Seeking refuge from the police during the last days of Franco's rule, Minaya moves into his uncle's country estate and stumbles upon a dark secrets involving an old poet, his uncle, and the death of the woman they both had loved.

In this “beautifully wrought” novel set in Franco-era Spain, a university student stumbles into a decades-old mystery (New York magazine). It’s the late sixties, the last dark years of Franco’s dictatorship. Minaya, a university student in Madrid, is caught up in the student protests and the police are after him. He moves to his uncle Manuel’s country estate in the small town of Mágina to write his thesis on an old friend of his uncle, an obscure republican poet named Jacinto Solana. The country house is full of traces of the poet—notes, photographs, journals—and Minaya soon discovers that, thirty years earlier, during the Spanish Civil War, both his uncle and Solana were in love with the same woman, the beautiful, unsettling Mariana. Engaged to Manuel, she was shot in the attic of the house on her wedding night. With the aid of Inés, a maid, Minaya begins to search for Solana’s lost masterpiece, a novel called Beatus Ille. Looking for a book, he unravels a crime. One of Spain’s most celebrated literary figures, the author of Sepharad and In the Night of Time weaves a “rapturously gothic” tale that is both a novel of ideas and an intricately plotted mystery (The New York Sun). “A brilliant novel by an important writer unafraid of ideas, emotions and genuine beauty.” —Los Angeles Times “Already a contemporary classic, this work . . . is an enigmatic gem in the very best metafiction tradition.” —Library Journal

Explores the phenomenon that millions of people, many who are not otherwise active in the practice of their faith, come back to church to receive ashes and engage in Lenten practices every year. It offers some practical ideas for active Catholics to accompany newcomers and visitors throughout the season of Lent and beyond – and in so doing, help turn brief moments into memorable milestones on the journey of faith.

The final nail-biting installment in the ten-part, award-winning Hanne Wilhelmsen series—bestselling in Norway and throughout Europe—from Scandinavia’s most celebrated female crime writer, Anne Holt. Police investigator Kjell Bonsaksen is a contented man in most areas of life, but for one mistake he made years ago that has rankled like a stone in his shoe ever since: in 2001, a two-year-old girl was killed by a speeding car while playing in the road in front of her home. The marriage of the toddler’s grief-stricken parents dissolved in the wake of the accident, and not long thereafter, the girl’s mother died under mysterious circumstances. The girl’s father, Jonas, was convicted of his ex-wife’s murder and sentenced to twelve years in prison. But Kjell Bonsaksen knew he was innocent. Now it’s 2016, and Kjell is looking forward to his retirement to the French countryside with his wife. An uncomfortable chance encounter with Jonas at a roadside gas station prompts him to dig out Jonas’s case files for Detective Henrik Holme, the resident cold case prodigy. Henrik doesn’t take long to convince his beloved mentor, Hanne Wilhelmsen, that Jonas was wrongly convicted for his ex-wife’s murder. As their investigation evolves, Hanne and Henrik uncover eerie connections to the recent suicide of a right-wing extremist blogger whose fanatic ideologies seem incompatible with a desire to die. Masterfully plotted, In Dust and Ashes is the outstanding finale to Anne Holt’s award-winning, politically and socially conscious series, confirming Hanne Wilhelmsen as a character who will “get in your head—and stay there” (Entertainment Weekly).

"At last, she arrives at the fatal end of the plank . . . and, with her hands crossed over her chest, falls straight downward, suspended for a moment in the air before being devoured by the burning pit that awaits her. . . ." This grisly 1829 account by Pierre Dubois demonstrates the usual European response to the Hindu custom of satis sacrificing themselves on the funeral pyres of their husbands—horror and revulsion. Yet to those of the Hindu faith, not least the satis themselves, this act signals the sati's sacredness and spiritual power. Ashes of Immortality attempts to see the satis through Hindu eyes, providing an extensive experiential and psychoanalytic account of ritual self-sacrifice and self-mutilation in South Asia. Based on fifteen years of fieldwork in northern India, where the state-banned practice of sati reemerged in the 1970s, as well as extensive textual analysis, Weinberger-Thomas constructs a radically new interpretation of satis. She shows that their self-immolation transcends gender, caste and class, region and history, representing for the Hindus a path to immortality.

"[A] translucent novel of passion, illusion and social class....slyly witty and luminous." —Francine Prose in O, The Oprah Magazine During working hours, Mario is a dutiful bureaucrat, scrupulously earning his paycheck as an employee of the provincial Spanish town where he lives. But when he walks through the door of his apartment, he is transformed into the impassioned lover of Blanca, the beautiful, inscrutable wife he saved from the brink of personal crisis. For the love of Blanca, Mario eats sushi and carpaccio, nods in feigned understanding at experimental films, sits patiently through long conversations with her avant-garde friends, and conceals his disgust at shocking art exhibits. Then, little by little, a strange and ominous threat begins to weigh on the marriage. How can love survive its own disappearance? The desperate answer that Antonio Muñoz Molina proposes in this short, circular novella is a model of literary strategy and style, a splendid homage to Flaubert.

A long time ago in China, there existed three Books of Peace that proved so threatening to the reigning powers that they had them burned. Many years later Maxine Hong Kingston wrote a Fourth Book of Peace, but it too was burned--in the catastrophic Berkeley-Oakland Hills fire of 1991, a fire that coincided with the death of her father. Now in this visionary and redemptive work, Kingston completes her interrupted labor, weaving fiction and memoir into a luminous meditation on war and peace, devastation and renewal.