2023 Novella Series

£28.50

Our 2023 novella series is now available to purchase as a set. The series includes:

History. A Mess. by Sigrún Pálsdóttir

Translated from Icelandic by Lytton Smith

A young PhD student believes she has uncovered the first professional female artist in Britain. It’s a discovery that could transform her career. However, in her haste to break new ground, she has made a simple mistake which threatens everything – and she won’t acknowledge her error until it’s far too late.

168pp, paperback with flaps, £12.99
ISBN 978-1-908670-75-5
Publication date: 6 February 2023

The Love of Singular Men by Victor Heringer

Translated from Portuguese by James Young

An incisive exploration of Brazilian society and a tender account of first love, first grief and revenge. One hot Rio summer, Camilo meets Cosme and the two teenage boys discover a new kind of tenderness. But an act of violence will shatter their intimate world, and change the trajectory of their young lives.

184pp, paperback with flaps
ISBN 978-1-908670-77-9
Publication date: 11 July 2023

As the Eagle Flies by Nolwenn Le Blevennec

Translated from French by Madeleine Rogers

The narrator of As The Eagle Flies has been with Igor for seven years, and has two children with him – when she meets Joseph. Before long, they are deeply entangled with each other and she must decide between the life she knows with Igor and this unpredictable, and potentially destructive, affair.

176pp, paperback with flaps
ISBN 978-1-908670-83-0
Publication date: 10 October 2023

Press & Reviews

'Pálsdóttir writes with the hand of a mystery author and the mind of a postmodernist, teasing out her protagonist’s problem while playing with literary forms, fragmenting timelines, and injecting fierce irony.' - Publishers Weekly

'When you read something genuinely new it's hard to describe it - you end up settling for comparisons - and The Love of Singular Men is truly a singular novel. It's ingenious like Cortazar or Nabokov, elliptical like Grace Paley, funny like Donald Barthelme. Upon finishing it you want to immediately meet the young man who wrote it, shake him vigorously by the hand and congratulate him on the beginning of a brilliant career. But Victor Heringer is gone. He left this beautiful book behind.' - Zadie Smith

‘Victor Heringer scrambles genres – tragic romance, pulpy noir, family drama – to plumb the false solace that narrative promises... its style, in James Young’s deft translation, is itself bracing, depraved, and, in the way only something truly melancholic can be, very funny.’ – Charlie Lee, The New York Review of Books

‘A subtle, singular novel of profound insight, delivered in a voice so hilarious, intimate and frank, it was as if I suddenly had a zany French genius for my best friend. I enjoyed this book so much it felt illicit.’ Isobel Wohl, author of Cold New Climate

About The Book

Author

Sigrún Pálsdóttir is an Icelandic writer and historian. She completed a PhD in the History of Ideas at the University of Oxford in 2001, after which she was a research fellow at the University of Iceland. She was the editor of Saga, the principal peer-reviewed journal for Icelandic history, from 2008 to 2016. She first came to prominence as an author of historical biographies, including the 19th century biography Þóra biskups (Thora. A Bishop’s Daughter, 2010) and Sigrún og Friðgeir (Uncertain Seas, 2013), and has since published three novels. Pálsdóttir’s work has been nominated for the Icelandic Literary Prize, the Icelandic Women’s Literature Prize, the Hagþenkir Non-fiction Prize and the DV Culture Prize. Sigrún og Friðgeir won the Icelandic Booksellers’ Prize in 2013, and her second novel Delluferðin (forthcoming in English under the title Embroidery) was awarded the European Union Prize for Fiction 2021. First published as Kompa in 2016, History. A Mess. is her debut novel and is the first to be translated into English.

Victor Heringer was born in Rio de Janeiro in 1988. His first poetry collection, Automatógrafo, was published in 2011, followed by his debut novel, Glória, which won the 2013 Jabuti Prize. His second novel, The Love of Singular Men, was published in 2016, and was shortlisted for the São Paulo Prize for Literature, the Rio Prize and the Oceanos Prize. He also published O escritor Victor Heringer (2015), a conceptual book of photographs, contributed a weekly column to the literary magazine Pessoa and translated from English to Portuguese. In 2017 he was selected by Forbes for their ‘under 30’ list. Victor Heringer died in 2018, three weeks before his thirtieth birthday. Following his death, Companhia das Letras reissued all of his works and a complete anthology of his poems. In 2021, they published a collection of his non-fiction writing, Vida desinteressante, which was shortlisted for the 2022 Jabuti Prize.

Nolwenn Le Blevennec is a journalist and writer. She is editor-in-chief at L'Obs, and lives in Paris. As The Eagle Flies is her first novel.

Translator

Lytton Smith has translated over a dozen novels and nonfiction books from the Icelandic, including works by Andri Snær Magnason, Bragi Ólafsson, Kristín Ómarsdóttir, and Ófeigur Sigurðsson. He was awarded a 2019 Literary Arts Fellowship in Translation from the National Endowment for the Arts. His most recent poetry collection, The Square, won the 2020 NMP/ Diagram Chapbook Contest.

James Young is a translator and writer from Northern Ireland and is the winner of the 2022 Peirene Stevns Prize. His short stories have appeared in publications including Wasafiri, ShortFiction and The Honest Ulsterman, and been shortlisted for the 2019 Wasafiri New Writing Prize, the 2020 Fish Short Story Prize and the 2021 Bath Short Story Award. He is the editor of Short Fiction literary journal and runs the Hastings Writers Workshop. He lived in Brazil between 2005 and 2017, working as a teacher, translator and journalist. The Love of Singular Men is his first novel­ length translation.

Madeleine Rogers is a translator from French and Italian, and has worked in publishing since 2019. She studied Modern Languages at the University of Oxford, and Translation Studies at UCL. She lives in London.

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