Frank Wynne | Translator, Writer, Mammal, Fool

The Impostor by Javier Cercas

April 8, 2017 by adminfw

Who is Enric Marco? An august and much-revered old man from Barcelona, a veteran of the Spanish civil war, a fervent fighter against fascism, an impassioned campaigner for justice and freedom, a survivor of Flossenbürg, the Nazi concentration camp whose tireless work promoting historical memory in schools, at conferences, in countless interviews, in a speech to parliament that moved members of the Spanish congress to tears, earned him many honours and saw him rise to become president of Amical de […]

Categories: Spanish

Three Days and A Life by Pierre Lemaitre

April 8, 2017 by adminfw

Three days at the edge of the new millennium, one moment of madness and one young life’s course altered forever. A dazzling new thriller from the master of noir. Antoine is twelve years old. His parents are divorced and he lives with his mother in Beauval, a small, backwater town surrounded by forests, where everyone knows everyone’s business, and nothing much ever happens. But in the last days of 1999, a series of events unfolds, culminating in the shocking vanishing […]

Categories: Crime Fiction, Lemaitre

Get Well Soon by Marie-Sabine Roger

April 7, 2017 by adminfw

Saved from drowning in Paris’s River Seine, a sixty-something misanthrope finds himself stuck in a hospital bed for six weeks while he recovers, but if he was hoping for a peaceful convalescence he’s out of luck. As he looks back on his life, the good and the bad, he makes some unexpected new acquaintances, and just when he thought life had no more surprises in store for him, he finds out he was wrong…. As an unlikely cast of characters […]

Categories: French, Humour

Vernon Subutex I

January 8, 2017 by adminfw

Vernon Subutex was once the proprietor of Revolver, an infamous record shop in Bastille. His legend spread throughout Paris. But by the 2000’s, with the arrival of the internet and the decline in CDs and vinyl, his shop is struggling. When it closes, Subutex is out on a limb, with no idea what to do next. Nothing sticks. Before long, his savings are gone, his employment benefit is cut, and when the friend who had been covering his rent dies […]

Categories: French

The French Art of War by Alexis Jenni

January 8, 2017 by adminfw

“I watched the ballet of bombs over Baghdad, those fantastical fireworks with their greenish trails, and in doing so learned that modern warfare is conducted in the glow of computer screens; I saw the faint, grey outlines of buildings shudder into focus only to explode, destroyed from within with everyone inside…” 1991. A young man holed up in his apartment is watching the ‘shock and awe’ of Desert Storm, forging sick notes to avoid work, mesmerised by the rolling news, […]

Categories: French

The Blue Palace of the Belgian Engineers by Fulgencio Argüelles

August 14, 2016 by adminfw

“A magnificent and powerful novel.” —Ernesto Ayala-Dip, El País In September 1927, Nalo starts working as a trainee for the gardener at the blue palace of the Belgian engineers. A time of revolutions and war, his years at the palace will bring his awakening to life. With a careful and crafted prose, Fulgencio Argüelles displays a varied array of characters who share friendship, love, and hardship.

Categories: Spanish

Soft in the Head

March 25, 2016 by adminfw

His mother called him a worthless halfwit while his fellow drunks at the local bar ensure he’s the butt of all their jokes. He spends his days whittling wood, counting pigeons and adding his own name to the bottom of the list on the town war memorial. So how could Germain possibly understand what a casual encounter on a park bench with eighty-five year old Margueritte could mean? In this touchingly comic tale of an unusual friendship, that first conversation […]

Categories: French, Humour

Blood Wedding

March 25, 2016 by adminfw

Sophie is haunted by the things she can’t remember – and visions from the past she will never forget. One morning, she wakes to find that the little boy in her care is dead. She has no memory of what happened. And whatever the truth,her side of the story is no match for the evidence piled against her. Her only hiding place is in a new identity. A new life, with a man she has met online. But Sophie is […]

Categories: Lemaitre, Thriller, Verhoeven Trilogy

“The Great Swindle” by Pierre Lemaitre

July 13, 2015 by adminfw

October 1918: the war on the Western Front is all but over. Desperate for one last chance of promotion, the ambitious Lieutenant Henri d’Aulnay Pradelle sends two scouts over the top, and secretly shoots them in the back to incite his men to heroic action once more. And so is set in motion a series of devastating events that will inextricably bind together the fates and fortunes of Pradelle and the two soldiers who witness his crime: Albert Maillard and […]

Categories: Francophone Literature, French, Lemaitre • Tags: Lemaitre, Prix Goncourt

“Camille” by Pierre Lemaitre

May 29, 2015 by adminfw

Winner of the 2015 CWA International Dagger Anne Forestier finds herself in the wrong place at the wrong time when she blunders into a raid on a jewellers on the Champs-Élysées. Shot three times, beaten almost beyond recognition, she is lucky to survive, but her ordeal has only just begun. Lying helpless in her hospital bed, with her assailant still at large, Anne is in grave danger. Just one thing stands in her favour – a partner who will break […]

Categories: Awards & Nominations, Crime Fiction, CWA International Dagger, French, Lemaitre, Thriller, Verhoeven Trilogy • Tags: Awards, CWA International Dagger, French, Thriller

The Occupation Trilogy by Patrick Modiano

April 14, 2015 by adminfw

The Occupation Trilogy sees the first English publication of Patrick Modiano’s first novel, “La Place de l’Étoile“. A vitriolic, harrowing, hallucinatory hand grenade of a book. The translations of The Night Watch and Ring Roads (by Caroline Hillier and Patricia Wolf respectively) have been entirely revised for this edition. Publisher’s Synopsis When Patrick Modiano was awarded the 2014 Nobel Prize for Literature he was praised for using the ‘art of memory’ to bring to life the Occupation of Paris during […]

Categories: Awards & Nominations, French • Tags: Modiano, Nobel Prize., Occupation Trilogy

In the Beginning was the Sea” by Tomás González

March 25, 2015 by adminfw

Shortlisted for the 2015 Independent Foreign Fiction prize J. and Elena abandon their life in the bohemian, intellectual circles of Medellin and move to the sea, to a desolate, barren stretch of coastline somewhere in Antioquía, where they sink every peso they possess into buying a finca – a vast estate of several hundred hectares.. Neither has any experience of farming, of rural life, or of the customs and traditions of the local people; instead they are driven by a […]

Categories: Awards & Nominations, Colombia, Independent Foreign Fiction Prize, Latin America, Spanish • Tags: Colombia, Pushkin Press, Tomas Gonzalez

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