Tomás Nevinson, a retired MI6 agent, is working for the British Embassy in Madrid when his former handler, the sinister Bertram Tupra, offers to bring him back inside for one last assignment. His mission: to catch and, if necessary, kill a terrorist gone to ground in Northern Spain after bombings in Barcelona and Zaragoza. The trouble is there are three suspects – all women – and it may not actually be any of them. To find out, Nevinson must move incognito to the small town where the three women separately live, and become an intimate friend to each, in the hope of uncovering a clue . . .

A philosophical thriller with a climate of suspense to rival le Carré and a psychological depth that is purely Marias’s own, this is a novel that explores the deepest of human questions: in what circumstances can killing be called just?

Ana Luisa Amaral is considered to be one of the foremost Portuguese poets of her day, and although her poetry has been translated into many other languages, this is the first major collection of her poems to be published in English. Born in Oporto in 1956, and, for many years, Professor of Anglo-American Literature at the University of Oporto, Ana Luisa Amaral published her first collection of poems, Minha Senhora de Que, in 1990, and has since published many more, along with plays, children's literature, a novel and translations from English. Her work has brought her many prizes both in Portugal and elsewhere. Her poems are resolutely female, but she casts her net very wide in terms of subject matter, from tender poems about her daughter to thoughts provoked by finding a crumb lodged in the pages of a second-hand book to musings about Galileo, the theory of relativity and the larger themes of loneliness, loss, and death. She is a writer immersed in her own culture, but steeped, too, in the poetry, for example, of Emily Dickinson and Shakespeare, and in the world of the Bible and the Greek myths. The result is a poetry that takes equal pleasure in the physical and metaphysical, playing with words and ideas, a poetry that is always refreshingly oblique, taking the reader down unexpected intellectual and linguistic paths. Her poetry invites readers to share her own wonder and perplexity at life's joys and griefs.

This hand-picked selection from The Penguin Book of Spanish Short Stories celebrates the best literature to emerge from Spain since the twentieth century. From a poignant personal betrayal to a darkly humorous exchange between two wedding guests, this sparkling collection provides unique cultural insight and literary inspiration for language learners. Includes works from beloved authors such as Javier Marías, Carmen Laforet and more.

The Book of Disquiet is one of the great literary works of the twentieth century. Written over the course of Fernando Pessoa's life, it was first published in 1982, pieced together from the thousands of individual manuscript pages left behind by Pessoa after his death in 1935.

Now this fragmentary modernist masterpiece appears in a major new edition that unites Margaret Jull Costa's celebrated translation with the most complete version of the text ever produced. It is presented here, for the first time in English, by order of original composition, and accompanied by facsimiles of the original manuscript.

Narrated principally by an assistant bookkeeper named Bernardo Soares - an alias of sorts for Pessoa himself - The Book of Disquiet is 'the autobiobraphy of someone who never existed', a mosaic of dreams, of hope and despair; a hymn to the streets and cafés of 1930s Lisbon, and an extraordinary record of the inner life of one of the century's most important writers. This new edition represents the most complete vision of Pessoa's genius.

THE GRIPPING FINAL NOVEL FROM THE GREATEST SPANISH WRITER OF HIS GENERATION, JAVIER MAR�AS 'The most subtle and gifted writer in contemporary Spanish literature' Boston Globe Spain in the 1990s is beset by a simmering campaign of terror from Basque separatists ETA, with periodic atrocities shattering an illusory calm. Against this backdrop, retired British Secret Service member Tomás Nevinson - now living a quiet life in his hometown Madrid - is approached by his sinister former handler, Bertram Tupra, with an offer to bring him back in from the cold, for one last assignment: a favour for Tupra, for old times' sake, which is also a favour for a powerful Spanish friend. His mission: to go back undercover, in a small Spanish town, to find out which of three women who moved there a decade ago is in fact an ETA terrorist, on loan from the IRA, now on the run and living there incognito. Everything about the assignment is shadowy - from who exactly Nevinson will be working for to the question of what 'justice' he may need to mete out if he is somehow able to unmask one of the three women. But, still in his forties and lured by the appeal of once again being on the inside, he accepts the job. As he gets closer to the three women, his task becomes ever harder. How - or who - to choose between these three? Intimately involved with each of them, as lover, colleague or friend, he can find no firm clue to resolve the question. But under increasing pressure from his paymasters, choose - and act - he apparently must . . . Charting a world where right and wrong, and good and evil, are irreparably blurred, Javier Marías takes us on a journey of rare and unforgettable suspense in this, the final novel written before his untimely passing IN 2022. PRAISE FOR JAVIER MAR�AS: 'Unquestionably the most significant Spanish writer of his generation' Observer '[Marías] uses language like an anatomist uses a scalpel to lay bare the innermost secrets of that strangest of species, the human being' W. G. Sebald 'One of the greatest contemporary novelists' Le Monde 'A great writer' Salman Rushdie

Cipriano Algor, an elderly potter, lives with his daughter Marta and her husband Marcal in a small village on the outskirts of The Center, an imposing complex of shops, apartments, and offices to which Cipriano delivers his pots and jugs every month. On one such trip, he is told not to make any more deliveries. Unwilling to give up his craft, Cipriano tries his hand at making ceramic dolls. Astonishingly, The Center places an order for hundreds, and Cipriano and Marta set to work-until the order is cancelled and the three have to move from the village into The Center. When mysterious sounds of digging emerge from beneath their apartment, Cipriano and Marcal investigate, and what they find transforms the family's life. Filled with the depth, humor, and the extraordinary philosophical richness that marks each of Saramago's novels, The Cave is one of the essential books of our time.

The thought-provoking new novel from the international bestselling author whose words change lives. Linda knows she's lucky. Yet every morning when she opens her eyes to a so-called new day, she feels like closing them again. Her friends recommend medication. But Linda wants to feel more, not less. And so she embarks on an adventure as unexpected as it is daring, and which reawakens a side of her that she - respectable wife, loving mother, ambitious journalist - thought had disappeared. Even she can't predict what will happen next...

�lvaro de Campos is one of the most influential heteronyms created by Portugal’s great modernist writer Fernando Pessoa. According to Pessoa, Campos was born in Tavira (Algarve) in 1890 and studied mechanical engineering in Glasgow, although he never managed to complete his degree. In his own day, Campos was celebrated—and slandered—for his vociferous poetry imbued with a Whitman-inspired free verse, his praise of the rise of technology and his polemical views that appeared in manifestos, interviews and essays. Here in Margaret Jull Costa and Patricio Ferrari’s translations are the complete poems of Campos. This edition is based on the Portuguese Tinta-da-china edition and includes an illuminating introduction about Campos by the Portuguese editors Jerónimo Pizarro and Antonio Cardiello, facsimiles of original manuscripts and a generous selection of Campos’s prose texts.

One night at the theatre, Vitor da Silva, a young law graduate, sees a strikingly beautiful woman. Her name is Genoveva. Originally from Madeira, she has lived for many many years in Paris. Her rich French husband has died and she is in Lisbon with a view possibly to settling there. Genoveva, however, is not what she seems. Behind the mutual attraction between her and Vitor lies a terrible secret.

A novel from internationally acclaimed author Paulo Coelho – a dramatic story of love, life and death that shows us all why every second of our existence is a choice we all make between living and dying. Veronika has everything she could wish for. She is young and pretty, has plenty of boyfriends, a steady job, a loving family. Yet she is not happy; something is lacking in her life, and one morning she decides to die. She takes an overdose of sleeping pills, only to wake up some time later in the local hospital. There she is told that her heart is damaged and she has only a few days to live. The story follows Veronika through these intense days as to her surprise she finds herself experiencing feelings she has never really felt before. Against all odds she finds herself falling in love and even wanting to live again…

World—Ana Luísa Amaral’s second collection with New Directions—offers a new exhilarating set of poems that convey wonder, bemusement and an ever-deepening appreciation of life. Weaving the thread that connects the poem to life, World speaks of our immense human perplexity in the face of everything around us and our oneness with it all. As Amaral notes, all of us, “humans and non-humans, are on the same ontological level, the differences being only a matter of perspective. We are all made of the same stuff as dreams—and stars.� Asked about her thoughts on World, Amaral’s peerless translator Margaret Jull Costa replied: “What I take from this collection of poems is a sense of joy in the ordinary—seeing an ant going about its business, or a bee or a fish, or the feeling of sharing a whole history with a particular table, or watching a very ordinary woman sitting on a train playing with the handle of her handbag. World also brings us meditations on colonisation, slavery and whaling. Like the world, it is full of surprises and full of joy and sadness.� These vibrant, exultant poems invite you to share this marvellous world: Yes, all you need (how easy!) is to say yes.

Gathered for the first time in English and spanning his entire career, Vampire in Love offers a selection of the Spanish master Enrique Vila-Matas's finest short stories. An effeminate, hunchbacked barber on the verge of death falls in love with a choir boy. A fledgling writer on barbiturates visits Marguerite Duras's Paris apartment and watches his dinner companion slip into the abyss. An unsuspecting man receives a mysterious phone call from a lonely ophthalmologist and visits his abandoned villa. The stories in Vampire in Love, selected and brilliantly translated by Margaret Jull Costa, are all told with Vila-Matas's delightful erudition and wit, and his provocative questioning of the interrelation of art and life.

Eca de Queiroz's sharply satirical work aimed to expose the hypocrisies of his age. In The Mandarin his lascivious anti-heroes Teodoro and Teodorico, are dragged from their narrow Lisbon lives into exotic encounters with Chinese mandarins, the Devil (in the guise of a dark-suited civil servant)and Jesus Christ Himself. This short novel is accompanied by the short stories Jose Matias, The Hanged Man and The Idiosyncrasies of a young blonde woman.

A TLS Book of the Year This exhilarating collection of non-fiction sees one of the greatest twentieth-century writers meditating on the moments that make up a life 'How did I so unwittingly transform the joy of living into the great luxury of being alive?' Between 1967 and 1977, the internationally renowned author Clarice Lispector wrote weekly dispatches from her desk in Rio for the Jornal do Brasil. Already famous for her revolutionary, interior, metaphysical novels and short stories, in her Chronicles she turned her attention to the everyday, reshaping the material of her life into profound, touching and funny, tiny revelations. Observing the world around her, small encounters like hearing tales of the lost loves of a taxi driver, or the bitterness lurking beneath the prettiness of an old friend, become an exposition of the currents and foibles that define our lives. Everything from the meaning of cosmonauts to the new ideas, writers and artists that populate the sparkling international world of the sixties and seventies are considered and transformed into jewels of insight, delight and devastation. Sincere and playful, exhilarating and contemplative, Too Much of Life: Complete Chronicles opens up a new way of seeing the world.

Here, in Margaret Jull Costa and Patricio Ferrari's splendid new translations, are the complete poems of Alberto Caeiro, the imaginary "heteronym" coterie created by Fernando Pessoa, the Portuguese modernist master. Pessoa conceived Caeiro around 1914 and may have named him loosely after his friend, the poet Mario de Sa-Carrneiro. What followed was a collection of some of Fernando Pessoa's greatest poems, grouped under the titles The Keeper of Sheep, The Shepherd in Love, and Uncollected Poems. This imaginary author was a shepherd who spent most of his life in the countryside, had almost no education, and was ignorant of most literature; yet he (Pessoa) wrote some of the most beautiful and profound poems in Portuguese literature. This edition of The Complete Works of Alberto Caeiro is based on the magnificent Portuguese Tinta-da-China edition, published in Lisbon in 2016, and contains an illuminating introduction by the Portuguese editors Jeronimo Pizarro and Patricio Ferrari, some facsimiles of the original Portuguese texts, and prose excerpts about Caeiro and his work written by Fernando Pessoa well as his other heteronyms Alvaro de Campos and Ricardo Reis, and other fictitious authors such as Antonio Mora and I. I. Crosse.

"I passed away at two o'clock in the afternoon on a Friday in August in 1869, in my beautiful mansion in the Catumbi district of the city." So begins Posthumous Memoirs of Bras Cubas-at the end of the narrator's life. Published in 1881, this highly experimental novel was not at first considered Machado de Assis' definitive work-a fact his narrator anticipated, bidding "good riddance" to the critic looking for a "run-of-the-mill-novel". Yet in this coruscating new translation, Margaret Jull Costa and Robin Patterson reveal a pivotal moment in Machado's career, as his flights of the surreal became his literary hallmark. An enigmatic, amusing and frequently insufferable anti hero, Bras Cubas describes his Rio de Janeiro childhood spent tormenting household slaves, his bachelor years of torrid affairs and his final days obsessing over nonsensical poultices. A novel that helped launch modernist fiction, Bras Cubas shines a direct light to Ulysses and Love in the Time of Cholera.

The Sonatas are the memoirs of the Marquis o f Bradomin, a Galician Don Juan. Where the Spring and Summer Sonatas showed Bradomin at the height of his powers, we now find him in the autumn and winter of his life '