The Winter Warriors
Olivier Norek
translated from the French by Nick Caistor
“This is a book you will not put down. Maybe never”
Richard Ford
When the Soviet Union invaded tiny Finland in November 1939, they did not expect the Finns to fight back – much less to prevail. Olivier Norek’s novel is a story of courage, of resistance, and of the best sniper that the world has ever seen.
November, 1939. A conscription officer arrives in a farming village. The Soviet Union has invaded. Finland is at war. Setting off into the depths of winter to face the Red Army, the group of childhood friends recruited from Rautjärvi cannot be confident that they will ever return. But their unit has a secret weapon: the soldier Simo Häyhä, whose lethal skill as a sniper in the snow-bound forests of the front line will earn him the nickname “The White Death”.
Demy hardback, with map · 352pp · £18.99 · 11.ix.2025
The Darkest Winter
Carlo Lucarelli
translated from the Italian by Joseph Farrell
“A brutal evocation of a dystopian past, a stunning winter portrait of the debris and human detritus of wartime Bologna, and a gripping and complex trio of murders”
Peter May
In November 1944, in the worst winter ever known in Bologna, in the depths of the war, the bomb-scarred streets are home to starving refugees who have fled the advancing Allies. The Fascist Black Brigades, the officers of the S.S. and the partisans of the Italian Resistance compete for control of the city streets in bloody skirmishes. Comandante De Luca finds himself in trouble when three murders land on his desk: a professor shot through the eye, an engineer beaten to death, and a German corporal left to be gnawed on by rats in a flooded cellar. De Luca must untangle all three cases with ten lives on the line: ten Italian hostages who will face a Nazi firing squad if the corporal’s killing is not solved to the German command’s satisfaction.
Royal hardback, with map · 352pp · £18.99 · 22.v. 2025
Lovers of Franz K. (hardback edition)
Burhan Sönmez
translated from the Kurdish by Sami Hêzil
“Sönmez playfully expands Kafka’s world in a literary experiment that encourages readers to reimagine the unfinished work of their heroes”
Natalie Perman, Financial Times
West Berlin, 1968. As a youth uprising sweeps over Europe in the shadow of the Cold War, two men face each other across an interrogation table. Ferdy Kaplan, has shot and killed a university student. Kommissar Müller is trying to find out why.
When it transpires that Kaplan’s intended target was not the student, but Max Brod, Franz Kafka’s close friend and the executor of his literary estate, the interrogation of a murderer transforms into a dialogue between a passionate admirer of Kafka’s work, who is attempting to protect the author’s final wish to have all his manuscripts burned, and a police commissioner who is learning more about literature than he thought possible from a prisoner in his custody.B-format hardback · 112pp · £12.99 · Hardback ISBN 978-1-916788-72-5 · 10.iv.2025