FSG Originals – serie

A woman spills the story of her life to a bar full of strangers, in the acerbic first novel from Laura Adamczyk.Anything can become the story of your life if you let it, and I suppose this became mine.In Island City, a wry, wistful woman, estranged from her family, sells her belongings and moves back to her hometown in the Midwest. To her, it’s the “perfect place to give up.” She wants to get rid of everything—her stuff, her ambitions. Before making a “messy exit,” she holes up in a dark bar and tells her stories to an audience of indifferent strangers. There’s the time the river dried up and you could walk across its bed; the day her sister got clobbered at the nursing home; when her dad got cancer, then Alzheimer’s, then cancer again. Now she’s forgetting things the way he did, words slipping away. That third drink isn’t helping.Laura Adamczyk, whose writing is “super weird” and “super unsettling” (Eugenia Williamson, The Boston Globe), creates a full portrait of a person, even as the image blurs and fades. Delivered as a booze-soaked monologue, Island City is a funny, devastating first novel, one that bristles and burns with true feeling.

In the spirit of Haruki Murakami and Amelia Gray, Catherine Lacey's Nobody Is Ever Missing is full of mordant humor and uncanny insights, as Elyria waffles between obsession and numbness in the face of love, loss, danger, and self-knowledge. Without telling her family, Elyria takes a one-way flight to New Zealand, abruptly leaving her stable but unfulfilling life in Manhattan. As her husband scrambles to figure out what happened to her, Elyria hurtles into the unknown, testing fate by hitchhiking, tacitly being swept into the lives of strangers, and sleeping in fields, forests, and public parks.Her risky and often surreal encounters with the people and wildlife of New Zealand propel Elyria deeper into her deteriorating mind. Haunted by her sister's death and consumed by an inner violence, her growing rage remains so expertly concealed that those who meet her sense nothing unwell. This discord between her inner and outer reality leads her to another obsession: If her truest self is invisible and unknowable to others, is she even alive?The risks Elyria takes on her journey are paralleled by the risks Catherine Lacey takes on the page. In urgent, spiraling prose she whittles away at the rage within Elyria and exposes the very real, very knowable anxiety of the human condition. And yet somehow Lacey manages to poke fun at her unrelenting self-consciousness, her high-stakes search for the dark heart of the self.

An epic four-volume adventure in mythical medieval Japan: a world of warriors and assassins, demons and spiritsIn The Tengu's Game of Go, the final book of Lian Hearn's epic Tale of Shikanoko--all of which will be published in 2016--the rightful emperor is lost; illness and murder give rise to suspicions and make enemies of allies. Unrest rules the country. Only Shika can end the madness by returning the Lotus Throne to its rightful ruler.As destiny weaves its rich tapestry, a compelling drama plays out against a background of wild forests, elegant castles, hidden temples, and savage battlefields. This is the medieval Japan of Lian Hearn's imagination, where animal spirits clash with warriors and children navigate a landscape as serene as it is deadly."Expect graphic violence, fairy-tale magic, flights of comedy, and operatic melodrama but also genuine intimacy and tragedy." - Kirkus Reviews The Tale of Shikanoko, Book 1: Emperor of the Eight IslandsThe Tale of Shikanoko, Book 2: Autumn Princess, Dragon ChildThe Tale of Shikanoko, Book 3: Lord of the DarkwoodThe Tale of Shikanoko, Book 4: The Tengu's Game of Go

Named one of the best books of 2017 by The Los Angeles Times, The Boston Globe, PopSugar, Financial Times, Chicago Review of Books, Huffington Post, San Francisco Chronicle, Thrillist, Book Riot, National Post (Canada), Kirkus and Publishers WeeklyFrom the author of the Southern Reach Trilogy comes Jeff VanderMeer's Borne, a story about two humans and two creatures. “Am I a person?” Borne asked me.“Yes, you are a person,” I told him. “But like a person, you can be a weapon, too.”In Borne, a young woman named Rachel survives as a scavenger in a ruined city half destroyed by drought and conflict. The city is dangerous, littered with discarded experiments from the Company—a biotech firm now derelict—and punished by the unpredictable predations of a giant bear. Rachel ekes out an existence in the shelter of a run-down sanctuary she shares with her partner, Wick, who deals his own homegrown psychoactive biotech.One day, Rachel finds Borne during a scavenging mission and takes him home. Borne as salvage is little more than a green lump—plant or animal?—but exudes a strange charisma. Borne reminds Rachel of the marine life from the island nation of her birth, now lost to rising seas. There is an attachment she resents: in this world any weakness can kill you. Yet, against her instincts—and definitely against Wick’s wishes—Rachel keeps Borne. She cannot help herself. Borne, learning to speak, learning about the world, is fun to be with, and in a world so broken that innocence is a precious thing. For Borne makes Rachel see beauty in the desolation around her. She begins to feel a protectiveness she can ill afford. “He was born, but I had borne him.”But as Borne grows, he begins to threaten the balance of power in the city and to put the security of her sanctuary with Wick at risk. For the Company, it seems, may not be truly dead, and new enemies are creeping in. What Borne will lay bare to Rachel as he changes is how precarious her existence has been, and how dependent on subterfuge and secrets. In the aftermath, nothing may ever be the same.

A fierce, tender collection of stories about the lives, traumas, and dreams of Mapuche youth in modern-day Chile.The word "pinen" comes from Mapudungun and refers to the dust or the dirt that sticks to the body.In the all-too-real streets of Santiago de Chile, Daniela Catrileo gives us a portrait of a generation in search of itself. In "Warriache," two childhood friends whose lives have been marked by their part Mapuche identity and the memories that bind them circle each other at a party. Their dance of delays and inevitable meeting expands into a tale across epochs-one that gives life to the hidden and suppressed experiences of those who live on the margins of other stories. In "Pornomisery," a young girl considers the sexual violence that seems to lurk behind every closed door in her cloistered community and darken every possible route of exit.Pinen is suffused with the humanity of its vivid, complex characters, bringing a side of modern Chile to vibrant life. It also marks the confident next step in the career of a writer poised to become one of the boldest and most uncompromising chroniclers of modern life in Latin American literature.

A charged, delightfully offbeat novel of four women forging their way across time, place, and language in search of desire, power, and connection.One day they were in love and the next, a manuscript appeared in his study, written in a language she didn't speak. Leonie and Max are on separate but tangled paths. Now, she might be pregnant. And he's not answering her texts, off translating poetry from a language he seems barely to know. Ana, the poet, moves through the house her father filled with his paintings, the house where her mother struggled to survive. Ana guards her poems closely. Can she let this foreign man take her words, her art, into his tongue? Does every partnership require some form of surrender? Then Max blinks off the map, and Leonie asks Rhoda-an expert travel writer-to track him down in Malta, where a sun-baked wildness undermines Rhoda's sense of reality. What kind of caper is unfolding? And what will Rhoda do with this new version of herself? Charged and mischievous, Katy Simpson Smith's The Maltese Version upends the stability of language, desire, and the ways we make meaning.

A wise and subtle work that explores the refractive power of memory, and what it means to exist in the lives of others-from one of the most highly regarded writers working in Germany today. When Judith Hermann runs into her psychoanalyst in the middle of the night on Berlin's Kastanienallee, the meeting sparks an exploration of the moments and memories that have made a life: an intense friendship with another young mother; an unconventional childhood with long summers spent on the German coast; and the ties of familial trauma that echo through generations. In three interconnected sections at once confessional and lyrical, We Would Have Told Each Other Everything explores how the life and work of the writer converge and depart from each other when memory is no longer reliable and dreams intrude on reality.

Electrifying, sharp, and darkly funny, Mariel Franklin's first novel, Bonding, is a story of sex, tech, and pharmaceuticals in the tangle of our digital age.Adrift in her early thirties, Mary is exhausted by an endless cycle of casual relationships and unstable work. When she loses her job, she books a spontaneous trip to Ibiza and meets Tom, a brilliant chemist on the verge of launching a new antidepressant: a drug called Eudaxa that claims to be able to cure the anxieties of modern life. Back in London, Mary runs into the volatile and driven Lara, who has channeled her ambitions into Openr, an innovative dating app designed to revolutionize the industry. Mary and Lara have a complicated past, and as Mary begins working for Openr and falling for Tom, tech and pharma collide with shocking consequences, forcing her to question what love and success mean in a world that is hurtling out of control.