Valeria Parrella

Alexei Sayle

Jean-Claude Izzo

Pawel Huelle

Murathan Mungan

Artur Becker

Christian Garcin

Peppe Lanzetta

Dinesh Allirajah

Adam Kaminski

Hatice Meryem

Claudia Parman

The six European port cities known as the Cities on the Edge Liverpool, Bremen, Gdansk, Istanbul, Marseilles and Naples - share a history of dissent, diversity and economic reinvention. Once gateways to the world, bringing wealth and innovation to their respective nations, they've long been maligned and misunderstood by their compatriots, preferring instead to look outwards, towards the sea - to the possibilities of change, of travel and of rebirth. Featuring short stories by twelve acclaimed writers from the Cities on the Edge, ReBerth explores these landscapes of change - the social tensions, the scars of war and economic decline, the attempts at regeneration, and the startling and sometimes unsavoury secrets of how these cities inhabitants thrive and survive. ...In Gdansk, a German exile returns to his childhood home in search of a valuable coin collection left behind during World War II... ...In Naples, a young woman desperate to escape the slums by any means necessary rises from street kid, to Camorra moll, to political powerbroker... ...In Liverpool, a young Spanish footballer arrives to fulfil his dream of playing in the Premiership. But in the backstreets of Anfield he meets a local resident with a very different perspective on the beautiful game ...

Stories from Cities on the Edge

ReBerth

A student pedals an old Ukraina bicycle between striking factories, delivering bulletins, in the tumultuous first days of the Solidarity movement... A shepherd watches, unseen, as a strange figure disembarks from a pirate ship anchored in the cove below, to bury a chest on the beach that later proves empty... A prisoner in a Berber dungeon recounts his life s story the failed pursuit of the world s very first language by scrawling in the sand on his cell floor... The characters in Pawel Huelle's mesmerising stories find themselves, willingly or not, at the heart of epic narratives; legends and histories that stretch far beyond the limits of their own lives. Against the backdrop of the Baltic coast, mythology and meteorology mix with the inexorable tide of political change: Kashubian folklore, Chinese mysticism and mediaeval scholarship butt up against the war in Chechnya, 9-11, and the struggle for Polish independence. Central to Huelle s imagery is the vision of the refugee be it the Chechen woman carrying her newborn child across the Polish border (her face emblazoned on every TV screen), the survivor of the Gulag re-appearing on his friends doorstep, years after being presumed dead, or the stranger who befriends the sole resident of a ghostly Mennonite village in the final days of the Second World War. Each refugee carries a clue, it seems, or is in possession or pursuit of some mysterious text or book, knowing that only it like the Chinese Book of Changes can decode their story. What we do with this text, this clue, Huelle seems to say, is up to us.

Cold Sea Stories

Weiser wasn't just anyone - the other boys were sure of that. Even animals seemed to obey the scrawny boy. Then came the revelation of his arsenal at the disused brickworks which promotes him from Jewish outcast to local hero. This novel won the Independent Foreign Fiction Award.

Who Was David Weiser?

Pawel Huelle

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