Fresh out of college and uncertain how to proceed with life, the narrator of Ben Markovits' Playing Days finds himself drifting towards a career that once obsessed his father - professional basketball. Gaining a place on a minor league German team, he leaves Texas and lands in the small rather desolate town of Landshut, playing basketball with an eclectic group of teammates, training for most of the day and then trying to find ways to fill the rest of it. It's an odd, isolated existence, punctuated by the intense excitement - and often intense disappointment - of the game. But then he meets Anke, a young single mother who happens to be the former wife of one of his teammates; and their tentative, burgeoning relationship becomes as significant and as life changing as the game itself. Beautifully written, Playing Days is entirely recognisable in its depiction of the first long summer after university. Tinged with the melancholy and nostalgia of early steps into adulthood, it's the story of a young man's first experience of adult love, and of the discovery of his own limitations.

"[Markovits] leaves us wanting, in the most delicious way, more." —Kirsty Gunn, The Observer Lord Byron was the greatest writer and the most notorious, scandalous lover of his age—an irresistible attraction for a sheltered, bookish, and passionate young woman like Eliza Esmond. Eliza believes she’s met Byron on the doorstep of his publisher, and that her dreams have come true when he arranges to meet her in secret. But what if the man she believes to be Byron is someone else—a look-alike named John Polidori, who once toured Europe as Byron’s doctor?

'A novel that everyone should read before they face their own family Christmas.' The Times When the four Essinger children gather in Austin for Christmas, they all bring their news. Nathan wants to become a federal judge. Susie's husband has taken a job in England. Jean has asked her boyfriend and (once-married) boss to meet her family. Paul has broken up with Dana, mother of their son Cal. But their parents have plans, too, and Liesel, the materfamilias, has invited Dana and Cal to stay, hoping to bring them back together. As the week unfolds, each of the Essingers has to confront the tensions and conflicts between old families and new.

Award-winning adult author Benjamin Markovits delivers a poignant coming-of-age middle grade story that will give comfort to anyone feeling like a small fish in a Texas-size sea. Perfect for fans of Kevin Henkes, Rebecca Stead, and Kate DiCamillo. Twelve-year-old Ben is a shy, quiet kid. His life isn’t perfect, but he feels at home in his New York City apartment. Then his dad takes a job in London, and everything changes. His parents separate, and Ben’s mom moves them back to her hometown of Austin, Texas. Ben’s simple life is suddenly complicated. He misses his apartment, his best friend, Jake, and his dad. Then he meets Mabley, who becomes a bright spot to Ben’s day. But when his mom starts working at his new school and making friends with his teacher, Ben finds himself at the center of all the problems the adults around him can’t resolve—and even some of his own. That includes joining the school’s basketball team, where Mabley’s best friend is the star player. After being pushed around, looking for his place, Ben will have to learn how to stand his ground.

The last piece of a literary puzzle falls into place in the final novel of Benjamin Markovits’s Byron trilogy. When his former colleague Peter Sullivan dies, Ben Markovits inherits unpublished manuscripts about the life of Lord Byron—including the novels Imposture and A Quiet Adjustment. Ben’s own literary career is in the doldrums, and he tries to revive it by publishing and writing about his dead friend, whose reimagining of Byron’s lost memoirs—titled Childish Loves—may provide a key to Sullivan’s own life and tarnished reputation. Acting as a literary sleuth, Ben sorts through boxes of Sullivan’s writing; reads between the lines of his scandalous, Byron-inspired stories; meets with the Society for the Publication of the Dead; and tracks down people from Peter’s past in an effort to untangle rumor from reality. In the process, he crafts a masterful story-within-a-story that turns on uncomfortable questions about childhood and sexual awakening, innocence and attraction, while exploring the lives of three very different writers and their brushes with success and failure in both literature and life.

A frighteningly prescient novel of today’s America—one man’s story of a racially charged real estate experiment in Detroit, Michigan. “You get in the habit of living a certain kind of life, you keep going in a certain direction, but most of the pressure on you is just momentum. As soon as you stop the momentum goes away. It’s easier than people think to walk out on things, I mean things like cities, leases, relationships and jobs.” Greg Marnier, Marny to his friends, leaves a job he doesn’t much like and moves to Detroit, Michigan in 2009, where an old friend has a big idea about real estate and the revitalization of a once great American city. Once there, he gets involved in a fist-fight between two of his friends, a racially charged trial, an act of vigilante justice, a love affair with a local high school teacher, and a game of three-on-three basketball with the President—not to mention the money-soaked real estate project itself, cut out of 600 acres of emaciated Detroit. Marny’s billionaire buddy from Yale, Robert James, calls his project “the Groupon model for gentrification,” others call it “New Jamestown,” and Marny calls it home— until Robert James asks him to leave. This is the story of what went wrong. You Don’t Have to Live Like This is the breakout novel from the “fabulously real” (Guardian) voice of the only American included in Granta’s Best of Young British Novelists. Using the framework of our present reality, Benjamin Markovits blurs the line between the fictional and the fact-based, and captures an invisible current threaded throughout American politics, economics, and society that is waiting to explode.

'Elegant and absorbing.' Guardian'A book to be savoured.' Observer'Intimate, funny . . . Masterfully done.' Daily Mail'Sophisticated and engrossing.' Literary ReviewPaul is a mid-ranking tennis professional on the ATP tour. His girlfriend Dana is an ex-model and photographer, and together with their two-year-old son they form a tableau of the contented upper-middle-class New York family. But Paul's parents and siblings have come to stay in the build-up to the US Open, and with summer storms brewing, several generations of domestic tension are brought to boiling point . . .

Douglas Pitt is a man obsessed. Laughed at, mocked, and dismissed at every turn, Pitt has dedicated the best part of an unremarkable academic career attempting to prove the genius of Samuel Highgate Syme (b.1794, Baltimore; soldier, geologist, inventor). Pitt's postulation is simple enough: Syme, through some fault, wrong-doing, conspiracy or mischance, has not been credited with the recognition he deserves for hitting upon a key discovery in the advance of modern science - the theory of continental drift. Lacking the crucial last piece of the puzzle to convince his peers and normalize his family life, Pitt's emotional equilibrium is stabilised in a magical stroke of fortune when he uncovers a contemporary manuscript written by a fledgling German scientist, Friedrich Muller, which recounts a year (1821) in the company of the irrepressible Syme. Switching between these beguiling and colourful narratives, The Syme Papers takes the reader on an odyssey into the heart of Maryland and Virginia in the 1820s by way of London and Texas today. An epic stew of intellectual procrastination, early nineteenth-century picaresque and late twentieth-century angst, it is a novel of genius and failure; of a man who thought he could prove the world was hollow, and in the glorious process of discovery, broke his own heart. Teeming with comic detail and fierce intelligence, The Syme Papers recreates a time when to question the world and the origins of creation was the greatest project a scientist could undertake.

Benjamin Markovits is a leading Anglo-American novelist with a varied and ambitious body of work, ranging from a trilogy of historical fictions on the life of Lord Byron (Imposture, 2007; A Quiet Adjustment, 2008; Childish Loves, 2011) to an award-winning portrayal of a gentrification project in Obama-era Detroit (You Don’t Have to Live Like This, 2015) to intimate studies of contemporary family life (A Weekend in New York, 2018; Christmas in Austin, 2019). Prolific and unpredictable, Markovits is one of the most interesting realist writers working today. Featuring contributions from emerging and established scholars, this collection provides fresh perspectives on Markovits’s place in the contemporary literary field, as well as offering a detailed survey of his work to date. The collection begins with Markovits’s early ‘campus novel’, The Syme Papers (2004), before exploring his celebrated ‘Byron Trilogy’, and the 2005 story cycle, Either Side of Winter. Contributors consider Markovits’s best-known book, You Don’t Have to Live Like This, which won the James Tait Memorial Prize, as well as his more recent fictions focusing on the trials and tribulations of the Essinger family. Taken together, this authoritative collection brings to light the many preoccupations of Markovits’s singular oeuvre—from Byron to basketball, from race relations to real estate. It also includes a frank and wide-ranging interview with the author. The collection will be a first port of call for students and scholars in search of a comprehensive introduction to the work of one of our most exciting contemporary novelists.

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • From Nobel Prize–winning author Alice Munro come nine short stories with “the intimacy of a family photo album and the organic feel of real life” (The New York Times) “In Munro’s hands, as in Chekhov’s, a short story is more than big enough to hold the world—and to astonish us, again and again.”—Chicago Tribune FINALIST FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD • A TIME BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR • ONE OF THE NEW YORK TIMES’S 100 BEST BOOKS OF THE 21ST CENTURY In the nine breathtaking stories that make up this collection, Alice Munro creates narratives that loop and swerve like memory, conjuring up characters as thorny and contradictory as people we know ourselves. The fate of a strong-minded housekeeper with a “frizz of reddish hair,” just entering the dangerous country of old-maidhood, is unintentionally (and deliciously) reversed by a teenaged girl’s practical joke. A college student visiting her aunt for the first time and recognizing the family furniture stumbles on a long-hidden secret and its meaning in her own life. An inveterate philanderer finds the tables turned when he puts his wife into an old-age home. A young cancer patient stunned by good news discovers a perfect bridge to her suddenly regained future. A woman recollecting an afternoon’s wild lovemaking with a stranger realizes how the memory of that encounter has both changed for her and sustained her through a lifetime. Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage is Munro at her best—tirelessly observant, serenely free of illusion, deeply and gloriously humane.