Pushkin Press

"Beware of Pity is the most exciting book I have ever read...a feverish, fascinating novel" Anthony Beevor, Sunday Telegraph An extract of this book was chosen by Kazuo Ishiguro and included in the 2012 World Book Night edition of Remains of the Day An almost unbearably tense and powerful tale of unrequited love and the danger of pity. In 1913 a young second lieutenant discovers the terrible danger of pity....

When sixteen-year-old Tiuri answers a desperate call for help, he finds himself on a perilous mission that could cost him his life. He must deliver a secret letter to the King who lives across the Great Mountains - a letter upon which the future of the entire realm depends. It means abandoning his home, breaking all the rules and leaving everything behind - even the knighthood that he has dreamed of for so ...

'The time provides the pictures, I merely speak the words to go with them, and it will not be so much my own story I tell as that of an entire generation - our unique generation, carrying a heavier burden of fate than almost any other in the course of history.' During his lifetime, Stefan Zweig's (1881-1942) works were immensely popular and widely translated. In the decades after his death, he was largely f...

Stefan's Zweig's Letter from an Unknown Woman and other stories contains a new translation by the award-winning Anthea Bell of one of his most celebrated novellas, Letter from an Unknown Woman , the inspiration for a classic 1948 Hollywood film by Max Ophuls, as well as three new stories, appearing in English for the first time. A famous author receives a letter on his forty-first birthday. He doesn't know ...

The writer and satirist Teffi was a literary sensation in Russia until war and revolution forced her to leave her country for ever. Memories is her blackly funny and heartbreaking account of her final, frantic journey into exile across Russia-travelling by cart, freight train and rickety steamer-and the 'ordinary and unheroic' people she encounters. From refugees setting up camp on a dockside to a singer de...

The life of the great Portuguese explorer who dared to sail beyond the horizon The Portuguese explorer Ferdinand Magellan (1480-1521) is one of the most famous navigators in history-he was the first man to sail from the Atlantic to the Pacific Ocean, and led the first voyage to circumnavigate the globe, although he was killed en route in a battle with natives in the Phillipines. In this biography, Zweig ...

'I work in an office. I take cards out of a file. Once I have taken them out, I put them back in again. That is it. 'Twenty-three-year-old Frits - office worker, daydreamer, teller of inappropriate jokes - finds life absurd and inexplicable. He lives with his parents, who drive him mad. He has terrible, disturbing dreams of death and destruction. Sometimes he talks to a toy rabbit. This is the story of t...

When Zurich multimillionaire and local politician Isaak Kohler shoots a professor to death in broad daylight for no apparent reason, he cheerfully accepts his 20-year prison sentence. Yet, despite the fact that there were witnesses aplenty, he enlists Spat, a down-and-out lawyer, to investigate the crime, ordering him to pretend that someone else, now at large, committed it. Through luck and happenstance, t...

Winner of the prestigious Akutagawa Prize, three dream-like tales of memory and warVisiting a friend in the French countryside, a man finds himself cast into the quandaries of historical whim, religious identity, and seeing without sight; a walk along the seashore, upon the anniversary of a death, becomes a reverie on building sandcastles; and an innocent break-in at the ruins of an archbishop's residence t...

"I love this book"Michael Morpurgo A classic story about a magical miniaturefamily's adventures in wartime Japan In a dustylibrary, in the quietest corner of a house in a Tokyo suburb, live the LittlePeople: Fern and Balbo, Robin and Iris. Just a few inches high, sleeping incigarette boxes and crafting shoes from old book jackets, they need only onething from their Humans - a nightly glass of milk, served...

When Kid accompanies her parents to New York City for a six-month stint of dog-sitting and home-schooling, she sees what looks like a tiny white cloud on the top of their apartment building.

When Tom meets Spider he is sure he has found a friend for life. But their companionship does not run smoothly. Spider can't help being the naughty puppy that he is, and Tom has a lot on his plate: a new school, a bully and his parents' separation.

Identical twins Sonja and Charlotte are musical prodigies with extraordinary powers. Born on All-Hallows-Eve, the girls could play music before they could walk. They were found one night by Tatty, the Tattooed Lady of the circus, in a pail on her doorstep with only a note and a heart-shaped locket. They've been with Tatty ever since, roaming the Outskirts in the circus caravans, moving from place to place.

In the town of Fenchester, seven resourceful children are yearning to be famous. One day, they come across a disused chapel, and an idea is formed. With a lick of paint and the addition of a beautiful curtain (which, however much they try, won't "swish" as stage curtains ought), the chapel becomes a theatre - and The Blue Door Theatre Company is formed.

A partisan fighting with the Red Army in Germany comes across a grand, abandoned house, seemingly untouched by the devastation sweeping the country. Exhausted, he falls asleep in the living room, but wakes to find a German patrol marching up the garden path. His only hope is to pose as the house's owner, but how will he keep up the pretence when the real owner returns?

'A strange, haunting, and utterly original exploration of displacement and desire' -- Tea Obreht, author of The Tiger's Wife, New York TimesBook Review

'I was just a regular idiot, a nutcase, a show-off and all that. Nothing to cry about. Seriously' Edgar W., teenage dropout, unrequited lover, unrecognized genius - and dead - tells the story of his brief, spectacular life. It is the story of how he rebels against the petty rules of communist East Germany to live in an abandoned summer house, with just a tape recorder and a battered copy of Goethe's The S...