Picador: 364 books

This picaresque tale of a sexually voracious bed salesman whose life is dominated by his adventures with women opens in l962 as thirty-year-old Heinrich Hampel crosses the Berlin Wall leaving the West for East. This is not a political gesture but a desperate attempt to escape debt and the sexual mayhem...

Winner of the 2008 AWP Award for the Novel From 1941 to 1947, eighteen thousand Italian prisoners of war were sent to Australia. The Italian surrender that followed the downfall of Mussolini had created a novel circumstance: prisoners who theoretically were no longer enemies. Many of these...

In the early 1800s in a small village in rural France, a peasant woman named Louise summons her priest. Fearing she is about to die, Louise begins her final confession to the bored cleric and reveals a lifelong secret involving a famous woman writer, a young English poet, and a wicked and unusual...

With a New Introduction by George Saunders A New York Times Book Review Notable Book of the Year It is early spring, and Tom has called together his fellow psychologists at the Krakower Institute for their biannual pancake supper—a chance for likeminded analysts to talk shop and casually...

The author of Publish and Perish returns with a Faustian tale of the horrors of academe Nelson Humbolt is a visiting adjunct English lecturer at prestigious Midwest University, until he is unceremoniously fired one autumn morning. Minutes after the axe falls, his right index finger is severed...

After years of violence, a tense calm pervades Northern Ireland, soon to be broken by Jimmy Coogan, an IRA veteran gone renegade. Jimmy has stolen ten pounds of plastic explosive, intending to destroy the parliamentary ambitions of the IRA leadership. Into Jimmy's turbulent world come two young...

In her utterly original novel about mothers, daughters, and love, Judy Budnitz gives the traditional folktale an electrifying twist as she follows four generations of women from an Eastern European village to the tenements of an American city. Elena, born into a family ruled by a formidable mother,...

Winner of the Whiting Writers' Award In a voice somewhere between Cormac McCarthy and Kurt Cobain, John McManus explores young people living in extreme situations. Some are in the Tennessee Smoky Mountains, some in the Pacific Northwest, a few are in the Western deserts of Utah and Nevada,...

"Extremely impressive . . . . A wonderful read from a born storyteller." -Chris Cleave, New York Times bestselling author of Little Bee The setting: London, 1794. The problem: Four nouveau riche fathers with five marriageable daughters. The plan: Give the young women piano lessons....

LONGLISTED FOR THE ORANGE PRIZE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW EDITORS' CHOICE **"This book moved and provoked me in ways I can't fully articulate....Extraordinary."—**Anna Paquin (True Blood) A seventeen-year-old girl pieces together the mystery of her mother's life and...

Holden's Performance by award-winning author Murray Bail is the story of Holden Shadbolt, a guileless and matter-of-fact innocent as he passes through the cities and landscape of Australia. His reassuring silent presence and photographic memory make him useful to men of power and women who appear...

From Whiting Award-winning writer John McManus comes a debut novel of startling originality and mystery. The son of an unknown father and an ostracized mother, and the next of kin in a long line of bastard relatives, nine-year-old Loren Garland lives a life of subtle mystery beneath the shadow...

Two years ago--at twenty-two--John McManus captivated writers and critics with his first story collection and became the youngest recipient of the Whiting Writers Award. Now McManus returns with a collection of stories equally piercing and visionary: stories about the young and old, compromised by...

In this collection of a novella and stories, Anndee Hochman examines loss, faith, and love, and explores the complex anatomies of human relationships. Her tales are peopled by a brilliant assortment of characters, many of them adolescent girls and young women, all on the verge of discovering their...