Open Borders Press – förlag

November, 1939. A conscription officer arrives in a farming village. The Soviet Union has invaded. Finland is at war. Setting off into the depths of winter to face the Red Army, the group of childhood friends recruited from Rautjarvi cannot be confident that they will ever return. But their unit has a secret weapon: the soldier Simo Hayha, whose lethal skill as a sniper in the snowbound forests of the front line will earn him the nickname 'The White Death'.

November, 1939. A conscription officer arrives in a farming village. The Soviet Union has invaded. Finland is at war. Setting off into the depths of winter to face the Red Army, the group of childhood friends recruited from Rautjarvi cannot be confident that they will ever return. But their unit has a secret weapon: the soldier Simo Hayha, whose lethal skill as a sniper in the snowbound forests of the front line will earn him the nickname 'The White Death'.

Andrey Kurkov's war diaries continue: A profound and deeply personal chronicle of life under siege. In this second volume of his acclaimed war diaries, Ukraine's greatest living writer bears witness to a nation enduring the unendurable. From his home in Kyiv, Kurkov captures the surreal and the life-shattering: children learning algebra in metro stations turned bomb shelters, holidaymakers sunbathing on mined beaches, and farmers sowing fields shadowed by missile strikes. On its eastern borders, Ukrainian citizens are put into 'filtration camps', en route to Russia... or to execution. To the north, Belarusian forces press refugees into service as mine detectors. This is a lived account - rich with startling vignettes, dark humour and devastating detail - of a country adapting, resisting, surviving. A child downloads movies to a smartphone to watch during nightly power cuts. An elderly Japanese man feeds the hungry in Kharkiv. A soldier carefully rehomes a swarm of bees. A winemaker uses scrap wooden shell crates to package gift sets. A Ukrainian gunner inscribes messages on shells and rockets aimed for Russia: 'For Bakhmut', he writes. The family of a journalist killed in the Donbas sells their home to open a bookshop in his memory. Our Daily War is Kurkov at his most intimate and insightful: a record of resilience, heartbreak and fierce national pride. Urgent, humane, unforgettable, this is history as it happens, and as only Kurkov can write it

Police capitaine Noemie Chastain has everything: a coveted position in Paris, a devoted team and a loving partner. In an instant, she loses it all. On a dawn raid in a grimy Parisian banlieue, in an instant, she loses it all. Shot by the drug dealer she was about to arrest, she is left with serious scars on her face and deeper, longer-lasting damage to her psyche. Pushed out of her job in Paris by superiors concerned that her disfigurement would damage team morale, abandoned by her boyfriend, she is posted to a police department that serves six sparsely populated communes in the back of beyond, in the southern department of Aveyron. Her brief: to report back on the police department and give head office an excuse to close it altogether. But when the body of a child floats to the surface of the man-made lake that hides the buried past of the village of Avalone, Capitaine Chastain is forced to take the opportunity to prove her worth and win back her job in Paris. To solve the case, she must lead a team more used to tracking down stolen combine harvesters - handsome Lieutenant Valant, the mayor's son; ex-Drug Squad Brigadier Bousquet; and green local boy 'Bambi' - through the twists and turns of what has become a murder investigation and uncover the dark secrets that have haunted the village for twenty years.

Winner of the 2025 Scott Moncrieff Prize. The author was fifteen at the height of the genocide inflicted on the Tutsi people in Rwanda. She and her mother had spent weeks moving from one insecure shelter to another amid scenes of petrifying violence. Hundreds of thousands of Tutsi were killed in a period of only three months. The lives of Beata Umubyeyi Mairesse and her mother were a sleepless nightmare - until, eventually, a place was found for them on a convoy to safety. More than a decade later, after rebuilding her life in France, Beata Umubyeyi Mairesse was ready to begin the process of reconstructing her incomplete memories of the escape and establishing community with other survivors. She is now a poet and a prize-winning novelist, but until now she never written about her own history. Beginning by making contact with the BBC team which filmed the convoy, then by tracking down aid workers, journalists and fellow escapees and scouring archives in a search for photographs of her crossing of the border, the author pieces together records and personal accounts to try to comprehend the chaos that overtook Rwanda at the time of the genocide.

A thriller of love and revenge, and an imaginative literary obituary for Kafka, bringing the Cold War to life, from Paris and Istanbul to West Berlin and Tel Aviv. West Berlin, 1968. As a youth uprising sweeps over Europe in the shadow of the Cold War, two men face each other across an interrogation table. One, Ferdy Kaplan, has shot and killed a student. Kommissar Muller, the other is trying to find out why. As his interrogation progresses, Kaplan's background is revealed piece by piece, including the love story between him and his childhood friend Amalya, their shared passion for Kafka, and the radical youth movement they joined. When it transpires that Kaplan's intended target was not the student but Max Brod, Franz Kafka's close friend and the executor of his literary estate, the interrogation of a murderer slowly transforms into a dialogue between a passionate admirer of Kafka's work, who is attempting to protect the author's final wish to have his manuscripts burned, and a police commissioner who is learning more about literature than he ever thought possible from a prisoner in his custody. In this gripping, thought-provoking tribute to Kafka, Burhan Sonmez vividly recreates a key period of history in the 1960s, when the Berlin Wall divided Europe. More than a typical mystery, Lovers of Franz K. is an exploration of the value of books, and the issues of anti-Semitism, immigration, and violence that recur in Kafka's life and writings.

Bologna, 1944. Comandante De Luca is tasked with investigating three brutal murders, with the lives of ten Italian hostages on the line. The pitch-black prequel to the Inspector De Luca quartet, by the master of Italian Noir. In November 1944, in the worst winter ever known in Bologna, in the depths of the war, the bomb-scarred streets are home to starving refugees who have fled the advancing Allies. The Fascist Black Brigades, the officers of the S.S. and the partisans of the Italian Resistance compete for control of the city streets in bloody skirmishes. Comandante De Luca, who has proved himself 'the most brilliant investigator' in Bologna, but who is now unwillingly working for the Political Police in a building that doubles as a torture facility, finds himself in trouble when three murders land on his desk: a professor shot through the eye, an engineer beaten to death, and a German corporal left to be gnawed on by rats in a flooded cellar. De Luca must rapidly unravel all three cases with ten lives on the line: ten Italian hostages who will face a Nazi firing squad if the corporal's killing is not solved to the German command; satisfaction. As he navigates a web of personal and political motivations - his life increasingly at risk - De Luca will not stop until he has uncovered the dangerous secrets concealed in the frozen heart of his city.

Andrey Kurkov's war diaries continue: A profound and deeply personal chronicle of life under siege. In this second volume of his acclaimed war diaries, Ukraine's greatest living writer bears witness to a nation enduring the unendurable. From his home in Kyiv, Kurkov captures the surreal and the life-shattering: children learning algebra in metro stations turned bomb shelters, holidaymakers sunbathing on mined beaches, and farmers sowing fields shadowed by missile strikes. On its eastern borders, Ukrainian citizens are put into 'filtration camps', en route to Russia... or to execution. To the north, Belarusian forces press refugees into service as mine detectors. This is a lived account - rich with startling vignettes, dark humour and devastating detail - of a country adapting, resisting, surviving. A child downloads movies to a smartphone to watch during nightly power cuts. An elderly Japanese man feeds the hungry in Kharkiv. A soldier carefully rehomes a swarm of bees. A winemaker uses scrap wooden shell crates to package gift sets. A Ukrainian gunner inscribes messages on shells and rockets aimed for Russia: 'For Bakhmut', he writes. The family of a journalist killed in the Donbas sells their home to open a bookshop in his memory. Our Daily War is Kurkov at his most intimate and insightful: a record of resilience, heartbreak and fierce national pride. Urgent, humane, unforgettable, this is history as it happens, and as only Kurkov can write it

In this third volume of Andrey Kurkov's war diaries, Ukraine's greatest living writer chronicles the third year of the full-scale Russian invasion from his home in Kyiv and from journeys all over the country - capturing moments of horror, resilience, absurdity and grace with an unmatched clarity. Children on a contested border wear hooded bulletproof vests to school; soldiers write haiku; professional clowns go to war; and the mother of a young soldier killed in battle uses his compensation money to create a rehabilitation centre for veterans. Roses bloom across Ukraine in quiet tribute to a florist and soldier killed in Avdiivka, remembered by those who once bought his flowers. In Pokrovsk, 7,500 residents refuse to leave a city that no longer exists - their homes obliterated but their will unbroken. And buried beneath a cherry tree, a murdered writer's final diary is recovered, a haunting echo of a silenced voice. From the home front to the trenches, Kurkov captures the rhythms of survival - the quiet rituals, joys, unexpected humour and appalling losses - in a very moving record of national endurance. Three Years on Fire is a luminous act of remembrance from a writer whose voice stands witness to everything Ukraine has lost - and everything it refuses to give up.

Eric Cantona is an enduring enigma. No Frenchman in the past 50 years has so successfully captured the British imagination. In scintillating essays that bring to life Cantona's wild swings - on what felt like a weekly basis - between hero and villain, this idiosyncratic catalogue of the footballer's 82 goals for Manchester United, describing the matches in which each goal was scored, is a close-up portrait of an unparalleled artist which takes the reader back to some of footballing's most cherished moments. Manchester United was dominating English football during this period, a run of success which began with their first league title in 26 years during the 1992-3 season. Inspiring younger players such as Paul Scholes, Ryan Giggs and David Beckham, Cantona was, and remains, an iconic figure, known for his style and effortless grace, his French flair and his unwavering, unapologetic non-conformity.

In November 1944, in the worst winter ever known in Bologna, in the depths of the war, the bomb-scarred streets are home to starving refugees who have fled the advancing Allies. The city is divided between the Fascist Black Brigades, the officers of the S.S. and the partisans of the Italian Resistance. Comandante De Luca finds himself in trouble when three murders land on his desk: a professor shot through the eye, an engineer beaten to death, and a German corporal left to be gnawed on by rats in a flooded cellar. De Luca must untangle all three cases in a hurry with ten lives on the line: ten Italian hostages who will face a Nazi firing squad if the corporal's killing is not solved to the German command's satisfaction.

In this third volume of Andrey Kurkov's war diaries, Ukraine's greatest living writer chronicles the third year of the full-scale Russian invasion from his home in Kyiv and from journeys all over the country - capturing moments of horror, resilience, absurdity and grace with an unmatched clarity. Children on a contested border wear hooded bulletproof vests to school; soldiers write haiku; professional clowns go to war; and the mother of a young soldier killed in battle uses his compensation money to create a rehabilitation centre for veterans. Roses bloom across Ukraine in quiet tribute to a florist and soldier killed in Avdiivka, remembered by those who once bought his flowers. In Pokrovsk, 7,500 residents refuse to leave a city that no longer exists - their homes obliterated but their will unbroken. And buried beneath a cherry tree, a murdered writer's final diary is recovered, a haunting echo of a silenced voice. From the home front to the trenches, Kurkov captures the rhythms of survival - the quiet rituals, joys, unexpected humour and appalling losses - in a very moving record of national endurance. Three Years on Fire is a luminous act of remembrance from a writer whose voice stands witness to everything Ukraine has lost - and everything it refuses to give up.

No-one wants to die young, but nobody wants to get old. Elke Heidenreich, having reached a certain age, has made it her mission to debunk some of our persistent myths about ageing in a witty and life-affirming book. It does not set out to be a self-help text: it is rather a wise essay on the author's life and experience as a writer, literary critic, journalist and television presenter. She has read widely and here shares the wisdom of her favourite philosophers, historians and authors.