching for the authentic, finding it within the sophisticated irony which is a trademark of her fiction.Jelena Lengold is a storyteller, novelist and poet. She has published five books of poetry, one novel (Baltimore) and four books of short stories, including Rain-soaked Lions, Lift and Fairground Magician, which won her the European Prize for Literature in 2011. Lengold works as a journalist and an editor at Radio Belgrade.This book is also available as a eBook. Buy it from Amazon here.

The writing of Ayfer Tunc is in essence urban, and yet she manages to imbue her characters with a fragile humanity and an old-fashioned sense of the melancholy of modern life. In the title story, we meet Aziz Bey - at once the most genuine and the saddest of all her heroes. Here we see the life of an ordinary Turkish man, a master tambour player of local fame, whose life stretches from Istanbul to Beirut because of his obsessive love for Maryam. We witness the fading of this love with the passage of time and changing of circumstances, bringing us closer to this man than to many other modern protagonists. With the soft touch of an accomplished writer, the life of this singular musician is laid bare in all its sweetness and mediocrity, until we are almost sure that we might catch a glimpse of him next time we visit the vibrant, all-night bars of Istanbul. 'The Snow Traveller' features another solitary man whose "deadly loneliness...ate into his soul like a malignant tumour." Eșber, a train signal man, lives in a remote region of Turkey that, for most of the year, is carpeted in white. When a flash of colour appears he is exhilarated to discover a young woman lying in the snow and nurses her back to health. Fidan had jumped off the train, fleeing unnamed assailants. However, she is quickly unsettled by Eșber's unhealthy obsession. In 'A Cold Winter' Samavi Bey is also fixated by the memory of a woman. After losing his wife in a fire, Samavi never get warm again. He wanders from room to room in his house and visits coffee houses in an attempt to still his agitated heart. Eventually he wanders into a hamam where "the heat of the bath seemed to him like the heat of a love that had eluded him." Tunc writes about bitter disappointment with real skill so that her characters sense of hopelessness is affecting rather than maudlin. In the darkly comic 'Tales of Womanising', a man dreams of becoming a figure of desire. His friends' idle boasts about their conquests infect his mood until he is mired in "a deep and fatal affliction." He starts to pretend to be having an affair. Despite his wife's evident distress he can't stop himself and his various deceits become more and more elaborate with tragic consequences. In the final story, Tunc playfully recreates the existential anxieties of a series of characters waiting to be written into a story. Jealous of one another they are also highly ambitious regarding their development and status in the plot. It's a fitting conclusion to this haunting, unique collection that vividly evokes Turkey's various landscapes.

The Son follows one night in the life of a hero with no name, a writer whose life is on the verge of falling apart. One fateful afternoon, his wife leaves him and his long-term conflict with his father, who blames our hero for his mother's death, comes to a head. Incapable of finding inner calm—for our hero is a man who cannot seem to adapt to new times and rules—he steps into the warm Mediterranean night that has fallen in the city of Ulcinj, itself a multilayered mixture of European dimensions, African influences and the communist past.On his journey into the night, the writer meets an assortment of characters: a piano student from Vienna who has abandoned his musical career and converted to Islam, a radical Christian preacher and a group of refugees from Kosovo. In the style of Mihail Bulgakov, the characters meet in the old city of Ulcinj at the dramatically named Square of the Slaves. It is here where, in times of old, the pirates who lived in the city until the nineteenth century would bring and sell captured slaves, amongst them Miguel de Cervantes. And it is here that the dénouement of this fascinating novel takes place.Andrej Nikolaidis is one of the most outspoken and acclaimed writers in the Balkan region. His novels, philosophical works and articles have been translated into several languages, and have won him both awards and notoriety. He lives and writes in the ancient Montenegrin port city of Ulcinj. Winner of the European Prize for Literature 2011This book is also available as a eBook. Buy it from Amazon here.

Ekaterini, born in Greece at the beginning of the twentieth century, is a woman who knows her own mind. Against the wishes of her family, she marries an immigrant worker and follows him from the port of Thessaloniki to Belgrade. There, Ekaterini is not only forced to learn the country's 'odd' language and adapt to life in an alien culture, but soon becomes a young widow who must guide her two small daughters safely through the turmoil caused by the Second World War and the socialist post-war period. Refusing to cheer Stalin or to bend to the new political environment, the story of a remarkably stoic and courageous woman unfolds: a woman whose life spans the collapse of Yugoslavia, the last Balkan war, the Kosovo crisis and the bombing of Belgrade, and yet still dreams of one day returning to her beloved Greece. Ekaterini is the human story of an epoch. Though set in the Balkans, it is nevertheless a tale of universal human survival, chronicling the ordinary lives of women who live through history's most turbulent times. While written in homage to the ancient story of Odysseus this remarkable novel sees the roles reversed, so that it is a modern Penelope who must travel and suffer in search of her homeland. With her distinctive brand of humour, Marija Knezevic cleverly parodies the traditional biography by demystifying the everyday events of life and allowing a female narrator to share her version of events. The story of Ekaterini is the story of one woman who lives through the twentieth century in a part of the world where a long life could bear witness to four major wars. Just as there is no such thing as a 'normal life', so we can understand that one individual story can be the story of a country, of an epoch. The heroine of 'Ekaterini' is born in the Balkans, and her story is one of human survival, and is therefore universal. This is history seen from the woman's point of view, the story of the ordinary lives of the women who live through the turbulent historical events of their time. With her own brand of humour, Knezevic wants to parody the traditional biography by demystifying the everyday events in one 'ordinary life' and let the female narrator tell her side of the story.

Vladislav Bajac's novel Hamam Balkania has won five awards, been printed in seven bestselling editions, and has finally come to the UK. In the tradition of great modern Serbian novelists, Bajac twists and weaves a tale between old and new, modern and rusted, East and West, water and fire. This is a book that lives in two parts - one set in the Ottoman empire of the 16th century, and the other in our own 21st century reality. Here we have the story of two friends, both taken as children from their homes and inducted into the Turkish Sultan's private guard: Sokollu Mehmed Pasha, the Serbian shepherd boy who rose to the position of Grand Vizier and Koca Mimar Sinan, the 'Michelangelo of the East'. Between them they represent both destruction and creation, while at the same time providing us with a harrowing insight into the heart of religion and identity. Back in our own time, we hear the voice of the author, sharing with us his experiences in the modern world, and his musings on faith, identity and nation. This is a truly ambitious book that rewards the reader with insights into some of the great questions of our time. The author's home country of Serbia is fascinated with its Ottoman roots, and this novel is no exception. Bajac takes the lives of ancient figures and weaves them together with flashing, real, and dirty characters from Western society's recent past - his stories at times dipping their pen into the well of memoir. Bajac has rubbed elbows with Leonard Cohen, and shared words and stages with literary greats - none of that is lost on the reader here. Two stories collide in the reader's mind, not on the pages, as if learning two different histories from two separate professors. This is at once a story of friendship, and a book of warning: do we really know that which we believe we know so well?

Very different from the rougher, blunter prose of her male contemporaries, Alma Lazarevska's stories can perhaps be described as the tender heart of Bosnian war. Writing from the domestic perspective, her prose is nevertheless deceptively simple; allowing the horror of the war to impinge with devastating effect on the most banal, everyday scene. Apart from the protagonist of the first story, the characters remain nameless. In five of the six stories we can assume that we are following the same unnamed female narrator, who refers to her husband simply as "He" and her son as simply "The Boy." In a conflict where ethnic identity is at the heart, it seems a sobering decision to dispense with names. The family in these stories are at the same time everyone and no-one. They might become bigger than themselves, standing for every group that has ever been the victim of violence due to their ethnicity; or they might represent the de-humanization that has to occur in order for such persecutions to be carried out, reduced to pronouns rather than individuals with names. "Him" and "her" seem perilously close to "it." This collection brings home the acute unfairness of forcing that contemplation of death upon another person, of depriving them of that human freedom to dream and delude themselves. And it is a beautiful acknowledgement of the small humanities that we cling to when we are at the mercy of so much inhumanity.

The new Bulgarian ambassador to London is determined to satisfy the whims of his bosses at all costs. Putting himself at the mercy of a shady PR-agency, he is promised direct access to the very highest social circles. Meanwhile, on the lower levels of the embassy, things are not as they should be. With criminal gangs operating in the kitchens, police on the trail of missing ducks from Hyde Park and a sexy Princess Diana impersonator employed as the cleaner, how is an ambassador supposed to do his job?Combining the themes of corruption, confusion and outright incompetence, Popov masterly brings together the multiple plot lines in a sumptuous carnival of frenzy and futile vanity, allowing the illusions and delusions of the post-communist society to be reflected in their glorious absurdity!"A big European novel… his humour is the weapon of a merciless social critic, such as we have seen in the works of Jaroslav Hashec and Ilf and Petrov…" Miljenko Jergović"This is a true European comic novel in the best tradition of P.G. Wodehouse, Roald Dahl and Tom Sharp. An excellent narrative; a great awareness for detail; a fresh sense of humour and most importantly – a sense of moderation. The situations are typically Bulgarian, yet the irony brings a taste of Englishness." 24 HoursThis book is also available as a eBook. Buy it from Amazon here.

Fatos Lubonja is a writer and editor of the quarterly journal Perpjekja [Endeavor], representative of the Forum for Democracy, and a leading figure in Albania's political life. At twenty-three, Lubonja was sentenced to seven years imprisonment for "agitation and propaganda" after police found his diaries, which contained criticisms of Hoxha. He was re- sentenced without trail and spent a total of 17 years in prison, much of it in solitary confinement, and was released in 1991. Lubonja‟s first book in English, Second Sentence: Inside the Albanian Gulag, was published to great acclaim by I. B. Tauris in 2006. He is also the author of a number of books which have been translated into Italian, German, English and Polish. Among his many liaterary prizes, he received the Alberto Moravia Prize for International Literature in 2002 and the Herder Prize for Literature in 2004.

1914 - the Year of the Pathologist: Prologue: Two Revolver Shots13 A Long Hot Summer25 War40 Letters of Life and Death65 First Wartime Christmas73 The Typhus Situation92 1915 - the Year of the Trader The Smell of Snow and Forebodings of Doom99 The Man who Did Everything Twice115 War and the Sexes128 The Father of all Gothic Doctors143 Best Wishes from Hell160 Defence and Ultimate Collapse170 1916 - the Year of the King: The Valley of the Dead187 Far away, to the Ends of the Earth206 Miracle Cures and Other Elixirs223 Delusions as Broad as Russia238 Corporals, Chaplains and Helmsmen256 1917 - the Year of the Tsar: Betrayal, Cowardice and Lies279 T heir Time Has Passed298 Death Wears no Watch320 The Revolution Travels by Train339 1918 - the Year of the Criminologist: The End - Kaput361 The Pandemic369 Silent Liberation379 I am now Dead393 Wishes for the New World401 Epilogue: Dreams Made of Dreams408 The Author413 Translator414

The short-sighted adolescent is a poor schoolboy who is in love with literature, and tries to emulate the lives and works of the writers he most admires. He is also fascinated by science and history, and stays up all night reading. At the age of 17 he decides to write a novel to prove to his teachers that he is not as mediocre as his fellow pupils, and is prepared to give up everything in order to do so. The novel is written in a series of notebooks - the 'diary' of the title - but instead of achieving fame as an author, the myopic protagonist fails his exams and has to repeat the school year.From the perspective of a schoolboy’s diary of everyday life in Bucharest in the early 20th century, - his teachers, his classmates' academic and amorous rivalries, his first sexual experiences - we are introduced to the themes of religion, self-knowledge, erotic sensibility, artistic creation and otherness, subjects that would preoccupy Mircea Eliade, one of Romania’s most prominent intellectuals, until the end of his life. Diary of a Short-Sighted Adolescent

My Father's Dreams: A Tale of Innocence Abused, is a controversial and shocking novel by Slovenia's bestselling author Evald Flisar, and is regarded by many critics as his best. The book tells the story of fourteen-year-old Adam, the only son of a village doctor and his quiet wife, living in apparent rural harmony. But this is a topsy-turvy world of illusions and hopes, in which the author plays with the function of dreaming and story-telling to present the reader with an eccentric 'bildungsroman' in reverse. Spiced with unusual and original overtones of the grotesque, the history of an insidious deception is revealed, in which the unsuspecting son and his mother will be the apparent victims; and yet who can tell whether the gruesome end is reality or just another dream - This is a novel that can be read as an off-beat crime story, a psychological horror tale, a dream-like morality fable, or as a dark and ironic account of one man's belief that his personality and his actions are two different things. It can also be read as a story about a boy who has been robbed of his childhood in the cruelest way. It is a book which has the force of myth: revealing the fundamentals without drawing any particular attention to them; an investigation into good and evil, and our inclination to be drawn to the latter.

Homunculus is a collection of sixteen 'fairy tales for adults' with something for every reader. The author has largely retained the classical fairy-tale structure with its elements of surprise and the constant intertwining of the real and unreal, but he transcends the sugarsweet endings we are familiar with.Along with typical fairy-tale features like the interplay of humans and animals, he presents us with a wide range of more mature themes – the erotic, the tragic, the absurd – set amidst dichotomies on an adult wavelength: mythical vs. urban, banality vs. wisdom, as well as issues of guilt and longing. Some of the stories are related to existing internationally known fairy tales such as 'Tom Thumb', where the main character struggles with an oedipal bond with his mother, or 'The Huntsman', told from the perspective of the hunter sent out to kill Snow White. Others go back to Macedonian folk roots or have been freely composed by Prokopiev himself, but all of them are rendered with humour, skill and a noticeable love of life.

One man's search for his true identity through an investigation of his parent's past which leads him to discover truths about the former Yugoslav secret services. Through his own unique and now recognizable style, Nikolaidis takes us into a world of criminal intrigue and a dissection of our humble human existence. Powerful, rich in philosophy.

Exile is a collection of short stories with the taste of a novel. The over-riding theme is the sense of melancholy of those who have been alienated from their homeland, from their families or from society. By offering the reader short, vivid glimpses into other worlds; be they of real or fictional characters, Ilhan builds a patchwork of stories which highlight the lives of the dispossessed. As a woman writing in modern day Turkey, she is not afraid to take on the themes of honour killings or the American occupation of Iraq. All stories are open to her empathy and understanding.Born in 1972, Çiler İlhan worked as a hotelier, a freelance writer (Boğaziçi, Time Out İstanbul, etc.) and an editor (Chat, Travel+Leisure) at different periods of her life. İlhan, based in İstanbul, now works as the public relations manager of the Çırağan Palace Kempinski hotel. In 1993, she received a prestigious youth award for a short story. The award was a tribute to the memory of Yaşar Nabi, a leading publisher and writer. Ilhan's stories, essays, book reviews, travel articles and translations into Turkish have been published in a variety of journals and newspaper supplements.