Europa editions
MARCH-JULY 2021
Distributed by PGW
Europa
editions
MIEKO
KAWAKAMI
HEAVEN
A NOVEL
Europa
editions
2
Marketing & Publicity
• Spring 2021 Lead Title
• Paperback of Breasts and Eggs publishing in early April
• A third Kawakami novel, The Night Belongs to Lovers,
coming fall 2021.
• Dedicated Publicist for press reviews, features, interviews,
influencer campaign
• High-profile national and regional media campaign
• Galleys and e-galleys (Edelweiss, Netgalley) widely available
• Author and translators available for interviews and features
• Indie focus: regional fall show promotion, Indie Next List
campaign, bookseller outreach, blurbs
Comp titles: Breasts and Eggs by Mieko Kawakami;
The Nakano Thrift Shop by Hiromi Kawakami; Death in Her
Hands by Ottessa Moshfegh; The Memory Police by Yoko Ogawa
On-sale: May 25 • Fiction • Hardcover • 9781609456214
5.25 x 8.25 in. • 192 pages • US $23.00/Can $31.00
• ebook isbn: 9781609456306
Kawakami’s novel is told in the voice of a 14-year-old
school student subjected to bullying by his classmates.
The only person who understands his ordeal is
a female classmate who suffers similar treatment at
the hands of her tormenters. Each finds in the other
not only solace but a unique sensibility that opens
up new perspectives on their predicaments.
Revelatory, raw, and incisive, Kawakami’s portrayals
of two young people in need are drawn with profound
tenderness and framed within a nuanced exposition
on the effects and of violence and the importance of
solidarity.
Breasts and Eggs announced Kawakami as
a captivating storyteller, and as an author committed
to expanding the boundaries of contemporary
Japanese literature. Heaven stands as a dazzling
confirmation of her literary talent and broad appeal
and will find favor with readers of the best
contemporary literary fiction.
Heaven
Mieko Kawakami
Translated from the Japanese by Sam Bett and David Boyd
From the best-selling author of
Breasts and Eggs
and international cause célèbre Mieko Kawakami,
a sharp and illuminating novel about the power
of friendship and solidarity to combat life’s
challenges.
AUTHOR OF THE NATIONAL
BESTSELLER BREASTS AND EGGS
RETURNS WITH A NEW NOVEL
3
Mieko Kawakami
Born in Osaka prefecture in 1976, Kawakami began
her career as a singer and songwriter before making
her literary debut in 2006. In 2008, Kawakami pub-
lished Breasts and Eggs as a short novella. It won the
Akutagawa Prize, Japan’s most prestigious literary
honor, and earned praise from acclaimed writers Yoko
Ogawa and Haruki Murakami. The newly expanded
Breasts and Eggs, her first novel to be published in Eng-
lish, was a Vogue, The Millions, and LitHub most an-
ticipated book of the year. Kawakami lives in Japan.
BREASTS
AND EGGS
NOW AVAILABLE IN PAPERBACK
BREASTS AND EGGS
• 9781609456702 • ebook: 9781609455880
“I can never forget the sense of pure astonishment I felt when
I first read Mieko Kawakami’s Breasts and Eggs.”
—Haruki Murakami
“Original and deeply moving… Breasts and Eggs is a gift.”
—Laura van den Berg
“Kawakami considers the agency that women exert over their
bodies…with humor and empathy.”—The New Yorker
“A unique, direct voice—almost every page contains sentences
that stop me in my tracks.”—Marta Bausells, LitHub
“Will transcend cultural barriers and enchant readers.”
—Alina Cohen, New York Observer
• Lives of working-class women are often at the center
of Kawakami’s novels—reminiscent of authors like Lucia
Berlin, Stephanie Danler, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Joy
Williams, George Saunders
• Blurbs solicited from Porochista Khakpour, Rowan Hisayo
Buchanan, Kali Fajardo-Anstine, Katie Kitamura,
John Freeman, Rivka Galchen, Siddhartha Deb
“Breasts and Eggs is fearless in its demand for accountability,
transcendent in its honesty.”—PopMatters
Damon
Galgut
The Promise
Europa
editions
“Subtle and wildly original, tender
and humane.”—The New York Times
Twice shortlisted for the B ooker Prize
A NOVEL
Marketing & Publicity
• E-galleys available on Edelweiss, NetGalley, direct delivery;
• Physical galleys available for sales force & booksellers
• Finished copy mailings via Europa and PGW sales reps
• Major national and regional media campaign
• Feature title at fall regional ABA shows
• Author available for virtual events and interviews
On-sale: April 6 • Fiction • Hardback • 9781609456580
5.25 x 8.25 in. • 272 pages • US $25.00/Can $34.00
• ebook isbn: 9781609456597
The Promise
Damon Galgut
“Galgut will be seen as one
of the great literary triumphs of South
Africa’s transition… in every way
the equal of J. M. Coetzee”
—Rian Malan, author of My Traitor’s Heart
A modern saga that could only have come
from South Africa, written in gorgeous
prose that could only come from the pen
of literary giant and Booker Prize-shortlisted
author, Damon Galgut.
The Promise is the story of the Swart family—
theirs is a story of failed possibilities,
much like the history of their country.
Haunted by an unmet promise made
to the family servant, the well-to-do Swarts
lose touch after the death of their mother.
Reunited by four funerals over three decades,
the dwindling family reflects the charged
atmosphere of post-apartheid South Africa
in a family drama that unfurls against
the unrelenting march of national history.
4
5
Damon Galgut
Galgut’s 2003 novel The Good Doctor won the Com-
monwealth Writers Prize (Africa Region) and was
shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize. In a Strange
Room (Europa, 2010) was also shortlisted for the Man
Booker Prize. In 2013, he was inducted into the Amer-
ican Academy of Arts and Letters. He lives in Cape
Town, South Africa.
© XXXX
In a Strange
Room
Damon Galgut
Europa
editions
WINNER
OF THE 2010
BOOKER
PRIZE
ALSO AVAILABLE
ARCTIC SUMMER
• 9781609452346 • ebook: 9781609452360
IN A STRANGE ROOM
• 9781609450113 • ebook: 9781609450199
“Written in spare, controlled prose, Damon Galgut’s writing
has a powerful cumulative effect that is on one level hard and
comfortless, yet somehow also tender and humane.”
—The New York Times
“It’s no wonder that the South African novelist Damon Galgut
has won a place on the shortlist for the Man Booker Prize...
In a Strange Room is a gripping read, laced throughout with
powerful emotional truth and Damon Galgut’s extraordinary
vision.”—The Independent
“Galgut spares no details and his prose, suspended between
horror and comedy, is almost unbearably powerful.”
—The Guardian
“Like Graham Greene’s work, this quiet, affecting novel will
attract those haunted by the shadow of colonialism.”
—Publishers Weekly on The Good Doctor
• A timely discussion of race relations in South Africa that is
universal
• Author Damon Galgut has been shortlisted for the Booker
Prize and Walter Scott Prize, and won the Commonwealth
Writers Prize—a superb writer to watch
• A gripping family drama that plays out against the backdrop
of post-apartheid South African history
Europa
editions
Marketing & Publicity
• National and regional Media
• Dedicated Publicist for press reviews, features, interviews,
influencer campaign
• Key Library Marketing Campaign
• Author available for interviews
• Book Trailer and other digital author assets available
• E-galleys (Edelweiss, Netgalley, direct download)
and galleys widely available
On-sale: May 4 • Fiction • Hardcover • 9781609456276
5.25 x 8.25 in. • 528 pages • US $26.00/Can $35.00
• Sales: US & Canada • ebook isbn: 9781609456283
Remote Sympathy
Catherine Chidgey
An exquisitely readable and devastatingly
beautiful polyphonic novel of domestic drama
and human connection set in Germany during
the second world war and its aftermath.
Moving away from their lovely apartment
in Munich isn’t nearly as wrenching an
experience for Frau Greta Hahn as she had feared.
Their new home is even lovelier than the one they left
behind, and best of all, right on their doorstep, are some
of the finest craftsmen from all over Europe. Frau Hahn
and the other officers’ wives living in this small commu-
nity can order anything they desire, whether new curtains
made from the finest French silks, or furniture designed
to the most exacting specifications. Life here in Buchen-
wald would appear to be idyllic.
Lying just beyond the forest that surrounds them—so
close and yet so remote—is the
looming presence of a so-called work camp. Frau Hahn’s
husband, SS Sturmbannführer Dietrich Hahn, is to take
up a powerful new position as the camp’s administrator.
As the prison population begins to rise, the job becomes
ever more consuming. Corruption is rife at every level,
the supplies are inadequate, and the sewerage system is
under increasing strain.
When Frau Hahn is forced into an unlikely and poignant
alliance with one of Buchenwald’s prisoners, Dr. Lenard
Weber, her naïve ignorance about what is going on so
nearby is challenged.
A tour de force about the evils of obliviousness, Remote
Sympathy compels us to question our continuing and will-
ful ability to look the other way in a world that is once
more in thrall to the idea that everything—even facts,
truth and morals—is relative.
6
7
Catherine Chidgey
Chidgey is an award-winning and best-selling New
Zealand novelist and short-story writer. Her first novel,
In a Fishbone Church, won the Betty Trask Award, and
was longlisted for the Orange Prize. Golden Deeds was
Time Out’s book of the year, a Best Book in the LA
Times Book Review and a Notable Book in the New
York Times Book Review. Her fourth novel, The Wish
Child, was published in 2016 and won the 2017 Acorn
Foundation Fiction Prize, New Zealand’s richest liter-
ary prize.
“Chidgey could tackle any subject and produce something wonderful from it. She has that gift
of the imagination that finds metaphor, contiguity and paradox wherever she looks.”
—New Zealand Herald
“Chidgey is a gifted writer, and in The Transformations, her confident, commanding prose
and vivid atmospherics hold the attention.”—The Guardian
“The Wish Child [tells] a richly imaginative, memorable story.”—The Times, UK
• For readers of All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr, The German House
by Annette Hess, The Invisible Bridge by Julie Orringer, Suite Française by Irene Némirovsky,
Beneath a Scarlet Sky by Mark Sullivan, Kate Atkinson’s Life After Life and Transcription.
© HELEN MAYALL
Europa
editions
SACHA NASPINI
“Powerful.”
—Critica Letteraria
“Spellbinding.”
—La Stampa
Marketing & Publicity
• Major national and regional media
• Dedicated Publicist for press reviews, features, interviews,
influencer campaign
• E-cards and other digital assets available
• E-galleys (Edelweiss, Netgalley, direct download)
widely available
On-sale: April 20 • Fiction • Paperback • 9781609456665
5.25 x 8.25 in. • 208 pages • US $17.00/Can $23.00
• ebook isbn: 9781609456672
Nives
Sacha Naspini
Translated from the Italian by Clarissa Botsford
One of the most exciting new voices in Italian literature
brings to life a hauntingly beautiful story of undying
love, loss, and resilience, and a fierce, unforgettable
heroine.
Meet Nives: widower, Tuscan through-and-through,
survivor. Nives has recently lost her husband of fifty
years. She didn’t cry when she found him dead in the pig
pen, she didn’t cry at the funeral, but now loneliness
has set in. When she decides to bring her favorite chicken
inside for company, she is shocked, confused, and
guilt-ridden to discover that the chicken’s company
is a more than adequate replacement for her dead
husband. How is such a thing possible?!
But one day, Giacomina the chicken has some kind of
epileptic fit in front of the TV. Unable to rouse the
paralyzed chicken, Nives has no choice but to call the
town veterinarian, Loriano Bottai, an old acquaintance.
What follows is the phone call of a lifetime, a phone call
that becomes a novel. Their conversation veers from
the stricken chicken to the past—to the life they once
shared, the secrets they never had the courage to reveal,
wounds that never healed.
Nives reverberates with the kinds of stories we tell
ourselves late at night: stories of love lost,
of abandonment, of silent and heart-breaking nostalgia,
of joy, laughter, and despair. With delicate yet sharp prose
and raw, astonishing honesty, Sacha Naspini bravely
explores the core of our shared humanity.
8
DEBUT FICTION FROM ITALY
9
Sacha Naspini
Naspini was born in 1976 in Grosseto, a
town in Southern Tuscany. He has worked
as an editor, art director, and screenwriter,
and is the author of numerous novels and
short stories which have been translated into
several languages. Nives is his first novel to
appear in English.
© ALESSANDRA FUCCILLO
“As immediate and spellbinding as a two-character play… Naspini is excellent at conjuring
characters and situations.”
—La Stampa
“Nives carries a powerful message of female emancipation: it’s impossible not to root for the title
character as she reclaims her place in the world after a whole life spent in men’s shadow.”
—Critica Letteraria
• English debut of one of Italy’s most innovative and critically acclaimed new voices.
• For readers of Donatella Di Pietrantonio’s A Girl Returned, Olga Tokarcuk’s Drive Your Plough
over the Bones of the Dead, Our Souls at Night by Kent Haruf, Ties by Domenico Starnone,
Go, Went, Gone by Jenny Erpenbeck, and the novels of Alina Bronsky.
Europa
editions
In her twenty-eighth novel in as many years,
best-selling Belgian novelist and international lit-
erary superstar Amélie Nothomb takes on a story
for the ages: the life of Jesus.
In a first-person voice as droll and irreverent
as it is wise, Nothomb narrates Jesus’s final days,
from his trial to his crucifixion to the resurrec-
tion.
Amid asides about his relationships with his
mother and Judas, his love for Mary Magdalene,
and his many miracles, we find a man struggling
with his humanity and his exceptional nature,
straddling the line between human and deity, the
son of a formless, omnipotent creator in the falli-
ble form of a man.
• For readers looking for a wittier
Gospel According to Jesus Christ by José
Saramago, a slimmer The Testament of Mary
by Colm Tóibín, and a more European
sensibility than that found in The Book
of Longings by Sue Monk Kidd.
Marketing & Publicity
• National and regional Media Campaign
• Bookshop.org, Shelf, and other consumer marketing
• Video material, consumer-focused creatives available
• Special outreach to translation-focused media and religious
interest media
• Author available for interviews and tour tbd
• Galleys and E-galleys (Edelweiss, Netgalley, direct download)
widely available
On-sale: April 13 • Fiction • TPO • 9781609456603
5.25 x 8.25 in • 96 pages • US $17.00/Can $23.00
• ebook isbn: 9781609456610
Thirst
Amélie Nothomb
Translated from the French by Alison Anderson
10
11
Amélie Nothomb
Nothomb was born in Japan to Belgian par-
ents in 1967. She lives in Paris. Since her
debut on the French literary scene a little
more than a decade ago, she has published a
novel a year, every year. Her edgy fiction, un-
conventional thinking, and public persona
have combined to transform her into a world-
wide literary sensation. She is the recipient of
the French Academy’s 1999 Grand Prix for
the Novel, the René-Fallet, Alain-Fournier,
and Jean-Giono prizes.
“An incredible mix of Mel Gibson’s The Passion of Christ
and Monty Python’s The Life of Brian. I’ve never read anything
like it!”—France Inter
“Thirst is Amélie Nothomb’s best novel since The Character
of Rain [ . . . ] With humor, Nothomb philosophizes about
the body, love, pleasure, human ingratitude, suffering, hope,
faith, death.”—Les Echos
“Readers who love the alienation and dark comedy of Haruki
Murakami would be wise to hunt down Nothomb’s work;
she’s treading in the same forests as Murakami, but her steps
are lighter and she covers more territory than the celebrated
Japanese novelist.”
—Paul Constant, The Seattle Review of Books
• Finalist for the Prix Goncourt
• Major author relaunch with galleys, bookseller outreach,
social media and online campaign, marketing for this
critically acclaimed novel by best-selling European author
© JEAN-BAPTISTE MONDINO
Amélie Nothomb
TOKYO
FIANCÉE
Europa
editions
ALSO AVAILABLE
TOKYO FIANCÉE
• 9781933372648
PETRONILLE
• 9781609452902 • ebook: 9781609453008
Europa
editions
From one of Japan’s rising literary stars,
two mesmerizing novellas told with stylistic
inventiveness and breathtaking sensitivity
about memory, loss, and love.
Taichi was forced to stop working almost
a decade ago and since then he and his wife
Natsuko have been getting by on her part-time
wages. But Natsuko is a woman accustomed
to hardship. When her own family’s fortune dried
up for years during her childhood, she, her
brother, and her mother lived a surreal hand-to-
mouth existence shaped by her mother’s refusal
to accept their new station in life.
One day, Natsuko sees an ad for a spa and
recognizes the place as the former luxury hotel
that Natsuko’s grandfather had taken her mother
to when she was little. She decides to take her
damaged husband to the spa, despite the cost,
but their time there triggers hard but ultimately
redemptive memories relating to the complicated
history of her family and a reconciliation
with her husband.
Modeled on The Makioka Sisters, Junichiro
Tanizaki’s classic story, Ninety-Nine Kisses
portrays in touching and lyrical fashion the lives
of the four unmarried sisters in a historical,
close-knit neighborhood of contemporary Tokyo.
An atmospheric and captivating tail of siblings
and women’s lives.
Marketing & Publicity
• Galleys & e-galleys available; e-galleys offered on Edelweiss,
NetGalley, direct delivery via Europa and PGW sales reps
• National and regional Media
Comp titles: Hurricane Season by Fernanda Melchor, Breasts
and Eggs by Mieko Kawakami, The Nakano Thrift Shop by Hiromi
Kawakami
On-sale: April 6 • Fiction • Paperback • 9781609456511
5.25 x 8.25 in. • 144 pages • US $17.00/Can $23.00
• Sales: US & Canada • ebook isbn: 9781609456528
Touring the Land
of the Dead
& Ninety-Nine Kisses
Maki Kashimada
Translated from the Japanese by Haydn Trowell
12
Maki Kashimada
Kashimada’s first novel Two won the 1998 Bungei Prize. Since then, she has established herself as a writer
of literary fiction and become known for her avant-garde style. In 2005 she received the Mishima Yukio
Prize for Love at 6,000 Degrees Celsius, a novel set in Nagasaki and based on Hiroshima mon amour by
Marguerite Duras, and in 2007 she took the Noma Prize for New Writers for Picardy Third. She was nom-
inated three times for the Akutagawa Prize before ultimately winning the award in 2012 with Touring the
Land of the Dead. One of her best-known works is The Kingdom of Zero (2009), which reworks Dostoevsky’s
The Idiot into the tale of a saintly idiot in Japan. She has been a follower of the Japanese Orthodox Church
since high school and is married to a member of its clergy.
• Winner of the Akutagawa Prize, “Japan’s National Book Award”
• Two hallucinatory, emotionally charged tales by a bold, new voice in Japanese Fiction
• For readers of Yoko Ogawa, Fernanda Melchor, Yuko Tsashima, Mieko Kawakami,
The Enlightenment of the Greengage Tree by Shokoofeh Azar, Territory of Light
by Yuko Tshashima
13
Europa
editions
“FULLOF SUSPENSEAND BEAUTIFULLY WRITTEN”
–The Sunday Times
Marketing & Publicity
• Galleys & e-galleys available; e-galleys offered on Edelweiss,
NetGalley, direct delivery via Europa and PGW sales reps
• National and regional Media
• Library marketing campaign
On-sale: March 9 • Fiction • Hardcover • 9781609456825
5.25 x 8.25 in.• 320 pages • US $26.00
• ebook isbn: 9781609456832
A Station
on the Path
to Somewhere Better
Benjamin Wood
Shortlisted for the CWA Gold Dagger Award
and the European Union Prize for Literature 2019.
“His mistakes are my inheritance. The rotten blood he gave
me is the blood I will pass on.”
For twenty years, Daniel Hardesty has lived with
the emotional scars of a childhood trauma which
he is powerless to undo. One August morning, Daniel
and his estranged father Francis—a character
of irresistible charm and roiling self-pity—set out on
a road trip that seems a promise to salvage their
relationship.
They have one shared interest, The Artifex, a children’s
TV program where Fran works on set, and Daniel has
been promised special access to the studio. But with
every passing mile, the layers of Fran’s mendacity and
desperation are exposed, pushing him to acts
of violence that will define the rest of his son’s life.
The acclaimed author of The Ecliptic has written a novel
of exceptional beauty about the bond between fathers
and sons, and the invention and reconciliation of self—
weaving a haunting story of lost innocence and love.
“A NOVEL WRITTEN FROM THE GUT,
AND WITH A CORRESPONDINGLY
VISCERAL POWER. A SUPERBLY