A boy waits by a wall, whistling for the girl who has captured his heart. A writer believes his beard holds the secret to his art. A nursery rhyme echoes through a woman’s name, reshaping her fate. A spoonful of chili paste becomes both delight and ruin, tracing the fault lines of desire, history, and revolution. In these four  stories, acclaimed Ethiopian author Adam Reta weaves memory, rumor, and imagination into a narrative form he calls hitsinawinet. Footnotes open unexpected doors, nursery rhymes become plotlines, and silences speak as loudly as words.

Rendered into English for the first time by Bethlehem Attfield, Couch Grass invites readers into Ethiopia’s literary heartbeat, where everyday gestures carry philosophical weight and history lingers in intimate lives. Bold, experimental, and deeply humane, this collection introduces Reta, long celebrated in Amharic, as a major new voice in world literature.

When an elephant hurtles down a hillside and blocks the only road to Didoli, six lives become quietly entangled at a windswept estate called Four Chimneys. Its heart is Gargi Dilawari - a washed-up actress, incorrigible drinker and reluctant hostess - clinging to her crumbling inheritance and eroding sanity. She drinks with doctors to forget, gambles with ghosts for comfort, and despises both her tame husband and her unhinged son. Then comes Khaiman Daam, a silver-tongued land shark stranded by fate and drawn in by the estate’s hypnotic spell. 

As the dying elephant cries out from the gorge, old wounds rise from the walls of Four Chimneys, demanding reckoning. What began as idle chatter curdles into a dangerous dance of temptation and 

emotional barter. Out here, truth is never really what you see, it is what you refuse to swallow. 

Illustrator Elodie Ginsburg and her spendthrift best friend, Boris, are inseparable. Taking care of an audacious yellow-haired clown in a red-and-white-striped onesie and oversized black shoes can be a challenge. However, Boris means the world to Elodie. He is a handful, but he’s her handful. Their symbiosis is disrupted when Ivan Lennard, a former professional cyclist with a closely guarded secret, moves into the house next door and becomes a regular occurrence in their lives. Each encounter is a catalyst for Boris to spiral more out of control and increase his outrageous demands, until Elodie finds herself at a crossroads and has to make the most difficult decision she’s ever made.

"Readers who can tolerate the deliberately maddening Boris will find much to enjoy in this mercurial novel, which shrouds an affecting tale of loneliness and longing in lively whimsy. 

A stylish parable about the disconnect between inner and outer worlds."-Kirkus Reviews

Step into the gallery.

Quiet Disasters and Other Miracles is not so much a book as an exhibition—an installation of intimate rooms, each carrying its own catastrophe, its own fragile wonder.

Here, survival is not spectacle but artifact: a chair that remembers hesitation, a mirror that refuses to lie, a rooftop where trust is relearned in silence, a cup of tea still warm by the window.

You walk slowly, as in a museum—pausing, circling back, catching your reflection where you least expect it.

This is not a tale of grand explosions. It is an archive of small collapses and softer rebuildings, of the unseen courage it takes to keep showing up when no one applauds.

Welcome to the gallery of the broken and the becoming. 

Stay as long as you need.

‘Dear Planet’ tracks one Englishwoman’s journey, straddling life between the U.K., the Netherlands and the Philippines; poems her stepping-stones, as she tries to reconcile herself to the reality of different worlds, worlds divided by location, social status, even time.

There are universally relatable themes, such as loss of loved ones, wrestling with health and aging, getting comfortable with uncertainty, love of nature. But the poetry also speaks from a unique perspective, offering glimpses of a world many may not know; that of the social injustice of extreme poverty and the ‘Drug War’ in the Philippines.

Along the way, there is much hope and tenderness too. Perhaps you’ll be, as Ann has been, inspired by the resilience of fellow humans, as well as comforted by our kinship with the natural world, with this Dear Planet.

caught in the current

we are

I am

but not lost

(Garden Path Revisited)

"Some trees give shade. Some give fruit. And some remember— the laughter of children who never grew old, the tears of mothers left unheard, and the weight of generations carried in their roots."

In Ingbian, the land remembers. And memory, once awakened, demands to be heard. The Cursed Tree of Ingbian is a meditation on memory, land, and justice. It asks what becomes of a people who forget their covenants, who mistake fear for tradition, and who treat the earth as resource rather than kin.

In echoing ancestral wisdom, the tale speaks to today’s world of ecological crisis and social fracture, reminding us that what is buried returns, not as myth but as consequence.

A fierce and emotionally rich story set against the cultural landscape of Northern Nigeria. The novel follows Na’ima, a young woman raised to lower her gaze and obey, who dreams of love but finds herself bound in a marriage marked by silence and violence. Through communal judgment, courtroom battles, and her own quiet resistance, Na’ima begins a journey of defiance and self-liberation. This is not just a love story—it is an anthem for every girl told to endure rather than to live.

When famous new media artist Eli Schmidt inherits a mysterious chest from his emotionally detached grandmother, which he is instructed not to open, he can’t curb his curiosity. Inside, he finds a lost and lonely doll named Devorah, who begins to heartbreakingly scream for the love of her life, Yonah. Wishing he had obeyed orders; Eli has no choice but to go on a journey to reunite the pair. To his great distress, this means he must give up his treasured peace and quiet and do what he loathes the most: interact with other people. While Eli desperately tries to break free from this burden, Devorah amplifies her control, embroiling him in a battle that will forever change the course of his life.

"A high-flying comedic story that’s delightfully strange, refreshingly unpredictable, and surprisingly thoughtful amid all the oddity on display. A playful brew of madcap humor and inventive intelligence."-Kirkus Reviews