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NEWS
Silence of the Grave by Arnaldur Indridason has won the prestigious Crime Writers Association Gold Dagger.
Arnaldur Indridason has also won Sweden's Martin Beck Award for the best crime novel translated into Swedish given by the Swedish Academy of Detection. The winning novel, The Voice, was published in English by Harvill Secker in August 2006.
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Aftermath: The Omagh Bombing and the Families' Pursuit of Justice
Ruth Dudley Edwards
  The Omagh bomb was the worst massacre in Northern Ireland’s modern history – yet from it came a most extraordinary tale of human resilience, as families of murdered people channelled their grief into action. As the bombers congratulated themselves on escaping justice, the families determined on a civil case against them and their organisation. No one had ever done this before.
It was a very domestic atrocity. In Omagh, on Saturday, 15 August 1998, a massive bomb placed by the so-called Real IRA murdered unborn twins, six men, twelve women and eleven children, of whom two were Spanish and one English: the dead included Protestants, Catholics and a Mormon.
Although the police believed they knew the identities of the killers, there was insufficient evidence to bring charges. Taking as their motto ‘For evil to triumph, all that is necessary is for good men to do nothing’, families of ten of the dead decided to pursue these men through the civil courts, where the burden of proof is lower. This is the remarkable account of how these families – who had no knowledge of the law and no money, and included a cleaner, a mechanic and a bookie – became internationally recognised, formidable campaigners and surmounted countless daunting obstacles to win a famous victory.
How these mothers and fathers and sisters and brothers turned themselves into the scourge of the Real IRA is not just an astonishing story in itself. It is also a universal story of David challenging Goliath, as well as an inspiration to ordinary people anywhere devastated by terrorism.
Harvill Secker • RRP £12.99 •
Trade Paperback
Publication date: 02/07/2009 • 384 pages • Royal Octavo • ISBN: 0436205998
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Bangkok Days
Lawrence Osborne
 A passionate, affectionate record of adventures and misadventures in the world's hottest metropolis.
Tourists come to Bangkok for many reasons - a sex change operation, a night with two prostitutes dressed as nuns, a stay in a luxury hotel. Lawrence Osborne comes for the cheap dentistry. Broke - but no longer in pain - he finds that he can live in Bangkok on a few dollars a day. Osborne's is a visceral experience of Bangkok, whether he's wandering the canals that fill the old city; dining at the No Hands Restaurant, where his waitress feeds him like a baby; or launching his own notably unsuccessful career as a gigolo. A guide without inhibitions, Osborne takes us to a feverish place where a strange blend of ancient Buddhist practice and new sexual mores has created a version of modernity only superficially indebted to the West. Bangkok Days is a love letter to the city that revived Osborne's faith in adventure and the world.
'Thailand inspires such enthralled romanticism that it also invites great cynicism and it is a feat to acknowledge all its complexities and graces, as Osborne does, without ever quite surrendering to them' PICO IYER, Los Angeles Times
Harvill Secker • RRP £12.99 •
Trade Paperback
Publication date: 02/07/2009 • 288 pages • Demy Octavo • ISBN: 1846552982
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Critical Essays
George Orwell
 As a critic, George Orwell cast a wide net. Equally at home in discussing Charles Dickens and Charlie Chaplin, he moved back and forth across the porous borders between essay and journalism, high art and low. A frequent commentator on literature, language, film and drama throughout his career, Orwell turned increasingly to the critical essay in the 1940s, when his most important experiences were behind him and some of his most incisive criticism lay ahead.
These essays follow Orwell as he demonstrates in piece after piece how intent analysis of a work or a body of work gives rise to trenchant aesthetic and philosophical commentary. With masterpieces such as 'Politics and the English Language' and 'Rudyard Kipling' and gems such as 'Good Bad Books', here is an unrivalled education in – as George Packer puts it in his foreword to this new two-volume collection – 'how to be interesting, line after line'.
Harvill Secker • RRP £14.99 •
Trade Paperback
Publication date: 02/07/2009 • 416 pages • Royal Octavo • ISBN: 1846553261
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Narrative Essays
George Orwell
 George Orwell was first and foremost an essayist. From his earliest published article in 1928 to his untimely death in 1950, he produced an extraordinary array of short non-fiction that reflected – and illuminated – the fraught times in which he lived and wrote. 'As soon as he began to write something,' comments George Packer in his foreword to this new two-volume collection, 'it was as natural for Orwell to propose, generalize, qualify, argue, judge – in short, to think – as it was for Yeats to versify or Dickens to invent.'
This collection charts Orwell's development as a master of the narrative-essay form and unites classics such as 'Shooting an Elephant' with lesser-known journalism and passages from his wartime diary. Whether detailing the horrors of Orwell's boyhood in an English boarding school or bringing to life the sights, sounds, and smells of the Spanish Civil War, these narrative essays weave together the personal and the political in an unmistakable style that is at once plain-spoken and brilliantly complex.
Harvill Secker • RRP £12.99 •
Trade Paperback
Publication date: 02/07/2009 • 336 pages • Royal Octavo • ISBN: 184655327X
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Nineteen Eighty-Four
George Orwell
 ‘It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.’ This is the opening sentence of the most influential novel of the twentieth century, in English or in any of the sixty or more other languages which boast a translation. Nineteen Eighty-Four has been described as chilling, absorbing, satirical, momentous, prophetic and terrifying. It is all these things, and more.
Not only does the novel have a ferocious impact, it has also made an irreplaceable contribution to the language – Newspeak, Thought Police, Unperson and Doublethink are just a few of the concepts it introduced. Nineteen Eighty-Four proved to be Orwell’s last book – the physical effort of typing up the final draft leading to his eventual collapse from the TB that had dogged his later years. He lived long enough to see it become an immediate bestseller on both sides of the Atlantic.
This edition, with an introduction by the distinguished novelist Robert Harris, marks the sixtieth anniversary of this great work’s publication.
Harvill Secker • RRP £17.99 •
Hardback
Publication date: 02/07/2009 • 336 pages • Demy Octavo • ISBN: 1846553288
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The Twelve
Stuart Neville
 Sooner or later, everybody pays – and the dead will set the price...
Former paramilitary killer Gerry Fegan is haunted by his victims, twelve souls who shadow his every waking day and scream through every drunken night. Just as he reaches the edge of sanity they reveal their desire: vengeance on those who engineered their deaths. From the greedy politicians to the corrupt security forces, the street thugs to the complacent bystanders who let it happen, all must pay the price.
When Fegan’s vendetta threatens to derail Northern Ireland’s peace process and destabilise its fledgling government, old comrades and enemies alike want him gone. David Campbell, a double agent lost between the forces of law and terror, takes the job. But he has his own reasons for eliminating Fegan; the secrets of a dirty war should stay buried, even if its ghosts do not.
Set against the backdrop of a post-conflict Northern Ireland struggling with its past, The Twelve takes the reader from the back streets of the city, where violence and politics go hand-in-hand, to the country’s darkest heart. Stuart Neville’s gripping thriller marks the emergence of a brilliant new voice.
Harvill Secker • RRP £12.99 •
Trade Paperback
Publication date: 02/07/2009 • 336 pages • Royal Octavo • ISBN: 1846552796
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The Water's Edge
Karin Fossum
 Walking through the woods one warm September day, Reinhardt and Kristine Ris pass a man who is in a state of agitation. Unusually in a small town, he does not return Kristine’s smile and drives off in a hurry. Near the end of their walk they make a terrible discovery: lying in a cluster of trees is the lifeless body of a young boy. It is a moment that will change their lives for ever.
Inspector Sejer is called to the scene, but can find no immediate cause of death. As the weeks go by, the appeal for the man seen in the woods to come forward remains unanswered. A once peaceful community is deeply shaken and the children lose the sense of complete freedom they had enjoyed. Then a second boy goes missing.
Harvill Secker • RRP £11.99 •
Trade Paperback
Publication date: 02/07/2009 • 240 pages • Royal Octavo • ISBN: 1846551706
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Click for COMPLETE BACKLIST |
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Small Memories
José Saramago
 ‘Let yourself be led by the child you were.’ The Book of Exhortations
Born in Portugal in 1922 in the tiny village of Azinhaga, José Saramago was only eighteen months old when he moved with his father and mother to live in a series of cramped lodgings in a working-class neighbourhood of Lisbon. Nevertheless, he would return to the village throughout his childhood and adolescence, its river landscape and olive groves seeping deep into his memory.
Shifting back and forth between Azinhaga and Lisbon, this touching book is a mosaic of memories, a gathering together of the fragmented recollections that make up the idea of one’s youth. Lust, love, humiliation, aspiration - the raptures and miseries of childhood are beautifully captured: Saramago’s grandparents bringing the weaker piglets into their bed to keep them warm; the young José proudly carrying his first balloon on a string, only to be mocked by two strangers as it empties of air, the shrivelled remains dragging behind him; his first encounter with literature as he listens entranced to a friend’s mother reading out weekly instalments of Maria, the Fairy of the Forest, and the seven-year-old José doggedly teaching himself to read by deciphering articles in the daily newspaper brought home by his father.
Written with Saramago’s characteristic wit and honesty, Small Memories traces the formation of an artist fascinated by words and stories from an early age and who emerged, against all the odds, as one of the world’s most respected writers.
Harvill Secker • RRP £12.99 •
Hardback
Publication date: 05/11/2009 • 208 pages • B format • ISBN: 184655148X
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Hypothermia
Arnaldur Indridason
 One cold autumn night, a woman is found hanging from a beam in her summer cottage by Lake Thingvellir. At first sight it appears to be a straightforward case of suicide; the woman, María, had never recovered from the loss of her mother two years earlier and had a history of depression. But when Karen, the friend who found her body, approaches Erlendur and gives him the tape of a séance that María had attended, his curiosity is aroused.
Driven by a need to find answers that even he does not fully understand, Erlendur embarks on an unofficial investigation to find out why the woman’s life ended in such an abrupt and tragic manner. At the same time he is haunted by the unresolved cases of two young people who went missing thirty years before, and, inevitably, his discoveries raise ghosts from his own past.
Harvill Secker • RRP £11.99 •
Trade Paperback
Publication date: 01/10/2009 • 304 pages • Royal Octavo • ISBN: 1846552621
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Life is a Dream: 40 Years Reading Poems 1967-2007
Paul Durcan
 Famous for his electrifying poetry readings, Paul Durcan marks four decades of composing silently and reciting aloud with this magnificent collection, which brings together for the first time the critically acclaimed poet’s own choice of his work from his first book, Endsville (1967), to The Laughter of Mothers (2007). Life is a Dream represents the whole range of Durcan’s writing – funny and subversive verse narratives and self-mocking poems of underachievement; poems celebrating love and sex or the lives of famous writers and artists; as well as tender, poignant verses commemorating the dead.
Throughout his long career, Durcan has continued to make passionate and moving poetry out of his own and his country’s misfortunes. He is by turns a surrealist, a mystic, an Irish comedian with perfect comic timing and an angry champion of the oppressed. Life is a Dream reaffirms the constant vision and artistic integrity of one of the most powerful, humane and original voices in modern poetry.
Harvill Secker • RRP £16.99 •
Hardback
Publication date: 01/10/2009 • 608 pages • Royal Octavo • ISBN: 1846550246
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Notwithstanding
Louis De Bernieres
 A Frenchman once pointed out to Louis de Bernières that Britain was the most exotic country in Europe, adding that it was 'an immense lunatic asylum'. Casting his mind back to the village in southern Surrey where he grew up in the sixties and seventies, but plagued by a novelist's inability to stick to the truth, Louis de Bernières brings us in Notwithstanding stories of a vanished England which will delight readers of his much-loved novels.
The English village was a place where a lady might dress as a man in plus fours and spend her time shooting squirrels with a twelve bore, or keep a vast menagerie in her house. A retired general might give up wearing clothes, a spiritualist might live in a cottage with her sister and the ghost of her husband, and people might think it quite natural to confide in a spider that lives in a potting shed.
De Bernières’ characters roam through the book, appearing in each other's stories and painting a picture of an entire community. Here we find the atmosphere of those times as it was in the countryside. Notwithstanding is not about an imagined idyll; it is about people who are worth remembering, whose lives are worth celebrating, and who would otherwise have been forgotten.
Harvill Secker • RRP £12.99 •
Hardback
Publication date: 01/10/2009 • 224 pages • Demy Octavo • ISBN: 184655330X
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The Alchemaster's Apprentice
Walter Moers
 Malaisea, the unhealthiest town in the whole of Zamonia, is home to Echo the Crat, a multitalented creature resembling a cat in appearance but capable of speaking any language under the sun, human or animal. When his mistress dies, Echo finds himself out on the street. Dying of starvation, he is compelled to sign a contract with Ghoolion the Alchemaster, Malaisea's evil alchemist-in-chief. This fateful document gives Ghoolion the right to kill Echo at the next full moon and render him down for his fat, with which he hopes to brew an alchemical concoction that will make him immortal. In return, he promises to regale the little Crat with the most exquisite gastronomic delicacies until his time is up. But Ghoolion has reckoned without Echo's talent for survival and his ability to make new friends. These include the Leathermice, the Cogitating Eggs, the Golden Squirrel, the Cooked Ghost, Theodore T. Theodore the one-eyed Tuwituwu, and, above all, Izanuela Anazazi, the last Uggly in Malaisea.
Walter Moers's magnificent translation of Optimus Yarnspinner's novel introduces us to yet another of Zamonia's hotbeds of adventure: Malaisea, a place where sick is healthy, up is down, right is wrong, and Ghoolion the Alchemaster reigns supreme - until Echo crosses his path.
Harvill Secker • RRP £18.99 •
Hardback
Publication date: 01/10/2009 • 384 pages • Royal Octavo • ISBN: 1846552222
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The Kingdom of Light
Giulio Leoni
 Strange news arrives in Florence: on the banks of the river Arno a galley has been found, the entire crew dead. Dante Alighieri, Prior to the City, suspects poison. The only clue is a damaged mechanical device, possibly of Arabic origin. Frederick II, Holy Roman Emperor, known for his obsession with science and medicine, would have been one of the few who could understand such an instrument. At a time when conspiracy theories abound concerning the death of the Emperor, is this a coincidence or something more sinister?
Whilst working on his magnum opus the Divine Comedy, Dante returns to the city only to discover the renegade monk, Brindano, stirring up trouble and recruiting Florentines for a new crusade to liberate the Holy Land.
In The Kingdom of Light, Leoni paints an atmospheric medieval Florence, seething with plots and intrigue, and in Dante delivers a credible, intuitive detective and a fascinating man.
Harvill Secker • RRP £12.99 •
Trade Paperback
Publication date: 01/10/2009 • 320 pages • Demy Octavo • ISBN: 1846551285
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