Granta Books strana 5 z 16

Mitsuko, a schoolteacher at the Kitamura school, inspires both rumour and curiosity in the parents of her students because of her unconventional manner - not least when she tells the children the fable of a princess whose hand in marriage is promised to a dog she is intimate with. And when a young man with sharp canine teeth turns up at the schoolteacher's home and declares he's 'here to stay', the romantic - and sexual - relationship that develops intrigues the community, some of whom have suspicions about the man's identity and motives. Masterfully turning the rules of folklore and fable on their head, The Bridegroom Was a Dog is a disarming and unforgettable modern classic.

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.

A child is beguiled by a poem read to him by his mother. The poem follows this elusive narrator like a whisper throughout his life, echoing across the years in the stories and lives of others as they are recounted to him: an enigmatic and beloved schoolteacher who leaves behind a dark secret after his death; a woman who lays the table for a son she knows will never return home; a young man shunned by his family, who finds solace and freedom in the letters from an estranged aunt; a black-and-white photograph that tells of another family, afflicted with generations of tragedy. With fierce imagination, Issa Quincy has constructed a transcendent portrait of humanity, deftly illuminating a symphony of memories, murmurs and phantoms that add up to an ordinary human life.

Like many people, Tom Lee remembers the presence - somewhere out of sight, on the outskirts of town - of the local psychiatric hospital. It was a place that inspired jokes, rumours and dread, a place where the strange and deranged were kept away. But among those people were, at different times, Tom's own parents. Afterwards, those times were not much spoken about and before long the hospital closed, as part of the nationwide shutting down of psychiatric institutions. For many years, Tom believed that he had dodged the bullet of mental illness that had marked the lives of his parents. But then, quite out of the blue, he has a crisis of his own and finds himself returning to the past for clues. The Bullet is an attempt to piece together and understand what happened to his parents and what happened to him. It is also a story about how we have tried and spectacularly failed to care for people suffering with mental illness, and about the terrifying fragility and unknowability of the human mind.

This book's title, No Straight Road Takes You There, is an evocation and a declaration. Highways tend to be built across the easy routes and flat places, or the landscape is cleared away - logged, graded, levelled, tunnelled through - but to stick to these roads is to miss what else is out there. In her writing and activism, Rebecca Solnit has sought the pathless places in order to celebrate indirect and unpredictable consequences, and to embrace slowness and imperfection, which, she argues, are key to understanding the possibilities of change. In her latest essay collection, the award-winning writer explores responses to the climate crisis, as well as reflections on women's rights, the fight for democracy, the trends in masculinity, and the rise of the far right in the West. Incantatory and poetic, positive and engaging, these essays argue for the long-term view and the power of collective action, making a case for seeding change wherever possible, and offering us all a path out of the wilderness.

"Normality is the creepiest madness there is..."In our near-future world, children are solely conceived by artificial insemination. Even sex between married couples is viewed as taboo. Amane's family is irregular. Her parents copulated to create her and hope that she too will find love and have a child with the person she marries. But Amane falls in line with society's way of thinking and wants a regular 'clean' marriage. Then she hears of a place that is the subject of a social experiment. Everyone in Paradise-Eden will act as one big family. Could this be the perfect third wa? raise for Sayaka Murata's fiction:'Exhilarating, weird and funny' Sally Rooney'Radical, hilarious, heartbeaking' Elif Batuman'A gift to anyone who has ever felt at odds with the world' Ruth Ozeki

'A gem of a book. Quirky, deadpan, poignant and quietly profound' Ruth OzekiThe unexpected international bestseller. Meet Keiko. She's 36 years old, has never had a boyfriend, and she's been working in the same supermarket for eighteen years. Keiko's family wishes she'd get a proper job. Her friends wonder why she won't get married. But Keiko knows what makes her happy, and she's not going to let anyone come between her and her convenience store... A cult hit around the world, Convenience Store Woman is both a feminist rallying cry and a must-read oddball comedy. 'Exhilaratingly weird and funny... Unsettling and totally unpredictable - my copy is now heavily underlined' Sally Rooney'Darkly comic' Observer'[A] short, deadpan gem... A true original' Daily Mail'What a weird and wonderful and deeply satisfying book this is. Sayaka Murata is an utterly unique and revolutionary voice. I tore through it with great delight' Jami Attenberg

From the National Book Award-winning author Denis Johnson (Tree of Smoke) comes Train Dreams, an epic in miniature, and one of Johnson's most evocative works of fiction. Suffused with the history and landscapes of the American West?its otherworldly flora and fauna, its rugged loggers and bridge builders?this extraordinary novella poignantly captures the disappearance of a distinctly American way of life. It tells the story of Robert Grainer, a day laborer in the American West at the start of the twentieth century?an ordinary man in extraordinary times. Buffeted by the loss of his family, Grainer struggles to make sense of this strange new world. As his story unfolds, we witness both his shocking personal defeats and the radical changes that transform America in his lifetime.

When Ben Masters' father, a dedicated naturalist, is confined to the house with inoperable cancer, he is unable to follow the butterfly season for the first time since his childhood. His son must become his connection to the outdoors, reporting back on his beloved Purple Emperors, Lulworth Skippers, Wood Whites and Silver-studded Blues. The problem is, his son knows practically nothing about the natural world. Blending natural history, pop culture, and literary biography, this unforgettable memoir charts a terminal summer when butterflies become a way for father and son to talk about masculinity, memory, identity, generational differences, and, ultimately, loss and continuation. The Flitting takes readers on an unlikely journey, flitting between the lives and works of Vladimir Nabokov and other literary lepidopterists; the artistic metamorphoses of Prince and Joni Mitchell; butterflies and gender in Virginia Woolf, Angela Carter and The Sopranos; the voices of John Clare and Luther Vandross. These diverse subjects come together in an intensely authentic portrait of a father and son sharing passions, lessons and regrets as they run out of time.

'Jefferson's eye for details yields some devastatingly honest and painful insights' The Times'Captivating... Charm is this book's watchword' Colin Grant, Guardian The daughter of a successful paediatrician and a fashionable socialite, Margo Jefferson spent her childhood among Chicago's black elite. She calls this society 'Negroland': 'a small region of Negro America where residents were sheltered by a certain amount of privilege and plenty'. With privilege came expectation. Reckoning with the limits and demands of Negroland at crucial historical moments - the civil rights movement, the dawn of feminism, the fallacy of post-racial America - Jefferson brilliantly charts the twists and turns of a life informed by psychological and moral contradictions. Shortlisted for the Baillie Gifford Prize and winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award. 'Negroland is a sharp-eyed cultural commentary on an era of America that has often been too simply told' Aminatta Forna, Guardian 'Jefferson writes with piercing clarity of a childhood which was full of love and opportunity at home, but also saturated by contradictions, confusions and a racism which corrodes, like rust, to the heart's core' Observer 'Utterly compelling... a remarkable achievement' Sunday Times

At what point does a low mood tip over into depression? When does a distressing experience qualify as trauma? When does a cluster of symptoms indicate an underlying condition? As the conversation around mental health has moved from the consulting room to the public arena, so the concept of normal is shifting. Today, we are seeing an unprecedented rise in diagnosable conditions, in waiting lists, in diagnoses, and in medication. Yet, are we really less psychologically healthy than previous generations? In this brave, engrossing and vitally important new book, consultant neuropsychiatrist Dr Alastair Santhouse argues that the consequences of the new climate of diagnosis are immense. Drawing on his decades of clinical experience, Dr Santhouse explores our current malaise and proposes a solution - that we pull back from this diagnostic expansion, focus on the effective treatment of a core group of severe mental health problems, and de-medicalise a vast range of other normal human experiences.

In her twenties, Esther Rutter suffered an acute mental breakdown while living in Japan. Sectioned and held in a Japanese psychiatric institution until she could be flown home under escort, her recovery only began when she took a job in the Lake District at Dove Cottage, the home of William and Dorothy Wordsworth. Like Dorothy and William before her, whose search for Dove Cottage was borne out of the dislocation they experienced during their childhood, Esther realised that she was looking for a place to feel at home, and most like herself. In their lives and writings, she discovered an approach to understanding the self as sophisticated as the psychoanalysis of Freud that followed a century later: a desire to 'see into the life of things' through personal reflection, and the belief that the experiences of ordinary people are intrinsically worthwhile and important. With their insights and creativity to guide her, and amid the beautiful landscape around Dove Cottage, she made lifelong bonds of friendship, community - and love. All Before Me is a moving and absorbing account of the struggle to know oneself on the journey into adulthood, intertwined with the stories of the Wordsworth siblings at Dove Cottage. In the beautiful hamlet of Town End, where a cultural epoch was borne that would forever shape the way we experience the world, Esther found the spirit of place that sustains and inspires, making possible all that lies before us.

WINNER OF THE WALES BOOK OF THE YEAR 2025WINNER OF THE ONDAATJE PRIZE 2025LONGLISTED FOR THE 2024 HIGHLAND BOOK PRIZE'Tender, riveting and inventive is Clear, the newest offering and masterpiece from the brilliant Carys Davies. It will take your breath away' Sarah Jessica Parker'An exquisite, hopeful masterpiece' Rachel Joyce'A poignant, profound depiction of both solitude and connection. Carys Davies has written a masterful, discreetly sublime book' Hernan Diaz1843. On a remote Scottish island, Ivar, the sole occupant, leads a life of quiet isolation until the day he finds a man unconscious on the beach below the cliffs. The newcomer is John Ferguson, an impoverished church minister sent to evict Ivar and turn the island into grazing land for sheep. Unaware of the stranger's intentions, Ivar takes him into his home, and in spite of the two men having no common language, a fragile bond begins to form between them. Meanwhile, on the mainland, John's wife, Mary, anxiously awaits news of his mission. Against the rugged backdrop of this faraway spot beyond Shetland, Carys Davies's intimate drama unfolds with tension and tenderness: a touching and crystalline study of ordinary people buffeted by history and a powerful exploration of the distances and connections between us. Perfectly structured and surprising at every turn, Clear is a marvel of storytelling, an exquisite short novel by a master of the form.

In the mid-1800s, a fearsome and powerful conjure woman named Saint annihilates plantations in the South to rescue the enslaved. She brings those she has freed to a haven of her own creation: a town, magically concealed from outsiders, named Ours. In this miraculous place, a community takes root where the people may flourish. But although Saint does her best to protect the inhabitants, her conjuring and memories begin to betray her, leaving the town vulnerable to intrusions by newcomers with powers of their own. As the cracks in Saint's creation are exposed, some begin to wonder whether the safety and freedom of Ours might be yet another form of bondage. Set over the course of four decades and steeped in a rich tradition of American literature, Black surrealism, mythology and spirituality, Ours is a stunning exploration of the possibilities and limitations of love and freedom by a writer of huge vision and talent.

In the Montana backcountry live two brothers who run a saw mill and do a little poaching on the side. Thad is the brains of the operation. His brother Hazen has a talent for tracking and hunting and getting himself into trouble. Together they have just about made it work, but now there are mounting bills, a leaky roof and winter is closing in. When a menacing figure known as the Scot offers them a risky but potentially lucrative hunting job in Yellowstone National Park, the brothers can't refuse, but before long the precarious nature of their lives and their bond is exposed. From a fresh new voice in American fiction, this is a propulsive, bracing story about the cost of survival set against the unforgiving wilderness of the American northwest.

Richard has spent his life as a university professor, immersed in the world of books and ideas, but now he is retired, his books remain in their packing boxes and he steps into the streets of his city, Berlin. Here, on Oranienplatz, he discovers a new community -- a tent city, established by African asylum seekers. Hesitantly, getting to know the new arrivals, Richard finds his life changing, as he begins to question his own sense of belonging in a city that once divided its citizens into them and us. At once a passionate contribution to the debate on race, privilege and nationality and a beautifully written examination of an ageing man's quest to find meaning in his life, Go, Went, Gone showcases one of the great contemporary European writers at the height of her powers.