PORTOBELLO BOOKS

(P/B) STRANGE WEATHER IN TOKYO
Tsukiko is in her late 30s and living alone when one night she happens to meet one of her former high school teachers, 'Sensei', in a bar. He is at least thirty years her senior, retired and, she presumes, a widower. After this initial encounter, the pair continue to meet occasionally to share food and drink sake, and as the seasons pass - from spring cherry blossom to autumnal mushrooms - Tsukiko and Sensei come to develop a hesitant intimacy which tilts awkwardly and poignantly into love. Perfectly constructed, funny, and moving, Strange...
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(P/B) HUMAN ACTS
Gwangju, South Korea, 1980. In the wake of a viciously suppressed student uprising, a boy searches for his friend's corpse, a consciousness searches for its abandoned body, and a brutalised country searches for a voice. In a sequence of interconnected chapters the victims and the bereaved encounter censorship, denial, forgiveness and the echoing agony of the original trauma. Human Acts is a universal book, utterly modern and profoundly timeless. Already a controversial bestseller and award-winning book in Korea, it confirms Han Kang as a w...
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(P/B) VISITATION
By the side of a lake in Brandenburg, a young architect builds the house of his dreams - a summerhouse with wrought-iron balconies, stained-glass windows the colour of jewels, and a bedroom with a hidden closet, all set within a beautiful garden. But the land on which he builds has a dark history of violence that began with the drowning of a young woman in the grip of madness and that grows darker still over the course of the century: the Jewish neighbours disappear one by one; the Red Army requisitions the house, burning the furniture and...
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(P/B) A SHORT BORDER HANDBOOK
"My difficult relationship with borders goes back a very long way, back to my childhood, because whether or not you end up with border syndrome is largely a matter of luck: it depends on where you're born. I was born in Albania." After a perilous journey across the Albanian mountains, Kapllani finally reaches "the-world-beyond-the-borders": Greece, whose twinkling electric lights signal freedom, riches and love. On arriving in the promised land, however, he and his companions find that reality does not match their fantasy. Instead of recei...
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(P/B) CAST AWAY
Riot police are shutting down borders, 800 lives are lost in a single shipwreck, a boy's body washes up on a beach: this is the European Union in summer 2015. But how did a bloc founded upon the values of human rights and dignity for all reach this point? And what was driving millions of desperate people to risk their lives on the Mediterranean? Charlotte McDonald-Gibson has spent years reporting on every aspect of Europe's refugee crisis, and Cast Away offers a vivid glimpse of the personal dilemmas, pressures, choices and hopes that lie ...
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(P/B) I WAS TOLD THERE'D BE CAKE
From getting locked out of her flat twice on the same day and being fired for baking a giant cookie in the shape of her boss' head, to playing bridesmaid for a friend she'd long forgotten, Sloane Crosley can do no right, despite the best of intentions. With sharp, original and irresistible storytelling that confounds expectations at every turn, Crosley recounts her victories and catastrophes, finding uproarious comedy and genuine insights in the most unpredictable places. (From the publisher)...
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(P/B) HOW DID YOU GET THIS NUMBER
What happens when the minibus full of your fellow wedding travellers hits a bear in the middle of the Alaskan wilderness? Or you hear the voice of your high school's long lost queen bee from a bathroom cubicle? Why is there always a moment of utter disorientation when you emerge at street level from the tube station, no matter how many times you make the journey? It seems that Sloane Crosley can barely step outside her front door without being reminded of just how perplexing and absurd adult life can be. Combining elegant writing, mordant ...
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(P/B) HUMAN ACTS
Gwangju, South Korea, 1980. In the wake of a viciously suppressed student uprising, a boy searches for his friend's corpse, a consciousness searches for its abandoned body, and a brutalised country searches for a voice. In a sequence of interconnected chapters the victims and the bereaved encounter censorship, denial, forgiveness and the echoing agony of the original trauma. Human Acts is a universal book, utterly modern and profoundly timeless. Already a controversial bestseller and award-winning book in Korea, it confirms Han Kang as a w...
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(P/B) SLAVERY INC.
Illegal, inhuman, and impervious to recession, there is one trade that continues to thrive, just out of sight. The international sex trade criss-crosses the entire globe, a sinister network made up of criminal masterminds, local handlers, corrupt policemen, wilfully blind politicians, eager consumers, and countless exploited women and children. In this ground-breaking work of investigative reporting, the celebrated journalist Lydia Cacho follows the trail of the traffickers and their victims from Mexico to Turkey, Thailand to Iraq, Georgia...
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(P/B) THE VALUE OF NOTHING
Credit has crunched, debt has turned toxic, the gears of the world economy have ground to a halt. Yet despite its failures, the same market-driven ideas are being applied to everything from famine to climate change. We need to ask again one of the most fundamental questions a society ever addresses: why do things cost what they do? Radical, original, nimbly argued, The Value of Nothing draws on ideas from history, philosophy, psychology and agriculture to show how we can build an economically and environmentally sound future. (from the pub...
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(H/B) THE SECRET LIVES OF BUILDINGS - FROM THE PARTHENON TO THE VEGAS STRIP IN THIRTEEN STORIES
The plans are drawn up, a site is chosen, foundations are dug: a building comes into being with the expectation that it will stay put for ever. But a building is a capricious thing: it is inhabited and changed, and its existence is a tale of constant and curious transformation. In this radical re-imagination of architectural history, Edward Hollis tells the stories of thirteen landmark buildings, beginning with the 'once upon a time' when they first appeared, through the years of appropriation, ruin and renovation, and ending with a tempor...
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(P/B) A WORLD OF TROUBLE: AMERICA IN THE MIDDLE EAST

(P/B) TAO
Yong, let's get married and you can escape to Japan. This, then, is the beggining of our journey of escape. (From the publisher)...
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(H/B) HOLY WARRIORS - A JOURNEY INTO THE HEART OF INDIAN
August 15, 1947 is a date etched upon the soul of every Indian. It is the day India won its freedom from the British Empire. Yet it is also the date of Partition, an act which carved up India along religious lines to create the Islamic state of Pakistan, igniting violence which killed more than a million people. 2007 sees the 60th anniversary of these events, unifying the jubilation of Independence with the grief of a nation's division. The horror of Partition lives on in the psyche of the Indian people to this day, a dark reminder of how ...
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(P/B) THE SECRET LIVES OF BUILDINGS - FROM THE PARTHENON