Stefan Zweig

Anthea Bell

A new Pushkin Collection edition of this classic Zweig novella; a darkly compelling coming-of-age story.

Burning Secret

Jeremy Adler

E.T.A. Hoffmann

It was E. T. A. Hoffmann (1776-1822) who first explored many of the themes and techniques which were later used by writers from Dickens to Dostoyevsky, Poe to Kafka, Baudelaire to Marquez. His career reached a glorious climax in The Tomcat Murr, perhaps the strangest novel of the nineteenth century. Hoffmann was a follower of Cervantes and Sterne, a pioneering 'magic realist', fascinated by Gothic horror, extreme mental states and supernatural events occurring within sharply (and sometimes satirically) rendered social settings. A talented composer and painter, he portrayed himself in the guise of Johannes Kreisler - the hypochondriac, antisocial and moody but brilliant musician. In this book, a vain and very bourgeois tomcat sets out to write his memoirs, using a biography of Kreisler as a blotting pad. By a printer's error, the two lives get spliced together into a bizarre double narrative.

The Life and Opinions of the Tomcat Murr

Rafik Schami

A dead man hangs from the portal of St Paul's Chapel in Damascus. He was a Muslim officer - and he was murdered. But when Detective Barudi sets out to interrogate the man's mysterious widow, the Secret Service takes the case away from him. Barudi continues to investigate clandestinely and discovers the murderer's motive: it is a blood feud between the Mushtak and Shahin clans, reaching back to the beginnings of the 20th century. And, linked to it, a love story that can have no happy ending, for reconciliation has no place within the old tribal structures. Rafik Schami's novel spans a century of Syrian history in which politics and religions continue to torment an entire people. Simultaneously, his poetic stories from three generations tell of the courage of lovers who risk death sooner than deny their passions. He has also written a heartfelt tribute to his hometown Damascus and a great and moving hymn to the power of love.

The Dark Side of Love

Cornelia Funke

Although a year has passed, not a day goes by without Meggie thinking of the extraordinary events of Inkheart, and the story whose characters strode out of the pages and changed her life for ever. But for Dustfinger, the fire-eater, torn from his world of words, the need to return has become desperate. When he finds a crooked storyteller with the magical ability to read him back, he sets in motion a dangerous reversal that sees the characters of Inkheart transported to a charmed Inkworld, about to be fought over by rival rebels and princes.

Inkspell

Kerstin Meyer

Violetta is a little princess who wants to be as strong and brave as her brothers. And what she lacks in size, she makes up for in determination. At night she slips out into the woods and secretly teaches herself to become the cleverest, most nimble knight in the land. Soon she will be ready for the greatest battle of all - the battle for herself.

The Princess Knight

Christine Nöstlinger

Frantz Wittkamp

Mrs. Bartolotti finds a factory-made child, who never does anything wrong, in the post—delivered by mistake. The factory men try to reclaim Conrad but he doesn't want to go.

Conrad

Erich Kästner

Luise has ringlets. Lottie has braids. Apart from that they look exactly the same. But they are sure that they have never set eyes on each other in their lives. When the two girls meet at a summer camp and discover the secret behind their similarity, they decide to switch places. Everyone is fooled (apart from the dog) and, despite a few mistakes and misadventures, everything goes to plan for Luise as Lottie and Lottie as Luise - until their father meets a young, beautiful woman and things start to unravel...Funny, moving, affectionate and improbable, The Parent Trap has twice been adapted for film - but the book remains one of the great classics of German children's literature.

The Parent Trap

Anne-Laure Bondoux

Rebelling against the rigid constraints of her life as Princetta of Galnicia, fifteen-year-old Malva escapes with her maid Philomena and together they embark on a perilous and adventurous journey that will change the course of their lives forever.

The Princetta

Arthur Schnitzler

When Marie realises, with horror, that Felix is intent on making her fulfill her rash vow to die with him, she is left with a terrible conundrum: how can she escape with her life without compromising the self-imposed decorum of attending to the wishes of her dying lover? Schnitzler's talent as a dramatist shines through in this engrossing and shocking psychological study set in fin de siecle Vienna. Pushkin Collection editions feature a spare, elegant series style and superior, durable components.The Collection is typeset in Monotype Baskerville, litho-printed on Munken Premium White Paper and notch-bound by the independently owned printer TJ International in Padstow. The covers, with French flaps, are printed on Colorplan Pristine White Paper. Both paper and cover board are acid-free and Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) certified."

Dying

Julia Franck

An international best seller and winner of the German Book Prize, The Blindness of the Heart is a dark marvel of a novel by one of Europe’s freshest young voices—a family story spanning two world wars and several generations in a German family. In the devastating opening scene, a woman named Helene stands with her seven-year-old son in a provincial German railway station in 1945, amid the chaos of civilians fleeing west. Having survived with him through the horror and deprivation of the war years, she abandons him on the station platform and never returns. The story quickly circles back to rural Germany and Helene’s childhood, which came to an abrupt end with the outbreak of the First World War. Her father is sent to the eastern front, and her Jewish mother withdraws from the hostility of her surroundings into a state of mental confusion. As we follow Helene into adulthood, we watch riveted as the costs of survival and ill-fated love turn her into a woman capable of the unforgiveable.

The Blindness of the Heart

Five Historical Miniatures

Genius and Discovery

Hermann Simon

Irene Stratenwerth

Marie Jalowicz-Simon

One Woman's Extraordinary Account of Survival in the Heart of Nazi Germany

Gone to Ground

Jens K. Holm

Kim and the Buried Treasure

Jakob Arjouni

It began with a favour - it ended with two dead bodies on the floor of Romario's restaurant, their faces covered in ghostly white makeup. Kayankaya is determined to track down their identity, when he realises that he himself is being pursued by a faceless and utterly ruthless criminal gang. A new element has broken into the established order of the Frankfurt gangland: Croatian nationalists, battle-hardened from wars in their homeland. And when Kayankaya rescues a teenage Bosnian, Leila, from what purports to be a refugee hostel, the stakes go through the roof...

A Kayankaya Novel

Kismet

After learning that humans are headed toward his hidden home, Firedrake, a silver dragon, is joined by a brownie and an orphan boy in a quest to find the legendary valley known as the Rim of Heaven, encountering friendly and unfriendly creatures along the

Dragon Rider

Hans Christian Andersen

The strength of a little girl's love enables her to overcome many obstacles and free a boy from the Snow Queen's spell.

A Tale in Seven Stories

The Snow Queen

Johanna Adorján

Johanna Adorjn

The author describes the unconventional lives of her grandparents, from surviving the Holocaust and fleeing Budapest during the uprising of 1956 to their complex personalities and long-buried family secrets that may have led them to take their own lives together.

An Exclusive Love: A Memoir

Master calligrapher Hamid Farsi finds himself questioning the uses of the Arabic language in the modern world and devises a radical plan for reform as the relationship with his wife Nura becomes strained as she is flattered by the attention from Hamid's young apprentice.

The Calligrapher's Secret

Ritchie Robertson

Sigmund Freud

"A Case of hysteria, popularly known as the Dora Case, affords a rare insight into how Freud dealt with patients and interpreted what they told him. The narrative became a crucial text in the evolution of his theories, combining his studies on hysteria and his new theory of dream-interpretation with early insights into the development of sexuality." --from back cover.

Anthea Bell

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