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In Late Summer is written from the perspective of a 14-year-old girl killed in the August 1993 massacre in Bosnia. When a picturesque village is caught in the turmoil of war, the entire worlds of girls Ivana and Dunja and their families is blown up and swept away. Based on a personal experience, Magdalena Blazevic's novel is poetic and powerful, full of images of ordinary country life as well as the brutality of war. This is a haunting portrait of a family and a village, each affected differently by the daily realities of civil war. Compared by critics to Ingeborg Bachmann, Blazevic weaves emotion under the surface of her precise and lyrical prose.

Voracious follows a year in the life of a young woman caringfor her dying grandmother in the companyof her grandfather, her friend, and animals. The novel is set in a smallvillage which echoes with noises fromthe nearby abattoir and which is threatened by a landslide. The grandfather is renovating a room for hiswife while the women care for one another, for the plants, and for the animals. Malgorzata Lebda guides us through the countryside, the changing seasons, wildlife, illness, death, andlove. Everything is at once fragile and full of life, animate and inanimate. Full of profound emotionaltruths, this book signals the arrival of a newinternational talent.

A collection of essays about loss, grief, and absence, NOT THERE tells stories of ordinary people and the things that have happened to them. Emotions underlying these stories prompt the reader to think of their losses, and their compensations. It's also about how we remember things - unreliably on the whole - and how our idea of the truth may be a very personal one. Szczygiel's wide and international range of interlocutors includes: a Czech poet, a Ukrainian soldier, a Polish accountant, an Albanian painter, an Israeli writer, and the father of a reporter with whom the author travels to Prague for the last time. Written in a beautiful, associative style reminiscent of W. G. Sebald, Szczygiel lets his interlocutors and memories drive the story in unusual directions. With a perfect eye and a voice infused with empathy and wit, Szczygiel explores the human condition with its unavoidable absences. The advice that famous Polish writer, Hanna Krall, gave the author hovers over the book: 'Everything must have its form, its rhythm, Mr Mariusz. Especially absence.'

A dazzling debut novel about a young woman’s difficult coming of age in a traditional Azerbaijani community in Russia, grappling under the weight of Muslim patriarchal norms and a debilitating neurological condition. The mysterious affliction leaves her unable to control her muscles, plagued by pain and speech disorders, defying diagnosis.Addressing each body part with the scrupulousness of a medical researcher, the narrator explores memories, traditions, and taboos related to her physical self. In the process, a woman once destined for the role of a beautiful marriageable daughter comes to be perceived as damaged goods.With verbal elegance and poetic power, Egana Djabbarova unveils a hidden world in which illness unexpectedly facilitates her liberation. Her book stands in the proud tradition of confessional feminist writers like Sandra Cisneros, Arundhati Roy, Audre Lorde, Toni Morrison, and Jamaica Kincaid.

When Vera is diagnosed with breast cancer for the second time, she moves back in with her cantankerous and entrepreneurial father, Zeno. It is the first time she has slept in the family home since her mother died, of the same cancer, almost a decade earlier. Wandering through this house which vibrates with solitude, Vera stumbles upon Zeno's most surprising secret: a novel. Vera herself is a writer, but she hasn't published work for years. Confined now to Quaderni, a village in the province of Verona, and haunted by signs of mortality, the discovery of her father's private fantasy world presents an unexpected opportunity. Constructed between family visits, hospital appointments, and through fragments of memories, conversations, and the kernels of stories yet to be written, Struck is at once a delicate portrait of a family navigating life's catastrophes and a gently defiant celebration of the act of writing.

Deep in the French countryside, a farm is blind with secrets, and an exhausted family struggles to survive. The father can't pay the bills, the brothers compete with one other, and the mother tries desperately to suppress the weight of the past. Enveloped in visceral silence, the farm animals witness a family tragedy unfolding before their eyes. And since the humans remain silent, it is the animals who must tell their story. Milk and Blood is a choral novel like no other, narrated by farm animals as they observe the humans who exploit, kill, and love them. Death and life contract like a shimmering muscle, and quiet devastation lies beneath the surface. Yet amidst this bleak brutality, it is Clairville's tenderness that is most affecting, as she draws poetry from mud and compassion from violence, in what is ultimately a declaration of love to those who feed us.

One afternoon in May, 8-year-old Ilaria gets into the car with her father, expecting to go out to dinner with her mother and sister. Instead, she is taken across the border, on a whirlwind road trip around Italy with her father, from Trieste to Rome and Sicily, sleeping in roadside hotels and singing to the radio. But Ilaria's father is unpredictable, and she never knows which version of him she will get: charming and funny, or volatile and drunk. Torn between her life in Geneva with her mother and this strange shifting adventure on the road, Ilaria doesn't know who to side with in her parents' acrimonious separation. Throughout her travels, Ilaria meets a rag-tag cast of characters, learns how to light a cigarette, discovers when is best to keep quiet around her father, and finds comfort in her lovable teddy bear Birillo. Ilaria's voice is singular and powerful. Based on the author's own experience, this deeply moving novel captures the blurred lines between love and harm, memory and reality, fear and wonder. Ilaria is a haunting, intimate coming of age story about a girl who is forced to grow up too soon, and about the fragile moments of beauty she finds along the way.