Faber & Faber

ONE OF VOGUE'S TOP FIVE DEBUTS OF 2020
ONE OF THE OBSERVER'S HIGHLIGHTS OF 2020
ONE OF THE GUARDIAN'S TOP TEN BEST NEW BOOKS IN TRANSLATION

The sensational Dutch bestseller: Marieke Lucas Rijneveld's extraordinary portrait of a farming family distorted by grief, translated by Michele Hutchison.

I asked God if he please couldn’t take my brother Matthies instead of my rabbit. ‘Amen.’

Ten-year-old Jas has a unique way of experiencing her universe: the feeling of udder ointment on her skin as protection against harsh winters; the texture of green warts, like capers, on migrating toads; the sound of 'blush words' that aren't in the Bible. But when a tragic accident ruptures the family, her curiosity warps into a vortex of increasingly disturbing fantasies – unlocking a darkness that threatens to derail them all.

A bestselling sensation in the Netherlands, Marieke Lucas Rijneveld's radical debut novel is studded with images of wild, violent beauty: a world of language unlike any other.

'Outstanding. I'll be recommending this all year.' Sarah Bakewell
'A beautiful and deeply moving book.' Sally Rooney

‘I like this London life . . . the street-sauntering and square-haunting.’ Virginia Woolf, diary, 1925

Mecklenburgh Square, on the radical fringes of interwar Bloomsbury, was home to activists, experimenters and revolutionaries; among them were the modernist poet H. D., detective novelist Dorothy L. Sayers, classicist Jane Harrison, economic historian Eileen Power, and writer and publisher Virginia Woolf. They each alighted there seeking a space where they could live, love and, above all, work independently.

Francesca Wade’s spellbinding group biography explores how these trailblazing women pushed the boundaries of literature, scholarship, and social norms, forging careers that would have been impossible without these rooms of their own.

'Elegant, erudite and absorbing, Square Haunting is a startlingly original debut, and Francesca Wade is a writer to watch.' Frances Wilson
'A fascinating voyage through the lives of five remarkable women - moving and immersive.' Edmund Gordon

From the multi-award-winning author of the literary phenomenon A Girl Is a Half-formed Thing.

At the mid-point of her life a woman enters an Avignon hotel room. She’s been here once before – but while the room hasn’t changed, she is a different person now.

Forever caught between check-in and check-out, she will go on to occupy other hotel rooms, from Prague to Oslo, Auckland to Austin, each as anonymous as the last, but bound by rules of her choosing. There, amid the detritus of her travels, the matchbooks, cigarettes, keys and room-service wine, she will negotiate with memory, with the men she sometimes meets, and with what it might mean to return home.

Petina Gappah's epic journey through nineteenth-century Africa - following the funeral caravan who bore Bwana Daudi's body - is ‘engrossing, beautiful and deeply imaginative.’ (Yaa Gyasi)

This is the story of the body of Bwana Daudi, the Doctor, the explorer David Livingstone – and the sixty-nine men and women who carried his remains for 1,500 miles so that he could be borne across the sea and buried in his own country.

The wise men of his age say Livingstone blazed into the darkness of their native land leaving a track of light behind where white men who followed him could tread in perfect safety. But in Petina Gappah’s radical novel, it is those in the shadows of history – those who saved a white man’s bones; his dark companions; his faithful retinue on an epic funeral march – whose voices are resurrected with searing intensity.

This final, fateful journey across the African interior is lead by Halima, Livingstone’s sharp-tongued cook, and three of his most devoted servants: Jacob, Chuma and Susi. Their tale of how his corpse was borne out of nineteenth-century Africa – carrying the maps that sowed the seeds of the continent’s brutal colonisation – has the power of myth. It is not only symbolic of slavery’s hypocrisy, but a portrait of a world trembling on the cusp of total change – and a celebration of human bravery, loyalty and love.