Books to Look Forward to from Bitter Lemon Press

Every week, Roberto Marías crosses Rome on foot to arrive at his psychiatrist's office.  There, he often sits in silence, stumped by the ritual—but sometimes crucial memories come to the surface.  He remembers when he was a child and used to surf with his father.  He remembers the treacherous years he spent working as an under-cover Carabinieri, years that taught him how cynicism and corruption are not merely external influences, but also exist within us.  He has lived an intoxicating and crushing life, but now his psychiatrist's words, the hypnotic strolls through Rome, and a meeting with a woman named Emma—who like Roberto is ravaged by a profound guilt—are beginning to revive him.  Moreover, when eleven-year-old Giacomo asks Roberto to help him conquer his nightmares, Roberto at last achieves a true rebirth.  The Silence of the Wave is by Gianrico Carofiglio and is due out in September 2013.

 Film Tie-In Edition, previously published as 'Badfellas'.  The story is violent, pacy and full of black humour.  Imagine the Soprano family arriving in France, settling down in a small town in Normandy.  Fred Blake tells everyone he is writing a history of the D-Day landings.  In fact, Blake is Giovanni Manzoni, an ex-Mafia boss who grassed and is now in the FBI Witness Protection Program.  Having blown his cover a number of times in the US, the FBI finally sends him to France.  A coincidence beyond belief blows Fred's cover yet again and, with the arrival of the shooters from Newark, he is able to dive back into the violent life of crime he misses so much.  The Family/Badfellas is by Tonino Benacquista and is due to be published in October 2013.

The Man Who Loves Dogs is by Leonardo Padua and is due to be published in December 2013.  Cuban writer Iván Cárdenas Maturell meets a mysterious foreigner on a Havana beach who is always in the company of two Russian wolfhounds.  Iván quickly names him “the man who loved dogs”.  The man eventually confesses that he is actually Ramón Mercader, the man who killed Leon Trotsky in Mexico City in 1940, and that he is now living in a secret exile in Cuba after being released from jail in Mexico.  Moving seamlessly between Iván's life in Cuba, Mercader's early years in Spain and France, and Trotsky's long years of exile, The Man Who Loved Dogs is Leonardo Padura's most ambitious and brilliantly executed novel yet.  It is the story of revolutions fought and betrayed, the ways in which men's political convictions are continually tested and manipulated, and a powerful critique of the role of fear in consolidating political power