Linden Editions

Deep in the French countryside, a farm is blind with secrets, and an exhausted family struggles to survive. The father can't pay the bills, the brothers compete with one other, and the mother tries desperately to suppress the weight of the past. Enveloped in visceral silence, the farm animals witness a family tragedy unfolding before their eyes. And since the humans remain silent, it is the animals who must tell their story. Milk and Blood is a choral novel like no other, narrated by farm animals as they observe the humans who exploit, kill, and love them. Death and life contract like a shimmering muscle, and quiet devastation lies beneath the surface. Yet amidst this bleak brutality, it is Clairville's tenderness that is most affecting, as she draws poetry from mud and compassion from violence, in what is ultimately a declaration of love to those who feed us.

One afternoon in May, 8-year-old Ilaria gets into the car with her father, expecting to go out to dinner with her mother and sister. Instead, she is taken across the border, on a whirlwind road trip around Italy with her father, from Trieste to Rome and Sicily, sleeping in roadside hotels and singing to the radio. But Ilaria's father is unpredictable, and she never knows which version of him she will get: charming and funny, or volatile and drunk. Torn between her life in Geneva with her mother and this strange shifting adventure on the road, Ilaria doesn't know who to side with in her parents' acrimonious separation. Throughout her travels, Ilaria meets a rag-tag cast of characters, learns how to light a cigarette, discovers when is best to keep quiet around her father, and finds comfort in her lovable teddy bear Birillo. Ilaria's voice is singular and powerful. Based on the author's own experience, this deeply moving novel captures the blurred lines between love and harm, memory and reality, fear and wonder. Ilaria is a haunting, intimate coming of age story about a girl who is forced to grow up too soon, and about the fragile moments of beauty she finds along the way.

A collection of essays about loss, grief, and absence, NOT THERE tells stories of ordinary people and the things that have happened to them. Emotions underlying these stories prompt the reader to think of their losses, and their compensations. It''s also about how we remember things - unreliably on the whole - and how our idea of the truth may be a very personal one. Szczygiel''s wide and international range of interlocutors includes: a Czech poet, a Ukrainian soldier, a Polish accountant, an Albanian painter, an Israeli writer, and the father of a reporter with whom the author travels to Prague for the last time. Written in a beautiful, associative style reminiscent of W. G. Sebald, Szczygiel lets his interlocutors and memories drive the story in unusual directions. With a perfect eye and a voice infused with empathy and wit, Szczygiel explores the human condition with its unavoidable absences. The advice that famous Polish writer, Hanna Krall, gave the author hovers over the book: ''Everything must have its form, its rhythm, Mr Mariusz. Especially absence.''

In Late Summer is written from the perspective of a 14-year-old girl killed in the August 1993 massacre in Bosnia. When a picturesque village is caught in the turmoil of war, the entire worlds of girls Ivana and Dunja and their families is blown up and swept away. Based on a personal experience, Magdalena Blazevic''s novel is poetic and powerful, full of images of ordinary country life as well as the brutality of war. This is a haunting portrait of a family and a village, each affected differently by the daily realities of civil war. Compared by critics to Ingeborg Bachmann, Blazevic weaves emotion under the surface of her precise and lyrical prose.