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Two eleven-year old girls, Unn and Siss, meet. Unn is about to reveal a secret, one that leads to her death in a formation of ice caused by a large waterfall.

Siss's struggle with her fidelity to the memory of her friend, the strangle, terrifyingly beautiful frozen chambers of the waterfall and Unn's fatal exploration of the ice palace are described in prose of a lyrical economy that ranks among the most memorable achievements of modern literature.

In 1973 Vesaas received Scandinavia's most prestigious literary award, the Nordic Council Prize, for The Ice Palace.

'It is hard to do justice to The Ice Palace…The narrative is urgent, the descriptions relentlessly beautiful, the meaning as powerful as the ice piling up on the lake.'
–The Times

'Vesaas's laconic sentences are as cold and simple as ice-and as fantastic.'
–Daily Telegraph

'Austere poetical clarity, stoical wisdom and a vivid response to nature.'
–Times Literary Supplement
'Believable and haunting ….this beautiful neo-prose poem is as somber and Scandinavian as a Bergman film…the evocation of rime, frost and crackling ice have so eternal a quality that the mention of a passing car comes almost as a shock.'
–Nova

Wonderful Fool
Shusaku Endo

Price £ 7.50
ISBN 072061080X

'Wonderful Fool is the story of Gaston Bonaparte, a young Frenchman who visits Tokyo to stay with his pen-friend Takamori. Gaston is a trusting person with a simple love for others even after they have demonstrated deceit and betrayal, but his appearance and his behaviour proves a bitter disappointment and embarrassment to Takamori and his associates, Gaston spends his time making friends with street children, stray dogs, prostitutes and gangsters. Endo charts his misadventures with irony, satire and humanity.

'The Japanese writer who appeals most to an audience outside Japan. Everything I have read of Endo's is memorable. He never disappoints.'
–Anthony Thwaite

'Endo's penetration, his benignly satirical revelation of the inadequacy of materialism….make this strange novel, often funny and often grim, a fable of spectral luminosity.'
–Sunday Times

'Endo to my mind is one of the finest living novelists.'
–Graham Greene

The Redemption of Elsdon Bird
Noel Virtue

Price: £ 7.50
ISBN 0720611660

The Redemption of Elsdon Bird is the story of an imaginative child raised in the intolerant atmosphere of the Christian Brethren .

When Dad gets sacked from his city workplace for trying to 'save' his workmater, the Birds are forced to leave and move to a small, remote town. Elsdon hopes life will change for the better, but instead the family begins to disintegrate.

Communicating with no one except for other so-called 'holy rollers', Elsdon's parents descend into an even more extreme religious fundamentalism, using their son as a whipping-boy for all their frustrations. And when a sequence of disasters finally breaks up the family, Elsdon's amazing resilience and precocious humanity are tested to the very limit.

'Remarkable. Elsdon's untarnished optimism lights the bleakest landscapes.'
–Kate Saunders, Independent

'Written with a heartfelt simplicity which makes it very hard to put down….an excellent book.'
–New Zealand Listener

'A wonderful account of childhood.'
–Mail on Sunday

'A very talented novel. It is written in vivid, spare prose and grips from end to end.'
–Financial Times

Opium
Jean Cocteau

Price £ 9.40
ISBN 0720608007

'I do not plead, I merely produce documents, for and against, in the trial of opium.'

In this classic study Cocteau vividly describes his extraordinary experiences while taking opium, the drug to which he owed his ' perfect hours' but which, inevitably, extracted its price. Opium also contains reminiscences of some of Cocteau's closest friends, including Nijinsky and Marcel Proust, and provides revealing insights into the creation of such masterpieces as Orphee and Les Enfants terribles. The book is illustrated with Cocteau's own disturbing and powerful drawings.

'Such diamond precision of utterance has seldom been combined with so wide an aesthetic range.'-Kenneth Tynan, Observer

'Of all Cocteau's notebooks this is the most striking, and it gains very much from his harrowing drawings.'-The Times
'His contribution to the great literature of drug addiction is distinguished by the flashes of insight, the capacity to remember, the observation of the miraculous.'
--Daily Telegraph

Love Sonnets and Madrigals to Tommaso de'Cavalieri
Michael Sullivan (Tr.)

Price £ 12.00
ISBN 0720610400

The genius of Michelangelo as architect, sculptor and painter was recognised by his European contemporaries. Only recently has he been acknowledged as the greatest Italian lyric poet of his generation. What sets him apart from others was noticed by some at the time: 'They speak words; he says things.' From the time he was thirty he wrote verse all his long life, but what turned him into a great poet was his encounter at the age of fifty-seven with Tommaso de'Cavalieri, a young Roman nobleman.

The versions given here are of the sonnets and madrigals generated by his love for Cavalieri. Whether that love was ever physical is debatable. It was certainly 'metaphysical', and in their conceptual toughness and power these poems anticipate the work of the English poets of that description. The themes are light and dark, cold and the fever of flesh and damnation, helplessness in the face of young beauty, hope for the divine countenance.

Immortalized in these poems, Cavalieri has another aspect. Vasari tells us Michelangelo did a full-length cartoon of him. If Aretino is right, millions have admired his features - in all probability Christ in the Sistine Chapel Last Judgement is a portrait of Tommaso de'Cavalieri.

Before becoming a professional translator Michael Sullivan was visiting Lecturer in Philosophy at London University. He has spent many years in Italy and has had published translations of works of philosophy, history and literature. He was one of the translators of the Harrap-Sansone