Granta Books

The must-read art world novel of the summer: a story of love, ego and destruction, and the dark relationship between authenticity and celebrity, artist and muse. London. 1990s. Amid the heady rebellion of Young British Artists, Rabble Stone, a photographer, meets the artist, a painter, after renting a room in her Brixton home. Soon Rabble is in thrall to this new world: to the run-down glamour of the Victorian house; to the exhilarating and debauched gallery openings, and to those in the artist's orbit, beautiful and lost. Above all, she is drawn to her new friend's work; raw, unfiltered self-portraits of startling intimacy, which Rabble captures in her uncompromising photographs. But as Rabble's longing tips into obsession, her pursuit of the artist - her fame, her wealth, her life - threatens to consume her... "Sharp, vivid, compelling: a love letter to the last identifiable scene in British Art that captures the energy, grit and luxury and hunger of 90s London" - Lizzy Stewart, author of Alison and Wreck

Imagine a world in which you could take back the stupid thing you just said, unspill the coffee, avoid the accident, roll life back thirty seconds and do it over again - this time the right way. In Etgar Keret's universe, all things are possible. A man can take a yoga class that genuinely transforms his life. A son has the chance to redo a fateful exchange with his father. An alien can offer a guided tour of the destroyed earth. And an angry squirrel can wreck a wedding. Ranging from sci-fi scenarios to fictional thought-experiments and short vignettes, the stories here all deliver the irreverence, surprises, existential unease, hope and humanity we have come to expect from Etgar Keret - one of the most original and entertaining storytellers at work today.

Emigrating alone from Paris to New York after World War II, a young girl Gazala befriends two spirited sisters, Anne and Alma. When Gazala's beloved brother Samir joins her in Manhattan, this inseparable foursome becomes the beating heart of an untraditional, multigenerational family. The decades are marked by erupting passions within everyday life. Gazala and Samir make a home together, Alma loses a baby, Anne leaves her husband for his sister and her restless daughter grows up to raise a child on her own. The four friends stand by one another through it all, steadfastly unapologetic about their authentic desires and the unorthodox family they have created. Compassionate and full of warmth and humour, I'll Be Right Here embraces the complexity and richness of humanity and the mysterious ways we evolve as we love - and the ways we hope to be loved in return.

SHORTLISTED FOR THE NERO PRIZE FOR DEBUT FICTIONSHORTLISTED FOR THE GOLDSMITHS PRIZEPlans for the expansion of the Capmeadow Business Park are in full swing - its mission is to become the greatest business park in the region. Tom Crowley, a mid-level employee, loses his daughter at 'bring your daughter to work day'. He raises the alarm, and his colleagues rush to help him find her. Eventually, after no sign of her is found, it transpires she was never there. And yet, as time goes on, Tom still cannot reconcile that she is really at home. Refusing to accept that she is safe, Tom continues to search for her in the maze of corridors and impossible multi-dimensional spaces that make up his place of work... Because Capmeadow is expanding in unexpected ways, a Liaison Officer becomes the central focus for complaints about how the expansion is impacting the lives of the employees - unexpected buildings, years-long business days, cursed farmers' markets, and corridors of the mind are draining the life from Tom and everyone he works with. Years pass, and Tom remains at the company, convinced he is in the presence of his now adult daughter. But has he judged it correctly? And can anything go back to the way it was?

Flamboyance ignites every aspect of our lives, from art and entertainment to ritual and protest. The word conjures exuberance and unashamed passion; in thought, expression and dress. Yet historically the term 'flamboyant' has been reserved for the over-the-top and the outré, invoked at times as a pejorative innuendo or worse. In his fascinating new book, Jack Parlett argues for its value as an empowering and creative force, illuminating the ways in which flamboyance is a fundamental aspect of human conduct that both marks and transcends difference. Taking in an eclectic array of examples, from Gothic architecture to the orange flowers of Dungeness, and populated by figures such as Oscar Wilde, James Baldwin, Elton John, Amy Winehouse, Lil Nas X and Chappell Roan, this is a book about flamboyant art and the art of flamboyance. And having both aspired to it and rejected it, Jack recounts his personal relationship to flamboyance while also finding new meanings of the word, exploring its surprises and contradictions, and reconnecting with its radical power.

The smell of leather. The flash of a harness. The snap of a latex glove. Welcome to the radical, vibrant world of sexual fetishists. In 21st century commodity culture, we are all intimately involved with objects: we covet a Birkin bag; we keep trainers box-fresh. We are, in a sense, all fetishists. But occasionally this desire spills into something more subversive. SECOND SKIN offers a tour through the materials, objects and power dynamics commonly fetishised, unpacking their histories, their expressive potential, and the communities they give rise to. Drawing from her encounters with fellow fetishists and kinksters, it is also the story of Anastasiia Fedorova's own journey: of what it means to come to terms with one's sexuality. Brave and searching, SECOND SKIN reveals how what we deem 'taboo' is never static, while asking: do we have the courage to look at these desires directly, and express them unapologetically?

Sail Away Land is the space where we might go when we're no longer alive (sometimes only temporarily). In this uncommon and disarming collection, the characters go 'there' with or without knowing it. Maybe they have been living there all along without noticing - just like they hadn't really noticed that everyone is carrying a shiny black suitcase. These stories are about normal things - losing the people we're closest to, forgiving them, finding love and managing to hold onto it - but also about going to parties through a door in the back of a colleague's head, housebreaking in search of a sister's ghost, and asking the strangers in the kitchen to resurrect you at midnight. Like brilliant and strange anxiety dreams in prose, the stories in Sail Away Land are full of temporal weirdness, life and non-being, psychological acuity, imagination and wit, all while being effortlessly, seductively readable and incredibly moving.

LONGLISTED FOR THE GORDON BURN PRIZE'Is this honest? Are we all being honest here?'You couldn't really call the man soon to be christened TonyInterruptor a heckler, but he seems to feel an unquenchable urge to disrupt and interrupt live cultural events. Who is he? What does he want? Why does he indulge in behaviour that violates the social contrac? fter just such a public interruption goes viral, a small group of characters determine to find out the answers to these question, and end up learning more than they might possibly like about music, culture, relationships, Art, integrity, each other and their own endlessly disrupted and disruptable selves. As profound as it is exuberant, TonyInterruptor traces the aftermath of a single event as it reverberates through the online world and its characters' lives, upending everything in its wake and posing fundamental questions about authenticity, the internet, love and, yes, truth.

Nestled among rugged mountains, in a remote part of Catalonia frequented by wolf hunters, bandits, deserters, ghosts, beasts and demons, sits the old farmhouse called Mas Clavell. Inside, an impossibly old woman lies on her deathbed while family and caretakers drift in and out. All the women who have ever lived and died in that house are waiting for her to join them. They are preparing to throw her a party. As day turns to night, four hundred years' worth of memories unspool, and the house reverberates with the women's stories. Stories of mysterious visions, of those born without eyelashes and tongues or with deformed hearts. But it begins with the story of the matriarch Joana who double-crosses the devil, heedless of what the consequences might be. I Gave You Eyes and You Looked Toward Darkness is a formally daring and entrancing novel in which Irene Sola explores the duality and essential link between light and darkness, life and death, oblivion and memory.

A young, unnamed man, reeling from his addiction to heroin and alcohol, spirals through these interlinked stories of grief and transcendence, of rock bottom and redemption, of getting lost and found and lost again. In the course of his adventures, he meets an assortment of people, who seem as alienated and confused as he; sinners, misfits, the lost, the damned, the desperate and the forgotten. Out of their bleak, seemingly random lives, Denis Johnson creates modern-day parables of a harsh and devastating beauty.

'I've been summoned, Thursday, ten sharp.' So begins one day in the life of a young clothing-factory worker during Ceausescu's totalitarian regime. She has been questioned before, but this time she knows it will be worse. Her crime? Sewing notes into the linings of men's suits bound for Italy. 'Marry me', the notes say, with her name and address. Anything to get out of the country.As she rides the tram to her interrogation, her thoughts stray to her friend Lilli, shot while trying to flee to Hungary; to her grandparents, deported after her first husband informed on them; to Major Albu, her interrogator, who begins each session with a wet kiss on her fingers; and to Paul, her lover and the one person she can trust. In her distraction, she misses her stop and finds herself on an unfamiliar street.And what she discovers there suddenly puts her fear of the appointment into chilling perspective. Bone-spare and intense, The Appointment is a pitiless rendering of the terrors of a crushing regime.

Set in Romania at the height of Ceausescu's reign of terror, The Land of Green Plums tells the story of a group of young students, each of whom has left the impoverished provinces in search of better prospects in the city. It is a profound illustration of a totalitarian state which comes to inhabit every aspect of life; to the extent that everyone, event the strongest, must either bend to the oppressors or resist them and perish.

From her childhood in Romania, in a village 'as small as a thimble on the edge of the world', through to life in exile in Germany, Herta Müller's story unspools against the tumultuous history of Romania in the latter half of the twentieth century. Here, the Nobel Prize laureate reflects on cultural history, memory and trauma, and on what it was to live and write during Ceausescu's regime: on the friendships that buckled under the weight of fear and paranoia; on the experience of being surveilled and interrogated; and on the unique blend of fear and tedium borne through life under totalitarianism. The Village on the Edge of the World is a book that chronicles the minutiae of life under both fascism and the Soviet Union, while charting the existential questions posed by these regimes of the twentieth century - and how they remain with us in the twenty-first.

A story of complicated families and a wartime secret that ripples down through the generations from a writer of exceptional talent. Tommaso is just about making it work: travelling abroad for his job, helping his girlfriend with her two unruly sons, and keeping up with the eccentricities of his Italian grandmother, Alma. But as Alma grows increasingly troubled by strange and unsettling memories, Tommaso realises that there is much in her past that he doesn't know. And the more he discovers, the more it seems that the secrets she has guarded for so long might not only overwhelm her, but upend his own precariously balanced life too. Reaching back to the tumultuous days of the Italian resistance during the Second World War and into the domestic chaos of modern life, this is a story of the past's long shadow, and the families we have and those we make.

The sudden, devastating breakup of a relationship in the winter of 2021 left Catherine Lacey depressed and adrift. She began cataloguing the wreckage of her life and the beauty of her friendships, a process that led to the writing of fiction that was both entirely imagined and strangely, utterly true. She soon realised that she was writing about her relationship with faith. Betrayed by the mercurial partner she had trusted and suddenly catapulted into the unknown, Lacey's appetite vanished completely, a visceral reminder of the teenage emaciation that followed the ending of her belief in God. Bending form, both she and her fictional characters recall gnostic experiences with animals, close encounters with male anger, grief-driven lust and the redemptive power of platonic love and narrative itself. A hybrid work that is both non-fiction and fiction with no beginning and no ending, The Möbius Book troubles the line between memory and imagination with an open-hearted defence of faith's inherent danger.

Why did people, who lived so briefly in this universe, contain so much tim? ina and her ailing father have taken refuge at an enclave called the Sea, a staging post between migrations, with only a few possessions, among them three volumes from The Great Lives of Voyagers encyclopaedia series. In this mysterious and shape-shifting building, pasts and futures collide. Lina befriends her unusual neighbours: Bento, a Jewish scholar in seventeenth-century Amsterdam; Blucher, a philosopher in 1930s Germany fleeing Nazi persecution; and Jupiter, a poet of Tang Dynasty China, and through their stories, she comes to understand the role of fate in history and the way that ideas can shape the world, and to face up to the cost wrought on her family and others by her father's betrayals. Profound, adventurous, and with extraordinary subtlety of thought, The Book of Records explores our search for home and the place of faith and humanity in our world. A work of huge originality and heft, it shows the great novelist Madeleine Thien at her most ambitious and enriching.