'This book's power lies in its depiction of civilians trying to lead ordinary lives during the horror of war . . . It is shattering stuff, but Rothmann is tender towards his characters and this book is as memorable as his last.' The Times, 'Historical Fiction Book of the Month' As the Second World War enters its final stages, millions in Germany are forced from their homes by bombing, compelled to seek shelter in the countryside where there are barely the resources to feed them. Twelve-year-old Luisa, her mother, and her older sister Billie have escaped the devastation of the city for the relative safety of a dairy farm. But even here the power struggles of the war play out: the family depend on the goodwill of Luisa's brother-in-law, an SS officer, who in expectation of payment turns his attention away from his wife and towards Billie. Luisa immerses herself in books, but even she notices the Allied bombers flying east above them, the gauntness of the prisoners at the camp nearby, the disappearance of fresh-faced boys from the milk shed - hastily shipped off to a war that's already lost. Living on the farm teaches Luisa about life and death, but it's man's capacity for violence that provides the ultimate lesson, that robs her of her innocent ignorance. When, at a birthday celebration, her worst fears are realized, Luisa collapses under the weight of the inexplicable. Ralf Rothmann's previous novel, To Die in Spring, described the horror of war and the damage done on the battlefield. The God of that Summer tells the devastating story of civilians caught up in the chaos of defeat, of events that might lead a twelve-year-old child to justifiably say: 'I have experienced everything.'

The Earth is Falling is a haunting and magical novel based around the existence of an abandoned village outside Naples. The deserted houses that still stand there are peopled with ghosts who live in a perpetual present from which time has effectively been abolished. The village appears to be semi-alive; the landslide which ominously awaits and which will eventually lead to the abandonment of the place has yet to arrive (yet its rumbles are heard). Pellegrino peoples Alento with eccentrics, luminaries, an eternally optimistic town crier. In the closing pages, the narrator Estella summons the remaining ghosts for a final dinner. The overall effect is unsettling, haunting and uncanny, the trapped souls doomed to repeat their circumscribed daily life for ever, cut off from the world but dimly aware of its continued presence outside. The pervading mood of nostalgia and melancholy works in stark contrast with the inevitability of the impending catastrophe of the landslide that threatens to obliterate their world forever.

As the Second World War enters its final stages, millions in Germany are forced from their homes by bombing, compelled to seek shelter in the countryside where there are barely the resources to feed them.

Twelve-year-old Luisa, her mother, and her older sister Billie have escaped the devastation of the city for the relative safety of a dairy farm. But even here the power struggles of the war play out: the family depend on the goodwill of Luisa’s brother-in-law, an SS officer, who in expectation of payment turns his attention away from his wife and towards Billie. Luisa immerses herself in books, but even she notices the Allied bombers flying east above them, the gauntness of the prisoners at the camp nearby, the disappearance of fresh-faced boys from the milk shed – hastily shipped off to a war that’s already lost.

Living on the farm teaches Luisa about life and death, but it’s man’s capacity for violence that provides the ultimate lesson, that robs her of her innocent ignorance. When, at a birthday celebration, her worst fears are realized, Luisa collapses under the weight of the inexplicable.

Ralf Rothmann’s previous novel, To Die in Spring, described the horror of war and the damage done on the battlefield. The God of that Summer tells the devastating story of civilians caught up in the chaos of defeat, of events that might lead a twelve-year-old child to justifiably say: ‘I have experienced everything.’

Germany, 1918: a country in flux. The First World War is over, the nation defeated. Revolution is afoot, the monarchy has fallen and the victory of democracy beckons. Everything must change with the times.

Out of the ashes of the First World War, Germany launches an unprecedented political project: its first democratic government. The Weimar Republic is established. The years that follow see political extremism, economic upheaval, revolutionary violence and the transformation of Germany. Tradition is shaken to its core as a triumphant procession of liberated lifestyles emerges. Women conquer the racetracks and tennis courts, go out alone in the evenings, cut their hair short and cast the idea of marriage aside. Unisex style comes into fashion, androgynous and experimental. People revel in the discovery of leisure, filling up boxing halls, dance palaces and the hotspots of the New Age, embracing the department stores’ promise of happiness and accepting the streets as a place of fierce political battles.

In this short burst of life between the wars, amidst a frenzy of change, comes a backlash from those who do not see themselves reflected in the new Republic. Little by little, deep divisions begin to emerge. Divisions that would bring devastating consequences, altering the course of the twentieth century and the lives of millions around the world. Vertigo is a vital, kaleidoscopic portrait of a pivotal moment in German history.

It is 2027. France is in a state of economic decline and moral decay.

As the country plunges into a closely-fought presidential campaign, the French state falls victim to a series of mysterious and unsettling cyberattacks. The sophisticated nature of the attacks leaves the best computer scientists at the DGSI – the French counter-terrorism agency – scrambling for answers.

An advisor to the country’s Finance Minister, Paul Raison is close to the heart of government. His wife Prudence is a Treasury official, while his father Édouard, now retired, has spent his career working for the DGSI. When Édouard has a stroke, his children have an opportunity to repair their strained relationships, as they determine to free their father from the medical centre where he is wasting away.

Michel Houellebecq’s Annihilation reveals new sides to his writing, adding compassion and tenderness to the emotions of rage and irony that have powered both him and his earlier works to international fame.

Translated from the French by Shaun Whiteside

When her cousin and wife fail to return from a walk, this story takes a sinister turn to a quest of survival A woman takes a holiday in the Austrian mountains, spending a few days with her cousin and his wife in their hunting lodge. When the couple fails to return from a walk, the woman sets off to look for them. But her journey reaches a sinister and inexplicable dead end. She discovers only a transparent wall behind which there seems to be no life. Trapped alone behind the mysterious wall she begins the arduous work of survival. This is at once a simple account of potatoes and beans, of hoping for a calf, of counting matches, of forgetting the taste of sugar and the use of one's name, and simultaneously a disturbing dissection of the place of human beings in the natural world. **PERFECT FOR FANS OF THE YELLOW WALLPAPER, STATION ELEVEN AND THE MARTIAN** VINTAGE EARTH is a collection of novels to transform our relationship with the natural world. Each one is a work of creative activism, a blast of fresh air, a seed from which change can grow. The books in this series reconnect us to the planet we inhabit - and must protect. Discover great writing on the most urgent story of our times.

For fans of Dan Brown's Inferno, a sensational Italian thriller starring Dante Alighieri as lead detective. Florence, August 1300. On the banks of the river Arno, a war galley is found with the entire crew dead inside. Dante Alighieri, Prior to the City, suspects poison but the only clue is a mysterious mechanical device. Dante suspects that the damaged device is the work of al-Jazari, the legendary Persian inventor. But others are also after the instrument and will stop at nothing to lay their hands on it... When Dante returns to Florence to work on his magnum opus, the Divine Comedy, he discovers that the renegade monk, Brinando, is stirring up trouble and recruiting Florentines for a new crusade to liberate the Holy Land. Is this disturbing new development somehow linked to the deaths of the galley crew?

A witty yet moving narrative worked up from sketched biographical fragments, 1913 is an intimate vision of a world that is about to change forever. The stuffy conventions of the nineteenth century are receding into the past, and 1913 heralds a new age of unlimited possibility. Kafka falls in love; Louis Armstrong learns to play the trumpet; a young seamstress called Coco Chanel opens her first boutique; Charlie Chaplin signs his first movie contract; and new drugs like cocaine usher in an age of decadence. Yet everywhere there is the premonition of ruin - the number 13 is omnipresent, and in London, Paris and Vienna, artists take the omen and act as if there were no tomorrow. In a Munich hotel lobby, Rilke and Freud discuss beauty and transience; Proust sets out in search of lost time; and while Stravinsky celebrates the Rite of Spring with industrial cacophony, an Austrian postcard painter by the name of Adolf Hitler sells his conventional cityscapes.

A Sunday Telegraph, Irish Times and Glasgow Herald Book of the Year "Tender, acute and utterly absorbing" Anna Funder, author of Stasiland "A wry and unheroic witness... an unofficial history of a country that no longer exists" Julian Barnes "Beautiful and supremely touching" Keith Lowe, Sunday Telegraph "Compelling ... [Leo] is terrific at elucidating the slow, incremental steps by which people come to lie to themselves... Guile, guilt and disappointment drip from these pages and Red Love is all the more affecting for it" New Statesman Growing up in East Berlin, Maxim Leo knew not to ask questions. All he knew was that his rebellious parents, Wolf and Anne, with their dyed hair, leather jackets and insistence he call them by their first names, were a bit embarrassing. That there were some places you couldn't play; certain things you didn't say. Now, married with two children and the Wall a distant memory, Maxim decides to find the answers to the questions he couldn't ask. Why did his parents, once passionately in love, grow apart? Why did his father become so angry, and his mother quit her career in journalism? And why did his grandfather Gerhard, the Socialist war hero, turn into a stranger? The story he unearths is, like his country's past, one of hopes, lies, cruelties, betrayals but also love. In Red Love he captures, with warmth and unflinching honesty, why so many dreamed the GDR would be a new world and why, in the end, it fell apart. "Tender, acute and utterly absorbing. In fine portraits of his family members Leo takes us through three generations of his family, showing how they adopt, reject and survive the fierce, uplifting and ultimately catastrophic ideologies of 20th-century Europe. We are taken on an intimate journey from the exhilaration and extreme courage of the French Resistance to the uncomfortable moral accommodations of passive resistance in the GDR. "He describes these 'ordinary lies' and contradictions, and the way human beings have to negotiate their way through them, with great clarity, humour and truthfulness, for which the jury of the European Book Prize is delighted to honour Red Love. His personal memoir serves as an unofficial history of a country that no longer exists... He is a wry and unheroic witness to the distorting impact - sometimes frightening, sometimes merely absurd - that ideology has upon the daily life of the individual: citizens only allowed to dance in couples, journalists unable to mention car tyres or washing machines for reasons of state." Julian Barnes, European Book Prize With wonderful insight Leo shows how the human need to believe and to belong to a cause greater than ourselves can inspire a person to acts of heroism, but can then ossify into loyalty to a cause that long ago betrayed its people." Anna Funder, author of Stasiland >>"Leo uses the intimate scope of his family to explore the turbulent political history of East Germany from a perspective that has not been seen before. The result is an absorbing and personal account that gives outsiders an insight into life in the GDR" Shortlist "Affectionate, insightful... Red Love is a fascinating tale... beautifully written and translated" Bookoxygen Maxim Leo was born in 1970 in East Berlin. He studied Political Science at the Free University in Berlin and at the Institut d'Etudes Politiques de Paris. Since 1997 he is Editor of the Berliner Zeitung. In 2002 he was nominated for the Egon-Erwin-Kisch Prize, and in the same year won the German-French Journalism Prize. He won the Theodor Wolff Prize in 2006. He lives in Berlin.

'A tragedy of unconditional love' - L'Obs After the death of his wife, a father raises his two sons alone. His bond with Fus, the eldest, and Gillou, the youngest, is a close one. But their town is not one of opportunity, and it soon becomes clear that the boys are heading down different paths. Gillou sets his sights on university in Paris. Fus, despite his socialist upbringing, falls in with the local far-right group. Though he joins mostly for the camaraderie, their activities, which might on the surface appear harmless, lead to a violent confrontation. How can a father and son find common ground when everything seems set to break them apart? A sudden tragedy will force them to find an answer. Tense, sharp and ultimately heartbreaking, Laurent Petitmangin's first novel, What You Need From The Night, shines a spotlight on lives that are unfolding in forgotten corners of France and asks what acts can truly be forgiven. 'Heartbreaking . . . haunts you long after you've put it down'- Liberation 'As sublime as it is painful' - Le Parisien

Walter Urban and Friedrich 'Fiete' Caroli work side by side as hands on a dairy farm in northern Germany. By 1945, it seems the War's worst atrocities are over. When they are forced to 'volunteer' for the SS, they find themselves embroiled in a conflict which is drawing to a desperate, bloody close. Walter is put to work as a driver for a supply unit of the Waffen-SS, while Fiete is sent to the front. When the senseless bloodshed leads Fiete to desert, only to be captured and sentenced to death, the friends are reunited under catastrophic circumstances.

In a few days the war will be over, millions of innocents will be dead, and the survivors must find a way to live with its legacy.

An international bestseller, To Die in Spring is a beautiful and devastating novel by German author Ralf Rothmann.

Dissatisfied and discontent, Florent-Claude Labrouste feels he is dying of sadness. His young girlfriend hates him and his career as an engineer at the Ministry of Agriculture is pretty much over. His only relief comes in the form of a pill – white, oval, small. Recently released for public consumption, Captorix is a new brand of anti-depressant which works by altering the brain’s release of serotonin.

Armed with this new drug, Labrouste decides to abandon his life in Paris and return to the Normandy countryside where he used to work promoting regional cheeses, and where he had once been in love. But instead of happiness, he finds a rural community devastated by globalisation and European agricultural policies, and local farmers longing, like Labrouste himself, for an impossible return to what they remember as the golden age.

Written by one of the most provocative and prophetic novelists of his generation, Serotonin is at once a devastating story of solitude, longing and individual suffering, and a powerful criticism of modern life.

Swansong 1945 chronicles four significant days in the last three weeks of WWII: 20 April, Hitler's last birthday; 25 April, when American and Soviet troops first met at the Elbe; 30 April, the day Hitler committed suicide; and 8 May, the day of the German surrender. Side by side in these pages, we encounter the voices of civilians fleeing on foot to the west, British and American POWs dreaming of home, concentration camp survivors, loyal soldiers from both sides of the conflict and national leaders including Churchill, Hitler and Mussolini. A monumental account of survival, suffering, hope and despair, Swansong 1945 brings vividly to life a conflict whose repercussions are felt today.

In the eighteenth century, Laurence Sterne explores the temptations of the French capital in a teasing study of foreign mores and Restif de la Bretonne provides an eye-witness account of the Revolution. From the 1800s, Hugo, Balzac, Flaubert, and Zola offer fascinating portraits of the city's teeming humanity; the Goncourt brothers chronicle the explosion of artistic talent; Huysmans describes an evening at the Folies Bergere. Colette chronicles the pitfalls for a young girl in the decadent city of the early twentieth century; F. Scott Fitzgerald revels in the city's glamour; Jean Rhys's lost heroines wander from cafe to cafe; James Baldwin celebrates its sexual freedoms; and Raymond Queneau gleefully reinvents the language of the street. In our time, Michel Tournier's North African immigrant walks a camel along the boulevards, while Nobel Laureate Patrick Modiano brilliantly maps the city's many arrondissements. The alluring power of Paris has never dimmed and it is richly captured in all its facets in these compelling and seductive tales.

A magnificently ambitious and enthralling novel that confirms Moring's place as one of the most significant European novelists now at work. At the end of the Second World War, Jacob Noah emerges from the hole in the ground where he has been hiding for the past three years, and cycles madly back to his home town to find that his parents and brother have perished at the hands of the Nazis. Setting himself up as a shoemaker in the Dutch town of Assen, Noah patiently expands his business until he has become the most influential entrepreneur in the city. But however wealthy he becomes, nothing can console him for the loss of his family and the tragedy of history. In June 1980, on the eve of Assen's annual TT races, a despairing Noah sets off on a journey into the depths of his soul. Guided by a shabby, supernatural pedlar calling himself the 'Jew of Assen', he descends into the smoky heart of the town, a man-made hell modelled on Dis, the city in Dante's Inferno. In a rich and varied explosion of styles, fantasy and philosophical speculations, Marcel Moering leads us on a voyage through the dark heart of the twentieth century, and through a vivid exploration of loss and guilt.

After two years of nonstop negotiations with the Russian authorities, Jean-Christophe Brisard and Lana Parshina were granted access to secret files detailing the Soviets' incredible hunt to recover Hitler's body: the layout of the bunker, plans for escaping, eyewitness accounts of the Fuhrer's final days, and human remains-a bit of skull with traces of the lethal bullet and a fragment of jaw bone. For the first time, the skull, teeth and other elements were analysed by a medical examiner with cutting edge forensics equipment. The authors use these never before seen documents and research to reconstruct the events in fascinating new detail.

A prime number is inherently a solitary thing: it can only be divided by itself, or by one; it never truly fits with another. Alice and Mattia also move on their own axes, alone with their personal tragedies. As a child Alice's overbearing father drove her first to a terrible skiing accident, and then to anorexia. When she meets Mattia she recognises a kindred spirit, and Mattia reveals to Alice his terrible secret: that as a boy he abandoned his mentally-disabled twin sister in a park to go to a party, and when he returned, she was nowhere to be found. These two irreversible episodes mark Alice and Mattia's lives for ever, and as they grow into adulthood their destinies seem irrevocably intertwined. But then a chance sighting of a woman who could be Mattia's sister forces a lifetime of secret emotion to the surface. A meditation on loneliness and love, The Solitude of Prime Numbers asks, can we ever truly be whole when we're in love with another?

'This book's power lies in its depiction of civilians trying to lead ordinary lives during the horror of war . . . It is shattering stuff, but Rothmann is tender towards his characters and this book is as memorable as his last.' The Times, 'Historical Fiction Book of the Month' As the Second World War enters its final stages, millions in Germany are forced from their homes by bombing, compelled to seek shelter in the countryside where there are barely the resources to feed them. Twelve-year-old Luisa, her mother, and her older sister Billie have escaped the devastation of the city for the relative safety of a dairy farm. But even here the power struggles of the war play out: the family depend on the goodwill of Luisa's brother-in-law, an SS officer, who in expectation of payment turns his attention away from his wife and towards Billie. Luisa immerses herself in books, but even she notices the Allied bombers flying east above them, the gauntness of the prisoners at the camp nearby, the disappearance of fresh-faced boys from the milk shed - hastily shipped off to a war that's already lost. Living on the farm teaches Luisa about life and death, but it's man's capacity for violence that provides the ultimate lesson, that robs her of her innocent ignorance. When, at a birthday celebration, her worst fears are realized, Luisa collapses under the weight of the inexplicable. Ralf Rothmann's previous novel, To Die in Spring, described the horror of war and the damage done on the battlefield. The God of that Summer tells the devastating story of civilians caught up in the chaos of defeat, of events that might lead a twelve-year-old child to justifiably say: 'I have experienced everything.'

Introducing Little Clothbound Classics: irresistible, mini editions of short stories, novellas and essays from the world's greatest writers, designed by the award-winning Coralie Bickford-Smith Celebrating the range and diversity of Penguin Classics, they take us from snowy Japan to springtime Vienna, from haunted New England to a sun-drenched Mediterranean island, and from a game of chess on the ocean to a love story on the moon. Beautifully designed and printed, these collectible editions are bound in colourful, tactile cloth and stamped with foil. Georges Simenon's brilliant pipe-smoking detective, Jules Maigret, is one of the most beloved literary creations of the twentieth century. In this adventure, an officer from Scotland Yard is studying Maigret's methods when a call from an island off the Cote d'Azure sends the two men off to an isolated community to investigate its eccentric inhabitants.

THE INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER 'The most brilliant and fascinating book I have read in my entire life' Dan Snow 'A huge contribution... remarkable' Antony Beevor, BBC RADIO 4 'Extremely interesting ... a serious piece of scholarship, very well researched' Ian Kershaw The Nazis presented themselves as warriors against moral degeneracy. Yet, as Norman Ohler's gripping bestseller reveals, the entire Third Reich was permeated with drugs: cocaine, heroin, morphine and, most of all, methamphetamines, or crystal meth, used by everyone from factory workers to housewives, and crucial to troops' resilience - even partly explaining German victory in 1940. The promiscuous use of drugs at the very highest levels also impaired and confused decision-making, with Hitler and his entourage taking refuge in potentially lethal cocktails of stimulants administered by the physician Dr Morell as the war turned against Germany. While drugs cannot on their own explain the events of the Second World War or its outcome, Ohler shows, they change our understanding of it. Blitzed forms a crucial missing piece of the story.

'I know no one ever believes us nowadays - everyone thinks we knew everything. We knew nothing. It was all a well-kept secret. We believed it. We swallowed it. It seemed entirely plausible'

Brunhilde Pomsel described herself as an 'apolitical girl' and a 'figure on the margins'. How are we to reconcile this description with her chosen profession? Employed as a typist during the Second World War, she worked closely with one of the worst criminals in world history: Nazi Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels. She was one of the oldest surviving eyewitnesses to the internal workings of the Nazi power apparatus until her death in 2017. Her life, mirroring all the major breaks and continuities of the twentieth century, illustrates how far-right politics, authoritarian regimes and dictatorships can rise, and how political apathy can erode democracy.

Compelling and unnerving, The Work I Did gives us intimate insight into political complexity at society's highest levels - at one of history's darkest moments.

The Birth of Tragedy created a furore on its first publication in 1871; it has since become one of the seminal books of European culture. Dedicated to Richard Wagner, The Birth of Tragedy is rich in Nietzsche's current enthusiasms for Greek literature and especially tragedy, for Schopenhauer and Wagner's Tristan Und Isolde. Its central vision is the idea that 'only as an aesthetic phenomenon are existence and the world justified'. Making his celebrated distinction between the Apollonian and the Dionysian spirit, Nietzsche presses us to consider why it is that we derive pleasure from tragic art, and what is the relationship between our experiences of suffering in life and in art. The Birth of Tragedy was his first book. Occasionally flawed and impetuous in argument, it is none the less a triumph of passionate energy and insight.