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

'An utterly distinctive voice in contemporary Irish literature' IRISH TIMES'One of our most original writers'IRISH INDEPENDENTSummer, 1923. Six-year-old Catherine Carolan grows restless on her parents' farm. It's already clear that her intellect will soon outgrow the two-room schoolhouse across the fields. But in post-Civil War Ireland, an education is not an easy thing for a girl to access, and young Catherine is not the only one in her family who will come to tire of rural life.Summer, 1951. To ease him through his final days, Dr. Josef Alois calls for someone from his past. Enter Catherine Carolan, now an Oxford professor. As Alois's mind and body falter, Catherine must decide how far she will follow this man that she loves.A novel in two strands, A Thought without Collision is a beautiful meditation on how we construct our relationship to the world around us.'Duncan offers a different model of novelistic causality, with characters that feel alive in their vivid and quiet complexity' SUSANNAH DICKEY'Very moving, very funny, it will make your brain dance' JO LLOYD'An original voice, a writer who has come to recreate the world on his own terms' COLM TÓIBÍN

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.

'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, The Prisoner of Urga is an extraordinary passage through a hellacious paradise of perilous poetry.

The secret is revealed to her unceremoniously: Manolo is not her father.She wonders if his best friend Sebastian, her real father, might have been kinder than the charismatic, dangerous man she was sent away from as a child. The life granted to her in the Midwest, confusingly predictable though not altogether safe, was worlds away from her mother's madness, and Manolo's reckless chaos, both of which she left behind in Mexico City. Her uncle Ed, more a father to her than anyone, doted on her as if she were his own despite his callous and unwelcoming wife.Now, years later, she attempts to understand the splinters her fractured childhood have left in her. Who were these three fathers? What did they leave her with?