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SERPENT’S TAIL
THE CLERKENWELL PRESS & TINDAL STREET PRESS
SPRING 2014
Contents 2–3 4–5 6 7 8–9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25–27 28–29
No Man’s Land edited by Pete Ayrton In the Morning I’ll Be Gone Adrian McKinty The Death of the Poet N Quentin Woolf Eat My Heart Out Zoe Pilger We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves Karen Joy Fowler Quicksand & Passing Nella Larsen Astragal Albertine Sarrazin Live at the Brixton Academy Simon Parkes with J S Rafaeli Love Game Elizabeth Wilson The Norway Room Mick Scully No Regrets, Coyote John Dufresne Compartment No 6 Rosa Liksom Serpent’s Tail paperback highlights The Clerkenwell Press paperback highlights No Book but the World Leah Hager Cohen A Permanent Member of the Family Russell Banks The Ravens Tomas Bannerhed New paperbacks Recently published Serpent’s Tail Classics Backlist Contact information
Introduction
Serpent’s Tail
In his twenty-five years as publisher of Serpent’s Tail, Pete Ayrton earned a reputation for fearlessly publishing writers from all over the world. Now he has applied his international eye to the First World War, and to mark its centenary in January we will be publishing No Man’s Land, a collection of writing from and about that war that Pete has assembled.
An imprint of Profile Books Ltd 3A Exmouth House Pine Street London EC1R 0JH 020 7841 6300 info@serpentstail.com www.serpentstail.com
The pieces collected in No Man’s Land comprise mostly fiction and some memoir. They cover the fighting in all the theatres of the war, as well as the experiences of the men and women left behind on the home fronts and the soldiers who returned to their families, never able to forget what they had endured. It is a devastating and essential book, and its extraordinary range underlines what a truly global catastrophe the First World War was. We hope you enjoy the rest of our Spring 2014 list, which I’m pleased to say is as eclectic, and international, as ever. Hannah Westland Publisher
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No Man’s Land
New Title
Writings from a World at War
Edited by Pete Ayrton
First World War writing from frontlines and home fronts across the globe The Great War gave birth to some of the twentieth century’s most celebrated writing; from Rupert Brooke to Wilfred Owen, the poetry generated by the war is etched in the collective memory. But it is prose writing which has provided some of the most profound insights into the war’s individual and communal tragedies, the bravery and bitterness of its combatants and those they left behind, and the horror of the first industrial war. Featuring forty-seven writers from twenty nations, No Man’s Land is a truly international anthology of First World War fiction and memoir. Work by Siegfried Sassoon, Willa Cather and Erich Maria Remarque sits alongside forgotten masterpieces by Stratis Myrivilis, Dalton Trumbo and Mulk Raj Anand. The vivid accounts collected here are by turns shocking and uplifting. No Man’s Land is a moving tribute to the twentieth century’s most cataclysmic event. The first truly international anthology of First World War fiction – conveys the universal tragedy of the war like nothing else English-language greats like Faulkner and D. H. Lawrence are joined by foreign geniuses such as Joseph Roth and Robert Musil All major nations involved in the war are represented
Pete Ayrton was born in London in 1943. In 1986 he founded Serpent’s Tail with the aim of publishing translations of the most daring works of world fiction, including First World War classics Frederic Manning’s Her Privates We and Gabriel Chevallier’s Fear.
Fiction Anthology £25 Royal hardback 512pp ISBN: 9781846689253 eISBN: 9781847659224 January 2014 World English Language
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Crime fiction £7.99 B format paperback 352pp ISBN: 9781846688232 eISBN: 9781847657954 June 2012 World ex USA, Can Exclusive Europe
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The Cold Cold Ground
Paperback
Sean Duffy Book 1
Adrian McKinty
‘If Raymond Chandler had grown up in Northern Ireland, The Cold Cold Ground is what he would have written’ The Times ‘A cut above … fast-paced, intricate’ Guardian ‘A masterpiece of Troubles crime fiction’ Irish Times
Crime fiction £7.99 B format paperback 352pp ISBN: 9781846688195 eISBN: 9781847659293 January 2014 World ex USA, Can Exclusive Europe
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I Hear the Sirens in the Street
New paperback
Sean Duffy Book 2
Adrian McKinty
‘It blew my doors off’ Ian Rankin ‘A tough, smart, darkly funny thriller that’s brilliantly atmospheric’ Sun ‘The ever-excellent McKinty is on great form … characteristically fast and thrilling’ Mail on Sunday
In the Morning I’ll Be Gone
New Title
Sean Duffy Book 3
Adrian McKinty
A spectacular escape and a manhunt that could change the future of a nation – and lay one man’s past to rest Sean Duffy’s got nothing. So when MI5 come knocking, Sean knows exactly what they want from him – but he hasn’t the first idea how to get it. Of course he’s heard about the spectacular escape of IRA man Dermot McCann from prison. And he’s always known, with chilly certainty, that their paths would cross. But finding Dermot leads Sean to an old locked-room mystery and into the kind of danger where it’s as easy to lose as to win. And there’s no coming back from this kind of losing. From old betrayals and ancient history to 1984’s most infamous crime, Sean tries not to fall too far behind in the race to annihilation. Can he outrun the most skilled terrorist the IRA ever created? Or will the past catch him first? ‘Duffy is one of the most interesting, convincing and sympathetic police officers in recent crime fiction ... McKinty gets better and better’ The Times Sean Duffy Book 4, Sixteen Shells in a Thirty Ought Six, is coming in 2015
Adrian McKinty grew up in Carrickfergus, Northern Ireland. His debut Dead I Well May Be was shortlisted for the Ian Fleming Steel Dagger Award; Fifty Grand and The Cold Cold Ground won Spinetingler Awards in 2010 and 2013. In 2009 Adrian moved to Melbourne, Australia with his wife and two children.
Crime fiction £12.99 Royal trade paperback 352pp ISBN: 9781846688201 eISBN: 9781847659316 January 2014 World ex USA, Can Exclusive Europe
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The Death of the Poet N Quentin Woolf
New Title
When you swear to love, to be faithful or to do your duty, how far does that promise bind you? When John Knox interviews Rachel McAllistair for his radio show, he falls irrevocably in love. Afterwards, when he tells her how impressive she was, she hits him square on the jaw. Undeterred, he pursues her, promising never to leave her. This vow becomes his burden as she becomes increasingly abusive and cruel. And yet he stays – even when she does something so awful that it changes him forever. And that point, on which his life turns, leads to events and encounters that cross continents and generations. The Death of the Poet is a daringly honest exploration of violence and what it means to be a man in the modern world. Fiction £12.99 Demy trade paperback with flaps 416pp ISBN: 9781846689338 eISBN: 9781847659477 April 2014 World
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N Quentin Woolf is a writer and broadcaster. His short fiction has been published and translated internationally, and performed at Sadler’s Wells. He has featured in various guises on BBC Radio 4, and presents a weekly talk-show for Londonist.com
Woolf is articulate, engaging and well known on the London literary scene Controversial subject matter ideal for book group discussion www.nquentinwoolf.com
Eat My Heart Out Zoe Pilger
New Title
The Bell Jar meets The Rachel Papers for Generation Y Meet Ann-Marie. She’s twenty-three and her life is a disaster. She’s failed her degree, lost her boyfriend to her best friend and is working a minimum-wage job in a sleazy Soho restaurant. She’s looking for answers – in her past, in the idiots’ philosophy guides she carries in her handbag and in the men she seduces or is seduced by. She knows sex is not the answer to her despair but that doesn’t stop her charging into bed with the wrong people anyway. But then one night at the restaurant she meets second-wave feminist icon Stephanie Haight, who decides to awaken Ann-Marie’s responsibility to the sisterhood and save her from the curse of ironic detachment. Riotously funny and unflinchingly honest, Eat My Heart Out is an exhilarating novel about femininity and fearlessness, desire and disappointment. For fans of Muriel Spark, Gwendoline Riley, Lena Dunham, Sheila Heti and the TV writer Julia Davis Marks the arrival of a bold new talent on the British literary scene
Zoe Pilger is an art critic for the Independent and winner of the 2011 Frieze Writer’s Prize. She is working on a PhD at Goldsmiths’ College and lives in London. Eat My Heart Out is her first novel.
Fiction £11.99 Demy trade paperback with flaps 288pp ISBN: 9781781251348 eISBN: 9781847659712 January 2014 World
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We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves Karen Joy Fowler
New Title
A funny, devastating novel about families, from the author of worldwide bestseller The Jane Austen Book Club Rosemary’s newly arrived at college and she’s decided not to tell anyone a thing about her family. So we’re not going to tell you too much either: you’ll have to find out for yourselves, round about page 77, the twist that makes her unhappy family unlike any other. Rosemary is now an only child, but she used to have a sister and an older brother. Both are gone – vanished from her life. Fern was a sister like no other, and that’s where all the trouble started. So now Rosemary’s telling their story: full of hilarious asides and brilliantly spiky lines, it’s a looping narrative that begins towards the end and then goes back to the beginning. Twice. Funny, clever, intimate and honest, We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves swirls with ideas that will come back to bite you. ‘A novel so readably juicy and surreptitiously smart, it deserves all the attention it can get’ Barbara Kingsolver ‘Utterly, utterly heart-breaking’ Ruth Ozeki ‘Does the love survive the damage? Will human beings survive the damage they do to the world they love so much? This is a strong, deep, sweet novel’ Ursula K. LeGuin
Karen Joy Fowler is the author of six novels and three short story collections. The Jane Austen Book Club was an international bestseller and three of Fowler’s novels have been New York Times Notable Books. Fowler and her husband live in Santa Cruz, California.
Fiction 320pp £12.99 Demy hardback ISBN: 9781846689659 £11.99 Export trade paperback ISBN: 9781846689956 eISBN: 9781782830207 March 2014 UK Com ex Can
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Quicksand & Passing Nella Larsen
Classic
‘Quicksand and Passing are novels that I will never forget … indispensable’ Alice Walker A writer of the Harlem Renaissance, Nella Larsen wrote just two novels. Critically acclaimed, both speak powerfully of the contradictions and restrictions experienced by black women at that time. Quicksand, written in 1928, is an autobiographical novel about a mixed-race woman caught between fulfilling her desires and gaining respectability in her middle-class neighbourhood. Written a year later, Passing tells the story of two childhood friends, both light skinned enough to pass as white. Reconnecting in adulthood, they see how differently their lives have turned out. Nella Larsen pioneered writing about sexuality, race and the secret suffering of women, and her novels are both important and moving. Fiction £8.99 B format paperback 256pp ISBN: 9781846687853 eISBN: 9781847655561 May 2014 UK Com ex Can
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Nella Larsen (1893–1964) was born in Chicago to a Danish mother and a West Indian father. The success of both Quicksand and Passing made Larsen one of the most fêted writers of the Harlem Renaissance, but she never wrote another book and died in obscurity in Brooklyn some thirty years later.
‘Discovering Nella Larsen is like finding lost money with no name on it. One can enjoy it with delight and share it without guilt’ Maya Angelou A classic of twentieth-century American literature in a new, elegant edition
Astragal
Albertine Sarrazin
Classic
Translated by Patsy Southgate
A thrilling cult classic of rebel literature with a new introduction by Patti Smith At the age of twenty-one, a sad and hungry Patti Smith walked into a bookshop in Greenwich Village and decided to spend her last 99 cents on a novel that would change her life forever. Written by a young French-Algerian woman named Albertine Sarrazin, the book was called Astragal. Written from her prison cell, Sarrazin’s semi-autobiographical novel is a bewitching and timeless tale of youthful rebellion and romance. It tells the story of Anne, a young woman who breaks her ankle in a daring escape from prison. She makes it to a highway where she’s picked up by a motorcyclist, Julien, who’s also on the run. As they travel together, Anne and Julien fall in love and must do whatever they can to survive, always living on the edge of danger.
As lively and stylish as a French New Wave film ‘Smith’s essay and Sarrazin’s crackling and incandescent prose make Astragal a gift, a memento of a decade that was both rough and radical, yet full of potential, and the testament of two astonishing lives, one real, one fictive, both self-invented and utterly extraordinary’ Bookslut
Albertine Sarrazin (1937–1967) was a French–Algerian writer. At an early age she abandoned her studies and turned to a life of crime and prostitution. She wrote her first two novels in prison and died at twenty-nine. Patti Smith is a poet, performer, visual artist and author of the National Book Award-winning memoir Just Kids. She lives in New York.
Fiction £8.99 B format trade paperback 208pp ISBN: 9781846689413 eISBN: 9781847659606 March 2014 UK Com ex Can
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Live at the Brixton Academy Simon Parkes
New Title
with J S Rafaeli
The riotous life of a music impresario and how he turned a near-derelict theatre into a legendary gig venue In 1982, aged twenty-three, Simon Parkes paid £1 for a virtually derelict building in Brixton. Over the next fifteen years he turned it into Britain’s most iconic music venue. And now he’s telling his story: full of fond – and wild – reminiscences of the musicians who played at the venue, from Jimmy Page and Lou Reed to Pulp and the Beastie Boys. This remarkable memoir is about one man’s burning desire for success against the odds, his passion for live music and the excitement of those wilderness years, a far cry from the corporate world that controls the scene today. From rock-star debauchery and mixing it with Brixton gangsters to putting on the first legal raves in the UK, this is the story of how to fulfil your teenage fantasies and succeed in business with no experience. Music / Memoir £14.99 Royal trade paperback 320pp ISBN: 9781846689550 eISBN: 9781847659934 January 2014 World English Language
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Since leaving the Academy, Simon Parkes has got his life back and done all the things you can’t do while running the Brixton Academy. He and his family still live in Brixton. J S Rafaeli has worked as a copywriter, researcher and music booking agent. He plays in a band alongside his writing projects.
Simon Parkes is an utterly charming raconteur and a truly extraordinary entrepreneur Published to coincide with thirty years of the Brixton Academy in January 2014 For fans of 24 Hour Party People, Nick Kent and Howard Marks
Love Game
New Title
A History of Tennis, from Victorian Pastime to Global Phenomenon
Elizabeth Wilson
The journey of tennis from vicarage lawns to television screens The gladiatorial beauty of tennis and its fashionable court wear make it a romantic’s dream, and this most Victorian of games has always had a peculiarly passionate undercurrent – love even makes it into the scoring system. Beyond the romance, tennis has always been a barometer of the times. Henman Hill is unrecognisable from the days when the All England Club ostracised working class Fred Perry – and the great English tennis champion is now more famous as a leisure brand than a sportsman. Love Game tells the story of tennis’ journey from upper-middle-class hobby to global TV spectacle, taking in the innovators and trendsetters, the great players, heroes and iconoclasts, and the politics, class wars and culture clashes of what could rightfully be called the ‘beautiful game’. The first comprehensive history of the world’s most glamorous sport Every page is filled with legendary figures and forgotten heroes A book about tennis, but also about what sport – and watching it – means to us
Elizabeth Wilson began her career in the early 1970s writing for underground political magazines. She has lectured on cultural history at universities around the world and is the author of several non-fiction books. Her novels The Twilight Hour, War Damage and The Girl in Berlin are published by Serpent’s Tail. She lives in London.
Sport £16.99 Royal hardback 384pp with illustrations ISBN: 9781846689109 eISBN: 9781847658784 May 2014 World
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The Norway Room Mick Scully
What happens when life forces you to grow up too quickly? Ash is only thirteen when his father is sent to prison and he’s left to fend for himself. Luckily his dad’s friend Kieran is on hand to distract social services, and soon Ash has dropped out of school forever, teamed up with other local teenagers and started to believe he is master of his own destiny. But when his dad’s house begins to fill up with stolen goods and armed gangsters, he realises Kieran’s help comes with strings attached. Meanwhile, an ex-copper working as a bouncer for the city’s busiest club gets caught in the middle of a hostile takeover and is tempted towards joining the criminal underworld. And a trained Chinese killer falls in love with his target. As these narratives converge in a spectacular finale, who would bet against born-survivor Ash, alone in the city, to do the impossible and stay alive? Crime fiction £11.99 Demy trade paperback 208pp ISBN: 9781906994488 eISBN: 9781847659798 March 2014 World
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Mick Scully lives in Birmingham. He has been a bouncer, teacher, acupuncturist and now works as a Humanist funeral minister. His story collection Little Moscow was highly praised. The Norway Room is his debut novel.
‘A dark new talent’ Jake Arnott ‘Scully has a fine eye for human frailty, a wry compassion for the doomed and a meticulous ear for dialogue’ Guardian
No Regrets, Coyote John Dufresne
New Title
The black humour of Carl Hiaasen meets the emotional depth of The Wire and the mayhem of a Coen Brothers movie It’s Christmas Eve in Eden, Florida, and Wylie ‘Coyote’ Melville, professional therapist and hobbyist forensic consultant, is called by his cop friend to the scene of a horrific crime at a quiet suburban address. Wylie has enough on his plate as it is – his father is slipping deeper into the clutches of Alzheimer’s, his new kitten Django is wreaking havoc with the soft furnishings and a homeless man has taken up residence on Wylie’s front lawn. But the Hallidays have been found dead in their home and Wylie suspects foul play. So he starts his own haphazard investigation, but with the powerful police union strangely keen to shut down Wylie’s amateur operation and all the hallmarks of mob involvement, he might be biting off more than he can chew … ‘A novel so good you want to throw a party for it. It’s tense, unnerving, fearless and funny as hell. Beautifully rendered on every page, it may be a crime novel in name but it’s literature for the ages’ Dennis Lehane ‘A very cool ride. If Raymond Chandler was reincarnated as a novelist in South Florida, he couldn’t nail it any better than John Dufresne’ Carl Hiaasen
John Dufresne is the author of seven books, including the New York Times Notable Books Love Warps the Mind a Little and Louisiana Power & Light. He lives in Dania Beach, Florida.
Crime fiction £10 Demy trade paperback 352pp ISBN: 9781846689758 eISBN: 9781782830290 February 2014 UK Com ex Can
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Compartment No 6 Rosa Liksom
New Title
Translated by Lola Rogers
Two unlikely souls meet and spark on a journey across the Russian night A sad young woman boards the Trans-Siberian Railway in Moscow. Bound for Mongolia, she’s trying to leave a broken relationship as far behind her as she can. She chooses an empty compartment – No 6 – but her solitude is soon shattered by the arrival of a fellow passenger: Vadim Nikolayevich Ivanov, a grizzled, opinionated, foul-mouthed ex-soldier. Vadim fills the compartment with his long and colourful stories, recounting his sexual conquests and violent fights in lurid detail. As their train cuts slowly across a wintry Russia, where ‘everything is moving, snow, water, air, clouds, wind, towns, villages, people and ideas’, a grudging kind of companionship grows between the two inhabitants of Compartment No 6 and the girl realises that if she works out how to listen, Vadim’s stories may just contain lessons for her. Fiction £9.99 B format trade paperback with flaps 192pp ISBN: 9781846689277 eISBN: 9781847659231 May 2014 World English Language
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Rosa Liksom is a Finnish artist and the author of over a dozen books. She won the Finlandia prize in 2011 for Compartment No 6.
For fans of Audrey Niffenegger, Sarah Hall and Kelly Link Translated into thirteen languages, winner of the Finlandia Prize (the Finnish equivalent of the Booker) and shortlisted for the Nordic Council Prize
The Middlesteins Jami Attenberg
New paperback
A Waterstones Book Club selection for Autumn 2013
Fiction £7.99 B format paperback 288pp ISBN: 9781846689352 eISBN: 9781847659439 September 2013 UK Com ex Can
‘The Middlesteins had me from its very first pages’ Jonathan Franzen ‘Family ties are anything but simple, and the joy of this book lies in Attenberg’s merciless, tender, often brilliantly funny peeling back of the layers of history. Sublime’ Kate Saunders, Daily Mail
Petite Mort
Beatrice Hitchman
New paperback
‘Sumptuous … part Moulin Rouge, part Alfred Hitchcock’ Grazia
Fiction £7.99 B format paperback 336pp ISBN: 9781846689079 eISBN: 9781847658685 March 2014 World English Language
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‘An impressive and enjoyable debut: nimble, deft and wrapped luxuriously in the velveteen glamour of the movies’ Financial Times ‘There’s a touch of Angela Carter about Beatrice Hitchman’s beguiling debut’ Guardian 17
History £8.99 B format paperback 288pp ISBN: 9781846689611 eISBN: 9781847659811 June 2014 World ex USA, Can Exclusive Europe
1913
New paperback
The Year before the Storm
Florian Illies
Translated by Shaun Whiteside & Jamie Searle
A Sunday Times top ten bestseller and Waterstones Book of the Month for September 2013 ‘A wonderfully idiosyncratic book, alive with funny, strange, unexpected yarns’ Eileen Battersby, Irish Times ‘An absolute gem of a book … the most original historical account I’ve come across’ Observer
Fiction £7.99 B format paperback 208pp ISBN: 9781846689246 eISBN: 9781847659071 February 2014 UK Com ex Can
Gone to the Forest Katie Kitamura
New paperback
‘The death throes of a colonial world captured in dark, obsessive prose, punctuated by images of strange, surreal beauty’ Salman Rushdie ‘Beautifully observed … the cumulative effect of this shocking, desperate book is something that approaches magnificent’ Financial Times ‘A watchful and magnificent work … Kitamura is a skilled hunter and we are her helpless prey’ Teju Cole
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No Book but the World Leah Hager Cohen
The Clerkenwell Press
The highly anticipated follow-up to the Orange Prize-listed The Grief of Others A young boy goes missing. The accused is a loner and outsider. When Ava Manseau learns that the suspect is her brother Fred, she is convinced that she alone will be able to prove his innocence. Ava and Fred had a seemingly idyllic childhood, free of formal education and constraint in a family that rejected labels and diagnoses. Now brother and sister have grown apart, their parents are gone – and a boy is dead and Fred is in prison. Ava is forced to wonder: who is truly responsible for this turn of events? And how do we reach out to someone who is difficult to love? With her trademark grace, depth of feeling and insight, Leah Hager Cohen asks if, perhaps, our ongoing struggle to comprehend one another is better served by our imaginations than the facts. ‘Leah Hager Cohen writes like a dream and effortlessly inhabits each of her characters’ Daily Mail ‘Cohen’s writing is wise and incredibly moving’ The Times ‘Cohen is one of our foremost chroniclers of the unexpected tendernesses of human connection’ New York Times Book Review
Leah Hager Cohen is the author of four novels, most recently The Grief of Others, which was a New York Times Notable Book. She is also the author of five non-fiction titles, including Train Go Sorry. She is a frequent contributor to the New York Times Book Review.
Fiction 320pp £12.99 Demy hardback ISBN: 9781846689703 £11.99 Export trade paperback ISBN: 9781846689857 eISBN: 9781782830269 February 2014 UK Com ex Can
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A Permanent Member of the Family
The Clerkenwell Press
Russell Banks
The first story collection in a decade from the great Russell Banks One of America’s most prestigious writers, Russell Banks is a literary icon. His profound and resonant stories of the lives of ordinary Americans have appeared regularly in anthologies and collections. Reminiscent of Don DeLillo and Raymond Carver, this collection of twelve short works showcases a master at the peak of his craft. As he did in his haunting, classic works The Sweet Hereafter, Rule of the Bone and Lost Memory of Skin, Banks explores provocative themes with pathos and sharp insight. Each of the stories in this powerful collection demonstrates the range of his narrative virtuosity and a startlingly panoramic vision of humanity which recalls the moral sweep of John Steinbeck’s writing. A Permanent Member of the Family is a stunning addition to the canon of a writer ‘whose great works resonate with such heart and soul’ (The New York Times). Fiction / Short stories £9.99 B format trade paperback with flaps 256pp ISBN: 9781846689697 eISBN: 9781782830276 November 2013 UK Com ex Can
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Russell Banks is past president of the International Parliament of Writers and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. His work has been translated into twenty languages and has received numerous prizes and awards, including the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize. He lives in upstate New York and Miami, Florida.
‘Banks is one of those precious writers like Twain or Salinger who creates a voice so wonderfully real that the experience of reading them is like a conversation with an old friend’ Sunday Times ‘Russell Banks’ work presents without falsehood and with tough affection the uncompromising moral voice of our time ... I trust his portraits of America more than any other – the burden of it, the need for it, the hell of it’ Michael Ondaatje
The Ravens
Tomas Bannerhed
The Clerkenwell Press
Translated by Sarah Death
A stark, lyrical novel of madness, childhood and the natural world The fields at Raven Fen yield barely enough for Agne and his family to live on, and his young son Klas can only watch as despair consumes his father. While Klas dreams of migrating birds – of escape – Agne imagines his crops devoured by insects never seen in Sweden, predicts endless cycles of storm and drought, hears only the ceaseless shrieking of the ravens – and obsesses over the day when his son will take on his burden of toil. Caught between loyalty to his father and fear of his apparent destiny, Klas takes solace in nature, with the cuckoos, curlews and lapwings, far from the tormented world of Raven Fen. And as his father, like his father before him, falls deeper into madness, Klas begins to wonder if he himself might be insane.
‘Through young Klas’s clear eyes we see nature reborn in all its implacable grandeur: fatal and lush, strange and magical’ August Prize citation ‘The Ravens could be the magnum opus of a mature writer – but in fact it’s the author’s debut! Great literature is being written in Sweden – not just crime books’ Håkan Nesser
Tomas Bannerhed, born in 1966, grew up in Uråsa, a village in the province of Småland in southern Sweden. He now lives in Stockholm. The Ravens, his debut novel, won the 2012 August Prize for fiction, Sweden’s most prestigious literary award.
Fiction £9.99 B format trade paperback with flaps 352pp ISBN: 9781846688997 eISBN: 9781847658579 January 2014 World English Language
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New Paperbacks from Serpent’s Tail Mood Indigo Boris Vian ‘The most heartbreakingly poignant modern love story ever written’ Raymond Queneau ‘Your heart will be broken. You will be confused and confounded. You will laugh aloud. And at least for a time, however hard you try, your own world will refuse to be what you think it is’ LA Times Now a major motion picture directed by Michel Gondry (Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind) and starring Audrey Tautou (Amélie), Romain Duris (The Beat That My Heart Skipped) and Omar Sy (The Intouchables) ISBN: 9781846689444 Export ISBN: 9781846689772 eISBN: 9781847659699 £8.99 B format trade paperback 2014 UK Com ex Can Exclusive Europe
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Dirty Wars Jeremy Scahill ‘Highly gripping and dramatic, and of unparalleled importance in understanding the destruction being sown in our name’ Guardian £9.99 B format paperback ISBN: 9781846688515 eISBN: 9781847658258 April 2014 UK Com ex Can Exclusive Europe
A History of Football in 100 Objects Gavin Mortimer ‘A richly original account of the game’s past, present and future’ Mark Perryman £7.99 B format paperback ISBN: 9781846689307 eISBN: 9781847659057 May 2014 World Tr
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Sounds Like London Lloyd Bradley
‘A literary puzzle, a marvellous trick of the mind … as tightly wound as a great Alfred Hitchcock movie’ LA Times
‘Plotted like a thriller and reads like literature of the highest quality’ Monique Roffey
‘One of the very best writers we have’ T. S. Eliot
A unique document of a controversial relationship, set to be adapted for the stage by The Iron Lady screenwriter Abi Morgan
‘A must-read if you’re into the history of black input into London club culture’ Norman Jay MBE
£9.99 A format hardback ISBN: 9781846689437 eISBN: 9781847659866 November 2013 World ex USA, Can Exclusive Europe
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£11.99 Demy trade paperback with flaps ISBN: 9781846688133 eISBN: 9781847658043 July 2013 UK Com ex Can Exclusive Europe
‘The best of our war novels’ E. M. Forster £8.99 B format paperback ISBN: 9781846687877 eISBN: 9781847657640 September 2013 World English Language US
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26
Backlist
9781846686276
9781846685774
9781846689376
9781846685293
9781781251591
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£7.99
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£11.99
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27
Agents and Representatives, UK & Europe
Serpent’s Tail An imprint of Profile Books Ltd 3A Exmouth House
Sales Director
Claire Beaumont T: 020 7841 6308 E: claire.beaumont@profilebooks.com
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Penny Daniel T: 020 7841 6300 E: penny.daniel@profilebooks.com
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28
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Catalogue cover: Peter Dyer Catalogue artwork: Two Associates
29
SERPENT’S TAIL THE CLERKENWELL PRESS
& TINDAL STREET PRESS 3A Exmouth House Pine Street London EC1R 0JH 020 7841 6300 www.serpentstail.com www.theclerkenwellpress.com www.tindalstreet.co.uk
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