Books published by publisher Picador USA

Named one of the Best Books of 1999 by the Los Angeles Times, The Pianist is now a major motion picture directed by Roman Polanski and starring Adrien Brody (Son of Sam). The Pianist won the Cannes Film Festival’s most prestigious prize—the Palme d’Or.On September 23, 1939, Wladyslaw Szpilman played Chopin’s Nocturne in C-sharp minor live on the radio as shells exploded outside—so loudly that he couldn’t hear his piano. It was the last live music broadcast from Warsaw: That day, a German bomb hit the station, and Polish Radio went off the air.Though he lost his entire family, Szpilman survived in hiding. In the end, his life was saved by a German officer who heard him play the same Chopin Nocturne on a piano found among the rubble. Written immediately after the war and suppressed for decades, The Pianist is a stunning testament to human endurance and the redemptive power of fellow feeling.

This richly colored memoir chronicles the exploits of a flamboyant Jewish family, from its bold arrival in cosmopolitan Alexandria to its defeated exodus three generations later. In elegant and witty prose, André Aciman introduces us to the marvelous eccentrics who shaped his life--Uncle Vili, the strutting daredevil, soldier, salesman, and spy; the two grandmothers, the Princess and the Saint, who gossip in six languages; Aunt Flora, the German refugee who warns that Jews lose everything "at least twice in their lives." And through it all, we come to know a boy who, even as he longs for a wider world, does not want to be led, forever, out of Egypt.

The Definitive Cult, Postmodern Novel―a Shocking Blend of Violence, Transgression, and EroticismReissued with a New Introduction from Zadie SmithWhen J. G. Ballard, our narrator, smashes his car into another and watches a man die in front of him, he finds himself drawn with increasing intensity to the mangled impacts of car crashes. Robert Vaughan, a former TV scientist turned nightmare angel of the expressway, has gathered around him a collection of alienated crash victims and experiments with a series of autoerotic atrocities, each more sinister than the last. But Vaughan craves the ultimate crash―a head-on collision of blood, semen, engine coolant, and iconic celebrity.First published in 1973, Crash remains one of the most shocking novels of the twentieth century and was made into an equally controversial film by David Cronenberg.

Bret Easton Ellis has wrestled with the double-edged sword of fame and notoriety for more than 30 years now, since Less Than Zero catapulted him into the limelight in 1985, earning him devoted fans and, perhaps, even fiercer enemies. An enigmatic figure who has always gone against the grain and refused categorization, he captured the depravity of the '80s with one of contemporary literature's most polarizing characters, American Psycho's iconic, terrifying Patrick Bateman, and received plentiful death threats in the bargain. In recent years, his candor and gallows humor on both Twitter and his podcast have continued his legacy as someone determined to speak the truth, however painful it might be, and whom people accordingly either love or love to hate. He encounters various positions and voices controversial opinions, more often than not fighting the status quo. Now, in White, with the same originality displayed in his fiction, Ellis pours himself out and, in doing so, eviscerates the perceived good that the social media age has wrought, starting with the dangerous cult of likability. White is both a denunciation of censorship, particularly the self-inflicted sort committed in hopes of being 'accepted', and a bracing view of a life devoted to authenticity. Provocative, incisive, funny and surprisingly poignant, White reveals not only what is visible on the glittering, pristine surface but also the riotous truths that are hidden underneath.

Mario Vargas Llosa's brilliant, multilayered novel is set in the Lima, Peru, of the author's youth, where a young student named Marito is toiling away in the news department of a local radio station. His young life is disrupted by two arrivals.The first is his aunt Julia, recently divorced and thirteen years older, with whom he begins a secret affair. The second is a manic radio scriptwriter named Pedro Camacho, whose racy, vituperative soap operas are holding the city's listeners in thrall. Pedro chooses young Marito to be his confidant as he slowly goes insane.Interweaving the story of Marito's life with the ever-more-fevered tales of Pedro Camacho, Vargas Llosa's novel is hilarious, mischievous, and masterful, a classic named one of the best books of the year by the New York Times Book Review.

A POWERFUL AND PROVOCATIVE EXPLORATION OF HOW WAR HAS CHANGED OUT SOCIETY―FOR THE BETTER"War! / What is it good for? / Absolutely nothing," says the famous song―but archaeology, history, and biology show that war in fact has been good for something. Surprising as it sounds, war has made humanity safer and richer. In War! What Is It Good For?, the renowned historian and archaeologist Ian Morris tells the gruesome, gripping story of fifteen thousand years of war, going beyond the battles and brutality to reveal what war has really done to and for the world. Stone Age people lived in small, feuding societies and stood a one-in-ten or even one-in-five chance of dying violently. In the twentieth century, by contrast―despite two world wars, Hiroshima, and the Holocaust―fewer than one person in a hundred died violently. The explanation: War, and war alone, has created bigger, more complex societies, ruled by governments that have stamped out internal violence. Strangely enough, killing has made the world safer, and the safety it has produced has allowed people to make the world richer too. War has been history's greatest paradox, but this searching study of fifteen thousand years of violence suggests that the next half century is going to be the most dangerous of all time. If we can survive it, the age-old dream of ending war may yet come to pass. But, Morris argues, only if we understand what war has been good for can we know where it will take us next.

A Christian Science Monitor Best Fiction Book of the YearA Guardian Best Book of the YearA San Francisco Chronicle Best Book of the YearThe stunningly vibrant final novel in the bestselling Ibis TrilogyIt is 1839 and China has embargoed the trade of opium, yet too much is at stake in the lucrative business and the British Foreign Secretary has ordered the colonial government in India to assemble an expeditionary force for an attack to reinstate the trade. Among those consigned is Kesri Singh, a soldier in the army of the East India Company. He makes his way eastward on the Hind, a transport ship that will carry him from Bengal to Hong Kong.Along the way, many characters from the Ibis Trilogy come aboard, including Zachary Reid, a young American speculator in opium futures, and Shireen, the widow of an opium merchant whose mysterious death in China has compelled her to seek out his lost son. The Hind docks in Hong Kong just as war breaks out and opium is “pouring into the market like monsoon flood.” From Bombay to Calcutta, from naval engagements to the decks of a hospital ship, among embezzlement, profiteering, and espionage, Amitav Ghosh’s Flood of Fire charts a breathless course through the culminating moment of the British opium trade and vexed colonial history.

A LOS ANGELES TIMES BESTSELLER • A NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW EDITOR'S CHOICE • Bestselling author Richard Reeves provides an authoritative account of the internment of more than 120,000 Japanese-Americans and Japanese aliens during World War II“Highly readable . . . [A] vivid and instructive reminder of what war and fear can do to civilized people.” ―Evan Thomas, The New York Times Book ReviewAfter Japan bombed Pearl Harbor, President Roosevelt signed an executive order that forced more than 120,000 Japanese Americans into primitive camps for the rest of war. Their only crime: looking like the enemy.In Infamy, acclaimed historian Richard Reeves delivers a sweeping narrative of this atrocity. Men we usually consider heroes―FDR, Earl Warren, Edward R. Murrow―were in this case villains. We also learn of internees who joined the military to fight for the country that had imprisoned their families, even as others fought for their rights all the way to the Supreme Court. The heart of the book, however, tells the poignant stories of those who endured years in “war relocation camps,” many of whom suffered this injustice with remarkable grace.Racism and war hysteria led to one of the darkest episodes in American history. But by recovering the past, Infamy has given voice to those who ultimately helped the nation better understand the true meaning of patriotism.

A New York Times Book Review Editors' ChoiceA Washington Post Notable Fiction Book of YearA NPR Best Book of the YearIn Amitav Ghosh's Sea of Poppies, the Ibis began its treacherous journey across the Indian Ocean, bound for the cane fields of Mauritius with a cargo of indentured servants. Now, in River of Smoke, the former slave ship flounders in the Bay of Bengal, caught in the midst of a deadly cyclone. The storm also threatens the clipper ship Anahita, groaning with the largest consignment of opium ever to leave India for Canton. Meanwhile, the Redruth, a nursery ship, carries horticulturists determined to track down the priceless botanical treasures of China. All will converge in Canton's Fanqui-town, or Foreign Enclave, a powder keg awaiting a spark to ignite the Opium Wars. A spectacular adventure, but also a bold indictment of global avarice, River of Smoke is a consuming historical novel with powerful contemporary resonance.

At a small gallery in Florence, a Peruvian writer happens upon a photograph of a tribal storyteller deep in the jungles of the Amazon. He is overcome with the eerie sense that he knows this man...that the storyteller is not an Indian at all but an old school friend, Saul Zuratas. As recollections of Zuratas flow through his mind, the writer begins to imagine Zuratas's transformation from a modern to a central member of the unacculturated Machiguenga tribe. Weaving the mysteries of identity, storytelling, and truth, Vargas Llosa has created a spellbinding tale of one man's journey from the modern world to our origins, abandoning one in order to find meaning in both.

The third title in the compelling Tales of the Otori – the story that began with Across the Nightingale Floor and Grass for his Pillow, Brilliance of the Moon by Lian Hearn is an epic tale of love, power and destiny, set in a mythical world inspired by feudal Japan.Takeo and the exquisite Kaede, still only teenagers, are now married, but the implacable forces of destiny that rule their lives tear them apart. Takeo, a battle-hardened warrior at the head of an army fighting for his Otori birthright, finds his courage and leadership forged in the fire of bloodshed and sacrifice, while his legendary magical powers are tested to their limits against the invisible assassins of the Tribe. Kaede, determined to reclaim her own lands, is treacherously betrayed and forced into marriage. Their love will survive until death – but death, in this savage, beautiful world, is always only a moment away.

A magisterial account of one of the worst disasters to strike humankind--the Great Irish Potato Famine--conveyed as lyrical narrative history from the acclaimed author of The Great MortalityIn this masterful, comprehensive account of the Irish Potato Famine, delivered with novelistic flair, Kelly gives us not only the startling facts of this disaster--one of the worst to strike mankind, killing twice as many lives as the American Civil War--but examines the intersection of political greed, bacterial infection, religious intolerance, and racism that made it possible. Kelly brings new material to his analysis of relevant political factors during the years leading up to the famine, and the extent to which Britain's nation-building policies exacerbated the mounting crisis. Despite the shocking, infuriating implications of his findings, The Graves Are Walking is ultimately a story of triumph--of one people's ability to remake themselves in a new land in the face of the unthinkable.