Dimos Horacki is a Borolian journalist and a cynical patriot, his muckraking days behind him. But when his newspaper ships him to the front, he’s embedded in the Imperial Army and the reality of colonial expansion is laid bare before him. His adventures take him from villages and homesteads to the great refugee city of Hronople, built of glass, steel, and stone, all while a war rages around him. The empire fights for coal and iron, but the anarchists of Hron fight for their way of life. A Country of Ghosts is a novel of utopia besieged and a tale that challenges every premise of contemporary society.

Four troubled people meet beneath Chicago’s shadowy streets and discover a woman who changes their lives forever in this powerful, haunting novel of magic and miracles, from the New York Times bestselling author of the V.I. Warshawski series “Truly remarkable.”—San Francisco Chronicle “Rich, imaginative, [and] intensely moving.”—Chicago Tribune “Astonishing and affecting.”—Booklist They come from different worlds and meet at a time of crisis for all of them. Luisa, a drunken diva fallen on hard times, discovers on Chicago's streets a drama greater than any she has experienced onstage. Madeleine, a homeless woman, sees the Virgin Mary’s blood seeping through a concrete wall beneath a luxury hotel. Mara, a rebellious adolescent cast out by her wealthy grandfather, becomes the catalyst for a war between the haves and have-nots as she searches among society’s castoffs for the mother she never knew. As the three women fight for their right to live and worship beneath the hotel, they find an ally in Hector Tammuz, an idealistic young psychiatrist risking his career to treat the homeless regardless of the cost. Tensions in the city are escalating when a mysterious woman appears during a violent storm. Alluring to some, repellent to others, she never speaks; the street people call her Starr. And as she slowly transforms their lives, miracles begin to happen in a city completely unprepared for the outcome. In this extraordinary novel, Sara Paretsky gives voice to the dispossessed, to men and women struggling to bury the ghosts of the past, fighting for their lives in a world hungry for miracles, terrified of change.

Gaylord Brewer's ninth collection of poetry, Country of Ghost, is by turns harrowing, haunted, and darkly humorous, and always deeply felt. When the figure Ghost appears--crossing a bridge in Spain, beside a river of the dead in France, across a midnight lake in Finland--our speaker follows into a ravenous geography of longing and regret. In this astounding sequence of poems, who has summonsed whom? Brewer's folie à deux explores both the worlds of the living and of the dead, worlds alternately aching and tender, and of the spirits caught between them.

An intellectual feast for fans of offbeat history, Ghostland takes readers on a road trip through some of the country's most infamously haunted places--and deep into the dark side of our history.

Featuring everything from sports stadiums to shopping malls, hundreds of new cities in China stand empty, with hundreds more set to be built by 2030. Between now and then, the country's urban population will leap to over one billion, as the central government kicks its urbanization initiative into overdrive. In the process, traditional social structures are being torn apart, and a rootless, semi-displaced, consumption orientated culture rapidly taking their place. Ghost Cities of China is an enthralling dialogue driven, on-location search for an understanding of China's new cities and the reasons why many currently stand empty.

SHORTLISTED FOR THE PEN ACKERLEY PRIZE 2020 ‘A uniquely strange and wonderful work of literature’ Philip Hoare ‘An exciting new voice’ Mark Cocker, author of Crow Country