Foundry Mediterranean Collection – serie

Annabella Morelli is twenty-three years old, dreams of becoming a poet and lives in Lyon, far from Congo-Brazzaville where she was born, the daughter of a Franco-Italian worker, and a Congolese girl who became a mother too young. Annabella remembers a happy childhood until one Christmas, when she was seven, her father's anger exploded, and her mother left the family home.When she learns of his death in Cameroon, her world collapses for the second time and in her desperate attempt to repatriate her father’s body to France, Annabella is forced to confront the family secrets, lies and deep trauma at the heart of her existence. This stunning debut explores grief, family relationships, personal truths and the post-colonial condition with beautiful, urgent writing. It was the winner of the 2024 Prix Goncourt du Premier Roman.

In tired, hot Paris at the end of August, a group of friends, who’d rather still be at the sea, meet for a dinner in one couple’s apartment.Taking us behind the shutters of the Sixth Arrondissement, with a cast of characters that both delight and repel, fractured relationships, manipulation, bad behaviour and desperation are all laid bare in this very contemporary take on a Parisian huis clos story.What starts as just a little dinner ends up having monumental consequences for everyone.The book was shortlisted for the 2024 Prix Goncourt du Premier Roman and won the 2023 Prix Littéraire Gisèle Halimi for women’s writing.

The Winner of the 2023 Cypriot National Book PrizeWhen it was built in the 1950s, nothing symbolised Cyprus entering the modern world like the Ledra Palace Hotel. In Constantia Soteriou’s jewel of a novella, the ambitions and shortcomings of the island’s turbulent twentieth century are played out by its occupants. Among them we meet the king in exile who needs to drown his sorrows with a drink disguised to look like tea; the porter who, among the English roses of the hotel's gardens, secretly plants a rose from his village to make his rosebud infusions; the UN officer who drinks lemonade to deal with the heat and the lies; and the cleaning lady who always carries her holy water with her. They are reluctant actors in history, evocatively captured in this moving, personal, and highly original portrait of civil strife and division.__“Flavours bounce off the page and straight into the mouth” THE SUNDAY TIMES“This is, quite simply, one of the most powerful books ever to come out of our island” CYPRUS MAIL

Meet Michela, English gangster father, flamenco dancer mother, a hard, uncompromising police officer, operating on the shadier side of the law. In the company of this unorthodox, magnetically compelling character, cult writer Esther García Llovet takes us on a breath-taking, high-speed, anarchic romp through the underbelly of the pearl of the Costa Blanca, Benidorm, on the hunt for Reggie Kray’s stolen cigarette lighter. Beyond the sunburn and all-day fry-ups, in casinos, bars that are fronts for money laundering and flashy high society parties, we meet an unforgettable cast of characters English gangsters and Russian mafiosi, chancers, no-hopers, and low-life of all complexions in this unconventional yet literary thriller. With a turn of phrase that always astonishes, an eye for detail that is as forensic as it is cinematic, a sense of humour as dry as a glass of fino, and a wilful desire to break conventional genres, Llovet’s book feels like the best of Almodóvar in surreal, novel form.

Longlisted for the 2026 International Booker PrizeOutside Vallorgana, a tiny, isolated village high in the foothills of the Dolomites, the ‘Duke’ lives in the villa of his aristocratic ancestors. The last in the centuries’ old line of the Cimamontes, he spends his days on his land and absorbed in the family archive, tolerated, if gently ridiculed by the villagers who are his neighbours. When he finds out that the village big man is taking timber from his land, he has a decision to make. Will he stay in his glorious, cerebral isolation or will he honour his ancestral blood and take action against this affront?Matteo Melchiorre’s portrait of the idiosyncratic character of the Duke and the world of Valorgana is a sweeping feat of literary imagination. With the pace, panorama and plot twists of a great nineteenth-century classic, the breathless story of the Duke’s ensuing feud unfolds, asking some big twenty-first century questions about our relationships with privilege, the past, the natural world and each other.

"Extraordinary." The GuardianRome 1965. A man and a woman, excluded from Italian society, abandon their eight month old daughter in the Villa Borghese and take extreme action. In 2021, that child, author Maria Grazia Calandrone, sets out to discover the truth of what happened, examining the places where her mother lived and suffered.Your Little Matter is an intimate reconstruction of the life and death of a parent, a shocking insight into the real lives of marginalised women from the Italian South in the relatively recent past, and the revelation of a cause celebre that was a catalyst for social change in Italy. Combining poetic and philosophical insight with forensic investigation, the completely personal with the very public, the book tells a devastating story of how the institutionalised callousness of state and society can lead to tragedy, and how the dogged pursuit of personal choice can lead to liberation.Your Little Matter was shortlisted for the 2023 Premio Strega.

Faysal receives a mysterious letter about the death of aunt he can’t remember. Leaving his lover and his life in Europe behind, he returns to the village of his birth in Palestine and to his family’s extraordinary, deserted house, the palace on the higher hill. With a backdrop of violence and the permanent threat from settlers, Faysal wanders the once-lavish rooms as characters from the past return to shed light on his family story and on the story of his people.In beautiful, angry prose, Karim Kattan introduces us to an intimate Palestine of the imagination where dreams and nightmares are in constant conflict. With hints of One Hundred Years of Solitude and Brideshead Revisited, he gives a nuanced deeply moving vision of the tragedy of war and a picture of his homeland that feels entirely new to English-speaking readers.The book won the 2021 Prix des Cinq Continents de la Francophonie.

In Scauri, an end of the line seaside town forty miles or so from Rome, Vittoria dies unexpectedly in her bath. Whilst the townsfolk meet the event with sad but respectful southern Italian silence, Lea, the town lawyer, wants to investigate. Who was Vittoria, what were her secrets, why had she mysteriously arrived in Scauri thirty years earlier? And was her relationship with Lea all that it seemed?In this unforgettable portrait of a small town and the women who live there, reverberations from the past catch up with present. Through the silences, Vittoria’s story is revealed and everything - passions, emotions, and relationships - changes forever.Novelist, editor, critic, cultural commentator and mathematician Chiara Valerio is a sensation in Italy and The Little I Knew is a huge bestseller.

In a housing development in the middle of the nowhere, one of the many that were built in Spain, but never finished because of the crash, la small community of neighbours, trying to lead a normal life, despite living far from everything. Beyond the development that promised every luxury, beyond the streets leading nowhere, behind a high metal fence, the unfinished houses menace the inhabitants as they become occupied by people on the fringes of society whom the crash has destroyed.Rosa Ribas’s unnamed protagonists come from different sides of this fence. The atmospheric, disturbing, and addictive story of their growing relationship is half quirky love story half strong commentary on how easily and quickly people can fall through the cracks of society. Although the message is entirely universal, the context is deliciously and uniquely Spanish.

Samahani, the latest work by Sudanese author Abdelaziz Baraka Sakin, winner of the 2020 Prix de la Littérture Arabe, means ‘forgive me’ in Swahili, two words that stand in stark contrast to everything that happens in this novel.Set in 19th century Zanzibar, this is a dark story of slavery, cruelty and vengeance, that depict the agonies of the native Zanzibaris at the hands of both Europeans and Arabs, that turns their apparent island paradise into a living hell of cruelty and exploitation. Through the relationship between a spoilt, scheming, powerful Omani princess and her eunuch African slave Sundus, captured and castrated by Arab slavers, Sakin builds a grand narrative that paints a picture of barbarism and man’s inhumanity to man and becomes a furious cry against persecution in all its forms.

Wanderer, washed-up writer and part-time philosopher of Athens’ nightlife, Michalis Krokos is more comfortable watching the Johnny Depp trial on livestream than getting down to his next book. But his apathetic state is shattered when prosecutor Sofia Charitsi shows up with some startling news. His long-lost friend Rebecca, a sharp-tongued trans sex worker, is in serious trouble. For some reason, a violent far-right group, ONET wants her silenced, and fast.To rescue her, Krokos agrees to go undercover as a fake news copywriter inside ONET’s inner circle. Write a few lies, steal a few secrets, take down a fascist or two. All in a day’s work, right? But what begins as a rescue mission spirals into a wild dive through backroom deals, blackmail, and political paranoia. Sofia is hiding her own complicated past with ONET’s megalomaniac leader, and Krokos ends up just trying to stay alive long enough to write something that might be worth publishing.Part literary noir, part darkly comic political thriller Deepfake explores truth, loyalty, and the absurd theatre of modern politics— set in the heart of a sweltering, sleepless Athens.

On the hottest day of one of the hottest summers anyone has ever known, young journalist Federico Desideri is sent on an apparently routine assignment; to snatch an interview with Italy’s latest Oscar winning film director. But in Rome. Far from the comforts of his native Milan. When the director turns out to be elusive, and the Romans as rough as their reputation, Federico falls in with Barry Volpicelli, the rumoured inspiration behind the winning movie’s lead character - a seductive, fast-talking, America-obsessed rogue, and instead of finding his interviewee, he finds himself in Paradiso—Barry’s crumbling country estate on the Lazio coast, with an eccentric cast of inhabitants who seem frozen in time. Alan Bennett meets Fellini at a shabby, Italian White Lotus in this novel which is a satirical bildungsroman through the nature of illusion, escapism and the enduring myth of the Eternal City. As Federico navigates the absurdities, passions, and dangers of this apparent paradise, it starts to look more and more like purgatory, and he begins to question how he can find his way out.