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Dreams in a Time of War
Ngugi Wa Thiong'o
  In Dreams in a Time of War, Ngugi wa Thiong’o paints a mesmerising portrait of a young boy’s experiences in an African nation in flux.
Beginning in the late 1930s, this moving and entertaining memoir describes Ngugi’s day-to-day life as the fifth child of his father’s third wife in a family that included twenty-four children born to four different mothers. Against the backdrop of World War II, which affected the lives of Africans under British colonial rule in unexpected ways, Ngugi spent his childhood as the apple of his mother’s eye before attending school to slake what was then considered a bizarre thirst for learning.
As he grows up, the wider political and social changes occurring in Kenya at this time begin to impinge on the boy’s life in both inspiring and frightening ways. Through telling the story of his grandparents and parents and of his brothers’ involvement on different sides of the violent Mau Mau uprising, Ngugi wa Thiong’o takes us back to a momentous period in Kenyan history, deftly etching a bygone era, capturing the landscape, the people and their culture, and the social and political vicissitudes of life under colonialism and war.
This book has been selected to receive financial assistance from English PEN’s Writers in Translation programme supported by Bloomberg. English PEN exists to promote literature and its understanding, uphold writers’ freedoms around the world, campaign against the persecution and imprisonment of writers for stating their views, and promote the friendly co-operation of writers and free exchange of ideas.
Harvill Secker • RRP £12.99 •
Hardback
Publication date: 18/03/2010 • 272 pages • Demy Octavo • ISBN: 1846553776
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Dark Matter
 Sebastian and Oskar have been friends since their days studying physics at university, when both were considered future Nobel Prize candidates. But their lives took divergent paths, as did their scientific views. Whenever Oskar comes to visit from his prestigious research post in Geneva, there is tension in the air, and it doesn’t help their friendship that he feels Sebastian has not lived up to his intellectual capacities, having chosen marriage and fatherhood as an exit strategy.
A few days after a particularly heated argument between the two men, Sebastian leaves his son sleeping in the back seat while he goes into a service station. When he returns, the car has disappeared without trace. His phone rings and a voice informs him that in order to get his son back he must kill a man. As Sebastian’s life unravels, the only person he can safely reach out to is Oskar. Then Detective Schilf comes on the scene, with a most unorthodox method of uncovering the truth.
With intelligence, wit, precision, and grace, Juli Zeh crafts a philosophical thriller which uses the clash of the ideal and the material worlds, the bending of reality, and the search for a definition of time to explore the ideas of guilt and innocence and the infinite configurations of love.
Harvill Secker • RRP £12.99 •
Trade Paperback
Publication date: 04/03/2010 • 336 pages • Demy Octavo • ISBN: 1846552087
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Savage Lands
 Louisiana, 1704, and France is clinging on to a swampy corner of the New World with only a few hundred men. Into this precarious situation arrive Elizabeth Savaret, one of a group of young women sent from Paris to provide wives for the colonists, and Auguste Guichard, the only ship’s boy to survive the crossing. Elizabeth brings with her a green-silk quilt and a volume of Montaigne’s essays; August brings nothing but an aptitude for botany and languages. Each has to build a life, Elizabeth among the feckless inhabitants of Mobile who wait for white flour to be sent from France; Auguste in the ‘redskin’ village where he has been left as hostage and spy. Soon both fall for the bewitching charisma of infantryman Jean-Claude Babelon, Elizabeth as his wife, Auguste as his friend. But Babelon is a dangerous man to become involved with. Like so many who seek their fortunes in the colonies, he is out for himself, and has little regard for loyalty, love and trust. When his treachery forces Elizabeth and Auguste to start playing by his rules, the consequences are devastating.
Rich in tactile detail, heart-wrenching in its portrayal of people clinging on to their humanity against the brutality of nature and commerce, this is historical fiction at its best. So absorbing is Clare Clark’s recreation of eighteenth-century Louisiana that the reader won’t want to leave it, even though the unstable ground on which New Orleans is putting down its first foundations proves far from hospitable.
Harvill Secker • RRP £12.99 •
Trade Paperback
Publication date: 04/03/2010 • 384 pages • Royal Octavo • ISBN: 1846553512
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The Snowman
Jo Nesbo
 The night the first snow falls a young boy wakes to find his mother gone. He walks through the silent house, but finds only wet footprints on the stairs. In the garden looms a solitary figure: a snowman bathed in cold moonlight, its black eyes glaring up at the bedroom windows. Round its neck is his mother’s pink scarf.
Inspector Harry Hole is convinced there is a link between the disappearance and a menacing letter he received some months earlier. As Harry and his team delve into unsolved case files, they discover that an alarming number of wives and mothers have gone missing over the years. When a second woman disappears Harry’s suspicions are confirmed: he is a pawn in a deadly game. For the first time in his career Harry finds himself confronted with a serial killer operating on his turf, a killer who will drive him to the brink of insanity.
A brilliant thriller with a pace that never lets up, The Snowman confirms Jo Nesbø’s position as an international star of crime fiction.
Harvill Secker • RRP £12.99 •
Hardback
Publication date: 04/03/2010 • 464 pages • Royal Octavo • ISBN: 1846553482
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I Curse the River of Time
Per Petterson
 It is 1989 and all over Europe Communism is crumbling. Arvid Jansen, 37, is in the throes of a divorce. At the same time, his mother is diagnosed with cancer. Over a few intense autumn days, we follow Arvid as he struggles to find a new footing in his life, while all the established patterns around him are changing at staggering speed. As he attempts to negotiate the present, he casts his mind back to holidays on the beach with his brothers, to courtship, and to his early working life, when as a young Communist he abandoned his studies to work on a production line.
I Curse the River of Time is an honest, heartbreaking yet humorous portrayal of a complicated mother-son relationship told in Petterson’s precise and beautiful prose.
Harvill Secker • RRP £16.99 •
Hardback
Publication date: 01/07/2010 • 256 pages • Demy Octavo • ISBN: 1846553008
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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 £17.99 •
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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