From the author of the hit The Evenings - two classic novellas that are considered among Gerard Reve's best work There will be a club. Important messages have been sent already. If anybody wants to ruin it, he will be punished. Eleven-year-old Elmer inhabits a childhood of superstition, private lore and secret societies that only certain friends can join (and of which he is always president). When a new boy, pale, spindly Werther, arrives in the neighbourhood, a subtle game of fascination and persecution begins. In wartime Amsterdam, a young boy watches as Germans occupy the city. At first his parents' friends, the Boslowits family, think they have little to fear. Then, slowly, terribly, their fate is sealed. In these two haunting novellas from the acclaimed author of The Evenings, the world of childhood, in all its magic and strangeness, darkness and cruelty, is evoked with piercing wit and dreamlike intensity. Here, the things seen through a child's eyes are far from innocent.

From the author of the hit The Evenings - two classic novellas that are considered among Gerard Reve's best work Young Elmer longs to make friends and tries to control the world around him by forming secret clubs, of which he is always the president. When he invites Werther to become a member, a game of attraction and repulsion begins. What follows is a psychological masterpiece; Reve brilliantly conjures up a child's whole world, full of oppression and enchantment. During the Nazi occupation of Amsterdam, a boy watches as the family of one of his friends slowly loses everything and is then taken away. This is a deceptively simple story imbued with subtle horror. These two classic novellas, from the giant of post-war Dutch literature Gerard Reve, have all of the uncanny atmosphere and the incisive, dark wit of The Evenings.

"I've known JG Faherty since he was an up-and-comer. Now he's arrived. Start reading him now-as in TODAY-so you won't have to play catch-up later." -F. Paul Wilson, author of the bestselling Repairman Jack series "Every horror novella should read like this, a non-stop thrill ride that amps up the terror with each chapter." -Russell James, author of Q Island, on The Bear Who Wouldn't Leave Four original novellas to make you hide under the covers! Ah, the carefree, sunny days of childhood. And oh, the terrifying, dark nights. Nights when you closed your eyes tight, afraid to open them and see the painted, eternally leering face of a clown mere inches from your own. Nights when you could look out your bedroom window and watch the scarecrows walk across the lonely cornfields. When every story or fairytale your parents told you seemed to include monsters. And when even the teddy bear by your side had fangs and plans of his own. Travel back to those nights of horror now with four original novellas by four wonderfully macabre authors. And...sleep tight!

From the renowned author of Possession, The Children’s Book is the absorbing story of the close of what has been called the Edwardian summer: the deceptively languid, blissful period that ended with the cataclysmic destruction of World War I. In this compelling novel, A.S. Byatt summons up a whole era, revealing that beneath its golden surface lay tensions that would explode into war, revolution and unbelievable change — for the generation that came of age before 1914 and, most of all, for their children. The novel centres around Olive Wellwood, a fairy tale writer, and her circle, which includes the brilliant, erratic craftsman Benedict Fludd and his apprentice Phillip Warren, a runaway from the poverty of the Potteries; Prosper Cain, the soldier who directs what will become the Victoria and Albert Museum; Olive’s brother-in-law Basil Wellwood, an officer of the Bank of England; and many others from every layer of society. A.S. Byatt traces their lives in intimate detail and moves between generations, following the children who must choose whether to follow the roles expected of them or stand up to their parents’ “porcelain socialism.” Olive’s daughter Dorothy wishes to become a doctor, while her other daughter, Hedda, wants to fight for votes for women. Her son Tom, sent to an upper-class school, wants nothing more than to spend time in the woods, tracking birds and foxes. Her nephew Charles becomes embroiled with German-influenced revolutionaries. Their portraits connect the political issues at the heart of nascent feminism and socialism with grave personal dilemmas, interlacing until The Children’s Book becomes a perfect depiction of an entire world. Olive is a fairy tale writer in the era of Peter Pan and Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind In the Willows, not long after Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. At a time when children in England suffered deprivation by the millions, the concept of childhood was being refined and elaborated in ways that still influence us today. For each of her children, Olive writes a special, private book, bound in a different colour and placed on a shelf; when these same children are ferried off into the unremitting destruction of the Great War, the reader is left to wonder who the real children in this novel are. The Children’s Book is an astonishing novel. It is an historical feat that brings to life an era that helped shape our own as well as a gripping, personal novel about parents and children, life’s most painful struggles and its richest pleasures. No other writer could have imagined it or created it.

These two searingly funny and unsettling portraits of teenagers beyond the control and largely beneath the notice of adults in 1980s Taiwan are the first English translations of works by Taiwan's most famous and best-selling literary cult figure. Chang Ta-chun's intricate narrative and keen, ironic sense of humor poignantly and piercingly convey the disillusionment and cynicism of modern Taiwanese youth. Interweaving the events between the birth of the narrator's younger sister and her abortion at the age of nineteen, the first novel, My Kid Sister, evokes the complex emotional impressions of youth and the often bizarre social dilemmas of adolescence. Combining discussions of fate, existentialism, sexual awakening, and everyday "absurdities" in a typically dysfunctional household, it documents the loss of innocence and the deconstruction of a family. In Wild Child, fourteen-year-old Hou Shichun drops out of school, runs away from home, and descends into the Taiwanese underworld, where he encounters an oddball assortment of similarly lost adolescents in desperate circumstances. This novel will inevitably invite comparisons with the classic The Catcher in the Rye, but unlike Holden Caulfield, Hou isn't given any second chances. With characteristic frankness and irony, Chang's teenagers bear witness to a new form of cultural and spiritual bankruptcy.

'Food for the soul, it's simply deliciously readable and enjoyable' LoveReading In the darkest days of the Blitz, family is more important than ever. With her family struggling amidst the nightly bombing raids in London's East End, Ida Brogan is doing her very best to keep their spirits up. The Blitz has hit the Brogans hard, and rationing is more challenging than ever, but they are doing all they can to help the war effort. When Ida's oldest friend Ellen returns to town, sick and in dire need of help, it is to Ida that she turns. But Ellen carries a secret, one that threatens not only Ida's marriage, but the entire foundation of the Brogan family. Can Ida let go of the past and see a way to forgive her friend? And can she overcome her sadness to find a place in her heart for a little boy, one who will need a mother more than ever in these dark times? Jean Fullerton, the queen of the East End saga, returns with a wonderful new nostalgic novel.

Fourteen “exhilarating” (The Boston Globe) stories that explore “the delicate balance between nature and civilization” (San Francisco Chronicle), from the New York Times bestselling author of The Tortilla Curtain “[A] rollicking collection of . . . good, old-fashioned, funny-suspenseful-head shaking stories.”—The New York Times (Best Books of the Year) There may be no one better than T.C. Boyle at engaging, shocking, and ultimately gratifying readers while at the same time testing his characters' emotional and physical endurance. From “Wild Child,” a retelling of the story of Victor, the feral boy who was captured running naked through the forests of Napoleonic France, to “La Conchita,” the tale of a catastrophic mudslide that allows a cynic to reclaim his own humanity, these tales are by turns magical and moving, showcasing the mischievous humor and socially conscious sensibility that have made Boyle one of the foremost masters of the short story.

Set in Rembrandt's Amsterdam, "An Obscure Man" is the story of Nathanaël—innocent, open to experience—born like Everyman upon the stream of life. In "A Lovely Morning," Nathanaël's young son joins a touring company of Jacobean actors. "Anna, soror . . . ," the final tale, is an account of illicit passion in the baroque world of Naples. "An Obscure Man swarms with life. This intricately researched, imaginative, beautifully written tale of a young man's brief life in the mid-17th century is entirely engrossing."—Leona Weiss, San Francisco Chronicle "In these three stories, [Yourcenar] succeeds in making the essences of these past lives a part of the reader's future through the sheer intensity of their portrayal."—Margaret Ezell, Houston Chronicle

From the author of The Great Glass Sea, three linked novellas set between the Virginias about men confronting love, loss, and personal demons. Set in the hardscrabble hill country between the Virginias, The New Valley contains characters striving to forge new lives in the absence of those they have loved. Told in three varied and distinct voices—a soft-spoken middle-aged beef farmer struggling to hold himself together after his dad’s death; a health-obsessed single father desperate to control his reckless, overweight daughter; and a developmentally delayed man who falls in love with a married woman intent on using him in a scheme that will wound them both—each story explores survival, isolation, and the deep, consuming ache for human connection. As the men battle against grief and solitude, their heartache leads them all to commit acts that will bring both ruin and salvation, in these tales “full of tenderness and looming menace” (The New York Times Book Review). “Stark and haunting . . . Delivers great beauty” —Publishers Weekly, starred review “[Weil’s] language is exquisite, his sentences glorious. . . . Refreshing and engaging.” —Ploughshares

A magnificently stark book—within the smallness of one poor, muddled, provincial life, Natalia Ginzburg finds enormous pain and loss An almost unbearably intimate novella, The Road to the City concentrates on a young woman barely awake to life, who fumbles through her days: she is fickle yet kind, greedy yet abashed, stupidly ambitious yet loving too—she is a mass of confusion. She’s in a bleak space, lit with the hard clarity of a Pasolini film. Her family is no help: her father is largely absent; her mother is miserable; her sister’s unhappily promiscuous; her brothers are in a separate masculine world. Only her cousin Nini seems to see her. She falls into disgrace and then “marries up,” but without any joy, blind to what was beautiful right before her own eyes. The Road to the City was Ginzburg’s very first work, originally published under a pseudonym. “I think it might be her best book,” her translator Gini Alhadeff remarked: “And apparently she thought so, too, at the end of her life, when assembling a complete anthology of her work for Mondadori.