Alma Books: 225 books

Czechoslovakia, 1942. Jans father has been summarily executed by the Nazis. His mother and his older sister Maria have disappeared, and his younger sister Lena has been removed to a remote farm in the German countryside. With Europe in the throes of war, the ten-year-old boy embarks on a personal journey...

"Odyssey, a volume of twenty-one stories aimed at young adults, offers a variety of takes on the theme of travelling - at times funny and playful, at others dramatic and poignant - covering a wide range of themes relevant to teenagers across Europe such as coming of age, sexuality, migration,...

Jim Talbot, a writer with a dozen unpublished novels under his belt, has been roundly rejected by virtually every agent and publisher in the land, and is willing to go to extreme lengths to make his dream of literary stardom come true. Charles Randall, the eccentric founder and managing director of Tetragon...

The Vita Nuova remains a central document in European culture’s examination of love and the self. It is a hundred and fifty years since Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s groundbreaking version of the Vita Nuova. Now Anthony Mortimer, already acclaimed as translator of Cavalcanti, Petrarch and Michelangelo,...

An orphan child full of mischief, Jack lives with his crotchety widow aunt in eighteenth-century England. His naughtiness knows no limits, and when one day he goes a step too far, Aunt Constance decides that she's had enough: from now on, his bachelor uncle can take care of him. Uncle Edmund is in...

Like all the greatest writers, Samuel Beckett was primarily interested in discovering the meaning and purpose of life and of the world into which we are born. Knowledgeable about the religion his family and education instilled in him, which as an adult he could neither accept nor reject, he used it extensively...

Having left her job and boyfriend, thirty-year-old Sandra decides to stay in a village on the Costa Blanca in order to take stock of her life and find a new direction. She befriends Karin and Fredrik, an elderly Norwegian couple, who provide her with stimulating company and take the place of the grandparents...

Micromegas is a six-hundred-and-fifty-year-old, thirty-nine-kilometre-high giant from the planet Sirius who can speak a thousand languages and has been expelled from his homeland for writing a heretical tract. On Saturn he befriends the local secretary of the Academy of Sciences - a comparative dwarf,...

Arthur Baptiste knows little of Rwanda's past and is unaware of its emerging troubles. He lives with his parents on a flower plantation where he talks to no one, not even the butterflies he collects, until one day Beni appears. Beni, the cook's granddaughter, is a child much like Arthur but one who lives...

A theatrical retelling of Gogol's famous story of the two Ivans squabbling over a trifling insult, The Two Friends transposes the action to the village of Newington Green on the outskirts of London in the year 1722, when Daniel Defoe was a resident of the parish, the South Sea Bubble had recently burst...

Initially composed by Poe as a public lecture towards the end of his career and considered by him the culmination of all his life’s work, Eureka is an extended treatise about the creation, existence and the ultimate end of the world. An idiosyncratic blend of creative writing and scientific discourse,...

On arriving at a rural monastery, the monk Ambrosius meets a young girl, Benedicta. She is shunned by the local community for being the daughter of the local hangman, but Ambrosius is drawn into a dangerous sympathy with her, and in defiance of the community and his superiors, he starts spending time...

When war photographer Jo returns from her latest assignment in Afghanistan and moves into the Brighton flat she’s just inherited, she hopes to restore equilibrium to her chaotic life. But images and events of her recent past and the reading of her great-grandmother Elizabeth’s diary haunt her...

Amman, Jordan. As an ambitious digitization project gathers pace in a vast building outside Amman, some unpublished writings by Giordano Bruno flawed genius of the late Renaissance, renegade philosopher, occultist with a prodigious memory disappear together with the Jesuit priest sent by the Vatican...