SERP
E N T ’S ➸ TA I L SERPENT’S TAIL I
T H E CL E R K E NWE L L PR ES S
I T U S K AR
RO CK PR ES S
SPRING 2015
Contents 2–3 4–5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14–15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22–23 24–25 26–27 28–31 32–33
Gone to Ground Marie Jalowicz Simon All Day Long Joanna Biggs Adrian McKinty’s Sean Duffy Thrillers Gun Street Girl Adrian McKinty Glass Alex Christofi The Winter War Philip Teir Fatale Jean-Patrick Manchette The Gunman Jean-Patrick Manchette The Evening Chorus Helen Humphreys Leonora Elena Poniatowska Pleasantville Attica Locke Cowboys and Indies Gareth Murphy The Moth introduced by Neil Gaiman The Lights of Pointe-Noire Alain Mabanckou A Lesson Before Dying Ernest J. Gaines The Seven Madmen Roberto Arlt Serpent’s Tail Classics Introducing Tuskar Rock Press In the Night of Time Antonio Muñoz Molina Recently published and new in paperback Backlist Contact information
Introduction
Serpent’s Tail an imprint of Profile Books Ltd
Work is a fact of life. But sometimes just staying alive is a job in itself. Marie Jalowicz Simon was a young Jew in 1930s Berlin who realised her best chance of staying alive was to go underground, where she stayed until the war was over. Before she died, she decided to tell this story for the first time. The resulting memoir, Gone to Ground, which we’ll publish in March, is the most extraordinary account of survival I have ever read.
For more information about Serpent’s Tail, visit us at www.serpentstail.com Subscribe to our monthlyish newsletter at bit.ly/STsubscribe To get in touch, you can email, tweet or join us at info@serpentstail.com @serpentstail pinterest.com/serpentstail facebook.com/serpentstailbooks
This season we also have dazzling debut fiction with Alex Christofi’s Glass, a tale of a milkman turned window-cleaner in search of happiness, and Philip Teir’s The Winter War, a Franzen-like dissection of the Scandinavian dream. And non-fiction in the shape of Joanna Biggs’s sweeping survey of contemporary Britain at work, All Day Long. From cleaners to bankers, nurses to entrepreneurs, as we hurtle towards the General Election in April her book asks: are we really all in this together? Hannah Westland Publisher
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Gone to Ground Marie Jalowicz Simon Translated by Anthea Bell
THE CLERKENWELL PRESS
Thrilling and terrifying, this is the gripping true account of a young Jewish woman who survived World War Two by going to ground in Berlin In 1941, Marie Jalowicz Simon, a nineteen-year-old Jewish Berliner, made an extraordinary decision. All around her, Jews were being rounded up for deportation, forced labour and extermination. Marie took off the yellow star and vanished into the city. In the years that followed, Marie lived under an assumed identity, forced to accept shelter wherever she found it. Always on the move, never certain who she could trust, Marie moved between almost twenty different safehouses, living with foreign workers, committed communists and even convinced Nazis. It was only her fierce determination and amazing strokes of luck which kept her alive. This is Marie’s extraordinary story, told with unflinching honesty after more than fifty years of silence.
Reminiscent of Hans Fallada’s bestselling classic Alone in Berlin, Gone to Ground is an unheard testimony of a precarious life and everyday acts of resistance. ‘Takes us deep into Berlin, where meanness and helpfulness, squalor and great heartedness kept close quarters ... a mad journey into the reality that lies beyond the radar of history’s great words and broad brushstrokes’ Berliner Zeitung
Marie Jalowicz Simon (1922–98) was born in Berlin to a middleclass Jewish family. She escaped the ghettos and concentration camps that claimed so many lives during the Second World War by living in hiding in Berlin. Shortly before her death, her son recorded her telling her story for the first time.
Memoir £14.99 Demy hardback 368pp ISBN: 9781781254141 eISBN: 9781782831389 March 2015 World ex USA, Can Exclusive Europe
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All Day Long
Debut
A Portrait of Britain at Work
Joanna Biggs
Hear the voices of Britain’s workforce – rich and poor, native and immigrant, women and men – showing us who we are through what we do Nearly all of us have to work, but how much do we really know about what other people actually do all day? What is it really like to be a fishmonger, a sex worker or an orthodox rabbi? Or, for that matter, a banker, research scientist or advertising exec? How do our jobs colour our life, beliefs and happiness? And what happens to how we feel about work in a recession? In All Day Long, Joanna Biggs has travelled the length and breadth of Britain to find the answers, along the way talking to interns and bosses, professionals and entrepreneurs, thinkers and doers. Her journey takes us from Westminster to the Outer Hebrides, from a hospital in Wales to the industrial Midlands, introducing us to the different worlds of work and the people who inhabit them.
A fascinating and revealing exploration of the time we spend at work and what it means, in the mould of Craig Taylor’s Londoners and Studs Terkel’s Working Combines genuine empathy with social, cultural and political awareness
Joanna Biggs is a writer and editor at the London Review of Books, where she has reported on the student protest movement, the recession in Middlesbrough, legal aid cuts, censorship in China and food banks. She was born in London. @joannabiggs
Non-fiction / Oral history £14.99 Demy hardback 352pp ISBN: 9781781251874 eISBN: 9781782830146 April 2015 World English language
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Adrian McKinty’s Sean Duffy Thrillers
Now available in paperback
‘Duffy is one of the most interesting, convincing and sympathetic police officers in recent crime fiction … McKinty gets better and better’ The Times ‘A strain of rough and visual, sly and lyric narrative prose in service of one hell of a story. Sean Duffy is a great creation’ Daniel Woodrell ‘Duffy is crass and impetuous, but also wickedly funny and capable of an intense, redeeming empathy’ Guardian ‘McKinty is firmly in the front rank of modern crime writers’ Daily Mail ‘McKinty is as good as any novelist around. His lovely flair for language is matched by his feel for place, his appetite for redemptive violence leavened by some seriously mordant wit and his seriously cool appreciation of characters who reject conformity’ Weekend Australian ‘McKinty’s series is settling in as one of crime fiction’s most reliable attractions’ Mail on Sunday
The Cold Cold Ground ‘If Raymond Chandler had grown up in Northern Ireland, The Cold Cold Ground is what he would have written’ The Times Crime fiction £7.99 B format paperback 352pp ISBN: 9781846688232 eISBN: 9781847657954 June 2012 World ex USA, Can Tr
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In the Morning I’ll Be Gone
I Hear the Sirens in the Street
‘Smart and irreverent’ Sunday Times
‘It blew my doors off’ Ian Rankin
Crime fiction £7.99 B format paperback 336pp ISBN: 9781846688218 eISBN: 9781847659316 June 2014 World ex USA, Can
Crime fiction £7.99 B format paperback 352pp ISBN: 9781846688195 eISBN: 9781847659293 January 2014 World ex USA, Can
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Gun Street Girl
New Title
A Sean Duffy Thriller
Adrian McKinty
Fast-paced, sharply written, super-cool and full of dark humour Belfast, 1985. Gunrunners on the borders, riots in the cities, ‘The Power of Love’ on the radio. And somehow, in the middle of it all, Detective Inspector Sean Duffy is hanging on, a Catholic policeman in the hostile Royal Ulster Constabulary. Duffy is initially left cold by the murder of a wealthy couple, shot dead while watching TV. And when their troubled son commits suicide, leaving a note that appears to take responsibility for the deaths, it seems the case is closed. But something doesn’t add up, and people keep dying. Soon Duffy is on the trail of a mystery that will pit him against shadowy US intelligence forces and take him into the white-hot heart of the biggest political scandal of the decade.
‘McKinty has rightly developed an international reputation with his stories of the Troubles in Ulster focused around the edgy, belligerent Detective Inspector Sean Duffy … firmly in the front rank of modern crime writers’ Daily Mail Sean Duffy is like Ian Rankin’s Rebus – but younger, sexier, funnier and more outrageous
Adrian McKinty was born and grew up in Northern Ireland, and now lives in Melbourne, Australia. His first Sean Duffy novel The Cold Cold Ground won the 2013 Spinetingler Award and its sequel I Hear the Sirens in the Street was shortlisted for the 2013 Ned Kelly Award. www.adrianmckinty.com @adrianmckinty
Crime fiction £12.99 Royal trade paperback 336pp ISBN: 9781846689819 eISBN: 9781782830511 January 2015 World ex USA, Can Exclusive Europe
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Glass
Alex Christofi
Debut
A charming, comic tale of a young man finding his way in the modern world Glass is pure. Glass is transparent. Glass is sharp. Günter Glass, ex-milkman and aspiring window-cleaner, is certainly pure. And he’s pretty transparent. But the jury’s still out on how sharp he is. What naïve young Günter does have is a head for heights. So when he is called to window-cleaning’s most glamorous job – to clean the newly constructed Shard in London – he suddenly finds himself leaving the comfort of provincial Salisbury. Enchantingly unprepared for the bright lights of the city – and philosophically underequipped for sharing a flat with an eccentric German savant called the Steppenwolf – Günter must navigate his way along the straight and narrow using just his mother’s homespun wisdom and the knowledge gleaned from haphazard wanderings through Wikipedia. But will his innocence put him on a collision course with the baffling modern world?
Fiction £12.99 Demy hardback 240pp ISBN: 9781846689673 eISBN: 9781782830245 February 2015 World all languages ex USA Exclusive Europe
Alex Christofi was born and grew up in Dorset. After reading English at the University of Oxford, he moved to London to work in publishing. He has written a number of short pieces for theatre, and blogs about arts and culture for Prospect magazine. Glass is his first novel.
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@alex_christofi
With the boyish charm of Huckleberry Finn and the satirical edge of Candide – but with added window-cleaning – Glass will appeal to readers of Mark Haddon, Graeme Simsion and Maria Semple
The Winter War Philip Teir
Debut
Translated by Tiina Nunnally
A wise and funny family drama by Scandinavia’s answer to Jonathan Franzen On the surface, the Paul family are living the liberal, middle-class Scandinavian dream. Max Paul is a renowned sociologist and his wife Katriina has a well-paid job in the public sector. They live in an airy apartment in the centre of Helsinki. But look closer and the cracks start to show. As he approaches his sixtieth birthday, the certainties of Max’s life begin to dissolve. He hasn’t produced any work of note for decades. His wife no longer loves him. His grown-up daughters – one in London, one in Helsinki – have problems of their own. So when a journalist shows up and offers him a seductive lifeline, Max starts down a path from which he may never find a way back. Funny and razor-sharp, Teir’s debut has the feel of a big, contemporary, humane American novel, but with a distinctly Scandinavian edge.
Unravels the fantasy we have of perfect Scandinavian society ‘Somewhere between Richard Yates and John Updike, but with a cooler Nordic temperament’ Expressen
Finland-Swede Philip Teir is considered one of the most promising young writers in Scandinavia. His poetry and short stories have been included in anthologies, including Granta Finland. He lives in Helsinki. The Winter War is his first novel. #scanzen
Fiction 320pp £12.99 Demy hardback ISBN: 9781781254882 £11.99 Export trade paperback ISBN: 9781846689932 eISBN: 9781782830702 January 2015 World English language
US
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Fatale
Jean-Patrick Manchette
Classic
Translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith and with a new foreword by David Peace
Small-town politics can be vicious Aimée Joubert is a drop-dead gorgeous femme fatale with a penchant for bloody murder. Ever on the lookout for opportunities for self-enrichment, she finds plenty to like as a newcomer to the detestable backwater town of Bléville: self-interested parish politics, rampant corruption, dormant grudges, scandals just waiting to be uncovered – yes, there’s a killing to be made here. So Aimée starts to wreak her stylish mayhem on Bléville’s despicable bourgeoisie. But just when she’s ready to take them all to the cleaners, something snaps, and the master manipulator falls prey to her wayward passions. A tornado of redemptive murder and a gleeful satire of small-town life, Fatale is Manchette’s bloodiest, funniest and most riotously enjoyable thriller yet.
Crime fiction £8.99 B format paperback 112pp ISBN: 9781781253892 eISBN: 9781782831266 February 2015 UK Com ex Can Exclusive Europe
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Jean-Patrick Manchette (1942–95) was a genreredefining French crime novelist, screenwriter, critic and translator. David Peace is the prize-winning author of the Red Riding Quartet, The Damned Utd, Red or Dead and three other novels.
‘France’s king of noir fiction … he writes with a bleak, tragic beauty’ The Times ‘A fist between the eyes, leaving the reader reeling … so devastating it takes your breath away’ Complete Review
The Gunman
Jean-Patrick Manchette
Film tie-in
Translated by James Brook
Now a major film starring Sean Penn, Javier Bardem and Idris Elba Deadly professional assassin Martin Terrier returns to Paris after his latest job, determined to get out of the game. Ten years ago he made a promise to go back to his childhood sweetheart in the south of France. But circumstances put Martin’s attempted retirement on hold: a key target is flying in to Paris, and there is only one man fit for the task of eliminating him. As Martin flees southwards, desperate to return to the quiet mediocrity of small-town romance, he finds his former employers will stop at nothing to regain his services for one last job… Bursting with gallic irony and visceral brutality, The Gunman (originally published in English as The Prone Gunman) is a shocking and sardonic masterpiece from the late, great master of the French crime novel.
‘One of the last cool, compact and shockingly original crime novels’ New York Times Book Review ‘Stylish and uncompromising … a short sharp shock of a novel’ Daily Telegraph ‘Manchette turns pulp fiction into art’ Independent
Manchette’s first novel was published in 1971; The Gunman, his masterpiece, in 1981. In the decade which intervened he published a further eight novels. The Gunman, along with Fatale and Three to Kill, completes the loose trilogy of ultra-stylish, subtly subversive crime thrillers which made his name.
Crime fiction £7.99 B format paperback 128pp ISBN: 9781781253915 eISBN: 9781782831273 Ferbuary 2015 UK Com ex Can Exclusive Europe
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The Evening Chorus Helen Humphreys
New Title
‘A poised, lyrical novel about the griefs of war, written with poetic intensity of observation’ Helen Dunmore Shot down on his first RAF mission, James Hunter spends the Second World War in a German prison camp. While other soldiers plan their escapes, James dedicates himself to a detailed study of nesting redstarts. Left behind in their tiny cottage on the lip of Sussex’s Ashdown Forest, and unable to engage with his letters which talk of nothing but birds, James’s young wife Rose has grown apart from him. Now she’s in love with someone else – Toby, a young pilot home on sick leave. They meet secretly at night, until suddenly and devastatingly their affair ends. Beautifully written and full of moments of hope, The Evening Chorus is a stirring story about love and the natural world, set against the backdrop of World War Two.
Fiction £11.99 Demy trade paperback with flaps 304pp ISBN: 9781781253021 eISBN: 9781782830870 May 2015 UK Com ex Can
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Helen Humphreys was born in London, England, and now lives in Kingston, Ontario. Her first novel, Leaving Earth, was a New York Times Notable Book and won the City of Toronto Book Award. She is also the author of the novel The Reinvention of Love and the memoir True Story: On the Life and Death of My Brother.
‘The Evening Chorus serenades those people brutally marked by war yet enduring to live – and relish – the tiny pleasures of another day. With her trademark prose Humphreys convinces us of the birdlike strength of the powerless’ Emma Donoghue For fans of Pat Barker, Atonement, Birdsong and William Nicholson
Leonora
Elena Poniatowska
New Title
Translated by Amanda Hopkinson
Inspired by the life of the great surrealist painter Leonora Carrington, Leonora is The Girl with the Pearl Earring meets Patrick White’s The Vivisector Leonora Carrington was born in Lancashire in 1917, the wealthy heiress to her father’s textiles empire. But even from a young age she rebelled against the strict rules of her social class, and broke free into artistic and personal freedom. Today Carrington is recognised as the key female surrealist painter. For a time Max Ernst’s lover in Paris, Carrington rubbed elbows with Salvador Dalí, André Breton and Pablo Picasso. When Ernst fled Paris at the outbreak of the Second World War, the devastated Carrington was locked away in a Spanish asylum before escaping to Mexico, where she would work on the paintings which made her name. In the hands of Mexico’s greatest living writer, Carrington’s life becomes a whirlwind tribute to creative struggle and artistic revolution.
‘Masterful … Poniatowska paints a picture of a troubled woman who personifies the dreams and nightmares of the twentieth century’ Biblioteca Breve Prize citation Published to coincide with a major exhibition of Carrington’s work at Tate Liverpool in 2015
Elena Poniatowska was born in Paris in 1932. Poniatowska is one of the world’s most celebrated writers, amongst whose countless awards are the Biblioteca Breve Prize for Leonora and the 2013 Cervantes Prize. For over fifty years she was a close friend of Leonora Carrington’s, until the artist’s death in 2011.
Fiction £12.99 Demy trade paperback 448pp ISBN: 9781846688553 eISBN: 9781847658272 April 2015 UK Com ex Can Exclusive Europe
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Crime fiction £7.99 B format paperback 448pp ISBN: 9781846687532 eISBN: 9781847652645 April 2010 UK Com ex Can
Black Water Rising Attica Locke
Paperback
‘Black Water Rising is a terrifying reminder of how recently America was a very bad place to be young, gifted and black. This is an authentic, atmospheric debut that burns with an entirely reasonable anger’ Val McDermid Shortlisted for the Orange Prize and nominated for an Edgar Award, an NAACP Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize
Crime fiction £7.99 B format paperback 432pp ISBN: 9781846688041 eISBN: 9781847658500 July 2013 UK Com ex Can
The Cutting Season Attica Locke
Paperback
‘Attica Locke is stand-out in every way’ James Ellroy ‘Genuinely unnerving ... interested in subtle, complex questions of identity, family and history’ Daily Mail
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Pleasantville Attica Locke
New Title
Murder and political intrigue combine in the thrilling third novel from the Orange Prize shortlisted author of Black Water Rising It’s 1996, Bill Clinton has just been re-elected and in Houston a mayoral election is looming. As usual the campaign focuses on Pleasantville, the AfricanAmerican neighbourhood that has swung almost every race in recent memory. Axel Hathorne, former chief of police and the son of Pleasantville’s founding father, was the clear favourite, but his lead is slipping thanks to a late entrant into the race. As the competition intensifies, a girl goes missing, apparently while canvassing for Axel. When her body is found, Axel’s nephew is charged with her murder. The Hathornes turn to local attorney Jay Porter. And so he finds himself trying his first murder case – a trial that threatens to blow the community wide open, and reveal the lengths that those with power are willing to go.
‘I was first struck by Attica Locke’s prose, then by the ingenuity of her narrative and finally and most deeply by the depth of her humanity. She writes with equal amounts of grace and passion … I’d probably read the phone book if her name was on the spine’ Dennis Lehane A page-turning courtroom drama rife with politics, corruption, betrayal and conflicted characters for fans of Walter Mosley, James Lee Burke, The Wire and The Killing
Attica Locke is the author of two previous novels, Black Water Rising and The Cutting Season, and has worked as a screenwriter for Paramount, Warner Bros, Twentieth Century Fox and Dreamworks. A native of Houston, Texas, Locke lives in Los Angeles with her husband and daughter. @atticalocke
Literary thriller 432pp £14.99 Royal hardback ISBN: 9781846689482 £12.99 Export trade paperback ISBN: 9781781254097 eISBN: 9781847659774 April 2015 UK Com ex Can
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Cowboys and Indies
New Title
The epic history of the record industry
Gareth Murphy
‘If this book was a group, I would definitely sign them. It is that good’ Geoff Travis, founder of Rough Trade From the invention of the earliest known sound-recording device in 1850s Paris to the CD crash and digital boom, Cowboys and Indies takes us on a wildly entertaining tour of the ever-changing music industry, introducing us along the way to the performers and self-proclaimed ‘record men’ of the UK and America. Industry insider Gareth Murphy draws on archival material and over 100 exclusive interviews with legends of the music business to bring us the behindthe-scenes stories of the most important recordings of the past 150 years, including Billie Holiday, Elvis Presley, Aretha Franklin, Bob Dylan and many, many more. Cowboys and Indies is the definitive history of the music business.
Music £14.99 Royal trade paperback 384pp ISBN: 9781781254523 eISBN: 9781782831594 January 2015 UK Com ex Can
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Gareth Murphy was raised in Dublin surrounded by the musicians his father worked with as a concert promoter. He has worked at various record companies, and composes and produces music. He runs his own company, Atlantis Recordings. Murphy lives in Paris with his wife and son.
Interviewees include the founders and CEOs of Virgin Records, United Artists, Atlantic Records and A&M, who made artists such as The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, Bob Marley and The Sex Pistols household names ‘A fascinating account of the way recorded music has evolved, touched people and helped shape popular culture as we know it today’ Sir George Martin, legendary producer of The Beatles
The Moth
New Paperback
This is a true story
Introduced by Neil Gaiman A spell-binding collection of true stories Before television, before penny paperbacks and mass literacy, people would gather around the fire and tell stories. Bewitched listeners would sit and listen long into the night as moths flitted around overhead. The Moth is a group trying to recapture this lost art, helping storytellers – old hands and novices alike – hone their stories before playing to packed crowds at sold-out live events. The very best of these real-life stories are collected here. Established writers such as Malcolm Gladwell and Nathan Englander sit alongside ordinary people with extraordinary stories to tell. Whether it’s Bill Clinton’s hell-raising press secretary, a doctor whisked away by nuns to Mother Teresa’s bedside or a friend of Hemingway’s who accidentally talks himself into a role as a substitute bullfighter, these eccentric, pitch-perfect stories – all, amazingly, true – range from the poignant to the downright hilarious.
‘Brilliant and quietly addictive … crammed with personality … full of colour and life’ Guardian ‘One of the hottest events in town … enthralling, funny and moving’ The Times ‘New York’s hottest and hippest literary ticket’ Wall Street Journal
The Moth is an acclaimed notfor-profit organisation dedicated to the art of storytelling. Since its launch in 1997, The Moth has presented thousands of stories, told live and without notes, to packed-out audiences worldwide. Moth shows are renowned for the great range of human experience they showcase. @TheMoth
Non-fiction £9.99 B format paperback 400pp ISBN: 9781846689901 eISBN: 9781782830689 May 2015 UK Com ex Can
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The Lights of Pointe-Noire Alain Mabanckou
New Title
Translated by Helen Stevenson
A meditation on homecoming from one of Africa’s most important writers Alain Mabanckou left Congo in 1989. When he returns home two decades later to the bustling Congolese port town of Pointe-Noire, he finds a country in some ways changed beyond recognition: the cinema where, as a child, Mabanckou gorged on American culture has become a Pentecostal temple; his secondary school has been re-named in honour of a previously despised colonial ruler. But many things remain unchanged, not least the superstitions which inform everyday life. Mabanckou, now a celebrated writer, finds he can only look on as an outsider at the place where he grew up. As he delves into his childhood, into memories of his departed mother and into the strange mix of belonging and absence that informs his return to Congo, Mabanckou slowly builds a wise, wry, moving exploration of the way home never leaves us, however long ago we left.
Memoir £8.99 B format trade paperback 224pp ISBN: 9781846689802 eISBN: 9781782830382 May 2015 World English language
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Alain Mabanckou was born in 1966 in the Republic of the Congo. An award-winning novelist, poet and essayist, Mabanckou now lives in Los Angeles. His novels African Psycho, Broken Glass, Black Bazaar and Tomorrow I’ll Be Twenty are published by Serpent’s Tail. @amabanckou
‘Mabanckou is one of the continent’s greatest writers’ Guardian ‘One of Africa’s liveliest and most original voices’ The Times Mabanckou’s profound insight into Africa past and present will appeal to readers of Ryszard Kapuściński, Paul Theroux and Chinua Achebe
A Lesson Before Dying Ernest J. Gaines
Classic
with a new foreword by Attica Locke
An award-winning novel of prejudice, community and what it means to be a man in the American South In a small Cajun community in the late 1940s, a young black man named Jefferson witnesses a liquor store shootout in which three men are killed. The only survivor, he is convicted of murder and sentenced to death. In the tradition of Harper Lee’s To Kill A Mockingbird and Toni Morrison’s Beloved, Gaines explores the deep prejudice of the American South. A Lesson Before Dying is a richly compassionate and deeply moving novel, the story of a young black man sentenced to death for a murder he did not commit and a teacher who hopes to ease his burden before the execution.
‘Gaines has created a powerful and loving portrait of a small, mainly cane-cutting community … a transcendent and heartfelt novel of redemption’ Guardian ‘Straight and true, unafraid of sentiment and written for the people it depicts, not simply about them’ Independent
Ernest J. Gaines was born on a plantation in Pointe Coupee Parish, Louisiana, which is the Bayonne of all his fictional works. A Lesson Before Dying won the National Book Critics Circle Award and was nominated for the 1993 Pulitzer Prize. He still lives in Louisiana.
Fiction £8.99 B format paperback 272pp ISBN: 9781846687860 eISBN: 9781847655448 April 2015 UK Com ex Can, Aus
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The Seven Madmen Roberto Arlt
Classic
Translated by Nick Caistor and with a new afterword by Roberto Bolaño
An extraordinary portrait of 1920s Buenos Aires, with the existential angst of Sartre’s Nausea, the spiritual drama of Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov and the apocalyptic cult appeal of Alan Moore’s Watchmen. Remo Erdosain’s Buenos Aires is a seething hive of hustlers, scoundrels and madmen. Trapped between spiritual emptiness and the madness of the world around him, Erdosain clings to anything that can give his life meaning: smalltime fraud, petty hatreds, the Astrologer’s plans for a new world order … but is it enough? Or is the only appropriate response to reality – insanity? Written in 1929, The Seven Madmen depicts an Argentina on the edge of the precipice. This teeming world of dreamers, revolutionaries and scheming generals was Arlt’s uncanny prophesy of his country’s traumatic passage through the twentieth century. Even today it retains its power as one of the great apocalyptic works of modern literature.
Fiction £8.99 B format paperback 272pp ISBN: 9781781254288 eISBN: 9781782831488 February 2015 World ex USA, Can
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Roberto Arlt (1900–1942) was born in Buenos Aires to a Prussian immigrant from Poznań and brought up in the city’s crowded tenement houses. A journalist and inventor, he patented a method to prevent ladders in women’s stockings. Arlt died suddenly of a heart attack aged just 42.
‘If great means anything at all, then Arlt is surely a great writer … he is Latin America’s first truly urban novelist … this is the power which inspired literature possesses’ Guardian ‘Let’s say, modestly, that Arlt is Jesus Christ. Argentina, of course, is Israel and Buenos Aires is Jerusalem’ Roberto Bolaño
Serpent’s Tail Classics
9781781253892 e 9781782831266 £8.99
9781846687860 e 9781847655448 £8.99
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£8.99
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Introducing…
Tuskar Rock Press At a time when literary writing needs championing more than ever, we are proud to welcome Tuskar Rock Press to their new home at Serpent’s Tail. Tuskar Rock is a micro-imprint publishing a handful of carefully selected books a year – just two or three masterpieces by writers from all over the world. The brainchild of Colm Tóibín and Peter Straus, Tuskar Rock has, since its inception in 2008, built a reputation for outstanding writing from authors including Christos Tsiolkas, László Krasznahorkai, Richard Bausch, Terry Castle and Adam Haslett. Antonio Muñoz Molina’s In the Night of Time will be the first Tuskar Rock book to be published with Serpent’s Tail. A sweeping epic from one of the most important writers of his generation, In the Night of Time is exactly the kind of book that has made Tuskar Rock a byword for literary excellence. Hannah Westland Publisher Keep up-to-date with news from Tuskar Rock by subscribing to the Serpent’s Tail newsletter at bit.ly/STsubscribe For more information about Tuskar Rock Press, you can email, tweet or join us at info@serpentstail.com @serpentstail pinterest.com/serpentstail facebook.com/serpentstailbooks www.serpentstail.com
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In the Night of Time Antonio Muñoz Molina
Translated by Edith Grossman
The internationally bestselling tour de force of love and tragedy in the Spanish Civil War October 1936. Spanish architect Ignacio Abel arrives at New York’s Penn Station, the final stop on his journey from war-torn Madrid, where he has left his wife and children. Crossing the fragile borders of Europe, he reflects on months of fratricidal conflict in his embattled country, his own transformation from a bricklayer’s son to a respected bourgeois husband and professional, and the all-consuming love affair with an American woman that forever alters his life. A rich, panoramic portrait of Spain on the brink of civil war, In the Night of Time details the passions and tragedies of a country tearing itself apart. Compared in scope and importance to War and Peace, Muñoz Molina’s masterpiece is the great epic of the Spanish Civil War written by one of Spain’s most important contemporary novelists.
‘Sweeping, magisterial … an astonishingly vivid narrative that unfolds with hypnotic intensity by means of the constant interweaving of time and memory … In the Night of Time is Tolstoyan in its scale, emotional intensity and intellectual honesty’ Economist
Antonio Muñoz Molina is the author of more than a dozen novels, among them Sepharad, A Manuscript of Ashes and In Her Absence. He is the recipient of the Jerusalem Prize, the Prince of Asturias Prize, the Planeta Prize and many others. He lives in Madrid and New York.
Fiction £14.99 Royal trade paperback 656pp ISBN: 9781781254639 eISBN: 9781782831679 March 2015 UK Com ex Can
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‘Dark, dazzling and reeling with a constant undertow of dangerous unpredictability’ Téa Obreht
‘A James Thurber for our times, in Borges’ suit, wearing Flann O’Brien’s hat’ Ian McMillan
The explosive new thriller from the prize-listed author of The Dead Women of Juárez
Fiction £12.99 Demy trade paperback ISBN: 9781846689536 eISBN: 9781847659927 August 2014 UK Com ex Can Exclusive Europe
Fiction £8.99 B format trade paperback ISBN: 9781846689734 eISBN: 9781782830283 November 2014 World English language
Fiction / Short stories £8.99 B format trade paperback ISBN: 9781781253359 eISBN: 9781782831013 November 2014 UK Com ex Can
Fiction / Short stories £8.99 B format trade paperback ISBN: 9781781252833 eISBN: 9781782830801 August 2014 UK Com ex Can
Crime fiction £7.99 B format paperback ISBN: 9781846689420 eISBN: 9781847659613 September 2014 World all languages
US
26
US
Tr
New in paperback
No Book But the World Leah Hager Cohen
No Man’s Land edited by Pete Ayrton
‘A poignant and illuminating study of the bonds within families’ Financial Times
‘The essential collection of writing from the First World War’ The Times
Fiction £8.99 B format paperback ISBN: 9781846689710 eISBN: 9781782830269 March 2015 UK Com ex Can
Fiction anthology £9.99 B format paperback ISBN: 9781846689260 eISBN: 9781847659224 January 2015 World ex USA, Can
We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves Karen Joy Fowler The book everyone’s been talking about, from Booker judges to the twitterati Fiction £7.99 B format paperback ISBN: 9781846689666 eISBN: 9781782830207 June 2014 UK Com ex Can
Love Game Elizabeth Wilson ‘Fascinating … a sporting history unlike any I’ve read’ Guardian Sport / Social history £9.99 B format paperback ISBN: 9781846689116 eISBN: 9781847658784 May 2015 World all languages US
After Me Comes the Flood Sarah Perry ‘An extraordinary debut … will haunt readers long after the final page’ John Burnside, Guardian Debut fiction £8.99 B format paperback ISBN: 9781781253649 eISBN: 9781846689468 June 2015 World ex USA
Tr
27
Backlist
9781846687341
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9781846686832
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28
Backlist
9781781252789
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29
Backlist
9781846689765
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£7.99
£7.99
£8.99
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30
Backlist
9781846688096
9781846689079
9781846687990
9781846688997
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£7.99
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31
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