Dark at the Crossing

Romance

Elliot Ackerman

Contemporary

Daunt Books Publishing

As if Marguerite Duras wrote Convenience Store Woman - a beautiful, unexpected novel from a debut French Korean author\nIt’s winter in Sokcho, a tourist town on the border between South and North Korea. The cold slows everything down. Bodies are red and raw, the fish turn venomous, beyond the beach guns point out from the North’s watchtowers. A young French Korean woman works as a receptionist in a tired guesthouse. One evening, an unexpected guest arrives: a French cartoonist determined to find inspiration in this desolate landscape.\nThe two form an uneasy relationship. When she agrees to accompany him on trips to discover an ‘authentic’ Korea, they visit snowy mountaintops and dramatic waterfalls, and cross into North Korea. But he takes no interest in the Sokcho she knows – the gaudy neon lights, the scars of war, the fish market where her mother works. As she’s pulled into his vision and taken in by his drawings, she strikes upon a way to finally be seen.\nAn exquisitely-crafted debut, which won the Prix Robert Walser, Winter in Sokcho is a novel about shared identities and divided selves, vision and blindness, intimacy and alienation. Elisa Shua Duspain’s voice is distinctive and unmistakable.

Winter In Sokcho

Shua Dusapin, Elisa

Road to the City

They say that big families are happy, but I could never see anything particularly happy about ours.’\nDelia is one of five children, growing up in a poor Italian village. She is seventeen, and dreams of marrying a rich man; she dreams of a grand apartment in the city and silk stockings. To escape her father’s neglect and her mother’s sadness, she begins to take the dusty road to the city every day, accompanied by Nini, her sweet and mysterious cousin.\nWhen Nini takes a job in a factory and moves in with a city woman, Delia sees another way of being. But when she discovers she’s pregnant, she agrees to marry the father, seduced by the promise of wealth and comfort. Nothing, not even Nini’s desperate declaration of love, can stop her – but her rejection will be his undoing.\nThe Road to the City is a short, poignant novel about the dreams of youth, and the cruelty it takes to make them come true.\n‘In sparse, economical prose, Ginzburg portrays the emotional and social limits placed on women.’ – Observer\n‘Written in cool, detached tones but propelled by fierce emotional currents, it’s no surprise that Ginzburg’s books are adored by everyone from Sally Rooney to Zadie Smith.’ – Stylist Loves\n‘One of the great Italian writers of the 20th Century…[her] books snare so much of what is odd and lovely and fleeting in the world.’ – Parul Sehgal, New York Times\n‘The voice is pure and unmannered, both entrancing and alarming, elegantly streamlined by the authority of a powerful intelligence.’ – Deborah Eisenberg, New York Review of Books\n‘If Ferrante is a friend, Ginzburg is a mentor.’ – Guardian\nGinzburg gives us a new template for the female voice and an idea of what it might sound like.’ –Rachel Cusk\n‘Her prose style is deceptively simple and very complex. Its effect on the reader is both calming and thrilling – that’s not so easy to do.’ – Deborah Levy\n‘Filled with shimmering, risky, darting observation.’ – Colm Tóibín

Road To The City

NATALIA GINZBURG

‘‘A luminous ode to the multiplicities of London.’ 
Sharlene Teo 
‘An ode to the simple, but rewarding, pleasures of people-watching.’ 
Jini Reddy 
This is a book about the joy of city life. The joy that comes from chance encounters, unexpected sights and sounds, glimmers of beauty flashing out from the grey and the rush of the everyday. The mix of people, shoulder to shoulder, sunbathing in parks, having a coffee, jumping on a bus, daydreaming on a bench. From this thrum of activity and these private spots of solitude, inspiration, emotion and memory are drawn. 
Exploring the delight to be found in everyday interactions and chance observations, Look Here charts an affecting map of London, navigating ideas of anonymity and identity, freedom, ownership and community, while reflecting on whether the carousel of clothing we see on those around us holds some deeper meaning. 
Wherever she goes, Ana Kinsella looks around her with a keen eye for small, illuminating details, and a love for variety and emotional connection. Look Here is a gorgeous, layered portrait of a city and its people, a book that urges us to slow down, look closer and find beauty.

Look Here

Travel

Ana Kinsella

Travel Writing

Kick the Latch

Kathryn Scanlan

With a new introduction by Keggie Carew\nIt had been Graham Greene's idea to explore tropical West Africa.\nThe map of Liberia was virtually blank, the interior marked ‘cannibals’. It was a far cry from the literary London of 1935, and the result of the 350-mile trek was the masterclass in travel writing that is Journey Without Maps. But the gifted author was not travelling alone. His young cousin Barbara had, over perhaps a little too much champagne, rashly agreed to go with him. Unbeknown to him, she also took up pen and paper on their long and arduous journey.\nToo Late to Turn Back is the amusing, mock-heroic and richly evocative adventure of a young woman who set out from the world of Saki and the Savoy Grill armed only with a cheery stoicism and an eye for an anecdote. From her exasperation at her cousin’s refusal to pull his socks up to her concern over his alarmingly close scrape with death, from her yearning for smoked salmon to the missionary who kept a pet cobra, what emerges is a surprisingly refreshing and charming travelogue of comic misadventure, fizzing with good humour and colourful detail.

Too Late to Turn Back

Barbara Greene

A Wreath for the Enemy

Pamela Frankau

Sheep's Clothing

Celia Dale

By the River

Literature & Fiction

Various, Contributors

Essays & Correspondence

Headshot

Rita Bullwinkel

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