Deep Vellum Publishing

Winner of the inaugural Mo Habib Translation Prize in Persian Literature, Reza Ghassemi’s darkly comic and subtly provocative novel of life among the exiled and expatriated. Iranian exile Yadollah is barely scraping by in 1990s Paris. He lives in a run-down attic apartment with his friend Seyyed, and his girlfriend Ra’na. It’s an all too common situation—their apartment building houses a cast of eccentric neighbors, most of them fellow down-on-their-luck exiles from all over the world. When a mysterious new neighbor arrives on the scene, a man who ominously goes by the name of Prophet, Yadollah and his friends’ world is turned upside down. Yadollah suddenly finds himself confronted by the Islamic angels of death, and realizes that he must untangle the mystery of his own murder, which occurred at some unknown point after Prophet’s arrival. Suspenseful, yet darkly humorous, Woodwind Harmony In The Nighttime explores the trauma of displacement, and challenges readers to piece together the story of a life shattered by exile.

“It’s impossible to get a single answer from the past. It’s not a key to anything. It’s just a place we go to trick ourselves.”Andrea and Julián haven’t seen one another in twenty-one years—not since the tragic, fateful night their senior year of high school that marked their group of friends forever. A startling phone call brings the two together again in Houston, where they begin to unravel the truth of that year, picking open long scabbed-over wounds from their upper-class adolescence in 1990s Bolivia and the scandal that ripped them apart. A writer unhappy in his career and his marriage, Julián has been novelizing the past for his next book, trying to make meaning out of the events that changed the course of their lives forever. “I’d thought that writing about that time would free me, relieve the burden of the invisible years,” he writes, “but often it seems that it’s done the reverse.” Juxtaposing the naive invincibility of adolescence with the grasping uncertainties of adulthood, The Invisible Years deftly weaves a coming-of-age tale that leaves the reader hanging on every word, even as they know how the cards fall in the end.

From one of Moldova’s most celebrated writers, The Summer My Mother Had Green Eyes is a complex coming-of-age story unraveling the fragile, complicated, redemptive relationship between a mother and her son. Aleksy still remembers the last summer he spent with his mother in Northern France. At eighteen, eager to fly the nest and escape a family still grief-stricken by the death of his sister years earlier, these lazy months in the countryside are akin to torture. And then, his mother tells him she’s dying. Fourteen years later, at the urging of his psychiatrist, Aleksy relives the memory of the summer when everything changed, shaken once again by the emotions that besieged him when they arrived in that small French village. For fans of Claire Keegan and Elena Ferrante, this is a story of reconciliation, of three months in which mother and son finally lay down their weapons to make peace with each other and with themselves.

Jacqueline Cascorro, once a heartbroken and disillusioned wife, finds herself in a whirlwind of new experiences after her husband Nicolás Lobato’s infidelity.  As Nicolás’s business success elevates their social status, Jacqueline is introduced to a world of refined tastes and colors that were once beyond her reach. Through new acquaintances and lavish parties, she yearns for a more fulfilling life and a genuine love. Unable to accept her current reality, Jacqueline embarks on a series of misadventures, navigating the high society of Mexico in search of love.

From prizewinning Italian author Andrea Bajani: the secrets of a man and his country as seen through the eyes of the homes that have guarded them. The Book of Homes is the story of a man and his friendships, his upbringing, his discovery of sex and poetry, his detachment from a self-destructive family, and his liberation from the furniture that has followed him through 20 years of moves. His story jumps from home to home, upstairs to downstairs, each home a piece of the puzzle of his life. In its extraordinary, ambitious architecture, this novel brings to light all the stories hidden in the silence of domestic spaces.

In lyrical, unconstrained prose, debut author Tom Ross tells a story of intergenerational change and conflict in a Black American family in the pre-Civil Rights era.Lorraine ?Rain? Franklin?whose family made their way north as part of the Great Migration and have settled in the Finger Lakes region of upstate New York?is lost. She stumbles through a series of questionable romantic encounters and assumed identities, and eventually into an unplanned pregnancy, struggling both to define herself in and against a fallen world and to achieve autonomy from her mother?s repressive anxieties. Rain?s misadventures are a parable of what it means to confront, however imperfectly, the contradictions of a Black community defining itself in midcentury America.For twenty-five years, Tom Ross has been amassing the semi-autobiographical history of the extended Franklin family. Miss Abracadabra is the culmination and first extended publication from this astonishing storytelling project, which?through multiple viewpoints?fractures and reconfigures historical experience into infinite narrative possibilities.