Peter Owen World Series: Baltics

Part of the Peter Owen World Series: Baltics Lithuania, 1941, Vincentas has made a Faustian pact with an SS officer: in exchange for his own safety and that of his Jewish lover, Judita, he will take photographs - 'make art' - of the mass killings of Jews in the villages and forests of his occupied homeland. Learning of the pact that has kept her safe for so long, a disgusted Judita returns to her husband, surrendering herself to the ghetto, leaving Vincentas alone and trapped in his horrifying work. Through the metaphor of photography, Sigitas Parulskis lays bare the passivity and complicity of many of his countrymen during the Holocaust in which 94 per cent of Lithuania's Jewish population perished. Translated from the Lithuanian by Karla Gruodis.

Part of the Peter Owen World Series: Baltics Institutionalized in an asylum, a woman with a record of hallucinations commits her life story to paper. She records, from the age of six, her earliest memories of a drunken and abusive father, the strange men her mother introduced to repair the family, the imaginary forest to which she would run for safety and, of course, the talking Green Crow who appeared when she most needed her. The Green Crow is a conceited, boisterous creature who follows the novel's nameless protagonist throughout her life, until the day that the crow's presence begins to embarrass her. Confined to a tedious domestic life, she is desperate to hide the crow's very existence. Failing to do so, she winds up in a psychiatric hospital. Can she repress and renounce her acerbic, sharp-beaked daemon - or learn to love herself, bird and all? Translated from the Latvian by Zanete Vevere Pasqualini.

Part of the Peter Owen World Series: Baltics This story glows somewhere on the fringes of my consciousness, so close I can almost touch it.' Opening up about her family history, Tiina revisits the first two decades of her life following the Second World War, in Tartu, Estonia. The city, destroyed by Nazi invasion then rebuilt and re-mapped by the Soviets, is home to many secrets, and little Tiina knows them all, even if she does not know their import. The adult world that makes up Communist society, is one of cryptic conversations, undiagnosed dread and heavy drinking. From the death of Stalin to the gradual separation of her parents, Tiina, as a young girl, experiences both domestic and great events from the periphery, and is, therefore, powerless to prevent the defining tragedy in her life - a suicide in the family. Translated for the first time into English, Burning Cities is an intimate portrayal of life under Soviet Communism and an absorbing family drama told with poetic precision. Translated from the Estonian by Adam Cullen.