Moscow: present day. A four-year-old boy stands shivering on the pavement outside his deserted apartment block. His mother has been missing for three days. Driven by hunger and loneliness, overlooked by passers-by, he follows a large, yellow dog to her lair under a derelict church on the outskirts of the city, and crosses an invisible threshold into another life.

Eva Hornung’s extraordinary tale of a latter-day Romulus in post-perestroika Russia is a devastating story of childhood and survival on the harsh edges of society, and an unsettling exploration of what it means to be human.

Gerda Persson has lain dead for three days. Her life seems to have been quite ordinary. Until the freezer in her home is opened: it is full of books, neatly stacked and wrapped in clingfilm, a thick layer of ice covering them - all by the same prize-winning author, all with handwritten dedications to Gerda. Shadow is a compelling novel of dark family secrets, murder and betrayal, from an award-winning novelist.

The French literary bestseller, first published in 2001, has been translated into all major European languages and is now for the first time available in English. A single mother takes her two sons on a trip to the seaside. They stay in a hotel, drink hot chocolate and go to the funfair. She wants to protect them from a cold and uncomprehending world. She knows that it will be the last trip for her boys. This is a haunting and thought-provoking story about how a mother's love for her children can be more dangerous than the dark world she is seeking to keep at bay. Veronique Olmi handles an aspect of motherhood we all too often deny. She depicts a woman's fear of releasing her children into the world. The simple first person narrative achieves an extraordinry level of poetry and inner truth.

The narrative of this wonderful gem of a novel weaves together a rich tapestry of characters who are both nameless and faceless, representing Everyman and Everywoman, to tell stories of parting and return, suffering, healing and desire in a lyrical and moving exploration of the human heart. Like a bird in flight, the reader travels across a borderless landscape composed of tales of daily existence, news reports, allegories and ancestral myths, becoming aware in the course of the journey of the interconnection of individual lives. Véronique Tadjo is the Head of French at the School of Literature and Language Studies at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg. She was born in Paris, educated in Côte d’Ivoire, and is an artist and award-winning author of several novels and children’s books, as well as two volumes of poetry.