Fire: A Forgotten Question, by: Ignaas Devisch, About: In Fire, Ignaas Devisch, inspired by thinkers like Peter Sloterdijk and Bruno Latour, develops a new idea about the place of fire in our world. If we want to maintain our standard of living, we cannot do without a new source that sustains our freedom and prosperity without destroying the world and ourselves. The largest fireball in our galaxy —the sun—has this potential. Can we learn to truly embrace heliocentrism ?

Niznayou by Françoise Pirart About:A provincial town in the Ardennes (Belgium). In the refugee center where she works, Lena comes across a boy, a little wild, who claims to be called “Niznayou”. Intrigued by his mysterious attitude, the young woman gradually discovers his past when he still lived with his mother in Grozny, Chechnya, under the Russian bombs. A feeling of empathy and tenderness develops between Lena and her protégé. Confronted with vio¬lence - she in her relationship, he in the war - both feel a powerful need to be loved. Around this encounter are a few thrill-seeking hunters who think they’re vigi¬lantes, a kind-hearted adventurer strange enough to start a rumor, two solitary old men, a forest where one can get lost... All ordinary people, but some of them will breathe new life into Niznayou, while others will get carried away by their own little delusions. And at the center of it all, the child. But what do they really know about him?

THE ICE JUDGEMENT A novel by Jean Jauniaux About:A teacher harassed by his pupils, Barthélémy sinks into an insomniac depression inspiring him to write a book about his nocturnal wanderings through a marginal Brussels. The dazzling success of the book and its adaptation as a reality TV show enabled Barthélémy to retire and take refuge in Saint-Idesbald, on the Belgian coast, a stone’s throw from the French border. While out walking, he comes across a group of refugees fleeing the Calais Jungle. Led by Aslan, a woman, twin boys, and a Russian deserter who had fled the first Chechen war, the group was hoping, like so many others, to cross the Channel. For Barthélémy, this meeting is a redemption. He is going to help them and rediscover his vocation as a teacher. With his friends Van Drogenbos, an uncompromising town-planning official, Charon, an ex-fisherman and customs officer, and Zanzibar, who is restoring an old Grandbanks, he will organize the crossing of his protégés to Scotland. In this novel of redemption and adventure, we rediscover Jean Jauniaux’s world of fiction and the highly visual style that led to the film adaptation of one of his short stories.

Arabia Felix: The Danish Expedition of 1761-1767 An NYRB Classics Original, About: Arabia Felix is the spellbinding true story of a scientific expedition gone disastrously astray. On a winter morning in 1761 six men leave Copenhagen by sea--a botanist, a philologist, an astronomer, a doctor, an artist, and their manservant--an ill-assorted band of men who dislike and distrust one another from the start. These are the members of the first Danish expedition to Arabia Felix, as Yemen was then known, the first organized foray into a corner of the world unknown to Europeans, an enterprise that had the support of the Danish Crown and was keenly followed throughout Europe. The expedition made its way to Turkey and Egypt, by which time its members were already actively seeking to undercut and even kill one another, before disappearing into the harsh desert that was their destination. Nearly seven years later a single survivor returned to Denmark to find himself a forgotten man and all the specimens that had been sent back ruined by neglect. Based on diaries, notebooks, and sketches that lay unread in Danish archives until the twentieth century, Arabia Felix is both a comedy of intellectual rivalry and very bad manners and an utterly absorbing tale of high adventure."

Nowherelands: An Atlas of Vanished Countries 1840-1975, by: Bjørn Berge About: A refreshingly original history of the lost countries of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, examined and illustrated with the countries’ postage stamps These are the stories of fifty countries that once existed but have now have been erased from the map. Varying vastly in size and shape, location and longevity, they are united by one fact: all of them endured long enough to issue their own stamps. Some of their names, such as Biafra or New Brunswick, will be relatively familiar. Others, such as Labuan, Tannu Tuva, and Inini, are far less recognizable. But all of these lost nations have stories to tell, whether they were as short- lived as Eastern Karelia, which lasted only a few weeks during the Soviet– Finnish War of 1922, or as long- lasting as the Orange Free State, a Boer Republic that celebrated fifty years as an independent state in the late 1800s. Their broad spectrum reflects the entire history of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, with its ideologies, imperialism, waves of immigration, and conflicts both major and minor.