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The Bad Girl by Mario Vargas Llosa (Faber) — Otilia Salaverry meets Ricardo Somocurcio in Lima in 1950 and proceeds to disappear from and reappear in his life over five decades, always more dangerous, always more desired. A tribute to Flaubert’s Sentimental Education — a novel about the man who loves rather than the woman who is loved, about romantic obsession and self-destruction, vivid with Lima, Paris, London, Tokyo, and Madrid across a century. Published by Faber & Faber.

Loving Sabotage by Amélie Nothomb (Faber) — Nothomb’s childhood at an elite Chinese school for diplomatic children in 1970s Beijing, where the children of foreign embassies formed their own closed world with its own cruelties. Simultaneously a comedy of manners and a disturbing account of how social worlds form and enforce themselves, written with characteristic self-deprecating humour and psychological precision. Ideal for readers who loved Fear and Trembling. Published by Faber & Faber.

Laughable Loves by Milan Kundera (Faber) — seven stories set in 1960s Czechoslovakia, in which men and women navigate the gap between public performance and private reality with a mixture of weariness, ingenuity, and erotic energy. The early short fiction in which Kundera’s characteristic voice first becomes fully itself: philosophical intelligence, erotic comedy, and Central European melancholy in perfect balance. The ideal introduction to his work. Published by Faber & Faber.

Life Is Elsewhere by Milan Kundera (Faber) — Jaromil, a poet in Communist Czechoslovakia, is the product of a mother so completely invested in his genius that she has made him incapable of any relationship not mediated by her approval. One of Kundera’s most psychologically acute novels — a portrait of artistic narcissism whose implications extend far beyond its historical setting. Underrated even among Kundera devotees. Essential reading. Published by Faber & Faber.

Conversations in the Cathedral by Mario Vargas Llosa (Faber) — two men in a Lima bar ask when Peru screwed itself up, and the novel’s extraordinary formal structure — intertwining time frames and voices — reconstructs the answer across five hundred pages. Considered by many critics Vargas Llosa’s greatest achievement: the structure itself enacts the argument, that corruption is not dramatic but gradual, not an event but an environment. Published by Faber & Faber.

The Joke by Milan Kundera (Faber) — a sardonic postcard written in 1948 ends Ludvík’s university career and his future; fifteen years later, his revenge arrives too late to mean what he intended. Kundera’s first novel, suppressed after the Soviet invasion, in which his characteristic themes first find full expression: the relationship between the personal and the political, between love and power, between memory and the self that remembers. Published by Faber & Faber.

In a Place of Darkness by Stuart MacBride (Corgi) — the latest Logan McRae thriller, set in the wind-scoured landscape of Aberdeen where a body found in circumstances suggesting a serial killer leads McRae toward something he was not prepared to find. MacBride combines the atmospheric intensity of Nordic noir with the black comedy and psychological depth that have made his series one of the most consistently acclaimed in British crime fiction. Published by Corgi.

Greek Lessons by Han Kang (Penguin) — a man losing his sight and his ancient Greek, word by word; a woman who has lost her languages and is trying to find a new one. Between them, something begins that neither has words for. The Nobel Prize winner writes about language itself — about the way it both constitutes and fails us, about the particular vulnerability of a person stripped of the words that define their inner life. Quietly devastating. Published by Penguin.

The Collected Stories by Lydia Davis (Penguin Modern Classics) — four decades of stories, some a sentence long and some several pages, each turning a single thought or observation until every facet catches light. Davis is the most original American fiction writer of her generation, her influences French, her method empirical, her results completely unlike anyone else’s. A book that changes how you think about what a story can be. Published by Penguin Modern Classics.