Harvill Secker

Paris, 2018. Diégane Latyr Faye, a young Senegalese writer, discovers a legendary book titled The Labyrinth of Inhumanity. It has an immediate hold over him. No one knows what happened to the author, T.C. Elimane, who was accused of plagiarism, his reputation destroyed by the critics. Obsessed with discovering the truth about Elimane's disappearance, Faye weaves past and present, countries and continents, following the author's labyrinthine trail from Senegal to Argentina and France and confronting the great tragedies of history. Will he get to the truth at the centre of the maze? A gripping literary quest novel and a masterpiece of perpetual reinvention, The Most Secret Memory of Men confronts the impact of colonialism and neo-colonialism, the holocaust in Europe, dictatorships in South America and the Caribbean, genocide in Africa, and collaboration and resistance everywhere. Above all, it is a love song to literature and its timeless power.

A heart-rending story of a Native American community told through the generations Colorado, 1864. Star, a young survivor of the Sand Creek Massacre, is brought to the Fort Marion prison castle where he is forced to learn English and practice Christianity by an evangelical prison guard, who will go on to found the Carlisle Indian Industrial school, dedicated to the eradication of Native history, culture and identity. Years later, Star's son, Charles, is sent to this school, where he is brutalised by the same man. Together with fellow student Opal Viola, Charles envisions a future far away from the institutional violence that follows their bloodlines. Full of poetry music, rage and love, Wandering Stars, looks to the past and future across the generations of the Bear Shield and Red Feather family, finding their way through displacement and pain, towards home and hope.

It was the end of summer, 1977. I found a cat, a little ball of fluff. A teeny tiny baby kitten. The perfect gift for cat lovers: a beloved Japanese modern classic about our special connection with cats, and how they can change our lives over the course of a lifetime. For the last twenty years, Japanese readers have been falling in love with the late poet and prize-winning author Mayumi Inaba’s story of life with her cat Mii, after she rescued her as a newborn kitten from a riverbank in Tokyo. We follow their everyday joys through the seasons, as Mayumi develops her career as a writer and finds her feet in life, with her small feline always at her side. Mornings With My Cat Mii lovingly chronicles Mayumi and Mii’s unshakeable twenty-year bond, meditating on solitude, companionship, the writing life, and how we care for our cats as they grow older. Translated into English for the first time by world-renowned translator Ginny Tapley Takemori, this beloved Japanese modern classic is a celebration of how a cat can change our lives forever. Translated by Ginny Tapley Takemori

The house breathes. The house contains bodies and secrets. The house is visited by ghosts, by angels that line the roof like insects, and by saints that burn the bedsheets with their haloes. It was built by a small-time hustler as a means of controlling his wife, and even after so many years, their daughter and her granddaughter can’t leave. They may be witches or they may just be angry, but when the mysterious disappearance of a young boy draws unwanted attention, the two isolated women, already subjects of public scorn, combine forces with the spirits that haunt them in pursuit of something that resembles justice. Layla Martínez’s eerie debut novel Woodworm is class-conscious horror that drags generations of monsters into the sun.

A harmless game of Murder in the Dark? Or an invitation to die for? The brand new, festive murder mystery for 2023 from 'modern rival to Agatha Christie' Ada Moncrieff It's Christmas 1936 and an eclectic list of guests and staff have gathered for the grand reopening of Maybridge castle, a newly renovated yet still crumbling hotel deep in the Cumbrian countryside. Amongst them are a doctor and his new wife, tarot readers, a journalist, an elderly amateur sleuth and her cat. By the time the first sherries have been drunk a person will be dead. An innocent game of murder-in-the-dark turns into a real game of life and death. Someone has changed the rules...but who?

A pianist in Beijing must find a way to the life she really wants, in this atmospheric new novel from the critically acclaimed author of Braised Pork For three years, Song Yan has filled the emptiness of her Beijing apartment with the tentative notes of her young piano students. When she married, she gave up on her own career as a concert pianist, but her husband Bowen has long rebuffed her pleas to have a child. Instead, she must accommodate her mother-in-law, newly arrived from the province of Yunnan and bringing with her buried family secrets. Shortly after, strange parcels show up on the doorstep, Song Yan's dreams become troubling and claustrophobic, and she loses faith even in her teaching. Striking out alone through the winter city, she finds herself pulled into the ancient hutongs to confront the source, and perhaps the salvation, of her disquiet. In a still room in an ageless, ancient house, can she find the notes she needs to make sense of all the pain and beauty in her life? A gorgeous and atmospheric novel of art and expression, grief and survival, memory and self-discovery, Ghost Music animates contemporary Beijing through the eyes of a lonely yet hopeful young woman and gives vivid colour and texture to the promise of new beginnings.

An novel poking fun at modern mores and delving into what we should really treasure in our precarious lives. From the bestselling author of Captain Corelli's Mandolin. Sometimes we must look to the past to survive the future. An entertaining novel about what really matters in life from the bestselling author of Captain Corelli's Mandolin Q wants a simpler and safer life. His work as a quantum cryptographer for the government has led him to believe a crisis is imminent for civilisation and he's looking for somewhere to ride out what's ahead. He buys a ruined farmhouse in Cornwall and begins to build his own self-sufficient haven. Over the course of this quest he meets the eccentric characters who already live on the moors nearby - including the park ranger in charge of the reintroduced lynxes and aurochs that roam the area; a holy man waiting for the second coming on top of a nearby hill; an Arthurian knight on horseback and the amorous ghost of an Edwardian woman who haunts the farmhouse. As life in the cities gets more complicated, and our systems of electronic control begin to fall apart, Q flourishes in the wild Cornish countryside. His new way of life brings him back in tune with his teenage children, his ex-wife, and his own sense of who he is. He also grows close to Eva, energetic and enchanting, who is committed to her own quest for love and meaning. In this entertaining and heart-warming novel Louis de Berni res pokes fun at modern mores, and makes us reconsider what is really precious in our short and precarious lives.

The most dangerous person in the courtroom isn't the killer... Revelle is a court interpreter and knows the power of words. She spends her days translating for other people; murderers, fraudsters and their victims. She speaks their words. Only she knows exactly what they're saying. When she spots an injustice is about to take place, and a guilty man about to be labelled innocent, she has the power to twist an alibi to get the verdict she wants. The verdict she believes is correct. She's willing to risk it all. But someone knows what she's done. And they want justice.

Over 18 million copies sold worldwide. The bestselling Icelandic author of all time. When a young woman known for drug smuggling goes missing, her elderly grandparents have no choice but to call the retired Detective Konrád. Still looking for his own father's murderer, Konrád agrees to investigate the case. But digging into the past reveals more than he set out to discover, and a strange connection to a little girl who drowned in the Reykjavík city pond decades ago recaptures everyone's attention. A brilliant, chilling tale of broken dreams and children who have nowhere to turn.

From the bestselling writer of Italian Ways, Europa and The Hero's Way, a story set during the first days of lockdown in Europe, about the unexpected kindness of strangers and one man's emotional reckoning. Milan, 2020. Drawn abruptly from his reclusive life in London for a friend's funeral, Frank finds himself in the eye of a pandemic he had barely registered on the news. From the relative comfort of his balcony at Hotel Milano, he surveys the train station across the piazza, seeing the mad dash for the last trains, hearing the sirens and watching the police stop people in the street. He feels himself remote from it all. Then, one night, the sound of a child's footsteps leads him to discover a family sheltering secretly above him: a family who need his help. As the days pass, this reserved and difficult man begins to open himself to others. Faced with the task of saving a life, he must also take stock of his own.

A charmingly idiosyncratic look at writing, creativity, and the author's own novels. Haruki Murakami's myriad fans will be delighted by this unique look into the mind of a master storyteller. In this engaging book, the internationally best-selling author and famously reclusive writer shares with readers what he thinks about being a novelist; his thoughts on the role of the novel in our society; his own origins as a writer; and his musings on the sparks of creativity that inspire other writers, artists, and musicians. Readers who have long wondered where the mysterious novelist gets his ideas and what inspires his strangely surreal worlds will be fascinated by this highly personal look at the craft of writing.

Meet Chloe. First-year student, ordinary, legging-wearing, girl next door...and highly intelligent diagnosed psychopath. Her hobbies include yogalates, parties, and plotting to kill Will Bachman. Chloe is part of a secret clinical study of young psychopaths run by the university's Psychology Department. Most psychopaths aren't criminals, but when a string of murders on campus causes upheaval, Chloe's private vendetta is sidelined. Partnered with fellow study participants she can't trust - and distracted by typical university life - Chloe has to walk the line between hunter and prey. Never Saw Me coming is a sharp, electrifying and hugely entertaining thriller with an antiheroine who will work her manipulative magic on you.

All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others. George Orwell's fable of revolutionary farm animals - the steadfast horses Boxer and Clover, the opportunistic pigs Snowball and Napoleon, and the deafening choir of sheep - who overthrow their elitist human master only to find themselves subject to a new authority, is one of the most famous warnings ever written. Rejected by such eminent publishing figures as Victor Gollancz, Jonathan Cape and T.S. Eliot due to its daringly open criticism of Stalin, Animal Farm was published to great acclaim by Martin Secker and Warburg on 17 August 1945. One reviewer wrote 'In a hundred years' time perhaps Animal Farm ... may simply be a fairy story: today it is a fairy story with a good deal of point.' Seventy-five years since its first publication, Orwell's immortal satire remains an unparalleled masterpiece and more relevant than ever. The Authoritative Text. With an introduction by Christopher Hitchens.

You can live on a shilling a day in Paris if you know how. But it is a complicated business. When he was a struggling writer in his twenties, George Orwell lived as a down-and-out among the poorest members of society. In this early memoir, he recounts shocking experiences working as a penniless dishwasher in Paris, pawning clothes to buy a day's worth of bread and wine, sleeping in bug-infested bunks, trading survival skills and cigarette butts with fellow tramps, and trudging between London's workhouse spikes for a few hours' sleep and tea-and-two-slices. With sensitivity and compassion, Orwell exposed the hardships of poverty and gave readers an unprecedented look at life lived on the fringes of society. His vivid account is an enduring call to support the world's most vulnerable people and exemplifies his belief that 'The greatest of evils and the worst of crimes is poverty.' The Authoritative Text. With a new introduction by Kerry Hudson.

It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen. The year is 1984, and life in Oceania is ruled by the Party. Under the gaze of Big Brother, Winston Smith yearns for intimacy and love - "thought crimes" that, if uncovered, would mean imprisonment, or death. But Winston is not alone in his defiance, and an illicit affair will draw him into the mysterious Brotherhood and the realities of resistance. Nineteen Eighty-Four has been described as chilling, absorbing, satirical, momentous, prophetic and terrifying. It is all these things, and more. The Authoritative Text. With an introduction by Robert Harris.

Naomi seems to have everything. A beautiful daughter, a gorgeous house, a perfect life. Behind the scenes, though, she and her husband are drifting from one another and struggling to conceive their second child. Then Naomi meets a parent at her daughter's nursery. Sean understands her, or so she thinks. Looking for a connection, for a friend, she joins him at a swimming lesson with their children. That day, Naomi makes a terrible mistake. Weeks later, when Naomi attempts to contact Sean, he has disappeared without a trace. But as she begins to piece her life back together, it becomes clear that someone else knows her secret. Someone who wants to make sure she never forgets what she did at the pool. An intelligent, searing and addictive thriller about family, desire and the lengths people will go to for the ones they love the most.