Pick and Mix Deal - Vintage Editions

Little Nicolas is a delicate, timid schoolboy, with an excitable, if morbid imagination – the child of an overbearing father. So, two weeks away on the class trip is already enough to fill him with dread. But when a child goes missing, Nicolas’ mind turns to gruesome possibilities, impelling him to take up the role of detective – and edge closer to a truth more shocking than Nicolas’ worst fears.

Translated by Linda Coverdale

Discover the haunting, heartbreaking post-apocalyptic tale of female friendship and intimacy set in a deserted world.

Deep underground, thirty-nine women are kept in isolation in a cage. Above ground, a world awaits. Has it been abandoned? Devastated by a virus?

Watched over by guards, the women have no memory of how they got there, no notion of time, and only vague recollection of their lives before. But, as the burn of electric light merges day into night and numberless years pass, a young girl - the fortieth prisoner - sits alone and outcast in the corner.

Soon she will show herself to be the key to the others' escape and survival in the strange world that awaits them above ground. The woman who will never know men.

Translated by Ros Schwartz

It is the summer of 1916 and, with German Zeppelins on the skyline, the men of Paris are off at war. For Vincent, the sixteen-year-old son of a prestigious family, the tranquillity of the city sits at odds with the salons and soirees he attends. But, after an electrifying encounter with the enigmatic writer, Marcel P, draws Vincent’s desires out into the light, his ever-riskier liaisons with a young solider begin to shape Vincent’s future.

Translated by Frank Wynne

Eighteen-year old orphan Andrea moves to battle-scarred Barcelona to take up a scholarship at the university. But staying with relatives in their crumbling apartment, her dreams of independence are dashed among the eccentric collection of misfits who surround her, not least her uncle Roman. As Andrea’s university friend, the affluent, elegant Ena, enters into a strange relationship with Roman, Andrea can’t help but wonder what future lies ahead for her in such a bizarre and disturbing world.

Translated by Edith Grossman

Murderers and mourners, mothers and children, lovers and innocent bystanders – locked in the embrace of an ominous and darkly beautiful web, their fates all converge through the eleven stories here in Yoko Ogawa’s Revenge. As tales of the macabre pass from character to character – an aspiring writer, a successful surgeon, a cabaret singer, a lonely craftsman – Ogawa provides us with a slice of life that is resplendent in its chaos, enthralling in its passion and chilling in its cruelty.

Translated by Stephen Snyder

Nothing in Elias' measured life, in his whole career as a teacher of literature, in his marriage to the 'indescribably beautiful' Eva, foreshadowed the events of that apparently ordinary day. He makes sure he has his headache pills and leaves for work as he has done every morning for the past twenty-five years.

He is only too familiar with his pupils' hostile attitude both to his lectures and to himself, but today he feels their impatience, their oafishness, more painfully than ever before and, after their ritually dismissive and bored response to his passionate lecture on Ibsen's The Wild Duck, he reaches a point of crisis.

Translated by Sverre Lyngstad

Emerence is a domestic servant – strong, fierce, eccentric, and with a reputation for being a first-rate housekeeper. When Magda, a young Hungarian writer, takes her on she never imagines how important this woman will become to her. It takes twenty years for a complex trust between them to be slowly, carefully built. But Emerence has secrets and vulnerabilities beneath her indomitable exterior which will test Magda’s friendship and change the complexion of both their lives irreversibly.

Translated by Len Rix

One morning, a man shaves off his long-worn moustache, hoping to amuse his wife and friends. But when nobody notices, or pretends not to have noticed, what started out as a simple trick turns to terror. As doubt and denial bristle, and every aspect of his life threatens to topple into madness – a disturbing solution comes into view, taking us on a dramatic flight across the world.

Translated by Lanie Goodman