Far and Away
Showing all 5 results
-
Two by Mingarelli
Four Soldiers and A Meal in Winter$19.99Two timeless novellas about men in combat, from the Prix Médicis award winner whom Ian McEwan calls “remarkable,” combined in one anniversary volume for the first time
From the late, award-winning author Hubert Mingarelli, two of his most powerful novellas, now collected in one volume, plunge readers into the brutal, frozen landscapes of war and the moral chasms it creates. This masterful collection, including a tenth-anniversary edition of A Meal in Winter and a twenty-anniversary edition of Four Soldiers, explores the quiet moments of suffering, conscience, and fragile humanity that unfold amidst the overwhelming violence of history.
In the Prix Médicis award-winning Four Soldiers, a small unit in the Red Army in WWI waits out a brutal winter near the Romanian front. Amid the mundane struggle for food and warmth, they talk, smoke, and wait—for spring, for orders, for the inevitable return of violence, revealing the profound bonds and anxieties that define a soldier’s life between battles. The novella was also longlisted for the Man Booker International Prize.
In A Meal in Winter, short-listed for the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize and selected by Indies Introduce in the United States, three German soldiers in Poland during WWII are tasked with capturing a Jewish fugitive. What begins as a simple order descends into a tense moral reckoning when a break from the cold in an abandoned house forces each man to confront his own conscience and the humanity of his prisoner.
Mingarelli’s sparse, evocative prose captures the chilling atmosphere of war and the complex inner lives of men pushed to their limits. Two by Mingarelli is a profound and unforgettable exploration of survival, morality, and the search for warmth in the coldest of times.
-
Still Life
A Novel$19.99 $25.99Price range: $19.99 through $25.99A New York Times Top Historical Fiction Pick of 2020
A stunningly original new novel exploring race, truth in authorship, and the legacy of past exploitation, from the Windham-Campbell lifetime achievement award winner
When Zoëml; Wicomb burst onto the literary scene in 1987 with You Can’t Get Lost in Cape Town, she was hailed by her literary contemporaries and reviewers alike. Since then, her carefully textured writing has cemented her reputation as being among the most distinguished writers working today and earned her one of the inaugural Windham Campbell Prizes for Lifetime Achievement in Fiction Writing.
Wicomb’s majestic new novel Still Life juggles with our perception of time and reality as Wicomb tells the story of an author struggling to write a biography of long-forgotten Scottish poet Thomas Pringle, whose only legacy is in South Africa where he is dubbed the “Father of South African Poetry.” In her efforts to resurrect Pringle, the writer summons the specter of Mary Prince, the West Indian slave whose History Pringle had once published, along with Hinza, his adopted black South African son.
At their side is Sir Nicholas Green, a seasoned time traveler (and a character from Virginia Woolf’s Orlando). Their adventures, as they travel across space and time to unlock the mysteries of Pringle’s life, offer a poignant exploration of colonial history and racial oppression.
-
October
A Novel$19.99 $24.99Price range: $19.99 through $24.99A South African academic returns to her homeland in this novel by the award-winning author of You Can’t Get Lost in Cape Town—“an extraordinary writer” (Toni Morrison).
Winner of the Windham-Campbell Literature Prize, Zoë Wicomb is an essential voice of the South African diaspora, hailed by fellow writers—such as Toni Morrison and J. M. Coetzee, among others—and by reviewers as “a writer of rare brilliance” (The Scotsman).
In October, Wicomb tells the story of Mercia Murray, a South African woman of color in the midst of a difficult homecoming. Abandoned by her partner in Scotland, where she has been living for twenty-six years, Mercia returns to South Africa to find her family overwhelmed by alcoholism and buried secrets. Poised between her new life in Scotland and her South African roots, Mercia recollects the past and assesses the present with a keen sense of irony. October is a stark and utterly compelling novel about the contemporary experience of a woman caught between cultures, adrift in middle age with her memories and an uncertain future.
-
The One That Got Away
Short Stories$17.99 $24.95Price range: $17.99 through $24.95These short stories from the award-winning South African author “combine the coolly interrogative gaze of the outsider with an insider’s intimate warmth” (J. M. Coetzee).
Zoë Wicomb’s debut short story collection, You Can’t Get Lost in Cape Town, won critical acclaim across the globe as well as high praise from fellow authors including Toni Morrison, J. M. Coetzee, Bharati Mukherjee, and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Now, after two novels, Wicomb returns to the genre that first brought her international acclaim.
Set mostly in the South African city of Cape Town, where Wicomb is from, and the Scottish city of Glasgow, where she now lives, this new collection of short stories straddles two worlds. With an array of expertly drawn characters, these twelve tales explore a range of human relationships: marriage, friendship, family, and the fraught yet often intimate relations between those who serve and those who are served.
Full of ironic twists, ambiguities, and moments of startling insight, The One That Got Away showcases this Windham Campbell Award–winning author at the height of her powers.
“An extraordinary writer . . . seductive, brilliant, and precious, her talent glitters.” —Toni Morrison
-
Playing in the Light
A Novel$14.99 $24.95Price range: $14.99 through $24.95“In her ambitious third novel, Wicomb explores South Africa’s history through a woman’s attempt to answer questions surrounding her past” (The New Yorker).
Set in a beautifully rendered 1990s Cape Town, Windham Campbell Prize winner Zoë Wicomb’s celebrated novel revolves around Marion Campbell, who runs a travel agency but hates traveling, and who, in post-apartheid society, must negotiate the complexities of a knotty relationship with Brenda, her first black employee. As Alison McCulloch noted in the New York Times, “Wicomb deftly explores the ghastly soup of racism in all its unglory—denial, tradition, habit, stupidity, fear—and manages to do so without moralizing or becoming formulaic.”
Caught in the narrow world of private interests and self-advancement, Marion eschews national politics until the Truth and Reconciliation Commission throws up information that brings into question not only her family’s past but her identity and her rightful place in contemporary South African society. “Stylistically nuanced and psychologically astute,” Playing in the Light is as powerful in its depiction of Marion’s personal journey as it is in its depiction of South Africa’s bizarre, brutal history (Kirkus Reviews, starred review).
“Post-apartheid South Africa is indeed a new world . . . With this novel, Wicomb proves a keen guide.” —The New York Times
“Delectable . . . Wicomb’s prose is as delightful and satisfying in its culmination as watching the sun set over the Atlantic Ocean.” —The Christian Science Monitor
“[A] thoughtful, poetic novel.” —The Times (London)
Showing all 5 results
