Ways Of Going Home

Alejandro Zambra's Ways of Going Home begins with an earthquake, seen through the eyes of an unnamed nine-year-old boy who lives in an undistinguished middleclass housing development in a suburb of Santiago, Chile. When the neighbors camp out overnight, the protagonist gets his first glimpse of Claudia, an older girl who asks him to spy on her uncle Raúl. In the second section, the protagonist is the writer of the story begun in the first section. His father is a man of few words who claims to be apolitical but who quietly sympathized—to what degree, the author isn't sure—with the Pinochet regime. His reflections on the progress of the novel and on his own life—which is strikingly similar to the life of his novel's protagonist—expose the raw suture of fiction and reality. Ways of Going Home switches between author and character, past and present, reflecting with melancholy and rage on the history of a nation and on a generation born too late—the generation which, as the author-narrator puts it, learned to read and write while their parents became accomplices or victims. It is the most personal novel to date from Zambra, the most important Chilean author since Roberto Bolaño.

The landmark first story collection from internationally acclaimed author Alejandro Zambra, now featuring five additional stories and an introduction by his longtime collaborator, Megan McDowell An early desktop computer becomes the third partner in a doomed relationship; an older brother figure whose father lives in exile imparts hilarious life lessons to his young protégé. A man attempts to quit smoking despite the fact that he’s very good at it; another masquerades as the family man he'll never be. Throughout, Pinochet’s dictatorship casts a long shadow, and men in relationships exhibit their profound capacity for both love and harm. In these unforgettable stories—which span religion, romance, technology, soccer, solitude, and more—Alejandro Zambra unfolds a radical literary reflection on life, relationships, and the tender and brutal dimensions of masculinity in Chile from the 1980s to the present. Intimate and playful, provocative and profound, and brilliantly rendered by National Book Award winning translator Megan McDowell, My Documents a testament to the necessity of literature even—and especially—in times of political and personal crisis.

From two-time Newbery Medalist Kate DiCamillo comes a story of discovering who you are — and deciding who you want to be. When Louisiana Elefante’s granny wakes her up in the middle of the night to tell her that the day of reckoning has arrived and they have to leave home immediately, Louisiana isn’t overly worried. After all, Granny has many middle-of-the-night ideas. But this time, things are different. This time, Granny intends for them never to return. Separated from her best friends, Raymie and Beverly, Louisiana struggles to oppose the winds of fate (and Granny) and find a way home. But as Louisiana’s life becomes entwined with the lives of the people of a small Georgia town — including a surly motel owner, a walrus-like minister, and a mysterious boy with a crow on his shoulder — she starts to worry that she is destined only for good-byes. (Which could be due to the curse on Louisiana's and Granny’s heads. But that is a story for another time.) Called “one of DiCamillo’s most singular and arresting creations” by The New York Times Book Review, the heartbreakingly irresistible Louisiana Elefante was introduced to readers in Raymie Nightingale — and now, with humor and tenderness, Kate DiCamillo returns to tell her story.

Gordon Korman’s uproarious, outrageous, and all-too-familiar summer camp adventure is BACK! Rudy Miller really isn’t into the whole camping thing. So when his parents send him to Camp Algonkian “for his own good” all he wants to do is go home. Rudy teams up with his cabin-mate Mike for a series of carefully planned — yet hilariously bungled — escape attempts. Unfortunately, their counsellor (and nemesis) Chip is as determined to keep them there as they are to get away. Rudy and Mike spend their days plotting, playing chess, and working off punishments for their failed escapes. Hmmm, maybe it isn’t such a bad way to spend the summer after all . . .

A "brilliant, innovative, beautiful" (The Guardian) book from the acclaimed author of Chilean Poet "Dazzling . . . a work of parody, but also of poetry." —The New York Times Book Review NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY NPR, THE GUARDIAN, AND THE IRISH TIMES “Latin America’s new literary star” (The New Yorker), Alejandro Zambra is celebrated around the world for his strikingly original, slyly funny, daringly unconventional fiction. Now, at the height of his powers, Zambra returns with his most audaciously brilliant book yet. Written in the form of a standardized test, Multiple Choice invites the reader to respond to virtuoso language exercises and short narrative passages through multiple-choice questions that are thought-provoking, usually unanswerable, and often absurd. It offers a new kind of reading experience, one in which the reader participates directly in the creation of meaning, and the nature of storytelling itself is called into question. At once funny, poignant, and political, Multiple Choice is about love and family, authoritarianism and its legacies, and the conviction that, rather than learning to think for ourselves, we are trained to obey and repeat. Serious in its literary ambition and playful in its execution, it confirms Alejandro Zambra as one of the most important writers working in any language. NAMED A BEST BOOK OF THE SUMMER BY THE WALL STREET JOURNAL, ELLE, THE HUFFINGTON POST, THE MILLIONS, VOX, LIT HUB, THE BBC, THE GUARDIAN AND PUREWOW

Dot Bekker was born and raised in Bulawayo in the south-west of Zimbabwe. After thirty-eight years away ¬- twenty of those in Europe - she decided to return to the country of her birth; however rather than hop on a plane, Dot chose to drive there: all by herself at the age of sixty, in a twenty-year-old 2WD Ford Transit van that she converted into her home. Dot spent eight and a half months covering 20,000km of some of the toughest overlanding routes in the world, through West and Central Africa. This is her story.Follow Dot's extraordinary 20,000km adventure in her first book, Going Home to Africa, where she describes the ups and downs she faced over the course of her grand expedition: the countries, the people, insane traffic, corrupt borders, marriage proposals, perilous potholes and good old Africa Roadside Assistance.Her fascinating journal also highlights the varied landscapes and cultural history of Africa that she discovered along the way, the strange, funny and sometimes terrifying situations that she encountered, and the numerous challenges that she and BlueBelle endured - all the while navigating her own personal internal journey.At the time of writing Dot still lives in and travels with BlueBelle whenever possible and can be seen out and about meeting people and making things happen in her beloved Zimbabwe. Since her return to Bulawayo, Dot has been tirelessly seeking ways to improve the future for rural communities in Zimbabwe. Her twenty years of business coaching experience is helping to enhance their traditional lifestyle with 21st Century technology in order to actively encourage sustainable development. Another of her passions is giving vulnerable and disadvantaged girls access to education, to which end she created the non-profit organisation, Kusasa. She very much believes that making progress in the gender equality/equity agenda through education is vital for her country.She is also already working on the sequel to Going Home in Africa, which will detail the experience of returning to her homeland and the many joys and challenges she has faced since her return, it will be titled Being Home in Africa.Alongside all this, she has also decided to encourage more women to visit Africa and will be running small women-only group tours from 2022 in Zimbabwe, Namibia and South Africa. Watch her Facebook page for details of Going Home to Africa Tours.To find out about Dot's journey as it continues, look at @goinghometoafrica on Facebook and Instagram or on the website www.goinghometoafrica.com for blogs and updates. To find out about the girls' education fund, look at @kusasa.africa on Facebook and Instagram or on the website www.kusasa.africa.

The second novel by the internationally celebrated writer Alejandro Zambra, a “short and strikingly original” (The New Yorker) book about the stories we spin for ourselves and our loved ones—now reissued by Penguin Veronica is late, and Julián is increasingly convinced she won't ever come home. To pass the time, he improvises a story about trees to coax his stepdaughter, Daniela, to sleep. He has made a life as a literature professor, developing a novel about a man tending to a bonsai tree on the weekends. He is a narrator, an architect, a chronicler of other people's stories. But as the night stretches on before him, and the hours pass with no sign of Veronica, Julián finds himself caught up in the slipstream of the story of his life—of their lives together. What combination of desire and coincidence led them here, to this very night? What will the future—and possibly motherless—Daniela think of him and his stories? Why tell stories at all? The second novel by acclaimed Chilean writer Alejandro Zambra, The Private Lives of Trees overflows with his signature wit and his gift for crafting short novels that manage to contain whole worlds.

An "ethnographic" novel that portrays life in California's Napa Valley as it might be a very long time from now, imagined not as a high tech future but as a time of people once again living close to the land.