Pushkin Press

Chrysantha Stathos has won. By hiding her intelligence and ambition behind the mask of a beautiful air-headed girl, she has become a wealthy duchess. And, once her elderly husband dies, she will have all the freedom, money, and safety she's ever wanted. Or so she thought. A man claiming to be the estranged grandson of Chrysantha's lecherous late husband has turned up to steal her inheritance. To make matters worse, her little sister is going to be queen and is rubbing it in her face. Chrysantha decides that the only thing to do is upstage Alessandra at her own wedding. And as for this grandson, he has to go. Never mind that he's extremely handsome and secretive with mysterious powers... No, Chrysantha wants Eryx Demos dead, and in the end, a Stathos girl always gets what she wants.

Shiori knows at heart that she’s a troubadour. She may be completely tone-deaf, but she won’t let that stop her living a life dedicated to music. Even when her dominant older sister, Nozomi, forces Shiori to accept that her wild singing provokes only revulsion, she decides to forge a career as a lyricist instead. At eighteen, she moves to Tokyo to pursue her dream. Isolated and struggling in this unfamiliar city, Shiori seeks connection online, where her trusting outlook leaves her vulnerable to exploitation – with potentially explosive results. Shot through with dark irony and a playful sense of the absurd, Mysterious Setting is a propulsive and gloriously strange novel from one of Japan’s most distinctive contemporary writers.

He was known as the Wizard of the Kremlin. The enigmatic Vadim Baranov was a TV producer before becoming political advisor to Putin. After he resigns from this position, legends about him multiply, without anyone being able to distinguish truth from fiction. Until one night, he tells his story to the narrator of this book... Welcome to the heart of Russian power, where sycophants and oligarchs have been engaging in openwarfare, and where Vadim, now the regime's main spin doctor, turns an entire country into anavant-garde political stage. Yet Vadim is not as ambitious as the others. Entangled in the increasingly dark secret workings of the regime he has contributed to build, he will do anything to get out, guided by the memory of his grandfather, an eccentric aristocrat who survived the Revolution, and the mesmerizing, merciless Ksenia, whom he has fallen in love with. From the war in Chechnya to the invasion of Ukraine, The Wizard of the Kremlin is a great novel on contemporary Russia, and a sobering meditation on power, which takes the reader behind the scenes of the Putin era.

Tricia Levenseller, author of Daughter of the Pirate King, is back with an epic YA tale of ambition and love in the New York Times bestselling novel, The Shadows Between Us… “They’ve never found the body of the first and only boy who broke my heart. And they never will.” Alessandra is tired of being overlooked, but she has a plan to gain power: 1) Woo the Shadow King. 2) Marry him. 3) Kill him and take his kingdom for herself. No one knows the extent of the freshly crowned Shadow King’s power. Some say he can command the shadows that swirl around him to do his bidding. Others say they speak to him, whispering the thoughts of his enemies. Regardless, Alessandra knows what she deserves, and she’s going to do everything within her power to get it. But Alessandra’s not the only one trying to kill the king. As attempts on his life are made, she finds herself trying to keep him alive long enough for him to make her his queen?all while struggling not to lose her heart. After all, who better for a Shadow King than a cunning, villainous queen? “Tricia Levenseller’s latest, The Shadows Between Us, is a decadent and wickedly addictive fantasy, full of schemes and court intrigue, and delightful descriptions of food, which I am always a fan of.” ?Kendare Blake, #1 New York Times bestselling author of the Three Dark Crowns series And don't miss the companion novel, The Darkness Within Us?an instant #1 New York Times-bestseller!

Cooking is thinking! The spatter of sauce in a pan, a cook's subtle deviation from a recipe, the careful labour of cooking for loved ones: these are not often the subjects of critical enquiry. Cooking, we are told, has nothing to do with serious thought; the path to intellectual fulfilment leads directly out of the kitchen. In this electrifying, innovative memoir, Rebecca May Johnson rewrites the kitchen as a vital source of knowledge and revelation. Drawing on insights from ten years spent thinking through cooking, she explores the radical openness of the recipe text, the liberating constraint of apron strings and the transformative intimacies of shared meals. Playfully dissolving the boundaries between abstract intellect and bodily pleasure, domesticity and politics, Johnson awakens us to the richness of cooking as a means of experiencing the self and the world - and to the revolutionary potential of the small fires burning in every kitchen.

A building full of secrets. A key that will unleash them all The K Apartments for Ladies in Tokyo conceals a sinister past behind each door; a woman who has buried a child; a scavenger driven mad by ill-health; a wife mysteriously guarding her late husband's manuscripts; a talented violinist tortured by her own guilt. The master key, which opens the door to all 150 rooms, links their tangled stories. But now it has been stolen, and dirty tricks are afoot. For a deadly secret lies buried beneath the building. And when it is revealed, there will be murder.

One woman, many personas. But which one is telling the truth? Alexa Wu is a brilliant yet darkly self-aware young woman whose chaotic life is manipulated and controlled by a series of alternate personalities. Only three people know about their existence: her therapist Daniel; her stepmother Anna; and her enigmatic best friend Ella. When Ella gets a job at a high-end gentleman's club, she is gradually drawn into London's cruel underbelly. With lives at stake, Alexa follows her friend on a daring rescue mission. Threatened and vulnerable, she will discover whether her multiple personalities are her greatest asset, or her biggest obstacle.

1930s Leningrad. As a mood of fear cloaks the city, Investigator Vasily Zaitsev is called on to investigate a series of bizarre and seemingly motiveless murders. In each case, the victim is curiously dressed and posed in extravagantly arranged settings. At the same time, one by one precious old master paintings are going missing from the Hermitage collection. As Zaitsev sets about his investigations, he meets with suspicion at practically every turn, and potential witnesses are reluctant to provide information. Soon Zaitsev himself comes under suspicion from the Soviet secret police. The embittered detective must battle increasingly complex political machinations in his dogged quest to uncover the truth.

In the eleventh century, the rulers of the lands surrounding the North Sea are all hungry for power. To get power they need soldiers, to get soldiers they need silver, and to get silver there is no better way than war and plunder. This vicious cycle draws all the lands of the north into a brutal struggle for supremacy and survival that will shatter kingdoms and forge an empire. The Wolf Age takes the reader on a thrilling journey through the bloody shared history of England and Scandinavia, and on across early medieval Europe, from the wild Norwegian fjords to the wealthy cities of Muslim Andalusia. Warfare, plotting, backstabbing and bribery abound as Tore Skeie weaves sagas and skaldic poetry with breathless dramatization to bring the world of the Vikings and Anglo-Saxons to vivid life.

A glimpse of post-war France through the eyes and words of 14 (mostly) expatriate journalists including Mavis Gallant, James Baldwin, A.J. Liebling, S.N. Behrman, Luc Sante, Joseph Mitchell, and Lillian Ross; plus, portraits of their editors William Shawn and New Yorker founder Harold Ross. Together: they invented modern magazine journalism. Includes an introductory interview by Susan Morrison with Anderson about transforming fact into a fiction and the creation of his homage to these exceptional reporters.

On the night of the Tiananmen Square massacre, a woman gives birth alone in a Beijing hospital. So begins the slow unravelling of Su Lan: a woman determined to remake herself, an ambitious physicist and ambivalent mother who becomes consumed by her research into disproving the irreversibility of time. Following Su Lan's sudden death, her daughter Liya travels from the US to China to try to understand the silences and ghosts her mother left behind. Adrift in a country she doesn't know, Liya begins to piece together how her mother's obsessive desire to erase her own past has marked the lives of those around her, and Liya's own.

BERLIN, NOVEMBER 1938. With storm troopers battering against his door, Otto Silbermann must flee out the back of his own home. He emerges onto streets thrumming with violence: it is Kristallnacht, and synagogues are being burnt, Jews rounded up and their businesses destroyed. Turned away from establishments he had long patronised, betrayed by friends and colleagues, Otto finds his life as a respected businessman has dissolved overnight. Desperately trying to conceal his Jewish identity, he takes train after train across Germany in a race to escape this homeland that is no longer home. Twenty-three-year-old Ulrich Alexander Boschwitz wrote The Passenger at breakneck speed in 1938, fresh in the wake of the Kristallnacht pogroms, and his prose flies at the same pace. Shot through with Hitckcockian tension, The Passenger is a blisteringly immediate story of flight and survival in Nazi Germany.

Sandrine is unhappy in her body, her house and her life. But none of that matters when she meets her man. He makes room for her, a place in his home, with his son. He cares about where she is, who she is speaking to. He loves her, intensely. Everything would be perfect, if only the first woman, the one from before, would just stay away. . .

These stories conjure a vanished Russia, where Orthodox Christianity coexists with the shapeshifters and house spirits of ancient folk belief. Celebrated for her sublime wit and graceful style, Teffi here plumbs the darker aspects of psychology, infusing tales of domestic conflict with the occult spirituality that thrived in the country of her youth. A young girl, haunted by the sinister sound of a church bell, resolves to become first a brigand, then a saint. A reluctant participant in a pilgrimage to the Solovetsky Islands has a shatteringly profound experience. A recently married couple's relationship becomes strained as they each silently nurse the fear that their maid is a witch. By turns playful and profound, solemn and drily sceptical, these tales of other worlds precisely illuminate human desires, fears and failings.

'This slight book is an extraordinarily powerful exploration of what happens to the souls of men sent to kill and be killed' -- The Times, Historical Fiction Books of the Year 'Extraordinary... full of sadness, rage and beauty' Sarah Waters Alfa and Mademba are two of the many Senegalese soldiers fighting in the Great War. Together they climb dutifully out of their trenches to attack France's German enemies whenever the whistle blows, until Mademba is wounded, and dies in a shell hole with his belly torn open. Without his more-than-brother, Alfa is alone and lost amidst the savagery of the conflict. He devotes himself to the war, to violence and death, but soon begins to frighten even his own comrades in arms. How far will Alfa go to make amends to his dead friend? At Night All Blood is Black is a hypnotic, heartbreaking rendering of a mind hurtling towards madness.

When We Cease to Understand the World shows us great minds striking out into dangerous, uncharted terrain. Fritz Haber, Alexander Grothendieck, Werner Heisenberg, Erwin Schroedinger: these are among the luminaries into whose troubled minds we are thrust as they grapple with the most profound questions of existence. They have strokes of unparalleled genius, they alienate friends and lovers, they descend into isolated states of madness. Some of their discoveries revolutionise our world for the better; others pave the way to chaos and unimaginable suffering. The lines are never clear. With breakneck pace and wondrous detail, Benjamin Labatut uses the imaginative resources of fiction to break open the stories of scientists and mathematicians who expanded our notions of the possible.