Strange Weather in Tokyo

Tsukiko is in her late 30s and living alone when one night she happens to meet one of her former high school teachers, 'Sensei', in a bar. He is at least thirty years her senior, retired and, she presumes, a widower. After this initial encounter, the pair continue to meet occasionally to share food and drink sake, and as the seasons pass - from spring cherry blossom to autumnal mushrooms - Tsukiko and Sensei come to develop a hesitant intimacy which tilts awkwardly and poignantly into love. Perfectly constructed, funny, and moving, Strange Weather in Tokyo is a tale of modern Japan and old-fashioned romance.

(A special thank you to book club member, Ivor Watkins for the suggestion.)

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The Shape of Water

"The Shape of Water is the first book in the sly, witty, and engaging Inspector Montalbano mystery series with its sardonic take on Sicilian life.

Silvio Lupanello, a big-shot in Vigàta, is found dead in his car with his pants around his knees. The car happens to be parked in a part of town used by prostitutes and drug dealers, and as the news of his death spreads, the rumors begin. Enter Inspector Salvo Montalbano, Vigàta's most respected detective. With his characteristic mix of humor, cynicism, compassion, and love of good food, Montalbano battles against the powerful and corrupt who are determined to block his path to the real killer. 

Andrea Camilleri's novels starring Inspector Montalbano have become an international sensation and have been translated from Italian into eight languages, ranging from Dutch to Japanese."

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The Solitude of Prime Numbers

"A three-million-copy Italian bestseller and winner of that country’s prestigious Premio Strega award. 

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, too, move on their own axis, 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 recognizes a kindred, tortured 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.

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? "

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Nexhuman (aka Livid)

"First published as Livid. Rereleased in some countries as Nexhuman, Francesco Verso brings classic cyberpunk attitude to grand romantic obsession . . . a thoughtful meditation on what it means to be human and an exciting peek into a world that is just around the corner.’ –James Patrick Kelly (Nebula, Locus and Hugo Award winner)

In a future where most of Earth into a junk heap, Peter Payne is a trashformer, a scavenger, a kid under the thumb of a world too brutal to stay human. When his chance to change his fate is violently torn away, he embarks on a quest to rebuild the object of his obsession.

Examining themes such as cybernetics, prosthetics, consumerism, robotics and transcendence, Nexhuman expands on classic science fiction to build a world as deep and searching as its main character."

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The Lost Daughter

"'Elena Ferrante will blow you away.' -Alice Sebold, author of The Lovely Bones

From the author of The Days of Abandonment, The Lost Daughter is Elena Ferrante's most compelling and perceptive meditation on womanhood and motherhood yet. Leda, a middle-aged divorce, is alone for the first time in years when her daughters leave home to live with their father. Her initial, unexpected sense of liberty turns to ferocious introspection following a seemingly trivial occurrence. Ferrante's language is as finely tuned and intense as ever, and she treats her theme with a fierce, candid tenacity."

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Contempt

"Contempt is a brilliant and unsettling work by one of the revolutionary masters of modern European literature. All the qualities for which Alberto Moravia is justly famous—his cool clarity of expression, his exacting attention to psychological complexity and social pretension, his still-striking openness about sex—are evident in this story of a failing marriage. Contempt (which was to inspire Jean-Luc Godard’s no-less-celebrated film) is an unflinching examination of desperation and self-deception in the emotional vacuum of modern consumer society."

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The Break

"Dino is a placid, unambitious man. Living in a small provincial town, he and his wife spend their time planning journeys to faraway places - journeys they never take. Dino's only passion is billiards, and he spends his evenings in the local billiards hall honing his technique. One day, however, Dino's quiet life is interrupted - his wife falls pregnant. This the first in a series of events that shake him from his slumber and force Dino to test himself for the first time. As in his widely praised Fists, Pietro Grossi's stripped-down prose brings out the epic human drama in a tale of everyday life."

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The Neapolitan Novels

“Nothing quite like this has ever been published before,” proclaimed The Guardian about the Neapolitan novels.

The complete four-volume boxed set of the New York Times–bestselling epic about hardship and female friendship in postwar Naples that has sold over five million copies.

Against the backdrop of a Naples that is as seductive as it is perilous and a world undergoing epochal change, Elena Ferrante tells the story of a sixty-year friendship between the brilliant and bookish Elena and the fiery, rebellious Lila with unmatched honesty and brilliance. Beginning with My Brilliant Friend, the four Neapolitan Novels follow Elena’s and Lila’s rough-edged upbringing in Italy not long after WWII, through the many stages of their lives—and along paths that diverge wildly. Sometimes they are separated by jealousy or hostility or physical distance, but the bond between them is unbreakable, for better or for worse.

“Imagine if Jane Austen got angry and you’ll have some idea of how explosive these works are.” —The Australian

“An enduring masterpiece.” —The Atlantic

The four books in this novel cycle constitute a long, remarkable story, one that Vogue described as “gutsy and compulsively readable,” which readers will return to again and again, and each return will bring with it new revelations.

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Ficciones

"The seventeen pieces in Ficciones demonstrate the gargantuan powers of imagination, intelligence, and style of one of the greatest writers of this or any other century. Borges sends us on a journey into a compelling, bizarre, and profoundly resonant realm; we enter the fearful sphere of Pascal’s abyss, the surreal and literal labyrinth of books, and the iconography of eternal return. More playful and approachable than the fictions themselves are Borges’s Prologues, brief elucidations that offer the uninitiated a passageway into the whirlwind of Borges’s genius and mirror the precision and potency of his intellect and inventiveness, his piercing irony, his skepticism, and his obsession with fantasy. To enter the worlds in Ficciones is to enter the mind of Jorge Luis Borges, wherein lies Heaven, Hell, and everything in between."

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Ghosts

"The most unsettling and stunning of Aira's short novels.

'On a building site of a new, luxury apartment building, visitors looked up at the strange, irregular form of the water tank that crowned the edifice, and the big parabolic dish that would supply television images to all the floors. On the edge of the dish, a sharp metallic edge on which no bird would have dared to perch, three completely naked men were sitting, with their faces turned up to the midday sun; no one saw them, of course.' — from Ghosts

Ghosts is about a construction worker's family squatting on a building site. They all see large and handsome ghosts around their quarters, but the teenage daughter is the most curious. Her questions about them become more and more heartfelt until the story reaches a critical, chilling moment when the mother realizes that her daughter's life hangs in the balance."

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The Little School

"One of Argentina's 30,000 'disappeared,' Alicia Partnoy was abducted from her home by secret police and taken to a concentration camp where she was tortured, and where most of the other prisoners were killed. Her writings were smuggled out of prison and published anonymously in human rights journals.

The Little School is Alicia Partnoy's memoir of her disappearance and imprisonment in Argentina in the 1970s. Told in a series of tales that resound in memory like parables, The Little School is proof of the resilience of the human spirit and the healing powers of art. This second edition features a revised introduction by the author and a preface by Julia Alvarez."

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My Fathers' Ghost Is Climbing in the Rain

"The anticipated American debut of one of Granta’s Best Young Spanish-Language Novelists: a daring, deeply affecting novel about the secrets buried in the past of an Argentine family.

A young writer, living abroad, makes the journey home to South America to say good-bye to his dying father. In his parents’ house, he finds a cache of documents—articles, maps, photographs—and unwittingly begins to unearth his father’s obsession with the disappearance of a local man. Suddenly, he comes face-to-face with the ghosts of Argentina’s dark political past and with the long-hidden memories of his family’s underground resistance against an oppressive military regime. As the fragments of the narrator’s investigation fall into place, this audacious novel tells a completely original story of corruption and responsibility, history and remembrance."

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Adam Buenosayres

"A modernist urban novel in the tradition of James Joyce, Adam Buenosayres is a tour-de-force that does for Buenos Aires what Carlos Fuentes did for Mexico City - chronicles a city teeming with life in all its clever and crass, rude and intelligent forms. Employing a range of literary styles and a variety of voices, Leopoldo Marechal parodies and celebrates Argentina's most brilliant literary and artistic generation, the martinfierristas of the 1920s, among them Jorge Luis Borges. 

First published in 1948 during the polarizing reign of Juan Perón, the novel was hailed by Julio Cortázar as an extraordinary event in twentieth-century Argentine literature. Set over the course of three break-neck days, Adam Buenosayres follows the protagonist through an apparent metaphysical awakening, a battle for his soul fought by angels and demons, and a descent through a place resembling a comic version of Dante's hell."

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Trafalgar

"Don't rush Trafalgar Medrano when he starts telling you about his latest intergalactic sales trip. He likes to stretch things out over precisely seven coffees. No one knows whether he actually travels to the stars, but he tells the best tall tales in the city, so why doubt him?

Angélica Gorodischer lives in Rosario, Argentina. She has received many awards, most recently the World Fantasy Lifetime Achievement Award.

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All But My Life

All But My Life is the unforgettable story of Gerda Weissmann Klein's six-year ordeal as a victim of Nazi cruelty. From her comfortable home in Bielitz in Poland to her miraculous survival and her liberation by American troops in Czechoslovakia in 1945, Gerda takes the reader on a terrifying journey.

Despite her horrifying experiences, Klein conveys great strength of spirit and faith in humanity. In the darkness of the camps, Gerda and her young friends manage to create a community of friendship and love. Although stripped of the essence of life, they were able to survive the barbarity of their captors. Gerda's beautifully written story gives an invaluable message to everyone. It introduces them to last century's terrible history of devastation and prejudice, yet offers them hope that the effects of hatred can be overcome.

“An unforgettable reading experience . . . All But My Life is one of the most beautifully written human documents I have ever read. In this respect it is as sensitive and 'disturbing' a story as is The Diary of Anne Frank.” —Library Journal

“Gerda moves you, and not just because the story she can tell is so horrific. It is the passion with which she looked through the horror and found a heart-felt and basic goodness in humanity . . . All But My Life is filled with wonderful acts of decency and normalcy, even as she describes three years in labor camps and three months of a forced winter march from Germany to Czechoslovakia.” —The Boston Globe

”Soul-searching and human . . . A moving personal testament to courage.” —NY Times

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The Star Diaries

"'Something peculiar is happening to my head. I remember that my father was Barnaby, but I had another named Balaton. Unless that’s a lake in Albania.'

Ijon Tichy, Lem's Candide of the Cosmos, encounters bizarre civilizations and creatures in space that serve to satirize science, the rational mind, theology, and other icons of human pride. Line drawings by the author. Translated by Michael Kandel."

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Snow White and Russian Red

"'Nails' Robakoski is unraveling after his girlfriend Magda dumps him. A tracksuited slacker who spends most of his time doing little more than searching for his next line of speed and dreaming up conspiracy theories about the Polish economy, Nails ricochets from Magda, a doomed beauty who bewitches men, to Angela, a proselytizing vegetarian Goth, to Natasha, a hellcat who tears his house apart looking for speed, to Ala, the nerdy economics-student girlfriend of the friend who stole Magda. Through it all, a xenophobic campaign against the proliferating Russian black market escalates, to the point where the citizens have to paint their houses in national colors and one of these girls will be crowned Miss No Russkies Day—or is that just in Nails’ fevered mind?"

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Modernity on Endless Trial

"Leszek Kolakowski delves into some of the most intellectually vigorous questions of our time in this remarkable collection of essays garnished with his characteristic wit. Ten of the essays have never appeared before in English.

'Exemplary. . . . It should be celebrated.' —Arthur C. Danto, New York Times Book Review

A Notable Books of the Year 1991 selection, New York Times Book Review—a Noted with Pleasure selection, New York Times Book Review—a Summer Reading 1991 selection, New York Times Book Review—a Books of the Year selection, The Times."

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Cosmos

"Milan Kundera called Witold Gombrowicz 'one of the great novelists of our century.' His most famous novel, Cosmos, the recipient of the 1967 International Prize for literature, is now available in a critically acclaimed translation, for the first time directly from the Polish, by an award-winning translator.

Cosmos is a metaphysical noir thriller narrated by Witold, a seedy, pathetic, and witty student, who is charming and appalling by turns. On his way to a relaxing vacation he meets the despondent Fuks. As they set off together for a family-run pension in the Carpathian Mountains they discover a dead bird hanging from a string. Is this a strange but meaningless occurrence or is it the beginning of a string of bizarre events. As the young men become embroiled in the Chekhovian travails of the family running the pension Grombrowicz’s creates a gripping narrative where the reader questions who is sane and who is safe."

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The Last Wish

Geralt the Witcher—revered and hated—holds the line against the monsters plaguing humanity in this collection of adventures, the first chapter in the NY Times bestselling series that inspired the hit Netflix show and the blockbuster video games.

Geralt is a Witcher, a man whose magic powers, enhanced by long training and a mysterious elixir, have made him a brilliant fighter and a merciless assassin. Yet he is no ordinary killer. His sole purpose: to destroy the monsters that plague the world.

But not everything monstrous-looking is evil and not everything fair is good…and in every fairy tale there is a grain of truth.

“Like a complicated magic spell, a Sapkowski novel is a hodgepodge of fantasy, intellectual discourse, and dry humor. Recommended.” —Time  

“The universe of The Witcher is one of the most detailed and best-explored in modern fantasy, offering endless opportunities for fresh ideas. Complex character relationships enrich this already complex world; this is the sort of series fantasy fans will cherish.” —B&N

“Delightful, intense, irreverent, and compelling....you have to read The Witcher books because they are rife with all of the elements that make you love fiction, and especially fantasy, in the first place....In a word, The Witcher delivers.” ―Hypable

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