Vagabond Voices: 29 books

The still surface of a sea is both menacing and calmly beautiful: a perfect metaphor for this reflective novel. The narrator’s unassuming, thoughtful voice dampens but cannot conceal the forces driving his story of love and war and the boundless suffering of innocents. The narrator is a young historian,...

Jim Sillars argues convincingly that the referendum gives the Scottish people the power to create a better country, helps renew our belief in socialism as the answer to the economic and social crisis facing the country, and challenges the idea in the Yes campaign that independence means “change...

The Lost Art of Losing is a collection of aphorisms by award-winning novelist Gregory Norminton. By turns comic and despairing, jubilant and wry, they present, through fragments, a picture of the mind — and of troubling times. Gregory Norminton transforms the aphorism into something more accessible...

A twelve-year-old schoolchild was arrested at his school and questioned by an antiterrorist police squad, because he was organising a picket of the offices of his member of parliament, who happened to be the current prime minister of Great Britain. He was protesting against the closure of a youth...

Thumbnails is a collection of short stories or “micrograms” in which Gregory Norminton once again experiments with form, using his stylish and witty prose to examine the nooks and crannies of our distracted lives. Witty and thought-provoking, the stories are brief but clear sketches very different...

Ermanno Cavazzoni admits that his books push the novel to its very limits — “like outpourings of the maniacal”, he says. “That’s how they come to me, you must understand.” Here in The Nocturnal Library, we have the maniacal that we all know from our own dreams: a dreamer’s lack of control...

A middle-aged judge driven by curiosity and the intellectual challenge of his work, a nervous and neurotic young historian willing to run all manner of risks to uncover the state crimes of the forties, a nerdy, well-educated and good-natured young journalist motivated principally by the desire to...

Natalya Filippovna may be a middle-aged, single mother and member of the Russian minority in Estonia, but she is content with her simple life. She has a flat, a job at an electronics factory and, most importantly, she has her bright and ambitious teenaged daughter, Sofia. Money is tight, but they...

When the fascist government collapses in Italy, Renzo Modiano is almost seven years old. The war is over, his mother tells him. At last, thinks Renzo, they will get their radio back. On 10 September 1943 the dining table is crowded as ever, but the family eat in silence. When the meal is finished...

This is a collection of eleven short stories whose common theme is the heroism of our flawed lives. It explores the arduousness of people’s lives and covers such diverse subjects as human solidarity, generational change, single parenthood, domestic violence, the tragic complexity of revolution,...

A work in three parts, Things Written Randomly in Doubt starts with aphorisms in “How Not to Be a Ruminant”, shifts to essays in “Weights and Counterweights”, and concludes with poetry in “By the Metre”. Some arguments appear in more than one section, and include nationalism, class, free...

This is the story of Klaus Mann, son of Thomas and a bold political activist who strove beyond his father’s shadow to become an important author. Klaus was an exile, forced abroad while the Nazis defiled his homeland; a homosexual in a time of bigotry and intolerance; a heroin addict slithering...

Fifteen years ago, Tommy Hunter committed a terrible crime. Now pursued by his own bad memories and the attentions of his criminal companions of the past (as well as the present-day curiosity of the boys and girls in blue), Tommy is trying to put his family back together by the unlikely means of kidnapping...

“This is a book about language and above all about the value and essentiality of language in our lives. It might therefore be called a book on the “ecology” of language, because human language is in danger of being permanently damaged by the way modern technology has developed over the last...