Pushkin Press

The bestselling diaries of WWII in Tuscany, with a new introduction by writer and social historian Virginia Nicholson, and stunning rediscovered photographsAt the height of the Second World War, Italy was being torn apart by German armies, civil war, and the eventual Allied invasion. In a corner of Tuscany, one woman - born in England, married to an Italian - kept a record of daily life in a country at war....

'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...

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?

They exist as a rumour or a fading memory. They vanished from history leaving scarcely a trace, lost to fire, censorship, theft, war or deliberate destruction, yet those who seek them are convinced they will find them. This is the story of one man's quest for eight mysterious lost books.

The restaurant is where we go to celebrate, to experience pleasure, to show off - or, sometimes, just because we're hungry. But these temples of gastronomy hide countless stories.

This is a book like no other: a magical tapestry of folk tales, woven together to build a world that is as strange yet familiar as a half-remembered dream. It is an old world, a world of enchanted corn dollies and wild dances in poppy fields, a world of tricksters, lovers and fools.

The de Boer family are tobacco growers, working on terraces in the Veneto region of northern Italy. Life is hard, and the father, Augusto, occasionally supplements their income by smuggling tobacco across the border into Austria. Sometimes he takes his daughter Jole with him, and father and daughter journey together on the perilous route over the mountains.

I want to find out how they behave when they're free. Len Howard was forty years old when she decided to leave her London life and loves behind, retire to the English countryside and devote the rest of her days to her one true passion: birds. Moving to a small cottage in Sussex, she wrote two bestselling books, astonishing the world with her observations on the tits, robins, sparrows and other birds ...

Barbegazi are fabled creatures who live in the alps, rather like gnomes. Tessa knows that they exist because her beloved grandfather told her about them. So she sets out to prove to her family and friends that her grandfather wasn't just a confused old man. Soon she finds not only a family of Barbegazi but also a dastardly plot to kidnap one and keep it captive. But Tessa realises that uncovering the truth ...

"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....

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 ...

It felt like the slipknot on a rope round my chest was being tightened without pity Trouble is the last thing Albert needs. Travelling back to his childhood home on Christmas Eve to mourn his mother's death, he finds the loneliness and nostalgia of his Parisian quartier unbearable...Until, that evening, he encounters a beautiful, seemingly innocent woman at a brasserie, and his spirits are lifted. Still, ...

"It is impossible to look at the world the same way after reading Babel" FT Odessa was a uniquely Jewish city, and the stories of Isaac Babel - a Jewish man, writing in Russian, born in Odessa - uncover its tough underbelly. Gangsters, prostitutes, beggars, smugglers: no one escapes the pungent, sinewy force of Babel's pen. From the tales of the magnetic cruelty of Benya Krik - infamous mob boss, and one ...

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...

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...