For more than a decade, Jacques Pauw has traversed his native continent in pursuit of warlords and drug traffickers, child soldiers and charlatans, adventure and anarchy. What he found was a rich array of personalities and a panoply of stories, ranging from the profoundly tragic to the intensely personal. Pauw’s stories range from South Africa to Rwanda, from Sierra Leone and the Sudan to Mozambique. Readers are taken behind the scenes of sensational news reports with compassion, humour and occasional cynicism and emerge in the knowledge that, even if it’s true that there is nothing new out of Africa, the writer has found fresh ways to present time-honoured tales of love, life, misery and mortality.

A witch/detective and her young associate try to track a serial killer known as the Baron of the Mists in a city where crime should be impossible.

An extended ethnographic essay that explores the socially produced, narratively mediated, and relatively unconscious ideological responses of people--scholars and folk--to a history of race and class domination, with specific reference to several distinct though inter- related spheres of folkloric symbolic action concerning the working classes of Mexican-American south Texas. Paper edition (unseen), $15.95. Annotation copyright by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

A sorceress and a police detective track a reborn Jack the Ripper through historically recreated cities, from Victorian London to Montezuma's Mexico City.

I hunt demons.I don't work for them. And I promised my mom one thing before she was murdered: Under no circumstances, would I ever go near the high demons. But I'll break that promise over and over again if it helps me avenge her death. When my only lead turns to ash in the middle of demon territory, I'm suddenly a dead witch walking. Violence in Samael's club is an automatic death sentence... unless he can use you. And it turns out that the most powerful demon in the country has a use for little ol' me. Demons are being slaughtered. His demons. And as a bounty hunter, it's up to me to find out who would dare hurt his people. I've got two weeks to find the killer, and if I fail, I'm bonded to Samael. Forever. Samael's certain that I'll be his, but I'm not the kinda girl who risks her freedom for a demon. I'm the kinda girl who won't let anyone get in the way of her vengeance- not even the Machiavellian control freak who thinks he can run my life. The problem? I've pissed the wrong people off. Now I'm the one being hunted, and someone's coming for me with everything they have. But I'm never more dangerous than when my back is up against the wall. And I'm ready to come out swinging.

Winner of the EBRD Literature Prize 2019 On New Years' Eve 1938, the writer Abdulla Qodiriy is taken from his home by the Soviet secret police and thrown into a Tashkent prison. There, to distract himself from the physical and psychological torment of beatings and mindless interrogations, he attempts to mentally reconstruct the novel he was writing at the time of his arrest - based on the tragic life of the Uzbek poet-queen Oyhon, married to three khans in succession, and living as Abdulla now does, with the threat of execution hanging over her. As he gets to know his cellmates, Abdulla discovers that the Great Game of Oyhon's time, when English and Russian spies infiltrated the courts of Central Asia, has echoes in the 1930s present, but as his identification with his protagonist increases and past and present overlap it seems that Abdulla's inability to tell fact from fiction will be his undoing. The Devils' Dance brings to life the extraordinary culture of 19th century Turkestan, a world of lavish poetry recitals, brutal polo matches, and a cosmopolitan and culturally diverse Islam rarely described in western literature. Hamid Ismailov's virtuosic prose recreates this multilingual milieu in a digressive, intricately structured novel, dense with allusion, studded with quotes and sayings, and threaded through with modern and classical poetry. With this poignant, loving resurrection of both a culture and a literary canon brutally suppressed by a dictatorship which continues today, Ismailov demonstrates yet again his masterful marriage of contemporary international fiction and the Central Asian literary traditions, and his deserved position in the pantheon of both.