Books published by Pushkin Press

An offbeat, blackly comic thriller from the author of You Were Never Really Here.

In the autumn of his days, a privy councillor contemplates his past, looking back at the key moments in his life. He remembers sharing a lodging with a professor and his wife and a close friendship is formed. The professor, however harbours a dark secret which changes both men forever.

BURNING SECRET is set in an Austrian sanatorium in the 1920's. A lonely twelve-year-old boy is befriended and becomes infatuated by a suave and mysterious baron who heartlessly brushes him aside to turn his seductive attentions to the boy's mother. Stefan Zweig, the author of Beware of Pity and Confusion provides the reader, in this newly available translation, with a study of childhood on the brink of adolescence and a boy's uncontrollable jealousy and feelings of betrayal.

The best fiction from across the Nordic region, selected and introduced by Sjon - Iceland's internationally renowned writer

Anxious to please his father, Mihaly has joined the family firm in Budapest. Pursued by nostalgia for his bohemian youth, he seeks escape in marriage to Erzsi, not realising that she has chosen him as a means to her own rebellion. On their honeymoon in Italy, Mihaly 'loses' his bride at a provincial station and embarks on a chaotic journey.

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 in the Philippines. In this biography, Zweig brings to life the Age of Discovery by telling the tale of one of the era's most daring adventurers, whose astounding feats of navigation heralded the modern age.

Portrait of a City in Two Acts: Lviv, Then and NowLviv, Lwow, Lvov, Lemberg. Known by a variety of names, the City of Lions is now in western Ukraine. Situated in different countries during its history, it is a city located along the fault-lines of Europe's history.City of Lions presents two essays, written more than half a century apart - but united by one city.Jozef Wittlin's sensual and lyrical paean to his Lwow, written in exile, is a deep cry of love and pain for his city, most of whose familiar faces have fled or been killed.Philippe Sands' finely honed exploration of what has been lost and what remains interweaves a lawyer's love of evidence with the emotional heft of a descendant of Lviv.With an illuminating preface by Eva Hoffman and stunning new photographs by Diana Matar, City of Lions is a powerful and melancholy evocation of central Europe in the twentieth century, with a special resonance for today's troubled continent.Jozef Wittlin (b.1896) was a major Polish poet, novelist (Salt of the Earth won him a nomination for the Nobel prize), essayist and translator. He studied in Vienna, where he met Joseph Roth and Rainer Maria Rilke, and he served in the Austro-Hungarian army in the First World War. With the outbreak of WWII, Wittlin was evacuated to New York, where he died in 1976.Philippe Sands is Professor of Law at University College London. Lviv is the heart of his latest book, East West Street: On the Origins of Genocide and Crimes Against Humanity.Diana Matar is a photographer whose work investigates issues of history, memory and state sponsored violence. A graduate of the Royal College of Art, she has won many prizes and her work has been exhibited in institutions around the world.

A dazzling novel about the life of the groundbreaking artist, Paula Modersohn-Becker - a brilliant early expressionist whose work will be exhibited at the RA's Making Modernism exhibition in November 2022 'A moving and rare, heart-warming take on Paula Modersohn Becker's life' Nicholas Serota Paula Modersohn-Becker was a pioneer of modern art in Europe, but denounced as degenerate by the Nazis after her death. Sue Hubbard draws on the artist's diaries and paintings to bring to life her singular existence, her battle to achieve independence and recognition and her intense relationship with the poet Rainer Maria Rilke.Not only do we discover Paula's vibrant personality and rich legacy of Expressionist paintings, but also come to understand something of the corrupted ideologies of the Third Reich. Written with the eye of a painter and the soul of a poet this moving story is a meditation on love, loss, memory and, ultimately, hope.

Enchanting, fresh translations of the finest stories by Brazil's greatest writer and author of short stories, cited as the greatest black writer in Western literature "Machado de Assis showed the human comedy is the same everywhere, and in conflicts between man and society, society usually wins." --The New Yorker Machado de Assis is one of the most enigmatic and fascinating story writers who ever lived. What appear at first to be stately social satires reveal unanticipated depths through flashes of darkness and winking surrealism. This new selection of his finest work, translated by the prize-winning Daniel Hahn, showcases the many facets of his mercurial genius. A brilliant scientist opens the first asylum in his home town, only to start finding signs of insanity all around him. A young lieutenant basks in praise, but in solitude feels his identity fray into nothing. The reading of a much-loved elder statesman's journals reveals hidden thoughts of merciless cruelty. This beautiful new collection of fresh translations offers the perfect gathering of his most beloved stories: The Fortune-TellerThe Posthumous Portrait GalleryThe LoanThe Tale of the CabrioletThe StickThe Secret CauseThe Canon, or Metaphysics of StyleThe AlienistThe Looking-GlassMidnight Mass

"The first major book on Vikings by a Scandinavian author to be published in English, The Wolf Age reframes the struggle for a North Sea empire and puts readers in the mindset of Vikings, providing new insight into their goals, values, and what they chose to live and die for. Tore Skeie (Norway's Most Important Young Historian) takes readers on a thrilling journey through the bloody shared history of England and Scandinavia, and on across early medieval Europe, from the wild Norwegian fjords to the wealthy cities of Muslim Andalusia. Warfare, plotting, backstabbing and bribery abound as Skeie skillfully weaves sagas and skaldic poetry with breathless dramatization as he entertainingly brings the world of the Vikings and Anglo-Saxons to vivid life. In the eleventh century, the rulers of the lands surrounding the North Sea are all hungry for power. To get power they need soldiers, to get soldiers they need silver, and to get silver there is no better way than war and plunder. This vicious cycle draws all the lands of the north into a brutal struggle for supremacy and survival that will shatter kingdoms and forge an empire..."--

Sharply immediate, evocative diaries from the heart of Occupied Paris by a classic German writer, in English for the first time 'THE GREATEST LITERARY TALENT OF HIS GENERATION' Die WeltThe writer Felix Hartlaub died in obscurity at just 31, vanishing from Berlin in 1945. He left behind a small oeuvre of private writings from the Second World War: fragments and observations of life from the midst of catastrophe that, with their evocative power and precision, would make a permanent place for him in German letters.Posted to Paris in 1940 to conduct archival research, Hartlaub recorded his impressions of the unfamiliar city in notebooks that document with unparalleled immediacy the daily realities of occupation. With a painter's eye for detail, Hartlaub writes of the bustle of civilians and soldiers in cafes, of half-seen trysts during blackout hours and the sublime light of Paris in spring. Appearing in English for the first time, Clouds Over Paris is a unique testament to the persistence of ordinary life through disaster.