To research his thesis on contemporary agrarian life, anthropology student David Mazon moves from Paris to La Pierre-Saint-Christophe, a village in the marshlands of western France. Determined to capture the essence of rurality, the intrepid scholar shuttles around restlessly on his moped to interview local residents.    Unbeknownst to David, in these nondescript lands, once theatres of wars and revolutions, Death leads the dance. When an existence ends, the Wheel of Life recycles its soul and hurls it back into the world as microbe, human or wild animal, sometimes in the past, sometimes in the future. Only once a year do Death and the living observe a temporary truce, during a gargantuan three-day feast where gravediggers gorge themselves on food, libations and language, presided over by the village mayor.    Brimming with Mathias Enard’s characteristic wit and encyclopaedic brilliance, The Annual Banquet of the Gravediggers’ Guild is a riotous novel where the edges between past and present are constantly dissolving against a Rabelaisian backdrop of excess – and a paradoxically macabre paean to life’s inexhaustible richness.

In November 2019, Paul B. Preciado was invited to speak in front of 3,500 psychoanalysts at the Ecole de la Cause Freudienne's annual conference in Paris. Standing up in front of the profession for whom he is a 'mentally ill person' suffering from 'gender dysphoria', Preciado draws inspiration in his lecture from Kafka's 'A Report to an Academy', in which a monkey tells an assembly of scientists that human subjectivity is a cage comparable to one made of metal bars. Demonstrating the discipline's complicity with the ideology of sex, gender and sexual difference dating back to the colonial era, Preciado was heckled and booed and unable to finish. The lecture, filmed on smartphones, ended up published online, where fragments were transcribed, translated and published with no regard for exactitude. Eighteen months on, Can the Monster Speak? is published in a definitive translation for the first time.

Teeming with life and compulsively readable, the pieces gathered together in The Tribe aggregate into an extraordinary mosaic of Cuba today. Carlos Manuel �lvarez, one of the most exciting young writers in Latin America, employs the crónica form – a genre unique to Latin American writing that blends reportage, narrative non-fiction, and novelistic forms – to illuminate a particularly turbulent period in Cuban history, from the re-establishment of diplomatic relations with the US, to the death of Fidel Castro, to the convulsions of the San Isidro Movement. Unique, edgy and stylishly written, The Tribe shows a society in flux, featuring sportsmen in exile, artists, nurses, underground musicians and household names, dissident poets, the hidden underclass at a landfill, migrants attempting to make their way across Central America, fugitives escaping the FBI, dealers from the black market, as well as revelers and policemen in the noisy Havana night. It is a major work of reportage by one of Granta’s Best of Young Spanish-Language novelists.

'A magnificent small book to read urgently' Liberation Once upon a time in an enormous forest there lived a poor woodcutter and his wife. Around them a war wages, and hunger is a constant companion. Yet every night, the woodcutter's wife prays for a child. On a train crossing the forest, a Jewish father holds his twin children. His wife no longer has enough milk to feed them. In hopes of saving both their lives, he wraps his daughter in a shawl and gently throws her from the train. While foraging for food, the woodcutter's wife finds a bundle, a baby girl wrapped in a shawl. She knows that this little girl will be pursued, but she cannot ignore this gift: she will accept the precious cargo, and raise her as her own. . . Set against the horrors of the Holocaust and told with a fairytale-like lyricism, The Most Precious of Cargoes, translated from French by Frank Wynne, is a deeply moving fable about family and redemption, a story that reminds us that humanity can be found in the most inhumane of places.

A powerful, unsettling portrait of ordinary family life in Cuba, Carlos Manuel �lvarez’s debut novel The Fallen is a masterful portrayal of a society in free fall. Diego, the son, is disillusioned and bitter about the limited freedoms his country offers him. Mariana, the mother, is unwell and forced to relinquish her control over the home to her daughter, Maria, who has left school and is working as a chambermaid in one of the state-owned tourist hotels. The father, Armando, is a committed revolutionary who is sickened by the corruption he perceives all around him. In meticulously charting the disintegration of a family, The Fallen offers a poignant reflection on contemporary Cuba and the clash of the ardent idealism of the old guard with the jaded pragmatism of the young.

‘I write from the realms of the ugly, for the ugly, the frigid, the unfucked and the unfuckables, all those excluded from the great meat market of female flesh, and for all those guys who don’t want to be protectors, for those who would like to be but don’t know how, for those who are not ambitious, competitive, or well-endowed. Because this ideal of the seductive white woman constantly being waved under our noses – well, I’m pretty sure it doesn’t exist.’   Powerful, provocative and personal, King Kong Theory is a candid account of how the author of Baise-moi came to be Virginie Despentes. Drawing from personal experience, Despentes shatters received ideas about rape and prostitution, and explodes common attitudes towards sex and gender. King Kong Theory is a manifesto for a new punk feminism, reissued here in a brilliant new translation by Frank Wynne.

'Literature with conviction; a furious talent' L'Obs The first volume of THE GLORIOUS YEARS series, translated by Frank Wynne Beirut, 1948. The Pelletier family returns... The Pelletiers are a prominent French family living in Beirut. The patriarch, Louis, has built a successful business manufacturing and exporting artisanal soaps. He hoped to pass the business on to his eldest son, Jean, but Jean doesn't have the sharpness or aptitude for such an enterprise. After nearly running the company into the ground, Jean marries a money-grubbing young woman who quickly makes him miserable, and they emigrate to Paris. But there's another reason Jean must leave - he has committed a terrible crime... His brother, Etienne, travels to Saigon, where he soon uncovers irregularities in the local currency office and begins investigating what he believes is a scheme to channel smuggled goods and cash to the Viet Minh. It is evidence that presents a real threat to his own life. François, the middle Pelletier brother, has gone to Paris, ostensibly to study, but finds himself working as a journalist. His career flies when he reports on the brutal murder of an actress in a cinema ladies' room. It seems a serial killer is on the loose. 'You have the ingredients Balzac would have cooked with. And it is exactly those great 19th century novels that Lemaitre will remind you of' Sunday Times 'Pierre Lemaitre skilfully captivates and stuns the reader' Le Figaro

The first epic novel in THE GLORIOUS YEARS series from the two times winner of the prestigious Prix-Goncourt 'You have the ingredients Balzac would have cooked with. And it is exactly those great 19th century novels that Lemaitre will remind you of' Sunday Times The Pelletiers are a prominent French family living in Beirut, dominated by Louis, who has built a hugely successful business manufacturing artisanal soaps. Louis has three sons, but none seems to have the aptitude for commerce he desires. There's Jean, the eldest, a feckless man who is both lazy and weak. When his ambitious wife suggests a move to France, he jumps at the chance for escape - for Jean has a secret that no-one must ever uncover. Etienne is the youngest son, who travels to Saigon looking for love, and there uncovers financial corruption and violence linked to the very highest officials - evidence that presents a real threat to his own life. François, the middle Pelletier brother, leaves for Paris and becomes a journalist. When he reports a shocking and brutal murder, he realises he's uncovered the work of a dangerous serial killer, one who may be very close to home. Absorbing, colourful and rich with no-holds-barred detail, THE WIDE WORLD is a terrific novel of greed, blackmail, and shocking crime. 'Literature with conviction; a furious talent' L'Obs

Animalia retraces the history of a modest peasant family through the twentieth century as they develop their small plot of land into an intensive pig farm. In an environment dominated by the omnipresence of animals, five generations endure the cataclysm of war, economic disasters, and the emergence of a brutal industrialism reflecting an ancestral tendency to violence. Only the enchanted realm of childhood - that of Eleonore, the matriarch, and that of Jerome, the last in the lineage - and the innate freedom of the animals offer any respite from the visible barbarity of humanity. Written in shifting prose that reflects the passage of time, Animalia is a powerful novel about man's desire to conquer nature and the transmission of violence from one generation to the next.

LGBTQ writing from ancient times to yesterday, selected by award-winning translator Frank Wynne. Since the dawn of literature, queer people have turned to writing to document their existence: to share great triumphs and deep despairs; to praise the virtues of their lover, extol their loneliness and proclaim their lust; to tell of their peculiarities and mundanities. For almost as long, they have been censored and bowdlerised, persecuted and relegated to the margins. No longer. Alive in these pages, readers will hear Homer's Achilles beat his chest in grief for the loss of his Patroclus and Paul Verlaine exalt the arsehole of his lover. They will see Alison Bechdel tiptoe then leap out of the closet and Juno Dawson come out again, but differently. They will bite and lick and groan in sweet surprise with Roz Kaveney, and fall in and out of love alongside Qiu Miaojin in Paris and Taiwan. They will recognise queer saints and icons - Audre Lorde, Larry Kramer, Virginia Woolf - and meet young queer, trans and non-binary writers - Keith Jarrett, Zhang Yueran and Niviaq Korneliussen, among others. Frank Wynne allows their voices to ring out, unashamed and unabashed, in eighty pieces that straddle the spectrum of queer existence: short stories, poems, essays, extracts and scenes from countries the world over, from ancient times to yesterday. Reviews for Queer: 'A landmark anthology of queer writing' BBC Front Row 'A landmark collection of LGBTQ writing from ancient times to yesterday, featuring powerful voices in many literary forms' Spectator, Books of the Year 'A fearless and life-affirming celebration of what Gilbert Adair [...] called 'the second most natural thing in the world'' Review 31, Books of the Year

"One of those rare, transformative novels" KARIM MISKE "Funny and poignant" TIFFANY TSAO, author of The Majesties Initially a little intrigued, all babies eventually return the security guard's smile. The security guard adores babies. Perhaps because babies do not shoplift. Babies adore the security guard. Perhaps because he does not drag babies to the sales. The 1960s - Ferdinand arrives in Paris from Cote d'Ivoire, ready to take on the world and become a big somebody. The 1990s - It is the Golden Age of immigration, and Ossiri and Kassoum navigate a Paris on the brink of momentous change. The 2010s - In a Sephora on the Champs-Elysees, the all-seeing eyes of a security guard observes the habits of those who come to worship at this church to consumerism. Amidst the political bickering of the inhabitants of the Residence for Students from Cote d'Ivoire and the ever-changing landscape of French immigration policy, Ferdinand, Ossiri and Kassoum, two generations of Ivoirians, attempt to make their way as undocumented workers, taking shifts as security at a flour mill. Sharply satirical, political and poignant, Standing Heavy is a searingly witty deconstruction of colonial legacies and capitalist consumption, an unprecedented and unforgettable account of everything that passes under a security guard's gaze. Translated from the French by Frank Wynne "Inventive and very funny" Guardian "A compact, humane satire" Financial Times

"Tremendous and enjoyable" - La Libre Belgique "A great success" - La Croix April, 1940. Louise Belmont runs, naked, down the boulevard du Montparnasse. To understand the tragic scene she has just experienced, she will have to plunge into the madness of the 'Phoney War', when the whole of France, seized by the panic of a new World War, descends into chaos. Alongside bistro-owner Monsieur Jules, new recruit Gabriel and small-time crook Raoul, Louise navigates this period of enormous upheaval and extraordinary twists of fate, for as the Nazi's advance, the threat of German occupation will uncover long-buried secrets and make strange bedfellows. With his characteristic wit and verve, Pierre Lemaitre chronicles the greatness and decline of a people crushed by circumstance. In Mirror of Our Sorrows, the final novel in the Paris between-the-wars trilogy, is an incandescent tale that is both burlesque and tragic. Translated from the French by Frank Wynne

To research his thesis on contemporary agrarian life, anthropology student David Mazon moves from Paris to La Pierre-Saint-Christophe, a village in the marshlands of western France. Determined to understand the essence of the local culture, the intrepid young scholar scurries around restlessly on his moped to interview residents. But what David doesn’t yet know is that here, in this seemingly ordinary place, once the stage for wars and revolutions, Death leads a dance: when one thing perishes, the Wheel of Life recycles its soul and hurls it back into the world as microbe, human, or wild animal, sometimes in the past, sometimes in the future. And once a year, Death and the living observe a temporary truce during a gargantuan three-day feast where gravediggers gorge themselves on food, drink, and language. Brimming with Mathias Énard’s characteristic wit and encyclopedic brilliance, The Annual Banquet of the Gravediggers’ Guild is a riotous novel where the edges between past and present are constantly dissolving against a Rabelaisian backdrop of excess.  

"Terrific . . . Easily the most purely entertaining novel I have read so far this year" David Mills, The Sunday Times "A really excellent suspense novelist" Stephen King The second volume of Pierre Lemaitre's enthralling, award-winning between-the-wars trilogy In 1927, the great and the good of Paris gather at the funeral of the wealthy banker, Marcel Péricourt. His daughter, Madeleine, is poised to take over his financial empire (although, unfortunately, she knows next to nothing about banking). More unfortunately still, when Madeleine's seven-year-old son, Paul, tumbles from a second floor window of the Péricourt mansion on the day of his grandfather's funeral, and suffers life-changing injuries, his fall sets off a chain of events that will reduce Madeleine to destitution and ruin in a matter of months. Using all her reserves of ingenuity, resourcefulness, and a burning desire for retribution, Madeleine sets about rebuilding her life. She will be helped by an ex-Communist fixer, a Polish nurse who doesn't speak a word of French, a brainless petty criminal with a talent for sabotage, an exiled German Jewish chemist, a very expensive forger, an opera singer with a handy flair for theatrics, and her own son with ideas for a creative new business to take Paris by storm. A brilliant, imaginative, free-falling caper through between-the-wars Paris, and a portrait of Europe on the edge of disaster. Translated from the French by Frank Wynne Frank Wynne is an award-winning writer and translator. His previous translations include works by Virginie Despentes, Javier Cercas and Michel Houellebecq. His translation of Vernon Subutex I was shortlisted for the Man Booker International Prize. With the support of the Creative Europe Programme of the European Union From the reviews for The Great Swindle "The most purely enjoyable book I've read this year" Jake Kerridge, Sunday Telegraph "The vast sweep of the novel and its array of extraordinary secondary characters have attracted comparisons with the works of Balzac. Moving, angry, intelligent - and compulsive" Marcel Berlins, The Times

Police officers are obliged to give an account of every incident they are involved in. But what happened today will never be logged. Because that's what police solidarity means: what happens in the van stays in the van. Well, not always. Not this time. What really happens behind the walls of a police station? To answer this question, investigative journalist Valentin Gendrot put his life on hold for two years and became the first journalist in history to infiltrate the police undetected. Within three months of training to become an officer, he was given a permit to carry a weapon in public. And although he lived in daily fear of being discovered, in his book Gendrot hides nothing. Assigned to work in a tough area of Paris where tensions between the law and locals ran high, Gendrot witnessed police brutality, racism, blunders, and cover-ups. But he also saw the oppressive working conditions that officers endured, and mourned the tragic suicide of a colleague. Asking important questions about who holds institutional power and how we can hold them to account, Cop is a gripping expose of a world never before seen by outsiders.

**SHORTLISTED FOR THE MAN BOOKER INTERNATIONAL 2018** WHO IS VERNON SUBUTEX? An urban legend. A fall from grace. The mirror who reflects us all. Vernon Subutex was once the proprietor of Revolver, an infamous music shop in Bastille. His legend spread throughout Paris. But by the 2000s his shop is struggling. With his savings gone, his unemployment benefit cut, and the friend who had been covering his rent suddenly dead, Vernon Subutex finds himself down and out on the Paris streets. He has one final card up his sleeve. Even as he holds out his hand to beg for the first time, a throwaway comment he once made on Facebook is taking the internet by storm. Vernon does not realise this, but the word is out: Vernon Subutex has in his possession the last filmed recordings of Alex Bleach, the famous musician and Vernon's benefactor, who has only just died of a drug overdose. A crowd of people from record producers to online trolls and porn stars are now on Vernon's trail. Translated from the French by Frank Wynne "Thrilling, magnificently audacious" Irish Times "Brimming with sex, violence and deviant behaviour" Sunday Times "Virginie Despentes's Vernon Subutex trilogy is the zeitgeistiest thing I ever read" NELL ZINK

FROM THE BESTSELLING AUTHOR OF LIE WITH ME 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 'A short, bold and original novel which beautifully captures the romance and amorality of gilded youth' Independent

'A beautiful book about the best minds of a generation and the devastation of war - an outrageous voyage from the past that speaks eloquently to our present' Deborah Levy March 1941. A converted cargo ship, the Paul-Lemerle, left Marseille on a voyage to the Caribbean, fleeing Vichy France and the devastation of the war. The ship was filled with immigrants from the East, exiled Spanish Republicans, Jews, stateless persons and decadent artists. Among them were Claude Levi-Strauss, the painter Wifredo Lam, the writers Anna Seghers and Andre Breton, and the Russian revolutionary Victor Serge. Can we know the taste of pineapple from listening to travellers' tales? asks Bosc in the follow-up to his bestselling debut. Can we ever feel the sensation of history? Mixing the documentary techniques of history, the imaginative leaps of fiction and the cool analysis of the essay, Bosc takes us from Marseille to Casablanca to Martinique and on to New York, to tell an evocative story of migration, cultural crisis and the intellectual cost of the rise of fascism.