Call it a collection of stories or a compilation of human emotions, this is the second solo book of Ms Rimli Bhattacharya. The author calls herself a bohemian and travels around the globe in a caravan which is driven by rape, lust, lies, forbidden love, mental illness, homicide and death. This book had been crafted sitting in that caravan lost in myriad textures and flavours, with those mental demons screaming her to stop. She did not listen. The book which unleashes the dark domain of human mind makes it a compelling read.

A new translation of brilliant stories by Man Booker-finalist and author of Confession of the Lioness.

A delightful picture book about a wonderfully wet walk. Simple text and colourful illustrations introduce the science of rain to very young children. This is a highly illustrated ebook that can only be read on the Kindle Fire or other tablet.

Born in 1908, Niccolo Tucci is the author of six books (three in Italian, three in English). He first became known in America for his articles and stories published in various leading periodicals--among them Partisan Review, Harper's, The Atlantic, and The New Yorker. The Rain Came Last is the first collection of Tucci's English-language stories to be published. Mary McCarthy remarks in her introduction that the material Tucci delineates lies "somewhere between excruciated memory and 'happy' invention." He writes of his childhood and adolescence in the remote Tuscany countryside where his family lived, dislocated from its grand and opulent past. Later, in a different dislocation, Tucci's stories spring from his urbane and bohemian adult years in Manhattan, to which he emigrated in the 1930s. Very few other writers for whom English was not a native language have adopted and adapted it in so masterly and personal a fashion--Conrad and Nabokov among the rare exceptions. "He is," comments Mary McCarthy, "an international man, a very unusual thing, and it is that perhaps that has put and kept him in a class by himself."

Rain and Other Stories is a book of eleven short stories about people in crisis. Stories like Rope and The Last Day are about educators who have reached crisis moments in their lives and must find some kind of resolution. A man wants to live forever in Immortal, and in The River and Snow Falling readers will find out how dangerous it is to betray the trust of the McKinley women. Rain tells the tale of a young boy abducted by a rebel army in Africa, and The Green Chain deals with the dangers of working in a sawmill in Northeastern Montana. All of these stories are about the pivotal moments of ordinary people, and their responses show us something about how we survive as human beings.

• Winner of the 1997 Drue Heinz Literature Prize This collection is filled with narrative and character grounded in the meaning and value the earth gives to human existence. In one story, a woman sleeps with the village priest, trying to gain back the land the church took from her family; in another, relatives in the Azores fight over a plot of land owned by their expatriate American cousin. Even apparently small images are cast in terms of the earth: Milton, one narrator explains, has made apples the object of a misunderstanding by naming them as Eden's fruit: "In the Bible, no fruit is named in the Garden of Eden - and to this day apples are misunderstood. They were trying to tempt people not into sin but into listening to the earth more closely. . . . their white meal runs wet with the knowledge of the language of the land, but people do not listen."Vaz's beautiful, intensely conscious language often delicately slips her stories into the realm of the fado, the Portuguese song about fate and longing. "Listen for the nightingale that presses its breast against the thorns of the rose," on character sings, "that the song might be more beautiful." Such a verse might describe Vaz's own motive behind her willingness to confront her subject's ambiguities and her characters' conflicts - the simultaneous joy and sorrow of some of life's discoveries, the pain sometimes hidden within passion and pleasure.