MacLehose Press Sovietistan. A Journey Through Turkmenistan, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan Fatland Erika

Readers as well as listeners can now embark on a journey through the cycling year with The Cycling Podcast, which has been entertaining and informing fans since 2013 • Richard Moore, Lionel Birnie and Daniel Friebe share their diaries from three incident-filled Grand Tours, the Giro d’Italia, Tour de France and Vuelta a Espana. These take readers behind the scenes and explore the culture and landscape as well as the racing, while the ‘Lionel of Flanders’, complete with beer recommendations, does the same for the Classics in Belgium • There are appearances, too, by leading journalists and podcast favourites Francois Thomazeau, who takes responsiblity for the French Tour de France jinx, Ciro Scognamiglio, with a heartfelt love letter to cult favourite Filippo Pozzato, Fran Reyes, who pens a farewell to El Pistolero, Alberto Contador, and Orla Chennaoui, who hits the road to cover La Course in a one-woman karaoke-booth-on-wheels

Lord of All the Dead is a courageous journey into Javier Cercas' family history and that of a country collapsing from a fratricidal war. The author revisits Ibahernando, his parents' village in southern Spain, to research the life of Manuel Mena. This ancestor, dearly loved by Cercas' mother, died in combat at the age of nineteen during the battle of the Ebro, the bloodiest episode in Spain's history • Who was Manuel Mena? A fascist hero whose memory is an embarrassment to the author, or a young idealist who happened to fight on the wrong side? And how should we judge him, as grandchildren and great-grandchildren of that generation, interpreting history from our supposed omniscience and the misleading • perspective of a present full of automatic answers, that fails to consider the particularities of each personal and family drama? • Wartime epics, heroism and death are some of the underlying themes of this unclassifiable novel that combines road trips, personal confessions, war stories and historical scholarship, finally becoming an incomparable tribute to the author's mother and the incurable scars of an entire generation

"We owe you our lives, Sergeant, but you are our worst nightmare . . ." • Burma, 1852. Sergeant Arthur Bowman, a sergeant in the East India Company, is sent on a secret mission during the Second Anglo-Burmese War. But the expedition is foiled - his men are captured and tortured. Throughout their ordeal, a single word becomes Bowman's mantra, a word that will stiffen their powers of endurance in the face of unimaginable suffering: "Survival". But for all that, only a handful escape with their lives • Some years later in London, battling his ghosts through a haze of alcohol and opium, Bowman discovers a mutilated corpse in a sewer. The victim appears to have been subjected to the same torments as Bowman endured in the Burmese jungle. And the word "Survival" has been daubed in blood by the body's side

The village of Shimae is thrown into turmoil when master carp-catcher Katsuro suddenly drowns in the murky waters of the Kusagawa river. Who now will carry the precious cargo of carp to the imperial palace and preserve the crucial patronage that everyone in the village depends upon? • Step forward Miyuki, Katsuro's grief-struck widow and the only remaining person in the village who knows anything about carp. She alone can undertake the long, perilous journey to the imperial palace, balancing the heavy baskets of fish on a pole across her shoulders, and ensure her village's future • So Miyuki sets off. Along her way she will encounter a host of remarkable characters, from prostitutes and innkeepers, to warlords and priests with evil in mind. She will endure ambushes and disaster, for the villagers are not the only people fixated on the fate of the eight magnificent carp

The journey had taken on its own momentum, it had become an autonomous, independent entity, she was searching for love, and was still happily unaware that truth is the first casualty of peace • The long war is over, and Ingrid Barroy leaves the island that bears her name to search for the father of her child • Alexander, the Russian captive who survived the sinking of prisoner ship the Rigel and found himself in Ingrid's arms, made an attempt to cross the mountains to Sweden. Ingrid will follow in his footsteps, carrying her babe in arms, the child's dark eyes the only proof that she ever knew him • Along the way, Ingrid's will encounter collaborators, partisans, refugees, deserters, slaves and sinners, in a country that still bears the scars of defeat and occupation

Once upon a time there was a boy whose mother called him "Wolf" • She thought this name would bring him strength, luck, natural authority, but how could she know that this boy would grow up to be the gentlest and strangest of sons and that he would end up captured like a wild animal • There he is now, in the back of a police van, as we turn the page • It all begins with a crash • One night, seventeen-year-old Wolf steals his mother's car and drives six hundred kilometres in search of his sister, who left home ten years ago. Unlicensed and on edge, he veers onto the wrong side of the road and causes an accident. He is arrested, imprisoned, and leaves his mother and sister to pick up the pieces • What follows is an unflinching account of the events that lead to this moment, told through the alternating perspectives of Wolf's mother, sister and various other voices

A dazzling novel about the traces we leave, the traces we erase and the traces we seek to rebuild • In this innovative novel three losses and three quests are pursued. English writer Aliza Abravanel tries, in a battle with aphasia, to finish her book. A last indigenous speaker is confronted with the fading of his culture and language while an anthropologist struggles to prevent it. And through the construction of an esoteric theatre of memory, a survivor of the Guatemalan genocide of the 1970s and '80s seeks to recover the memories lost after the traumas of war. And behind these three threads lies the narrator's own story: Julio, a disillusioned university professor, must try to understand and complete his friend Aliza's novel, and come to terms with a past he shared with her but has blanked for thirty years

Yukon, Canada's far north. A young man tracks a wolf through the wilderness • The one his grandfather warned him about • In Mexico City, Juan Guillermo has pledged vengeance • For his murdered brother, Carlos • For his parents, sentenced to death by their grief • But in 1960s Mexico justice is sold to the highest bidder, • and the Catholic fanatics who killed Carlos are allied to Zunita, • a corrupt and influential police commander • If he is to quench his thirst for revenge • Juan Guillermo will have to answer his inner call of the wild • and discover what links his destiny to a hunter on the other side of America • A gripping coming of age thriller of vengeance and destiny set between Mexico City's murderous 1960s underworld and the bleak tundras of Canada's most remote province

A lonely librarian opens her heart • One morning a librarian finds a reader who has been locked in overnight • She begins to talk to him, a one-way conversation full of sharp insight and quiet outrage. As she rails against snobbish senior colleagues, an ungrateful and ignorant public, the strictures of the Dewey Decimal System and the sinister expansionist conspiracies of the books themselves, two things shine through: her unrequited passion for a researcher named Martin, and an ardent and absolute love for the arts • A delightful divertissement for the discerning bookworm

She woke up with a new face. She woke up with no memories. And she woke up to murder • Not only has Marla Cahill survived a deadly car accident, but her beautiful features have been restored through plastic surgery. She should be grateful. Instead, she's consumed by confusion...and panic. For the people gathered at her bedside - her family - are strangers. And so is the woman whose haunted eyes stare back from the mirror • Secluded at the magnificent Cahill mansion, Marla waits for something to trigger recognition. Yet the only thing she's left with is the unshakable feeling that she is not who everyone says she is, and that something is very, very wrong • Determined to piece together the truth, she finds herself drawn to her brother-in-law, Nick - a man who seems both to want and despise her

On the far eastern borders of the Soviet Union, in the sunset of Stalin's reign, soldiers are training for a war that could end all wars, for in the atomic age man has sown the seeds of his own destruction • Among them is Pavel Gartsev, a reservist. Orphaned, scarred by the last great war and unlucky in love, he is an instant victim for the apparatchiks and ambitious careerists who thrive within the Red Army's ranks • Assigned to a search party composed of regulars and reservists, charged with the recapture of an escaped prisoner from a nearby gulag, Gartsev finds himself one of an unlikely quintet of cynics, sadists and heroes, embarked on a challenging manhunt through the Siberian taiga • But the fugitive, capable, cunning and evidently at home in the depths of these vast forests, proves no easy prey

Behind the ornate doors of 30, rue du Metal in Brussels, twenty students begin their apprenticeship in the art of decorative painting - that art of tricksters and counterfeiters, where each knot in a plank of wood hides a secret and every vein in a slab of marble tells a story • Among these students are Kate, Jonas and Paula Karst. Together, during a relentless year of study, they will learn the techniques of reproducing materials in paint, and the intensity of their experience - the long hours in the studio, the late nights, the conversations, arguments, parties, romances - will cement a friendship that lasts long after their formal studies end • For Paula, her initiation into the art of trompe l' il will take her back through time, from her own childhood memories, to the ancient formations of the materials whose depiction she strives to master