Quote: Through its investigation of social issues such as poverty, Heart shows the influence of left-wing ideologies on De Amicis' work (he was later to join the Italian Socialist Party). Because of this, the book remained influential (and the staple of many textbooks in countries of the Eastern Bloc. On the other hand, the book's strong evocation of Italian nationalism and patriotism also made it very welcome in Fascist Italy.


Enrico's parents and older sister Silvia interact with him as written in his diary. As well as his teacher who assigns him with homework that deals with several different stories of children throughout the Italian states who should be seen as rolr models – these stories are then given in the book as Enrico comes upon reading them. Every story revolves around a different moral value, the most prominent of which are helping those in need, having great love and respect for family and friends, and patriotism. These are called 'The Monthly Stories' and appear at the end of every school month.

   

Quote:A series of grisly murders disrupts Victorian London’s covert gay scene in Brennan’s historical thriller.

In 1888, the city of London is abuzz over the sensational murders of Jack the Ripper in the East End, but over on the West End—in a neighborhood known as “Clubland” for its concentration of gentleman’s clubs—another murderer is at work. The most infamous of the clubs is Sizar’s, a place where boys from poor backgrounds can rise in the world so long as they’re willing to “bend.” Former Navy man Stewart Marsh sorts boys for Sizar’s; when he can, he sneaks down to Brighton to go for a run on the beach. It is here, beneath a pier, that he finds an unwelcome sight: “Snagged in the pooled crevice where sand had been drawn away by the tide lay a young man. He felt able to adjudicate the mound’s youthfulness by the roundness of boyish bulk, having refereed many a wrestling match in the scouting for Sizar’s.” The body belongs to an infamous pimp and blackmailer known as the Pipe, a young man who many might have wished dead. But who actually did the deed? As Scotland Yard Detective Oscar Glass gets to the bottom of the crime, bodies continue to pile up, and the evidence seems to point right to the heart of Sizar’s itself. Brennan has constructed an immersive puzzle, one that delights in shattering Victorian facades of class and propriety with sex and blood. Unfortunately, the author’s baroque prose weighs the story down like an anchor: “White and soft was the fall from London Bridge into the Thames,” opens one chapter; “Painless and warm, too. Death was, truly, as the evangelical preachers promised it to be: a sweet relief. Instead of the mucky freeze of the black Thames at midnight, impact was straight into the clouds.” Those who can weather the mannered prose will be treated to a fascinating look into the strange, lost world gentleman’s clubs and the young men ensnared in their customs.

   

Quote: The Gray House by Mariam Petrosyan — a cult magical realist saga

A runaway success in Russia, translated into English at last, this epic set in a school for students with disabilities offers so much more than a Soviet Hogwarts

Gangs of teenagers have strange adventures in a rambling boarding school on the edge of town: it sounds like a premise for a children’s book. But Mariam Petrosyan’s first novel, a 732-page magical realist saga two decades in the writing that has been a cult success in Russia, has unexpected depths as well as lashings of alcohol and violence. The Gray House is enigmatic and fantastical, comic and postmodern, flawed but brilliant, with elements of multiple genres — Rowling meets Rushdie via Tartt.

It is the latest offering from AmazonCrossing, which now produces more books in translation than any other US publisher, focusing on popular and accessible fiction. Marian Schwartz, who translates for them, says: “Amazon may be bad for booksellers, but I don’t see AmazonCrossing being bad for literary translation.” The problem is sales: the books are not often available in shops and are rarely reviewed because “everyone hates Amazon”. So can The Gray House be successful in English?

In the mid-1990s, Petrosyan, an Armenian graphic artist, showed friends in Moscow the manuscript of her then-unfinished novel. Passed from hand to hand, it found its way to a publisher in 2009. The following year, it was shortlisted for the Russian Booker and won several awards. It has since inspired postgraduate dissertations, Instagram pages of fan art and long signing queues. But Petrosyan has refused to write a sequel or sell the film rights to this complex and unusual epic.

The House is a school for students with disabilities; this literary ruse to isolate the protagonists is also an integral part of the novel’s exploration of identity. The teenagers use wheelchairs or prosthetics and the leader of the house is blind. Mundane details may not always ring true, but there is nothing sentimental or tokenistic about these wisecracking young adults, sporting dreadlocks, tattoos and a murderball-style physicality.

Different characters narrate an overlapping series of events. Most of them are known only by a pseudonym or “nick”. We first experience the house through the eyes of Smoker; he is an outsider, who moves from the conformist “Pheasants” dormitory to the anarchic “Fourth”. Alternating with this are flashback chapters in which, confusingly, several people have different, earlier nicknames. Petrosyan excels at the fresh details that make up individual personalities. One inscrutable youngster likes “seltzer, stray dogs, striped awnings, round stones” and hates “white clothing, lemons … the scent of chamomile”.

Individuality is a central theme, producing a symphony of narrative voices. “Everyone chooses his own House. It is we who make it interesting or dull,” explains a student called Sphinx. Later Sphinx tells his girlfriend, one of the novel’s relatively rare female characters: “Whoever’s telling the story creates the story. No single story can describe reality exactly the way it was.”

The number of narrators proliferates, including the appealing figure of Tabaqui the Jackal, whose entries provide a kind of authorial manifesto: “I don’t like stories. I like moments. I like night better than day, moon better than sun, and here-and-now better than sometime-later.” Tabaqui embodies Petrosyan’s inventiveness, her resistance to chronology, her penchant for false trails and signs.

The house, it emerges, has hidden dimensions. Petrosyan plays with space and time, introducing parallel loops of narrative and a weird “Forest” with its own impenetrable laws. This boundless psychogeography distinguishes the school from a gritty Soviet version of Hogwarts, although there are superficial similarities — dorms that are sorted by personality types, mentions of dragons and basilisks.

At other times, there are echoes of Lord of the Flies: rival gangs of ungovernable boys, face painting, fires. Songs and fairytales are part of the textual patchwork, along with all kinds of allusions, from Hieronymus Bosch to the Kama Sutra. Petrosyan’s stylistic quirks match her flamboyant protagonists; one gothic-sounding sentence, rich in sub-clauses, lasts a page and a half. Yuri Machkasov’s translation is a Herculean feat. The intriguing original title, The House, In Which …, has gone, but Machkasov has captured the novel’s poetic richness.

The Gray House is a Marmite book: worshipped by some, criticised by others as meandering nonsense, lacking either true magic or convincing realism. The plot can feel frustratingly serpentine, but, as Tabaqui explains: “Life does not go in a straight line.” To its most ardent fans, a spell in Petrosyan’s mysterious house is nothing short of life-changing.