Engelska

<p>Penelope Wells, precocious daughter of a poet, is holidaying at her family's distinctly bohemian hotel on the French Riviera. She spends the summer beneath the green umbrella pines and oppressive purple bougainvillea scribbling into her Anthology of Hates to pass the time. </p><p>Until she meets the Bradleys. </p><p>Don and Eva Bradley are well-behaved and middle-class - everything she is not. It is love at first sight. But the friendship ends in tears. Penelope and Don Bradley leave the Riviera, embarking on the painful process of growing up. She, in love with an elusive ideal of order and calm. He, in rebellion against the philistine values of his parents. </p>

<p>In four beautifully woven parts, Mukasonga spins a marvelous recounting of the clash between ancient Rwandan beliefs and the missionaries determined to replace them with European Christianity. When a rogue priest is defrocked for fusing the gospels with the martyrdom of Kibogo, a fierce clash of cults ensues.</p><p>Swirling with the heady smell of wet earth and flashes of acerbic humor, Mukasonga brings to life the vital mythologies that imbue the Rwandan spirit. </p>

<p>Nathalie arrives at the circus in Vladivostok fresh out of fashion school in Geneva. She is there to design the costumes for a trio of artists who are due to perform one of the most dangerous acts of all - the Russian Bar act.</p><p>What ensues is an intimate and beguiling account of four people learning to work with and trust one another. </p><p>At its heart, this is a book about the delicate balance that must be achieved when flirting with death in such spectacular fashion, set against the backdrop of a cloudy ocean and plunging the reader into Dusapin's trademark dreamlike prose. </p>

<p>The story of the eight best teenage girl boxers in the United States, told over the two days of a championship tournament and structured as a series of face-offs.</p><p>As the girls' pasts and futures collide, the specific joy and violence of the sport comes to life with electric energy, and a portrait emerges of the desire, envy, perfectionism, madness and sheer physical pleasure that motivates each of these young women to fight. </p>

A story collection that contains ghosts, mediums, a lover obsessed with the sound of harps tuning, teenage girls who believe they are actually plants, gulag prisoners who outsmart a terrible warden, and carnivorous churches. Throughout these grotesque and tender stories, characters question the bodies they've been given and what their bodies require to be sustained.

<p>It's summer, 1984, in blue-collar Swaffham, Massachusetts. </p><p>Mel is thirteen, drinking a Slush Puppie at the drugstore, when she hears a voice, 'deep and movie-star dramatic, like Lauren Bacall': Sylvia. </p><p>What follows is a story of transgender awakening. Sylvia's shameless swagger and tough-girl trans femininity is an affront to the Swaffham locals, and her presence triggers hatred and, ultimately, violence. But it is also a catalyst for Mel.</p><p>Through her friendship with Sylvia, Mel comes to realise that not only is there a world beyond Swaffham, there are other ways of being, free from the class and gender roles embodied by her cruel, vulnerable mother Irene or her best friend, the troubled Jules. </p>

Grace lives alone in Ballybrady, a little village on the sublimely beautiful east coast of Northern Ireland. She fills her days with swimming, fishing, quilting, and baiting the tourists who arrive from the city with more money than sense. She hasn't left the village since a traumatic stay in London as a young woman at the end of the 1980s. One of the tourists is Evan, taking an enforced holiday from his family and work in Belfast after breaking down after the death of his daughter in infancy. He has come to try to process his grief and make himself desirable again as a husband, a father and a business partner. But he hasn't been there a week until he gets trapped by lockdown. When Grace saves his life in a kayaking accident - if it was an accident - and Evan's troubled son arrives to stay, all three are drawn together in a way that forces a reckoning with their personal traumas and draws them back into society. This is a moving and funny debut novel set in a quirky coastal community you will be desperate to visit after reading. It will appeal to readers of Elizabeth Strout, Maggie O'Farrell and Alice Munro.