Bøger udgivet af Daunt Books

It had been Graham Greene's ideato explore tropical West Africa. The map of Liberia was virtually blank,the interior marked 'cannibals'. It was a far cry from the literary London of 1935,and the result of the 350-mile trek was the masterclass in travel writing that is Journey Without Maps. But the gifted author was not travelling alone. His cousin Barbara had, over perhaps a little too much champagne, rashlyagreed to go with him. Unbeknown to him, she also took up pen and paper on their long and arduous journey.Too Late to Turn Back is the amusing, mock-heroic and richly evocative adventure of a young woman who set out from the world of Saki and the Savoy Grill armed only with a cheery stoicism and an eye for an anecdote. From her exasperation at her cousin's refusal to pull his socks up to her concern over his alarmingly close scrape with death, from her yearning for smoked salmon to the missionary who kept a pet cobra, what emerges is a surprisingly refreshing andcharming travelogue of comic misadventure, fizzing with good.

'It was incredible how fear and danger never produced ignoble words but always true ones, words that were torn from your very heart.'Anna, a sixteen-year-old schoolgirl in a small town in northern Italy, finds herself pregnant after a brief romance. To save her reputation, she marries aneccentric older family friend, Cenzo Rena, and they move to his village in the south. Their relationship is touched by tragedy and grace as the events of their life in the countryside run parallel to the war and the encroaching threat of fascism - and in their wake, a society dealing with anxiety and grief.At the heart of the novel is a concern with experiences that both deepen and deaden existence: adultery and air raids, neighbourhood quarrels and bombings. With her signature clear-eyed wit, Natalia Ginzburg asks how we can act with integrity when faced with catastrophe, and how we can love well.

In a letter to her six-year-old daughter, Julietta Singh writes toward a tender vision of the world, offering children's radical embrace of possibility as a model for how we might live. In order to survive looming political and ecological disasters, Singh urges, we must break from the conventions we have inherited and begin to orient ourselves toward more equitable and revolutionary paths.The Breaks celebrates queer family-making, communal living, and Brown girlhood, complicating the stark binaries that shape contemporary US discourse. With nuance and generosity, Singh reveals the connections among the crises humanity faces-climate catastrophe, extractive capitalism, and the violent legacies of racism, patriarchy, and colonialism-inviting us to move through the breaks toward a tenable future.

Lamps, penknives, paperbacks, mechanical pencils, inflatable headrests. Marcin Wicha's mother Joanna was a collector of everyday objects. She found intrinsic - and often idiosyncratic - value in each item. When she dies and leaves her apartment intact, Wicha is left to sort through her things.The objects are the seemingly ordinary possessions of an ordinary life. But through them, Wicha begins to construct an image of Joanna as a Jewish woman, a mother, and a citizen. As Poland emerged from the Second World War into the material meanness of the Communist regime, shortages of every kind shaped its people in deep and profound ways. What they chose to buy, keep - and, arguably, hoard - tells the story of contemporary Poland.Joanna's Jewishness, her devotion to work, her formidable temperament, her weakness for consumer goods, all accumulate into an unforgettable portrait of a woman and, ultimately, her country. Things I Didn't Throw Out is an intimate, unconventional and very funny memoir about everything we leave behind.

'I took the revolver out of his desk drawer and shot him between the eyes.'Four years before she shoots her husband and walks to a cafe for a coffee, a lonely young woman living in a boarding house meets an older man called Alberto. They go for long walks along the river and on the outskirts of the city; they look like lovers, although they're not.Alberto doesn't tell her anything about himself and she asks few questions. Still, with little else to distract her, she lets her imagination run wild and convinces herself to fall in love. Though he doesn't feel the same, Alberto asks her to marry him and they have a baby. But Alberto is a man who tires quickly of everything.The Dry Heart is a short, dark and psychologically rich novel that forensically examines how an unhappy marriage comes to end in murder.

Delia is one of five children, growing up in a poor Italian village. She is 17, and dreams of marrying a rich man, living in a grand apartment in the city and wearing silk stockings. To escape her father's neglect and her mother's sadness, she begins to take the dusty road to the city every day, accompanied by Nini,her sweet and mysterious cousin.When Nini takes a job in a factory and moves in with a city woman, Delia sees another way of being. But when she discovers she's pregnant, she agrees to marry the father, seduced by the promise of wealth and comfort.Nothing, not even Nini's desperate declaration of love, can stop her - but her rejection will be his undoing. The Road to the City is a short, poignant novel about the dreamsof youth, and the cruelty it takes to make them come true.

'Looking back, Mrs Fitzgibbons could not recall which of the major changes in her life had come about first, the discovery that she possessed a gift for persuasive speech, or the sudden quickening of her libido.'Forty-five-year-old Frances Fitzgibbons is a loan officer at a New England bank, known for her polite discretion and kindly, tolerant disposition. Suddenly she transforms almost overnight: seducing a high-school student, usurping her boss as vice president, and firing anyone who crosses her.Once Frankie has found her voice - which arrives fully-formed, without hesitation or thought - resistance is futile. It's not long before she has a gang of devoted acolytes, including her hairdresser and son-in-law, and her plans to obliterate the competition can run unchecked, to horrifying effect.First published in 1990 and set against the financial crisis of 1987, Ride a Cockhorse is a rollicking cautionary tale brimful with snappy dialogue and gleeful obscenity - and an irresistibly compelling antiheroine.

A woman leaves the man she lives with and moves to a low stone cottage in a university town. She joins an academic department and, high up in her office on the thirteenth floor, begins a research project on the poet Paul Celan. She knows nothing of Celan, still less of her new neighbours or colleagues.She is in self-imposed exile, hoping to find dignity in her loneliness. Like everywhere, the abiding feeling in the city is one of paranoia. The weather is deteriorating, the ordinary lives of women are in peril, and an unexplained curfew has been imposed.But then she meets Clara, a woman who is her exact opposite: decisive, productive and assured. As their friendship grows in intimacy Clara suggests another way of living - until an act of violence threatens to sever everything between them. Reminiscent of Thomas Bernhard, Rachel Cusk and Gwendoline Riley, The Coming Bad Days is a penetrating portrait of feminine vulnerability and cruelty. It announces the arrival of a startling new voice in fiction: intelligent, brutal, sure, and devastatingly funny.'Raw, dazzling and bracingly new. A vividly original novel about the fractured difficulty of living.' - Rebecca Tamas, author of Strangers: Essays on the Human and Nonhuman

'Bear,' she cried. 'I love you. Pull my head off.'Lou is a shy and diligent librarian at the local Heritage Institute. She lives a mole-like existence, buried among maps and manuscripts in her dusty basement office. With nothing and no one to go home to, she resigns herself to passionless sex on her desk with the Institute's Director.When she is summoned to a remote island to inventory the house and estate of the late Colonel Jocelyn Cary, she takes it as an opportunity to head north and get out of the city, hoping for an industrious summer of cataloguing.Colonel Cary left many possessions behind, but no one warned her about the bear. Lou soon begins to anticipate the bear's needs for food and company. But as summer blooms across the island and Lou shakes off the city, she realises the bear might satisfy some needs of her own.

In this gripping and heartfelt memoir, Jack and Rochelle Sutin recount how they fell in love during the height of World War II in the dense forests of Poland.Though they grew up in the same village, Jack and Rochelle only knew each other at a distance, having once shared a clumsy school dance. After the Nazi occupation, they were torn from their families and forced to live in labour camps. Each managed a daring escape into the surrounding woods, where they happened upon each other and, along with thousands of other Jews, joined the Polish underground Resistance. Jack and Rochelle's poignant shared narrative reveals the extreme conditions they endured while living for years in an underground bunker in the woods, and the impossible love affair that grew out of it and lasted over fifty years. More than an account of stark survival, this is an inspirational story of courage, resilience, and, above all, true love. 'Captures the horror of the Holocaust without missing the central characters' strength, courage, and passion.' - USA Today 'A powerful and illuminating personal account . . . Faithful inclusiveness, combined with a depth of feeling never minimised and never paraded, makes this strong, honest, affecting book a valuable addition to Holocaust literature.' - New York Times Book Review

A memoir of gender transition and recovery from addiction, a dance across genres, a ripping-up of the rulebook, Please Miss is unlike anything you've ever read before.Grace Lavery is a reformed druggie, an unreformed omnisexual chaos Muppet, and a 100 per cent, all-natural, synthetic female hormone monster. How could her story be straightforward when she is anything but? The telling of her tale is kaleidoscopic, wild and audacious: Grace performs in a David Lynch remake of Sunset Boulevard and is reprogrammed as a 1960s femmebot; she is targeted with anonymous letters from a mysterious cabal of clowns; she writes a socialist manifesto disguised as a porn parody of QI (or is it vice versa?).As Grace fumbles toward a new trans identity, she tries on dozens of different voices, creating a coat of many colours. The result is dazzling, unique and unforgettable. Startlingly funny and ruthlessly smart, Please Miss gives us what we came for, then slaps us in the face and orders us to come again.

It is the day of her younger brother's wedding and our narrator is struggling to compose her toast. She was nine years old when she travelled with her parents to Thailand to meet her brother Danny, and while their childhood in California was a happy one, when she holds their story up to the light, it refracts in ways she didn't expect. How to put words to their love?What follows is a heartfelt letter addressed to Danny and an excavation of their years growing up. Invoking everything from the classic Victorian adoption plot to childless women in literature to documents from Danny's case file, her narration is also a confession of sorts: to the parts of her life that she has kept from Danny, including her own struggle with infertility. And as the hours until the wedding tick down, she uncovers the words that can't and won't be said aloud.In Immediate Family, a fiercely tender debut novel, one luminous with love, Ashley Nelson Levy explores the complexities of motherhood, infertility, race, and the many definitions of family.