The renowned Sudanese-Egyptian author explores the lives of immigrants at home and abroad in this “earnest and engrossing” story collection (Publishers Weekly, starred review). A young woman’s encounter with a former classmate elicits painful reminders of her old life in Khartoum. A wealthy young Sudanese woman studying in Aberdeen begins an unlikely friendship with one of her Scottish classmates. A woman experiences an evolving relationship to her favorite writer, whose portrait of their shared culture both reflects and conflicts with her own sense of identity. Shuttling between the dusty, sun-baked streets of Khartoum and the university halls and cramped apartments of Aberdeen and London, Elsewhere, Home explores, with subtlety and restraint, the profound feelings of yearning, loss, and alienation that come with leaving one’s homeland in pursuit of a different life.

Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Harvard University --

These intimate stories of South Indian immigrants and the families they left behind center women’s lives and ask how women both claim and surrender power—a stunning debut collection from an O. Henry Prize winner Traveling from Pittsburgh to Eastern Washington to Tamil Nadu, these stories about dislocation and dissonance see immigrants and their families confront the costs of leaving and staying, identifying sublime symmetries in lives growing apart. In “Malliga Homes,” selected by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie for an O. Henry Prize, a widow in a retirement community glimpses her future while waiting for her daughter to visit from America. In "No. 16 Model House Road," a woman long subordinate to her husband makes a choice of her own after she inherits a house. In "Nature Exchange," a mother grieving in the wake of a school shooting finds an unusual obsession. In "A Life in America," a professor finds himself accused of having exploited his graduate students. Sindya Bhanoo’s haunting stories show us how immigrants’ paths, and the paths of those they leave behind, are never simple. Bhanoo takes us along on their complicated journeys where regret, hope, and triumph appear in disguise.

For fans of Small Spaces, Coraline, A Series of Unfortunate Events, and James Howe's Bunnicula classics comes the first book in the award-winning, New York Times bestselling Books of Elsewhere series. This house is keeping secrets . . . When eleven-year-old Olive and her parents move into the crumbling mansion on Linden Street and find it filled with mysterious paintings, Olive knows the place is creepy—but it isn’t until she encounters its three talking cats that she realizes there’s something darkly magical afoot. Then Olive finds a pair of antique spectacles in a dusty drawer and discovers the most peculiar thing yet: She can travel inside the house’s spooky paintings to a world that’s strangely quiet . . . and eerily sinister. But in entering Elsewhere, Olive has been ensnared in a mystery darker and more dangerous than she could have imagined, confronting a power that wants to be rid of her by any means necessary. With only the cats and an unusual boy she meets in Elsewhere on her side, it’s up to Olive to save the house from the shadows, before the lights go out for good.

Presents a novel of hope, love, and redemption.

In November 1962, the then 22-year-old Stücke left his job as a tool and die maker and rode out of his hometown on a three-speed bike, with a dream to explore the world on two wheels. During his travels, Stücke encountered many obstacles and near death experiences, which saw him hit by a truck in Chile's Atacama Desert, chased by an angry mob in Haiti, attacked by bees in Mozambique, detained by military in Cameroon and losing his bike in Siberia before having it stolen in Portsmouth. Stücke's extraordinary desire to travel the world was partly motivated by his aversion to returning to factory work in his native Germany. Heinz Stücke is now back where he started: in Hövelhof, the German village he happily cycled away from half a century ago. He visited 196 countries, got through 21 passports, and ended up with a tidy number of 100,000 photos to sort out. He came across Pelé, got pocket money from Haile Selassie, and even slept under the arms of Christ the Redeemer. He cycled more than 648,000 kilometres, most of them on an ordinary gents' bike, and several thousands on a Brompton folding bike. Heinz 'wanted to see it all'. Dutch travel writer Eric van den Berg, who dug into his vast collection of journals, photos, postcards and notes, visited the now 75 year old cyclist to get an answer to that most pressing question: why? His philosophy of 'home is elsewhere' comes through in the daily routines, unexpected encounters and inevitable mishaps of a lifelong adventurist and Einzelgänger, and not least through the pictures Heinz took himself.

A comic novel about a Midwestern professor who tries to prop up his failing prospects for happiness by setting out on the Journey of a Lifetime. Louie Hake is forty-three and teaches architectural history at a third-rate college in Michigan. His second marriage is collapsing, and he's facing a potentially disastrous medical diagnosis. In an attempt to fend off what has become a soul-crushing existential crisis, he decides to treat himself to a tour of the world's most breathtaking architectural sites. Perhaps not surprisingly, Louie gets waylaid on his very first stop in Rome--ludicrously, spectacularly so--and fails to reach most of his other destinations. He embarks on a doomed romance with a jilted bride celebrating her ruined marriage plans alone in London. And in the Arctic he finds that turf houses and aluminum sheds don't amount to much of an architectural tradition. But it turns out that there's another sort of architecture there: icebergs the size of cathedrals, bobbing beside a strange and wondrous landscape. It soon becomes clear that Louie's grand journey is less about where his wanderings have taken him and more about where his past encounters with romance have not. Whether pursuing his first wife, or his estranged current wife, or the older woman he kissed just once a quarter-century ago, Louie reveals himself to be endearing, deeply touching, wonderfully ridiculous . . . and destined to find love in all the wrong places.