International Literature

Penguin Book of Spanish Short Stories

Various authors

This exciting new collection celebrates the Spanish short story, from its modern origins in the 19th century to the remarkable work being written today. It blends hidden gems and old favourites, surprising new voices and giants of Spain’s literary culture, from Emilia Pardo Bazán and Leopoldo Alas, through Mercè Rodoreda and Manuel Rivas, to Javier Marías. Brimming with romance, horror, history, farce, strangeness and beauty, and showcasing alluring hairdressers, war defectors, vampiric mothers, and talismanic mandrake roots, the daring and entertaining assortment of tales in The Penguin Book of Spanish Short Stories will be a treasure trove for readers.

The Ghost Theatre

Mat Osman

Bloomsbury

$33

Named book of the year by The Evening Standard, The Observer and The Times, Matt Osman’s magical Elizabethan tale tells the story of Shay, a messenger girl and trainer of hawks, and Nonesuch, the dark star of the city’s fabled child theatre scene. Together they create The Ghost Theatre: a troupe staging magical plays in London’s hidden corners. As their hallucinatory performances incite rebellion among the city’s outcasts, the pair’s relationship sparks and burns against a backdrop of the plague and a London in flames. The Ghost Theatre is a beautifully written story of rebellion and magic, of mysticism and broken love in the streets of Elizabethan London.

The Wind Knows My Name

Isabel Allende

Bloomsbury

The East Indian

Brinda Charry

Among the settlers, slaves and indentured servants that make the treacherous journey across the Atlantic to the New World in the early 1600s – for some, an exciting opportunity, for others, a brutal abduction –there is also Tony, the first Indian to set foot on American soil. East Indian follows Tony from his homeland on the Coromandel Coast of India to London, where the orphaned teenager is kidnapped and bound to servitude on a Virginia plantation. The East Indian is a Dickensian-style yarn about family, friendship, and finding oneself in the seeds of a new world.

Bad Summer People

Emma Rosenblum

Penguin

Outsiders aren’t welcome on the island where the same families have been holidaying for years. There are the Weinsteins, the Metzners, the Grobels, and the unlucky-inlove Rachel Woolf. Then Robert arrives, the handsome new tennis coach, who some people are going out of their way to make very welcome … But then a body is found face-down beneath the boardwalk. None of them would claim to be a good person, but who among them is capable of murder?

The Bee Sting

Paul Murray

Penguin

Samuel Adler is five years old when his father disappears during Kristallnacht and his mother sends him alone to England, away from danger in Austria. Eight decades later, Anita Diaz and her mother board another train, fleeing looming danger in El Salvador, but the pair become separated and Anita finds herself alone in the Nogales camp. Intertwining past and present, The Wind Knows My Name tells the tale of these two unforgettable characters, both in search of family and home. It is a testament to the sacrifices that parents make, and a love letter to the children who survive the most unfathomable dangers.

$33

The Barnes family is in trouble, on the verge of fracturing and in a crisis with roots that stretch deep into the past. When the moment of reckoning finally arrives, all four of them must decide how far they’re willing to go to save the family, and whether there’s still time to give their story a happy ending … From the author of Skippy Dies comes a dazzlingly intricate and poignant tragicomedy about family, fortune, and the struggle to be a good man at the end of the world.

The Happy Couple

Naoise Dolan

Naoise Dolan, author of the runaway sensation Exciting Times, returns with a novel about four characters, linked by the wedding they are all set to attend. Will it be the happiest day of their lives? The beginning of the lives they have always imagined? Or the end of them? As the wedding approaches and these four lives intersect, each character will find themselves looking for a path to their happily ever after.

Scribe $35

Mater 2-10

Hwang Sok-yong

Yellowface

R.F. Kuang

Bestselling sensation Juniper Song is not who she says she is; she didn’t write the book she claims she wrote, and she is most certainly not Asian American. In this chilling and hilariously cutting novel from the #1 New York Times bestselling author R. F. Kuang, takes on questions of diversity, racism, cultural appropriation and the persistent erasure of Asian-American voices and history by Western white society.

The Moon Represents My Heart

Pim Wangtechawat

$33

The Wang family are hiding a secret – they all have the ability to time travel. When parents Joshua and Lily depart for the past and never return, their children Tommy and Eva are forced to deal with their grief alone. Eva might be trying to find her place in the present, but Tommy is pulled further and further into a past that he hopes holds the truth. When he falls in love with a woman from a different era, his inability to confront his own history has severe ramifications for the people who can bring him happiness.

Big Swiss

Jen Beagin

Big Swiss. That’s Greta’s nickname for her – she is tall, and she is from Switzerland. Greta can see her now: dressed top to toe in white, that adorable gap between her two front teeth, her penetrating blue eyes. But Greta has never met Big Swiss and is miles away from Switzerland, sitting at a desk in her own house, transcribing this disembodied voice. What she doesn’t know is that she’s about to bump into Big Swiss in the local dog park. A new – and not entirely honest – relationship is going to be born.

I Am Homeless If This Is Not My Home

Lorrie Moore

$30 Faber

Finn is in the grip of middle-age and on an enforced break from work. High up in a New York City hospice, he sits with his beloved brother Max, who is slipping from one world into the next. But when a phone call summons Finn back to a troubled old flame, a strange journey begins, opening a trapdoor in reality. It will prompt a questioning of life and death, grief and the past, comedy and tragedy, and the diaphanous separations that lie between them all. Lorrie Moore’s new novel is a magic box of longing and surprise.

Cursed Bunny

Bora Chung

This genre-defying collection of short stories blurs the lines between magical realism, horror, and science fiction. Using elements of the fantastic and surreal, Bora Chung exposes the very real horrors and cruelties of patriarchy and capitalism in modern society, gliding effortlessly from terrifying to wryly humorous in a skilful translation by the acclaimed Anton Hur. Shortlisted for the 2022 Booker Prize.

$33

The Discreet Charm of the Big Bad Wolf

Alexander McCall Smith

In the hilarious new novel in the Detective Varg series, Ulf Varg will need to resolve both a sensitive crime and his own delicate dilemma. In the midst of the downsizing of the Department of Sensitive Crimes due to the recent downturn of sensitive crime, Ulf embarks on an important inquiry: a man’s cabin has disappeared and Ulf must find out what happened.

The Mill House Murders

Yukito Ayatsuji

Every year, a group of acquaintances pays a visit to the castle-like Mill House, home to the reclusive Fujinuma Kiichi, who has lived his life behind a mask since a disfiguring car accident. This year, however, the visit is disrupted by a gruesome murder. As Kiyoshi Shimada investigates, death strikes again, and again … can he get to the truth before the killer gets to him?

Central Park West

James Comey

Exquisite Corpse

Marija Pericic

$35

Beautiful but impoverished Lina Dahlstrom is dying of tuberculosis and it seems that no one can save her. All hope is lost until an eccentric doctor, Carl Dance, becomes enthralled with Lina’s charms and vows to do everything in his power to cure her. But when the illness claims Lina’s life, Dance’s obsession grows. And so begins a mad and criminal scheme to bring her back from beyond the grave. Set in Stockholm in 1930 and based on true events, Exquisite Corpse is a story about the madness and horror of a romance that knows no bounds.

A Chateau Under Siege

Martin Walker

$33

Federal prosecutor Nora Carleton has spent years building a case against a powerful New York mobster. Desperate to stop the mobster from walking free, Nora investigates the darker side of the city. The more she uncovers, the deeper the corruption runs. Former director of the FBI James Comey draws on years of experience for this thrilling debut novel.

Cross Down

James Patterson

Penguin $33

When a series of military-style attacks erupts across the United States, Detective John Sampson is called in to investigate. As Sampson discovers a lead through an ex-military contact, his partner Alex Cross is brutally side-lined, leaving him certain about one thing: he can trust no one. Sampson must revisit his military past if he is to save his country’s future.

The event of the Perigord tourist season is to be the re-enactment of the liberation of the historic town of Sarlat from the English in 1370. But it all goes wrong when the man playing the part of the French general is almost killed. France’s favourite country cop, Bruno Courreges, discovers that the man’s wound was faked, and that he is secretly negotiating a massive deal to build a semi-conductor industry in France. But then a new and dangerous player emerges, determined to nip the deal in the bud.

The Scarlet Papers

Matthew Richardson Penguin $33

The devastating secrets of the Scarlet Papers connect three people across decades: a brilliant German scientist spirited out of the ruins of Nazi Europe in search of a new life; a rising star of the British diplomatic service in Moscow, 1964, whose job is not what it seems;and a once promising academic offered an opportunity to seal his place in history in London in the present day. This single document binds their stories, their lives, and the fate of the world.