Par un dimanche après-midi, Lord Amigon, grand propriétaire foncier à la tête du journal The Horizon, âgé d'environ soixante ans, rentrait à Londres après un week-end dans son château de Ghaven, quand sa voiture, dans la périphérie ouest de la ville, tomba en panne...

Dans sa maison à l'écart de la ville, le substitut du procureur de la République, Giovanni Auer, travaillait un soir au réquisitoire du procès Oleari, se demandant s'il allait ou non requérir la peine de mort, lorsqu'il entendit des bruits dans le salon attenant, vide à cette heure-ci...

Alors qu'il filait à toute allure dans sa voiture pour la rejoindre, sur la route tortueuse qui longe le littoral, Antonio Izorni entendit derrière lui un long grincement sinistre. Il tourna la tête sans ralentir...

Dès la première phrase de ce recueil de nouvelles, Dino Buzzati ménage l'art du suspense et invite le lecteur à le suivre, à découvrir des situations, des personnages forcément moins ordinaires qu'ils n'y paraissent a priori. Autant d'invitations à la lecture... Avec cet ouvrage, rassemblant des nouvelles encore inédites dans notre langue, tirées de différents volumes publiés en Italie du vivant de l'auteur, le lecteur français a désormais accès à toute l'oeuvre narrative de Buzzati.

'This is a remarkable book... anyone who has ever felt the pull of the secret past should read it and marvel' Jane Shilling, Sunday Telegraph

The world's finest living short-story writer turns to her family for inspiration; and what follows is a fictionalised, brilliantyl imagined version of the past. From her ancestors' view from Edinburgh's Castle Rock in the eighteenth century, to her parents' thwarted ambitions in Ontario, and her own awakening in '50s Canada, Munro effortlessly weaves fact and myth to create an epic story of past and present, proving that fiction has much to tell us about life.

'A memoir that has taken a breath, and expanded itself beyond the genre and beyond the confines of one life' Hilary Mantel, Guardian

'Beautifully written, this delicat interweaving of fact and fiction is Munro on top form' Daily Mail

'Unbelievably good' Literary Review

'A rare and fascinating work, in which the past makes sense of the present and the present makes sense of the past' Karl Miller, Guardian

'Incomparable' Independent

It's 1985. Benji, the son of a lawyer and a doctor, is one of the only black kids at an elite prep school in Manhattan. He spends much of the year going to roller-disco Bar Mitzvahs and trying desperately to find a social group that will accept him.

But every summer, Benji and his brother Reggie escape to Sag Harbour on Long Island, where a small community of african-american professionals have built a world of their own. Except Benji is just confused about this all-black refuge as he is about the white world he negotiates during the school year. He's one step behind on every new dance, and his attempts to meet a girl are undermined by his own awkwardness, not to mention his braces and his father-cut afro.

Sag Harbour is a warm and funny novel about the perpetual mortification of teenage existence from one to the most acclaimed writers in the english language.

Welcome to Kittur, an imaginary everytown nestling on the Indian coast south of Goa and north of Calicut. Journeying through its streets and schoolyards, bedrooms and businesses, its inner workings and outer limits, Aravind Adiga weaves a remarkable fictional tapestry of India in the 80s, the years after the assassination of Indira Gandhki and before that of her son Rajiv.

From a middle-aged Communist to an Islamic terrorist; from the young children of a Tamil building-site worker to a privileged and alienated schoolboy; from an idealistic journalist to a Brahmin housemaid, an entire Indian world comes vividly and unforgettably to life. Muslim, Christian and Hindu, high-caste and low-caste, rich and poor; all of Indian life - the 'sorrowful parade of humanity' - is here.

Sizzling with acid observations and textured with wicked humour and gentle humanity, Between the Assassinations is a triumph of voice and imagination.

Joseph Roth tenait tout particulièrement aux deux essais ici réunis. Inventaire poétique et lucide d'un univers que l'écrivain savait menacé, celui des bourgades juives d'Europe centrale et orientale, Juifs en errance analyse les raisons de sa lente désagrégation : la pauvreté qui pousse les habitants du shtetl à l'exode, la tentation de l'assimilation, le rêve sioniste. En véritable passeur de culture, le juif assimilé Roth, porte un regard bienveillant sur ces juifs à l'idiome étrange, vêtus de caftans, que l'on croise dans certains quartiers de Vienne, de Berlin ou de Paris. D'une toute autre nature, et par son sujet et par sa langue, qui semble celle d'un prophète des temps modernes, L'Antéchrist est lui aussi une profession de foi humaniste et une interrogation inquiète sur le devenir de l'Europe. Dans cet étrange réquisitoire contre les phénomènes de l'âge technique, on peut lire l'angoisse profonde d'un intellectuel épris de cosmopolitisme qui voit son monde sombrer dans l'exacerbation des nationalismes et le chaos infernal des dictatures.

En cette fin d’année 1499, l’archevêque de Grenade, confesseur de la Reine Isabelle, vient d’ordonner la destruction de tous les ouvrages de la ville écrits en langue arabe. Cet autodafé sonne la fin de la glorieuse civilisation d’al-Andalus, qui a régné pendant sept siècles sur la péninsule ibérique. Chez les al-Hudayl, très ancienne famille dont le domaine est implanté à quelques lieues de la ville, on s’interroge face à la radicalisation des Chrétiens : faut-il accepter d’abjurer sa foi pour sauver ses biens et peut-être sa vie, comme s’y sont résolus le propre oncle du chef de clan, devenu prélat, et un de ses cousins, négociant à Grenade ? Faut-il fuir de l’autre côté de la Méditerranée ? Ou alors organiser la résistance qu’appelle de ses vœux le jeune et fougueux Zuhayr, convaincu que la marche de l’histoire n’est pas irréversible ? Tariq Ali excelle à camper les détails du quotidien de ces aristocrates libéraux à un moment où leur monde, tout de raffinement et de tranquille certitude, bascule. Mais si, avec sa verve coutumière, il donne vie et chair aux intrigues amoureuses, aux unions clandestines voire incestueuses et aux secrètes rivalités, le romancier livre aussi une subtile réflexion sur les germes du déclin de la culture arabe en Andalousie. C’est bien le projet de son Quintet de l’islam, dont ce roman est le troisième volet : confronter, au fil des siècles et à différentes périodes, les mondes chrétien et musulman. Déjà parus : Un sultan à Palerme (2007), évocation de la Sicile cosmopolite du XIIe siècle, et Le Livre de Saladin (2008), récit de la reconquête de Jérusalem par Salah al-Din.

Le contrôleur des poids et mesures Eibenschütz s'installe dans la petite ville de Zlotogrod, où il vient d'être nommé. Accompagné d'une jeune épouse indifférente, il mène une vie solitaire, dans ce petit bourg des confins de l'Empire où la présence d'un fonctionnaire honnête perturbe beaucoup de petits arrangements.
Quand Eibenschütz se prend de passion pour la compagnie du plus téméraire des contrebandiers, les repères s'abolissent, et pour cet homme sans histoire le monde semble changer d'aspect...

Part noir, part psychedelic romp, all Thomas Pynchon - private eye Doc Sportello comes, occasionally, out of a marijuana haze to watch the end of an era as free love slips away and paranoïa creeps in with the L. A. fog.

It's been a while since Doc Sportello has seen his ex-girlfriend. Suddenly out of nowhere she shows up with a story about a plot to kidnap a billionaire land developer whom she just happens to be in love with. Easy for her to say. It's the tail end of the psychedelic sixties in L.A., and Doc knows that 'love' is another of those words going around at the moment, like 'trip' or 'groovy', except that this one usually leads to trouble. Despite which he soon finds himself drawn into a bizarre tangle of motives and passions whose cast of characters includes surfers, hustlers, dopers and rockers, a murderous loan shark, a tenor sax player working undercover, an ex-con with a swastika tattoo and a fondness for Ethel Merman, and a mysterious entity known as the Golden Fang, which may only be a tax dodge set up by some dentists.

In this lively yarn, Thomas Pynchon, working in an unaccustomed genre, provides a classic illustration of the principle that if you can remember the sixties, you weren't there... or... if you were there, then you... or, wait, is it...

Always attuned to the moment of epiphany, these twelve stories are profound, intimate observations of men and women whose lives ache with possibility - each story a dramatisation of the instant in a life that exposes it all : love and the lack of love, hope and the lack of hope.

These men and women are perfectly ordinary people - whose marriages founder, who sit on their own in a cinema watching a film with no soundtrack, who risk sex in a hotel with an anonymous stranger. They conceal tenderness and disappointment, vulnerability and longing, griefs and wonders - and, with each of them, Kennedy finds and opens up that extraordinary emotional wound, that insight into their experiences: like the woman in 'Saturday Teatime' who tries to relax in a flotation tank, before her memories hijack her, taking her back to last weekend's party - to a boy with a hamster, and his lecherous father - and then further back to another Saturday, when she was nine years old, when the troubling of her life began.

A. L. Kennedy's fifth remarkable collection of short stories shows us exactly what becomes of the broken-hearted. She reveals the sadness, violence, hurt and terror, but also the redemption of love - and she does so with the enormous human compassion, wild leaps of humour, and the brilliantly original linguistic skill that distinguishes her as one of Britain's finest writers.

Haffner is charming, morally suspect, sexually omnivorous, vain. He is British and Jewish and a widower. But when was Haffner ever really married ? Or Jewish ? When was he ever attached ?

There are so many stories of Haffner: but this, the most secret, is the greatest of them all.

In a spa town snug in the Alps, at the end of the twentieth century, the 78-year-old Haffner has arrived to claim his wife's inheritance: a villa expropriated by the century's totalitarian politics. But Haffner never does what he is told. In the spa hotel, he has tried to develop a mildly successful affair with a hungrily passionate married woman; and a much less successful affair with a capricious young yoga instructor.

But gradually, through the tribulations of government bureaucracy, he discovers that he wants this villa, very much. Now that he has to fight for it, he wants it.

For how can you ever desert from your past, your family, your history ? That is the problem of Haffner's story in The Escape. That has always been the problem of Haffner's life. How do you remain a libertine ?

So, through the digressions of his comic couplings and uncouplings, through three days of sexual farce, emerge the stories of Haffner's century: the chaos of World War Two, the heyday of jazz, the post-war diaspora, the uncertain triumph of capitalism, and the inescapability of memory.