Open Borders Press – serie

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.

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.