The bestselling voice of Europe's fastest-growing, fastest-living city: the new Berlin. 'The little jewellery box also held the red coral bracelet from Nikolai Sergeyevich. Its six hundred and seventy-five little coral beads were strung onto a silken thread, and they glowed as red as rage. My great-grandmother put the hairbrush down in her lap. She closed her eyes for a long time. Then she opened her eyes again, took the red coral bracelet from the little box and fastened it around her left wrist. Her skin was very white. That evening, for the first time in three years, she shared a meal with my great-grandfather.' Coral bracelets 'as red as rage' from Russian lovers; a sad old woman who nonetheless 'sometimes sang and winked with her left eye and laughed till the tears came'; country houses 'away from Berlin, linden trees out front, chestnuts in the back, sky above': 'The Summer House, Later' is an elegant, measured, reflective collection of stories which captures beautifully the...

When someone very close to you dies your whole life changes. Everything is different. Alice is the central figure in these five inter-connected narratives, which tell of her life at times of loss. Suddenly it is no longer possible to say what the person looked like, how he spoke, cursed, smiled, how he lived his life. Objects are left behind, books, letters, pictures and every now and again you think you can see them in a crowd. Judith Hermann tells of days of transition, of waiting, of holding on and letting go - and of how clear and dazzling such days can sometimes be. Alice is a book of extraordinary power and great literary beauty from one of Europe's finest writers Alice is translated by Margot Bettauer Dembo.

Stella is married, she has a child and a fulfilling job. She lives with her young family in a house in the suburbs. Her life is happy and unremarkable, but she is a little lonely - her husband travels a lot for work and so she is often alone in the house with only her daughter for company. One day a stranger appears at her door, a man Stella's never seen before. He says he just wants to talk to her, nothing more. She refuses. The next day he comes again. And then the day after that. He will not leave her in peace. When Stella works out that he lives up the road, and tries to confront him, it makes no difference. This is the beginning of a nightmare that slowly and remorselessly escalates. Where Love Begins is a delicately wrought, deeply sinister novel about how easily the comfortable lives we construct for ourselves can be shattered.

Judith Hermann's masterly new stories reveal the inconceivable drama of existence: what happens when we meet someone?In the stories of Letti Park, strangers wander into ordinary lives and change them in profound yet unknowable ways. Like us, Judith Hermann's characters have no defence against these intense and unpredictable encounters. They occur at random, without cause or provocation, and unfold beneath the threshold of comprehension. In Letti Park, Judith Hermann explores this all-important moment, our loneliness and rage and longing.