Tuskar Rock – serie

A PARIS REVIEW BOOK OF THE YEAR'Highly accomplished, deeply satisfying ... I marked up almost every page' TLS'Laugh-out-loud funny' DAILY MAIL'My favourite nihilistic romantic' RACHEL KUSHNER'A brutally honest, insightful, intelligent and absolutely hilarious novel' MICHAEL IMPERIOLIWhat's this book about? Is there a restroom? Do you have gluten-free bagels? Do you work here? Do you have a restroom? Do I buy books or rent books or what? Still a bookseller in his late forties, Sean knows that the worst thing about a bookshop is the customers. Then there's the gift-wrapping, the invoicing, the Yelp reviews. The overwhelming sense of self-loathing after another day of not writing a novel yourself. While Sean's book remains unfinished, his city has changed around him. As have friends and acquaintances, at least the ones who keep in touch. The service industry is different, too. But what, or whom, is he serving anyway? Biting, hilarious and self-aware, John Tottenham's debut novel is a razor-sharp dissection of gentrification, friendship, jealousy and the role of literature in a digital age.

Winner of The Center for Fiction's 2021 First Novel Prize'A gorgeously written, Franzen-calibre tale' O MagazineIn this vivid, darkly funny and beautifully rendered debut novel, Kirstin Valdez Quade brings to life the struggles of five generations of the Padilla family. Amadeo, struggling to stay off the bottle, Angel, his pregnant fifteen-year-old daughter, Yolanda, the family matriarch, reeling from a recent discovery, Angel's mother, who Angel isn't speaking to and Tío Tive, keeper of the family's history. But amid the challenges they face individually and together, it is Connor, Angel's baby, who might just be the one to save the family from themselves.

'Duncan brings a new way of seeing to the world of prose' Irish TimesMichael has been away from Ireland for most of his life and lives alone in Bilbao after the death of Catherine, his girlfriend. Each day he listens to two versions of the same piece of music before walking the same route to visit Richard Serra's enormous installation, The Matter of Time, in the Guggenheim.As he walks, his thoughts circle around the five-year period of mental agitation spent in Leipzig with Catherine. This 'sabbatical', caused by the stress of his job and the suicide of a former colleague, splits his career as an engineer into two distinct parts.Intensely realistic, mapped out like Michael's intricate drawings, this is a novel of precision and beguiling intelligence.

'When I was sent by the Soviet state to London to further my studies in calculus, knowing I would never become a great mathematician, I strayed instead into the foothills of anthropology ...'It is 1950 and Nikolai Lobachevsky, great-grandson of his illustrious namesake, is surveying a bog in the Irish Midlands, where he studies the locals, the land and their ways. One afternoon, soon after he arrives, he receives a telegram calling him back to Leningrad for a 'special appointment'. Lobachevsky may not be a great genius but he is not foolish: he recognises a death sentence when he sees one and leaves to go into hiding on a small island in the Shannon estuary, where the island families harvest seaweed and struggle to split rocks. Here Lobachevsky must think about death, how to avoid it and whether he will ever see his home again

'Destined to become a classic of its kind' Maggie Nelson'One of the most compulsive voices I've read in years' Olivia Laing, ObserverWhen Constance told her ex-husband that she was dating women, he made a string of unfounded accusations that separated her from her young son, Paul. Laurent trained Paul to say he no longer wants to see his mother, and the judge believed him.She approaches this new life with passionate intensity and the desire for an unencumbered existence, certain that no love can last. Apart from cigarettes, two regular lovers and women she has brief affairs with, Constance's approach is monastic and military - she swims daily, reads, writes, and returns to small or borrowed rooms for the night.A starkly beautiful account of impossible sacrifices asked from mothers, Love Me Tender is a bold novel of defiance, freedom and self-knowledge.

Nominated for the PEN/Jean Stein Book AwardLauded as the best story writer of our time, Joy Williams returns with a taut collection that responds to our modern dilemmas with her signature dry wit and deftness of touch. In sinister and shifting landscapes, we meet souls lost and found: from the twin heiresses of a dirty industrial fortune, who must commit a violent act in recompense for their family's deeds, to a newly grown man who still revolves in a dreamscape of his childhood boarding-school innocence, to the "pelican child", who lives with the bony, ill-tempered Baba Yaga in a little hut on chicken legs. For readers of Lorrie Moore, Mary Gaitskill and George Saunders, these haunted stories examine the instincts separating us from the beastly and the divine.

AN IRISH INDEPENDENT AND IRISH TIMES BOOK TO LOOK OUT FOR'An original voice' Colm Tóibín'Duncan brings a new way of seeing' Irish Times'A deliberative and delicate reading experience, revelatory in the truest sense of that word' GuardianDuring winter season in a secluded Alpine city, John Molloy, an Irish restorative sculptor, meets Bernadette, an enigmatic Italian sociologist. As John falls in love, a distressing moment from his youth rises into view, the disastrous fallout of which has reverberated unchecked through his life.Years later, a letter from home arrives, asking him to pray for the speedy death of an ailing friend. Over a day-long odyssey through the ancient streets and churches of Bologna, John is forced to confront his present, his past and the bedrock of his psyche. A delicately crafted novel of two halves, a decade apart, The Gorgeous Inertia of the Earth is a masterful excavation of human desires, inhibitions, and the patterns of habit to which we unwittingly fall prey.

'One of the most mysterious artists now at work' Colm Tóibín'The contemporary master of the apocalypse' Susan SontagUnder a cold sun blazing in a blinding blue sky, a train pulls away from Urga and out into the Gobi desert, headed for Beijing. Aboard the train sits a traveller who, amid a Dantean spiritual crisis and dogged by questions of the most profound variety, has been compelled to run away to the heart of China. His journey, though finite, resists quantification. His destination proves even harder to define.Available now in English for the first time since its original publication in 1992, Prisoner of Urga is an extraordinary passage through a hellacious paradise of perilous poetry.