Serpent S Tail imprint: 83 books

A plain-clothes copper in Paris, Kleber is 40 years old, drinks hard and smokes fifty a day. He is devoted to his young wife, Elenya, a former prostitute whom he rescued from her pimp, but he is embittered by 22 years on the streets, and his sleep is haunted by dreams of death. Kleber has many enemies,...

Michel is ten years old, living in Pointe Noire, Congo, in the 1970s. His mother sells peanuts at the market, his father works at the Victory Palace Hotel, and brings home books left behind by the white guests. Planes cross the sky overhead, and Michel and his friend Loun?s dream about the countries...

El Paso and Ciudad Ju?rez sit across the Texas / Mexico border from each other. They share streets, share industry, share crime. One gang claims territory in both: Los Aztecas. This single criminal organisation is responsible for most of the homicides committed in Ju?rez, and Felipe Morales is one...

Just thirty, with a well-paid job, depression and no love life, the narrator and anti-hero par excellence of this grim, funny and clever novel smokes four packs of cigarettes a day and writes weird animal stories in his spare time. A computer programmer by day, he is tolerably content, until, that...

Ranging from one-page fantasies to novella-length studies of everyday existence, The Walk reveals the irresistible genius of one of the twentieth century's greatest writers. Under-appreciated even in his own lifetime, Robert Walser has nonetheless been recognised by such writers as W.G. Sebald, Susan...

Gerardo Fischer is missing. Can you help? Theater director Gerardo Fischer has vanished from the Argentinian artists' colony where he was rehearsing a pioneering new work. No note. No warning. No trace. His colleagues are frightened for him, so they call in Juan Manuel Pérez,...

This updated edition of Secret Affairs covers the momentous events of the past year in the Middle East and at home in the UK. It reveals the unreported attempts by Britain to cultivate relations with the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt after the fall of Mubarak, the military intervention on the side of...

TOP TEN SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER Think about that first tickle of hunger in your stomach. A moment ago, you could have been thinking about anything, but now it's thickly buttered marmite toast, a frosty scoop of ice cream straight from the tub, some creamy, cheesy scrambled eggs or a fuzzy,...

'Listen, Leaf,' Pritchard said, 'the hash is neither here nor there. You're in a lot more trouble than possession of a bit of dope. You've got big problems, man... big problems.' He looked at me with something akin to sympathy. 'How did you get into such a fix?' I'd been asking myself...

Once the preserve of the English, now, for nations the world over, summertime means cricket bats to be oiled, rain forecasts analysed and tea in the pavilion. Cricket has enthralled us since the seventeenth century. But what is it about the game that provokes such fervour? Award-winning...

Leonard March walks free from jail after fourteen years' hard time, served after turning state's witness against his Mafia boss Salvatore Lombard. It's only after Leonard is sentenced that the public learned that he was a Mob hitman with eighteen deaths to answer for. Leonard is released to...

Anytown, England. Jeremy Shepherd has reached post-ambition, giving up the trappings of his London life (flash job, flash cars, even flashier girlfriends) to move back to his home town and his parents' house. By day, he is a low-level civil servant, chained to his desk and content to idle away the...

Jack Searle is an American widower, bringing up his two stepdaughters Lidia and Marina alone in the border town of Laredo after losing his wife to cancer. Jack often takes the girls to visit their Mexican family over the border in Nuevo Laredo. Marina, the elder sister, persuades him to let...

April 1943: four boys playing in Hagley Woods, Worcestershire make a gruesome discovery. Inside an enormous elm tree, there is the body of a woman, her mouth stuffed with a length of cloth. As the case goes cold, mysterious graffiti starts going up across the Midlands: 'Who put Bella in the Wych Elm?' To...