The Stormhaven Etiquette Society, a secretive affair, unafraid to name and shame those who transgress Model Services, the town’s only brothel, a discreet but busy presence in Church Street Bybuckle Asylum, a desolate shell on the seafront that housed over seven hundred mental patients prior to ‘care in the community’ What brings these three together is a cold-blooded execution that both shocks and confounds. For lying dead in the empty asylum, tied to an old metal bed frame, is a pillar of the establishment. Or is she? Sleuthing couple DI Tamsin Shah and her remarkable cleric uncle join forces once again to solve a murder mystery that reveals dark secrets from Abbot Peter’s tempestuous student years. ‘Do we ever leave anything behind?’ he wonders as the killer swings the gun barrel towards him . . . ‘To a long list of much-loved detective pairings, which includes Holmes and Watson, Poirot and Hastings, and Morse and Lewis, we must now add Abbot Peter and Tamsin Shah’. Church Times

A harrowing chronicle of England's early-eighteenth century 'gin craze.--The Atlantic Monthly

A wickedly funny work of depraved genius by one of Brazil’s most radical twentieth-century writers; imagine the Marquis de Sade as written by Clarice Lespecter An electrifying masterpiece by one of modern Brazilian literature’s most significant and controversial writers, Hilda Hilst takes us into the disorder and beauty of a mind restlessly testing its own limits. Every month I ingested the body of God, not in the way one swallows green peas or agrostis, or swallows swords, I ingested the body of God the way people do when they know they are swallowing the More, the All, the Incommensurable, for not believing in finitude I would lose myself in absolute infinity… The Obscene Madame D tells the story of Hillé, a sixty-year-old woman who has decided to abandon conventional life and spend the rest of her days in contemplation in a recess under the stairs. There, she is haunted by the perplexity of her recently deceased lover, Ehud, who cannot understand her rejection of common sense, sex and a simple life in favour of metaphysical speculations that he considers delusional and vain. In a stream-of-consciousness monologue that’s part James Joyce, part Clarice Lispector, and part de Sade, Hillé speaks of her search for spiritual fulfilment from a space of dereliction, as she searches for answers to great questions of life, death and the relationship between body and soul.

“Spence shows himself at once historian, detective, and artist. . . . He makes history howl.” (The New Republic) Award-winning author Jonathan D. Spence paints a vivid picture of an obscure place and time: provincial China in the seventeenth century. Life in the northeastern county of T’an-ch’eng emerges here as an endless cycle of floods, plagues, crop failures, banditry, and heavy taxation. Against this turbulent background a tenacious tax collector, an irascible farmer, and an unhappy wife act out a poignant drama at whose climax the wife, having run away from her husband, returns to him, only to die at his hands. Magnificently evoking the China of long ago, The Death of Woman Wang also deepens our understanding of the China we know today.

In these three works of erotic prose Georges Bataille fuses sex and spirituality in a highly personal and philosophical vision of the self. My Mother is a frank and intense depiction of a young man's sexual initiation and corruption by his mother, where the profane becomes sacred, and intense experience is shown as the only way to transcend the boundaries of society and morality. Madame Edwarda is the story of a prostitute who calls herself God, and The Dead Man, published in 1964 after Bataille's death, is a startling short tale of cruelty and desire. This volume also contains Bataille's own introductions to his texts as well as essays by Yukio Mishima and Ken Hollings.