A story of family, friendship, belonging and what it means to be human, told from the unlikely point of view of a dog. King, a scarred, mixed-breed dog with five different names under his collar, would never claim to be man’s best friend. His humans haven’t all been friendly, and so far life’s been dominated by hunger, hurt and homelessness. King’s created laws for survival, like the essential Law #1: See Food, Eat Food. And when he’s saved from a desperate situation by Rose, a fellow hound with teardrop ears and a bark like gravy, he sticks by her side and decides to give up on humans altogether. But a dog’s life is not his own, and when he and Rose are violently separated, King vows to find her, even if it means leaving the kind, patient human who’s just entered his life. Join King in this heartwarming, thought-provoking novel on humanity, and experience the happy ending that all canines and humans alike deserve.

The book of human skin is a large volume with many pages of villainy writ upon it. There are people who are a disease, you know. 13 May, 1784, Venice: Minguillo Fasan, heir to the decaying, gothic Palazzo Espagnol, is born. Yet Minguillo is no ordinary child: he is strange, devious and all those who come near him are fearful. Twelve years later Minguillo is faced with an unexpected threat to his inheritance: a newborn sister, Marcella. His untempered jealousy will condemn his sister to a series of fates as a cripple, a madwoman and a nun. But in his insatiable quest to destroy her, he may have underestimated his sister's ferocious determination, and her unlikely allies who will go to extraordinary lengths to save her...

Humanity's Strings: Being, Pessimism, and Fantasy interrogates the nature of reality against fantasy as the two are presented to and created by the human consciousness-a consciousness that is in constant struggle with the omnipresence of misery and the inevitability of death. The book shows that being, pessimism, and fantasy as the strings which are made up of forces unseen, unknown, and ungoverned that control the human being like a puppet. Through a study of the metaphysical and existential philosophies of thinkers, such as Franz Brentano, Edmund Husserl, Søren Kierkegaard, Arthur Schopenhauer, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Jacques Derrida, the book interrogates not only how the self interacts with fantasy but why it does as well. It also asks why fantasy forces the self towards a unity that impacts existence in the modern world with its questions of justice, politics, and materiality. Furthermore, it situates the fantasy novels of authors, such as Stephen King, Brandon Sanderson, Douglas Adams, and Robert Jordan, as discourses which delineate the considerations above as ideas which modulate the existence of the human. Additionally, the book shows how it is not just the human that is affected by the machinations of the cosmos but also time and space-ostensibly a priori entities of existence-as these two interact with the human and its consciousness.

Mario Conde investigates a murder in the Barrio Chino, the rundown Chinatown of Havana. Not his usual beat, but when Conde was asked to take the case by his colleague, the sultry, perfectly proportioned Lieutenant Patricia Chion, a frequent object of his nightly fantasies, he could n’t resist. The case proves to be unusual. Pedro Cuang, a lonely old man, is found hanging naked from a beam in the ceiling of his dingy room. One of his fingers has been amputated and a drawing of two arrows was engraved with a knife on his chest. Was this a ritual Santería killing or a just a sordid settling of accounts in a world of drug trafficking that began to infiltrate Cuban society in the 1980s? Soon Conde discovers unexpected connections, secret businesses and a history of misfortune, uprooting and loneliness that affected many immigrant families from China. As ever with Padura, the story is soaked in atmosphere: the drinking of rum in deliciously smoke-filled bars, the friendships, the food and beautiful women.