The Indigo Press

Steffie spends her days working in a dry-cleaner’s, trying to scrub the world clean one garment at a time. But no matter how spotless the clothes, she can’t rid herself of the guilt and grime she feels inside.  Haunted by what happened to her sister when they were children, large fragments of which she can’t fully remember, Steffie is stuck in a loop of self-destruction, defiance, and shame.  When her violent, bullying father dies suddenly, it sparks a reckoning that cracks open her past. What follows is an unexpectedly redemptive journey of a woman trying to piece herself together in a world that failed to make space for her. Raw, exhilarating, and full of heart, No Such Thing As Monday confirms Sian Hughes as a masterful chronicler of life lived on the edge, and people at their most vulnerable.

In the 1990s, Gaia’s family moves from the neglected peripheries of Rome to an idyllic lakeside town in search of a new life that will lift them out of poverty. Each of them bears their own scars: Gaia’s mother is fiercely determined to secure a better future for her children at any cost; her father, a once proud man, now suffers in bitter silence after a devastating accident; her anarchist older brother rebels against the political apathy he sees at home; and her young twin brothers wordlessly bear witness to a family in decay. When Gaia meets two local girls, Agata and Carlotta, the trio builds a fragile friendship. Gaia’s encounters with callous boys and contemptuous teachers convince her that she might always be an outsider—excluded from a privileged life and beyond the possibility of happiness. Winner of the Campiello Prize, The Bitter Water of the Lake is an unflinching portrait of a generation striving to make a place for themselves in a world markedly different from the one their parents promised them.

The Japanese novel comes of age in this gripping story of love, art and life as a group of architects competes to design the new National Library of Modern Literature in Tokyo. In 1980s Japan, newly-graduated Toru Sakanishi joins a small, prestigious architecture firm founded by a former student of Frank Lloyd Wright. As the sweltering summer months approach, the team migrates from the bustling centre of Tokyo to the beautiful rural surroundings of Mount Asama, where several love stories are woven together and Sakanishi encounters four remarkable women who change the course of his life. From honouring ancestors to illustrating the complexities of the living, Summer at Mount Asama is a prize-winning novel beautifully translated by National Book Award winner Margaret Mitsutani, offering a moving and elegant portrait of the clash of modernity and tradition.

Moscow, 1985. Four teenagers – Anya, Milka, Petya and Aleksey, whose lives, like those of their Western counterparts, are fuelled by sex, alcohol and cigarettes – yearn for a world of Levi’s, Queen, foreign travel and the freedom to choose their fates. Instead, they encounter heartbreak and tragedy, while all around them Soviet policies, cruel but familiar, are giving way to untested concepts such as glasnost and perestroika and a brief flourishing of hope before the next repressive regime take root. This is the hour between dog and wolf, twilight, when one state has ended and another has not quite begun. Although it depicts a chaotic and desperate era, this exceptional debut novel pulsates with life. It is radiant with friendship and love, the power of international literature, values and politics, as its characters struggle to survive, to save their country and one another.

In 1970s Switzerland, high up in the Valais mountains, is a village where everyone knows everything, and no one says anything. Jeanne learns from an early age to dodge her father’s abuse, but her mother and sister resign themselves to his brutality. One day when she is eight he attacks her viciously, angered by her self-assurance. Convinced that the village doctor will put an end to their nightmare, she is shocked by his silence. From then on, Jeanne’s hatred of her father and her disgust at the doctor’s cowardice drive her on. At boarding school she experiences five years of respite, but is then triggered by an unbearable replica of the violence that started it all. Moving to Lausanne, unable to come to terms with her past and to engage fully with life, she nevertheless finds solace in the arms of lovers and in the waters of Lake Geneva, while further tragedy fuels her rage. My Favourite is a powerful novel about departure and return, of love, guilt and shame, and the paralysing effects of trauma. Sarah JollienFardel forcefully describes the price to be paid for Jeanne’s hard-won emancipation, as history inexorably repeats itself.

Former social media executives tell us that the system is an addiction-machine. Like drug addicts, we are users, waiting for our next hit as we like, comment and share. We write to the machine as individuals, but it responds by aggregating our fantasies, desires and frailties into data, and returning them to us as a commodity experience. Through journalism, psychoanalytic reflection and interviews with users, developers, security experts and others, Seymour probes the human side of this machine, asking what we're getting out of it, and what we're getting into.

Can an eleven-year-old boy succeed where others have failed? Can he recover a kidnapped child, disprove a false accusation of assault or win a sleep-deprivation competition that has driven others mad with tragic consequences? He can, if he is accompanied by a black rooster, his protector and friend. And if he is Martin, orphaned after a massacre, full of wisdom, courage and a pure heart. Too good for the selfish and idiotic villagers around him, his integrity entrances an itinerant painter with whom he departs on a quest. His heroic adventures through a morally abhorrent landscape, physically ravaged by war and famine, keep the reader cheering for him and his companion as this fairy tale for adults unfolds. Set against a pseudo-medieval post-apocalyptic backdrop reminiscent of Cormac McCarthy, Angela Carter and Missouri Williams, this bestselling novel shines with the inner radiance of good deed in a naughty world that will leave you haunted, horrified, and completely riveted.