From the author of the award-winning White Fever, Kolyma Diaries is an excursion into one of the world's last remaining badlands, a place full of Gulag ghosts and living wrecks. All along the 2000 kil
'A day without laughter is a day wasted.'It is Christmas Day when Charlie Chaplin receives a visit from Death. The great actor is 82 years old, but not yet ready to face the final curtain. Desperate t
One night in 1968, on the eve of the Soviet invasion, 13 year-old Ondra and his younger brother Kamil are bundled into a coach bound for their father's birthplace, a mountainous, forested village in n
On the eve of the first Chechen war in the 1990s, Mikail Eldin was a young and naïve arts journalist. By the end of the second war, he had become a battle-hardened war reporter and mountain partisan w
It is announced that Jesus Christ is to visit Belgium in a few weeks time, on its national day, the 21st of July. Coincidentally, our narrator's mother dies and his marriage ends. Feeling very low, an
LONGLISTED FOR THE INTERNATIONAL MAN BOOKER PRIZE 2019'I am astonished by Four Soldiers. I have never read anything like it, yet it is one of those books you feel must always have existed, a classic o
If you were to master the twenty languages discussed in Babel, you could talk with three quarters of the world's population. But what makes these languages stand out amid the world's estimated 6,500 t
Meet Keiko.Keiko is 36 years old. She's never had a boyfriend, and she's been working in the same supermarket for eighteen years.Keiko's family wishes she'd get a proper job. Her friends wonder why sh
One of the great contemporary European writers takes on Europe's biggest issue Richard has spent his life as a university professor, immersed in the world of books and ideas, but now he is retired, hi
