Henning Mankell

Light Paperback (1 lb or less)

Iowa

From the bestselling author of the Kurt Wallander series comes a touching and intimate story about an embattled man's unexpected chance at redemption.  
 
Many years ago a devastating mistake drove Fredrik Welin into a life as far as possible from his former position as a surgeon, where he mistakenly amputated the wrong arm of one of his patients. Now he lives in a frozen landscape. Each morning he dips his body into the freezing lake surrounding his home to remind himself he's alive. However, Welins's icy existence begins to thaw when he receives a visit from a guest who helps him embark on a journey to acceptance and understanding. Full of the graceful prose and deft characterization that have been the hallmarks of Mankell's prose, Italian Shoes shows a modern master at the height of his powers, effortlessly delivering a remarkable novel about the most rewarding theme of all: hope.

Italian Shoes

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Isabel Allende

Frances Riddle

Excellent like new condition as shown! All books come tissue wrapped and all orders are hand packed. Feel free to reach out for information on saving money by bundling orders! Thank you for shopping my book store! ~ Olivia‘s books 🙂📚

Hardcover (1 to 2 lbs)

Oregon

A Novel

From the start, Violeta's life is marked by extraordinary events and bears witness to the greatest upheavals of the twentieth century. Violeta tells her story in the form of a letter to someone she loves above all others, recounting times of devastating heartbreak and passionate affairs, poverty and wealth, terrible loss and immense joy. Her life is shaped by some of the most important events of history: the fight for women's rights, the rise and fall of tyrants, and ultimately not one, but two pandemics. Author of "A Long Petal of the Sea."

Violeta [English Edition]

437a3b66-2a8f-4321-a58f-50796f493206-1

Bianca Pitzorno

Connecticut

A bestselling Italian writer makes her American debut with this delightful dramedy of manners, family, romance, and fashion that is set on the island of Sardinia at the end of the nineteenth century--a dazzling and original literary blend of Jane Austen and Adriana Trigiani.

In 1900 Sardinia, a young woman's remarkable talent with a needle earns her a position as a seamstress with a wealthy family. Inside this privileged world far different from her own humble beginnings, the skilled sewer quietly takes measurements, sketches designs, mends hems--and in the silence, hears whispered secrets and stories of all those around her.

Through the watchful young seamstress's eyes, this small Italian city and its residents emerge in all their vitality, vanity, and fragility--flawed yet congenial people who are not quite what they pretend to be. There is the Marchesa Esther, who rides horses and studies mechanics and ancient Greek; Miss Lily Rose, a spirited American journalist who commissions a special corset--with pockets to hide more than just her flaws; the Provera sisters with their expensive Parisian fashions that belie their financial hardships; and Assuntina, the wild child. There are men, young, old, and in between; love affairs and broken hearts; and even a murder (or was it suicide?). And at the center, watching and waiting is the seamstress herself, an intelligent, ambitious girl with a tender heart and her own impossible dream.

An irresistible literary confection rich in atmosphere and period detail and packed with compelling characters. The Seamstress of Sardinia transports us to a long-ago world not so removed from our own--to a society rigidly divided by wealth and shaped by passion, hope, ambition, and love--the elemental forces that drive human lives.

The Seamstress of Sardinia

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Wiz Wharton

Light Hardcover (1 lb or less)

Florida

Set between the last years of the "Chinese Windrush" in 1966 and Hong Kong's Handover to China in 1997, a mysterious inheritance sees a young woman from London uncovering buried secrets in her late mother's homeland in this captivating, wry debut about family, identity, and the price of belonging.

Hong Kong, 1966. Sook-Yin is exiled from Kowloon to London with orders to restore honor to her family. But as she trains to become a nurse in cold and wet England, Sook-Yin realizes that, like so many transplants, she must carve out a destiny of her own to survive.

Thirty years later in London, having lost her mother as a small child, biracial misfit Lily can only remember what Maya, her preternaturally perfect older sister, has told her about Sook-Yin. Unexpectedly named in the will of a powerful Chinese stranger, Lily embarks on a secret pilgrimage across the world to discover the lost side of her identity and claim the reward. But just as change is coming to Hong Kong, so Lily learns Maya's secrecy about their past has deep roots, and that good fortune comes at a price.

 Heartfelt, wry and achingly real, Ghost Girl, Banana marks the stunning debut of a writer-to-watch.  

Ghost Girl, Banana - New!

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Paperback (1 to 2 lbs)

Wisconsin

One Hundred Years From Behind Bars And Eyelashes

The Zekameron

824d0974-3811-48aa-b821-366cb8f07288-0

#paperback #shortstories #norwegian #translated

Stories

From one of the greatest Norwegian authors of the twentieth century, comes a collection of spare, biting stories of people caught between reality and expectation, hope and despair, love and longing.

A man and a woman in a quiet, remote house, an old man on a park bench, an estranged brother in a railway café -- Kjell Askildsen's characters are surrounded by absence. Filled with disquiet, and longing, they walk to a fjord, they smoke, they drink on a veranda, they listen to conversations that drift through open windows. Small flashes like the promise of a sunhat, a nail in a cherry tree, or a raised flag, reveal the interminable space between desire and reality in which Askildsen's characters are forever suspended. Widely recognized as one of the greatest modern short-story writers, with unadorned prose and a dark humor, Askildsen captures life as it really is, the worlds of his characters uncanny mirrors of our own.

Everything Like Before

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Eva Garcia Sáenz

Maryland

A madman is holding Vitoria hostage, killing its citizens in brutal ways and staging the bodies. The city's only hope is a brilliant detective struggling to battle his own demons. Inspector Unai López de Ayala, known as "Kraken," is charged with investigating a series of ritualistic murders. The killings are eerily similar to ones that terrorized the citizens of Vitoria twenty years earlier. But back then, police were sure they had discovered the killer, a prestigious archaeologist who is currently in jail. Now Kraken must race to determine whether the killer had an accomplice or if the wrong man has been incarcerated for two decades. This fast-paced, unrelenting thriller weaves in and out of the mythology and legends of the Basque country as it hurtles to its shocking conclusion.

The Silence of the White City

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Yoko Tawada

Margaret Mitsutani

Ohio

Yoko Tawada's new novel is a breathtakingly light-hearted meditation on mortality and fully displays what Rivka Galchen has called her "brilliant, shimmering, magnificent strangeness"

The Emissary

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Heavy Paperback (2 to 4 lbs)

New York

Flowers Over the Inferno

Kim Yideum

Ji Yoon Lee

Blood Sisters tells the story of Jeong Yeoul, a young Korean college student in the 1980's, when the memory of President Chun Doohwan's violent suppression of student demonstrations against martial law was still fresh. Yideum captures with raw honesty the sense of dread felt by many Korean women during this time as Jeong struggles in a swirl of misguided desires and hopelessness against a society distorted by competing ideologies, sexual violence, and cultural conservatism. Facing this helplessness, herimpulse is to escape into the world of art.Blood Sisters is a vivid, powerful portrayal of a woman's efforts to live an authentic life in the face of injustice.

Blood Sisters

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Maryla Szymiczkowa

Antonia Lloyd-Jones

Virginia

A bored socialite becomes a cunning amateur sleuth in this wildly entertaining, Agatha Christie¬inspired mystery of murder and mayhem set in nineteenth-century Poland¶"An ingenious marriage of comedy and crime."--Olga Tokarczuk, Nobel laureate and author of the Man Booker International Prize winner Flights¶ Cracow, 1893: Zofia Turbotynska--professor's wife, socialite, and bored homemaker--has little more to do than plan a charity auction sponsored by the wealthy residents of a local nursing home and the nuns who work there. But when one of those residents is found dead, Zofia finds a calling: solving crime. Ridiculed by the police, who have declared the deaths of natural cause, she starts her own murder investigation, unbeknownst to anyone but her loyal cook Franciszka and one reluctant nun. With her husband blissfully unaware of her secret, Zofia remakes herself into one the most surprising, and maybe even effective, detectives combing the city streets. But what will it take for her to find the killer. . .before she becomes the next victim?

Mrs. Mohr Goes Missing

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Ludmilla Petrushevskaya

Keith Gessen

Anna Summers

Texas

Scary Fairy Tales

New York Times Bestseller
Winner of the World Fantasy Award
One of New York magazine's 10 Best Books of the Year
One of NPR's 5 Best Works of Foreign Fiction

The celebrated scary fairy tales of Russia's preeminent contemporary fiction writer--the author of the prizewinning memoir about growing up in Stalinist Russia, The Girl from the Metropol Hotel

Vanishings and aparitions, nightmares and twists of fate, mysterious ailments and supernatural interventions haunt these stories by the Russian master Ludmilla Petrushevskaya, heir to the spellbinding tradition of Gogol and Poe. Blending the miraculous with the macabre, and leavened by a mischievous gallows humor, these bewitching tales are like nothing being written in Russia--or anywhere else in the world--today.

There Once Lived a Woman Who Tried to Kill Her Neighbor's Baby

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Sofía Segovia

Simon Bruni

North Carolina

From a beguiling voice in Mexican fiction comes an astonishing novel--her first to be translated into English--about a mysterious child with the power to change a family's history in a country on the verge of revolution. From the day that old Nana Reja found a baby abandoned under a bridge, the life of a small Mexican town forever changed. Disfigured and covered in a blanket of bees, little Simonopio is for some locals the stuff of superstition, a child kissed by the devil. But he is welcomed by landowners Francisco and Beatriz Morales, who adopt him and care for him as if he were their own. As he grows up, Simonopio becomes a cause for wonder to the Morales family, because when the uncannily gifted child closes his eyes, he can see what no one else can--visions of all that's yet to come, both beautiful and dangerous. Followed by his protective swarm of bees and living to deliver his adoptive family from threats--both human and those of nature--Simonopio's purpose in Linares will, in time, be divined. Set against the backdrop of the Mexican Revolution and the devastating influenza of 1918, The Murmur of Bees captures both the fate of a country in flux and the destiny of one family that has put their love, faith, and future in the unbelievable.

The Murmur of Bees

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#paperback #suspense #fiction #erotic #france #shortread #intranslation #translated 

Mississippi

"Fascinating . . . Adèle has glanced at the covenant of modern womanhood--the idea that you can have it all or should at least die trying--and detonated it." --The New York Times Book Review "[A] fierce, uncanny thunderbolt of a book." --Entertainment Weekly From the bestselling author of The Perfect Nanny--one of the 10 Best Books of the Year of The New York Times Book Review--as well as Sex and Lies and In the Country of Others, her prizewinning novel about a sex-addicted woman in Paris She wants only one thing: to be wanted. Adèle appears to have the perfect life: She is a successful journalist in Paris who lives in a beautiful apartment with her surgeon husband and their young son. But underneath the surface, she is bored--and consumed by an insatiable need for sex. Driven less by pleasure than compulsion, Adèle organizes her day around her extramarital affairs, arriving late to work and lying to her husband about where she's been, until she becomes ensnared in a trap of her own making. Suspenseful, erotic, and electrically charged, Adèle is a captivating exploration of addiction, sexuality, and one woman's quest to feel alive.

Adèle

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Laurent Gaude

Alison Anderson

From the winner of the Prix Goncourt Timely and provocative, Hear Our Defeats is a novel about the battles that define us. The battles lost, won, and those still being fought. A French intelligence officer, Assem, is tasked with tracking down a former member of the U.S. Special Forces suspected of drug trafficking during the War in Afghanistan. En route to Beirut he shares a night with Miriam, an Iraqi archaeologist, who is in a race against time to save ancient artifacts across the Middle East from the destruction wreaked by ISIS. Woven into these two forceful, gripping storylines are stylish meditations on humankind's bellicose history: Hannibal's failed march on Rome and the burning of his fleet on the waters of the Mediterranean; Grant's pursuit of the Confederates into rural Virginia; Robert E. Lee's surrender at Appomattox Courthouse; and Emperor Haile Selassie's swift retreat from Ethiopia. All turning points in world history, each showing a different facet of how nations and individuals face defeat. Gaudé writes with a riveting immediacy, seamlessly taking the reader across the battlefields of our past to reflect upon the implications of conflicts being waged today.

Hear Our Defeats

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Andrey Kurkov

"Kyiv, 1919. World War I has ended in Western Europe, but to the East, six factions continue to vie for control of Ukraine. Amidst the political turmoil, young Samson Kolechko is forced to place his engineering career on hold. But in the city of Kyiv everything remains up for grabs and new opportunity lurks just around the corner. When two Red Army soldiers commandeer his home, Samson's life is completely upended. But as Samson juggles his personal life -including a budding romance with the ingenious Nadezhda, a statistician helping run the city's census- with the soldiers' intrusion, he winds up overhearing their secret plans. Deciding to report them, Samson instead finds himself unwittingly recruited as an investigator for the city's new police force. His first case involves two murders, a long bone made of pure silver, and a suit of decidedly unusual proportions tailored from fine English cloth. The odds stacked against him, Samson turns to Nadezhda, who proves to be more than his match."--Provided by publisher.

The Silver Bone - New!

2f3bebc0-e683-4340-a9a7-028a31bced1d-0

NISIOISIN

Wound Tale

A stand-alone prequel to the leading Monogatari (Kodansha) series by the 33-year-old novelist whose first printings are now second only to Haruki Murakami's, this story about a blond female vampire on a 'tourist visit' to the country is being adapted into an animated feature for Japanese theatrical release in late 2015/early 2016. High schooler Koyomi, encountering a dying vampire on his way home from purchasing age-restricted magazines, offers his blood and must face the three vampire hunters who have stolen his mistress's limbs.

Kizumonogatari

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David Diop

Sam Taylor

The hotly anticipated new novel by David Diop, winner of the International Booker Prize. Paris, 1806. The renowned botanist Michel Adanson lies on his deathbed, the masterwork to which he dedicated his life still incomplete. As he expires, the last word to escape his lips is a woman’s name: Maram. The key to this mysterious woman’s identity is Adanson’s unpublished memoir of the years he spent in Senegal, concealed in a secret compartment in a chest of drawers. Therein lies a story as fantastical as it is tragic: Maram, it turns out, is none other than the fabled revenant. A young woman of noble birth from the kingdom of Waalo, Maram was sold into slavery but managed to escape from the Island of Gorée—a major embarkation point of the transatlantic slave trade—to a small village hidden in the forest. While on a research expedition in West Africa as a young man, Adanson hears the story of the revenant and becomes obsessed with finding her. Accompanied by his guide, he ventures deep into the Senegalese bush on a journey that reveals not only the savagery of the French colonial occupation but also the unlikely transports of the human heart. Written with sensitivity and narrative flair, David Diop’s Beyond the Door of No Return is a love story like few others. Drawing on the richness and lyricism of Senegal’s oral traditions, Diop has constructed a historical epic of the highest order.

Beyond the Door of No Return

2eac7f51-fcca-491c-be07-f1ba0827fad8-0

Nahoko Uehashi

Cathy Hirano

This copy is well loved. It has shelf wear and staining on the pages due to pass of time, a remainder mark on the bottom and is embossed (see pictures for reference).

Puerto Rico

Elin's family has an important responsibility: caring for the fearsome water serpents that form the core of their kingdom's army. So when some of the creatures mysteriously die, Elin's mother is sentenced to death as punishment. With her last breath, she manages to send her daughter to safety.

Alone and far from home, Elin soon discovers that she can communicate with both the terrifying water serpents and the majestic flying beasts that guard her queen. This skill gives her great power, but it also involves her in deadly plots that could cost her life. Can she save herself and prevent her beloved beasts from being used as tools of war? Or is there no escaping the terrible battles to come?

The Beast Player

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Gaëlle Josse

Natasha Lehrer

New York, November 3, 1954: The last immigration officer of Ellis Island looks back at 45 years as gatekeeper to America.

The Last Days of Ellis Island

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#paperback #shortstories #french #translated 

Alaska

At once wickedly funny and unexpectedly touching, Marie Desplechin's debut collection of stories explores life and love in contemporary Paris. Here are the trials and tribulations of sex in the city, as - with alarming frequency - her heroines' affairs fail to measure up to their expectations. They're not asking for much: but how much is too much? How long should they wait? And what should they do in the meantime? Sweet, sharp and unsentimental, Desplechin's stories capture eight unlikely moments of truth.

Taking It to Heart

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In this novel that was made into a prize-winning film, two men, imprisoned for homosexual and revolutionary activities, share their dreams and passions, arriving at a strong, though dangerous friendship.

Kiss of the Spider Woman

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Stieg Larsson

Pennsylvania

While recovering in the hospital, Lisbeth Salander enlists the aid of journalist Mikael Blomkvist to prove her innocent of three murders and identify the corrupt politicians who have allowed her to suffer, and, on her own, Lisbeth plots revenge against the man who tried to kill her. Reprint. A #1 best-seller.

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Henning Mankell

Italian Shoes

Isabel Allende; Frances Riddle

Violeta [English Edition]

Bianca Pitzorno

The Seamstress of Sardinia

Wiz Wharton

Ghost Girl, Banana - New!

Maxim Znak

The Zekameron

Kjell Askildsen; Sean Kinsella (Translator)

Everything Like Before

Eva Garcia Sáenz

The Silence of the White City

Yoko Tawada; Margaret Mitsutani

The Emissary

Ilaria Tuti

Flowers Over the Inferno

Kim Yideum; Ji Yoon Lee

Blood Sisters

Maryla Szymiczkowa; Antonia Lloyd-Jones

Mrs. Mohr Goes Missing

Ludmilla Petrushevskaya; Keith Gessen; Anna Summers

There Once Lived a Woman Who Tried to Kill Her Neighbor's Baby

Sofía Segovia; Simon Bruni

The Murmur of Bees

Isabel Allende; Frances Riddle

Violeta [English Edition]

Leila Slimani

Adèle

Laurent Gaude; Alison Anderson

Hear Our Defeats

Andrey Kurkov

The Silver Bone - New!

NISIOISIN

Kizumonogatari

David Diop; Sam Taylor

Beyond the Door of No Return

Nahoko Uehashi; Cathy Hirano

The Beast Player

Gaëlle Josse; Natasha Lehrer

The Last Days of Ellis Island

Marie Desplechin; Will Hobson (Translator)

Taking It to Heart

Manuel Puig; Thomas Colchie (Translator)

Kiss of the Spider Woman

Stieg Larsson

The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest