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The House of Rajani
Alon Hilu
  The year is 1895, Jaffa. Salah Rajani, a troubled Muslim boy living in a dilapidated mansion surrounded by orange groves, suffers from peculiar visions about a disaster which is set to befall his people. His life is changed by the arrival of a handsome young man, a dynamic Jewish settler, new to the city, by the name of Isaac Luminsky. Luminsky covets both the fertile lands of the Rajani estate and Salah's beautiful mother Afifa, and his friendship with the boy is destined to lead to violence and tragedy.
This rich and colourful novel is made up of the two opposing journals of Hilu's intriguing and extraordinary protagonists as they negotiate love, honour and betrayal in the changing world of nineteenth-century Palestine.
Harvill Secker • RRP £12.99 •
Trade Paperback
Publication date: 21/02/2010 • 288 pages • 205x135 • ISBN: 1846552990
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Books Burn Badly
Manuel Rivas
 On 19 August 1936 Hercules the boxer stands on the quayside at Coruña and watches Fascist soldiers piling up books and setting them alight. It is a moment which transforms a young group of friends, who just weeks before had spent their days sunbathing beneath the lighthouse, into a broken generation.
Out of this incident during the early months of Spain’s tragic civil war, Manuel Rivas weaves a colourful tapestry of stories and unforgettable characters to create a panorama of twentieth-century Spanish history. For it is not only the lives of Hercules the boxer and his friends that are tainted by the unending conflict, but also those of a young washerwoman who sees souls in the clouded river water and the stammering son of a judge who uncovers his father’s hidden library.
Rivas’ depiction of life under Franco’s dictatorship reveals violence and betrayal but also irrepressible humour and love, and stands as a testament to the indomitable freedom of the human imagination.
Few novels become classics during their authors’ lifetimes, but in Books Burn Badly Manuel Rivas has produced an astonishing masterpiece. This is a poet’s evocation of his native land and its collective memory. As the singed pages fly away on the breeze, their stories live on in the minds of their readers.
Harvill Secker • RRP £18.99 •
Hardback
Publication date: 18/02/2010 • 560 pages • Royal Octavo • ISBN: 1846551463
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Disgrace: Limited Centenary edition
J.M. Coetzee
 David Lurie, middle-aged and twice divorced, is a scholar fallen into disgrace. After years teaching Romantic poetry at the Technical University of Cape Town, he has an impulsive affair with a student. The affair sours; he is denounced and summoned before a committee of inquiry. Willing to admit his guilt, but refusing to yield to pressure to repent publicly, he resigns and retreats to an isolated smallholding owned by his daughter Lucy.
For a time, his daughter’s influence and the natural rhythms of the farm promise to harmonise his discordant life. He helps with the dogs in the kennels, takes produce to market, and assists with treating injured animals at a nearby refuge.
But the balance of power in the country is shifting. He and Lucy become victims of a savage and disturbing attack which brings into relief all the faultlines in their relationship.
Chilling, uncompromising and unforgettable, Disgrace is a masterpiece.
Harvill Secker • RRP £20.00 •
Hardback
Publication date: 06/05/2010 • 224 pages • Royal Octavo • ISBN: 1846553903
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Everything Flows
Vasily Grossman
 Everything Flows is Vasily Grossman’s final testament, written after the Soviet authorities suppressed his epic Life and Fate.
Ivan Grigoryevich has been in the Gulag for thirty years. Released after Stalin’s death, he finds that the years of terror have imposed a collective moral slavery. He must struggle to find a place for himself in an unfamiliar world. But in a novel that seeks to take in the whole tragedy of Soviet history, Ivan’s story is only one among many – Grossman had too much to say, and too short a time to live, to concern himself with conventional novel-writing.
Thus we also hear about Ivan’s cousin, Nikolay, a scientist who never let his conscience interfere with his career, and Pinegin, the informer who had Ivan sent to the camps. Then comes a series of informers, each making excuses for their inexcusable deeds – inexcusable and yet, they plead, in Stalinist Russia understandable, almost unavoidable. And at the core of the book, we find the story of Anna Sergeyevna, Ivan’s lover, who tells of her involvement as an activist in the Terror famine of 1932–3, which led to the deaths of three to five million Ukrainian peasants.
Everything Flows is an unbearably lucid novel about human suffering from one of the giants of twentieth-century literature.
Harvill Secker • RRP £16.99 •
Hardback
Publication date: 06/05/2010 • 304 pages • Demy Octavo • ISBN: 1846552362
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The Leopard: Limited Centenary edition
Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa
 In the spring of 1860, Fabrizio, the charismatic Prince of Salina, still rules over thousands of acres and hundreds of people, including his own numerous family, in mingled splendour and squalor. Then comes Garibaldi’s landing in Sicily and the Prince must decide whether to resist the forces of change or come to terms with them.
Harvill Secker • RRP £20.00 •
Hardback
Publication date: 06/05/2010 • 224 pages • Royal Octavo • ISBN: 1846553911
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The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle: Limited Centenary edition
Haruki Murakami
 Toru Okada's cat has disappeared and this has unsettled his wife, who is herself growing more distant every day. Then there are the increasingly explicit telephone calls he has started receiving. As this compelling story unfolds, the tidy suburban realities of Okada's vague and blameless life, spent cooking, reading, listening to jazz and opera and drinking beer at the kitchen table, are turned inside out, and he embarks on a bizarre journey, guided (however obscurely) by a succession of characters, each with a tale to tell.
Harvill Secker • RRP £25.00 •
Hardback
Publication date: 06/05/2010 • 624 pages • Royal Octavo • ISBN: 1846553873
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A Life in Letters
George Orwell
 George Orwell was a tireless and lively correspondent. He communicated with family members, friends and newspapers, figures such as Henry Miller, Cyril Connolly, Stephen Spender and Arthur Koestler, and strangers who wrote to him out of the blue. This carefully selected volume of his correspondence provides an eloquent narrative of Orwell’s life, from his schooldays to his final illness.
Orwell’s letters afford a unique and fascinating view of his thoughts on matters both personal, political and much in between, from poltergeists, to girls’ school songs and the art of playing croquet. In a note home to his mother from school, he reports having ‘aufel fun after tea’; much later he writes of choosing a pseudonym and smuggling a copy of Ulysses into the country.
We catch illuminating glimpses of his family life: his son Richard’s developing teeth, the death of his wife Eileen and his own illness. His talent as a political writer comes to the fore in his descriptions of Barcelona during the Spanish Civil War, his opinions on bayonets, and on the chaining of German prisoners. And of course, letters to friends and his publisher chart the development and publication of some of the most famous novels in the English language, providing unparalleled insight into his views on his own work and that of his contemporaries.
A Life in Letters features previously unpublished material, including letters which shed new light on a love that would haunt him for his whole life, as well as revealing the inspiration for some of his most famous characters. Presented for the first time in a dedicated volume, this selection of Orwell’s letters is an indispensible companion to his diaries.
Harvill Secker • RRP £20.00 •
Hardback
Publication date: 15/04/2010 • 480 pages • Royal Octavo • ISBN: 1846553555
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Animal Farm
George Orwell
 Animal Farm is one of the most famous warnings ever written. Orwell’s immortal satire – ‘against Stalin’ as he wrote to his French translator – can be read on many levels. With its piercing clarity and deceptively simple style it is no surprise that this novel is required reading for schoolchildren and politicians alike. This fable of the steadfast horses Boxer and Clover, the opportunistic pigs Snowball and Napoleon, and the deafening choir of sheep remains an unparalleled masterpiece.
One reviewer wrote ‘In a hundred years’ time perhaps Animal Farm ... may simply be a fairy story: today it is a fairy story with a good deal of point.’ Over sixty years on in the age of spin, it is more relevant than ever.
Rejected by such eminent publishing figures as Victor Gollancz, Jonathan Cape and T.S. Eliot, Animal Farm was published to great acclaim by Martin Secker and Warburg on 17 August 1945 in an edition of 4500 copies. In the centenary year of Martin Secker, Ltd., Harvill Secker is proud to publish this special edition with a brand-new introduction by Christopher Hitchens.
Harvill Secker • RRP £10.99 •
Hardback
Publication date: 15/04/2010 • 128 pages • Demy Octavo • ISBN: 1846553547
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