Literature & Fiction

A 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.

From the New York Times–bestselling author: A story of one man’s awakening and “a heartfelt reminder of the many people whose struggles are never known” (The Plain Dealer).
 
Jesper Humlin, a poet of middling acclaim and underwhelming book sales, is facing a crisis. His boy-wonder stockbroker has squandered Humlin’s investments, and his editor, who says he must write a crime novel to survive, starts pitching and promoting the nonexistent book despite Humlin’s emphatic refusals. Then, when he travels to Gothenburg to give a reading, he finds himself thrust into a world where names shift, stories overlap, and histories are both deeply secret and in profound need of retelling.
 
Leyla from Iran, Tanya from Russia, and Tea-Bag, who is from Africa but claims to be from Kurdistan (because Kurds might receive preferential treatment as refugees)—these are the shadow girls who become Humlin’s unlikely pupils in impromptu writing workshops. Though he had imagined their stories as fodder for his own book, soon their intertwining lives require him to play a much different role.
 
Offering both surprising humor and heartrending tragedy, The Shadow Girls is a “passionate and entertaining” triumph that will astonish longtime fans of Mankell’s acclaimed Kurt Wallander novels as well as readers new to his work (The Daily Telegraph).

“A tiny miracle of a biographical novel” inspired by the life of the brilliant French composer (Booklist).
 
Shortlisted for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award
 
This beguiling and original evocation of the last ten years in the life of a musical genius opens in 1927 as Maurice Ravel—dandy, eccentric, curmudgeon—crosses the Atlantic aboard the luxury liner the SS France to begin his triumphant grand tour of the United States. With flashes of sly, quirky humor, this novel captures the folly of the era as well as its genius, and the personal and professional life of the sartorially and socially splendid ravel over the course of a decade. From a winner of the prestigious Prix Goncourt, Ravel is a touching literary portrait of a dignified and lonely man going reluctantly into the night.
 
“A beautifully musical little novel.” —The New York Times Book Review
 
“The most distinctive voice of his generation.” —The Washington Post

From the bestselling author of the Kurt Wallander novels: The “haunting and fascinating” tale of a young boy’s harrowing odyssey from Africa to Sweden (Booklist).
 
In the 1870s, Hans Bengler arrives in Cape Town from Småland, Sweden, driven by a singular desire: to discover an insect no one has seen before and name it after himself. But then he impulsively adopts a young San orphan boy whose parents have been killed by European colonists. Christening the boy Daniel, Hans brings him back to Sweden—a quite different specimen than he first contemplated.
 
Daniel is told to call Bengler “Father,” and to knock on doors and bow. He continually struggles to understand this strange new land of mud and snow that surrounds and seemingly entraps him. At the same time, he is haunted by visions of his murdered parents calling him home to Africa. Knowing that the only way home is by sea, he decides he must learn to walk on water if he is ever to reclaim his true place in the world.
 
Evocative and sometimes brutal, the novel follows Daniel through a series of tragedies and betrayals that culminate in a shocking act. Henning Mankell, a world-renowned “master of atmosphere,” offers this “quiet tragedy” with a ruthless elegance all his own (The Boston Globe).

These 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

For fans of Duras’s enduring bestseller The Lover, an evocative and intimate exploration of the drama and power of adolescence, in a remarkable blend of fiction and memoir

Far more daring and truthful than any of her other novels, The North China Lover is a fascinating retelling of the dramatic experiences of Duras’s adolescence that shaped her most famous work. Initially conceived as notes toward a screenplay for The Lover, this later novel, written toward the end of her life, emphasizes the tougher aspects of her youth in Indochina and possesses the intimate feel of a documentary.

Both shocking and enthralling, the story Duras tells is “so powerfully imagined (or remembered) that it . . . lingers like a strong perfume” (Publishers Weekly). Hailed by the French critics as a return to “the Duras of the great books and the great days,” it is a mature and complex rendering of a formative period in the author’s life.

“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)