Böcker i Anthem Cosmopolis Writings-serien

A highly intelligent, empathetic account of a family haunted by dark secrets. Simultaneously a psychological study, a focus for feminism, a novel of intrigue, it has the unique and laudable ability to win the reader¿s sympathy for the most unsavoury of characters.

Christian Lehmann brings his experience as a musicologist, singer and academic to this fascinating journey through the origins of music and its role in human development, culture and society.

The sound of a trumpet across a Japanese mountain valley leads a young man to befriend a mysterious stranger. During repeated visits to the cave where the stranger has set up home, the young man learns about his life in the region. The stranger's hilarious, bawdy and touching narratives captivate the young man, but he begins to doubt their veracity. Can they really be true?'Tales from a Mountain Cave' is a translation of Hisashi Inoue's highly popular 'Shinshaku Tono Monogatari' (新釈遠野物語), set in the Kamaishi area of Iwate Prefecture, Northeast Japan. Kamaishi was devastated by the tsunami of March 2011, and royalties on sales of this book will be donated to post-tsunami community support projects.

It is the period just before the First World War. The multilingual, multifaith and multicultural Ottoman Empire is facing ruin and annihilation. Sehsuvar Sami is a young man from the city of Salonika whose dream is to move to Paris with his lover Ester and become a writer. However, the uprisings that begin in July 1908 in the Balkans are set to change his destiny, just as they will change the destiny of the entire country. A bit part in an assassination eventually turns him into one of the uprising's most feared hitmen. Caught between his love of literature and the dark world of politics and struggling to find the strength to resist the pull of history, Sehsuvar ends up becoming a key figure in the new government's intelligence network. His aim now is not to write novels that will draw people into a world of decency and beauty but to carry out his duties as a servant of the nation and defend his country, even if that means committing murder, mass murder. The reasoning is simple: in order to create a strong and independent country, one must be ready to commit atrocities. Taking place in Istanbul, Salonika, Paris and Macedonia between 1908 and 1926, 'Farewell, My Beautiful Homeland' is the story of lives that have been turned upside down by rebellion, revolution and war. It is the story of the Greek declaration of independence, of the Jews of Salonika being forced into exile, of the Bulgarians fighting for their independence and of the decline of the Ottoman Empire and the struggle to create a new nation out of its crumbling ruins. It is also the story of one man's search for his true calling amidst the chaos of a turbulent historical era, the story of a man caught between his love for his country and his love for his woman. 'Farewell, My Beautiful Homeland' is a story of unfulfilled dreams and the call of history. And underpinning it all is one fundamental question, one fundamental struggle: which takes precedence - the state or the people?

A powerful love story set in the class-conscious Tsarist Russia of the early 19th century. It embraces every level of that society - serf, provincial, aristocrat - in verse which is by turns beautiful, witty, wickedly perceptive and always readable. It traces the lives of two young people from childhood to maturity. Yevgeny, the fashionably disillusioned young man who knows everything about love except the most important thing; Tatiana, whose only experience of love comes from romantic novels but who knows how to love till the end. This is essential reading for anyone with a love of Russian literature, because this is where it all began. There is little pre-history to that golden age of 19th century novels. Lomonosov, a fisherman's son turned scholar, took church Slavonic, peasant Russian, mixed in a few 'Loan translations' and gave a French-speaking aristocracy a literary language; Pushkin was the first truly great poet to use it; Eugene Onegin is his greatest work.