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When We Were Orphans by Kazuo Ishiguro (Faber) — the most celebrated detective in 1930s London has never stopped believing his parents, who disappeared in Shanghai when he was a child, can be found. When he returns to Shanghai as the world darkens toward war, he discovers not truth but the lengths to which a person can go to maintain a necessary illusion. A thriller without the certainties of the thriller genre — growing stranger and more moving with every page. Published by Faber & Faber.

My Name Is Red by Orhan Pamuk (Faber) — Constantinople, 1591: a master miniaturist is murdered, and the detective who must identify the killer is also in love with the murdered man’s niece. A murder mystery, a love story, and a meditation on art, style, and the threat that Western perspective posed to the Islamic painting tradition — narrated by a corpse, a dog, a tree, and the colour red itself. Winner of the Nobel Prize. Published by Faber & Faber.

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.

The Time of the Hero by Mario Vargas Llosa (Faber) — young cadets at a Lima military academy navigate the rituals of institutional brutality presented as education, until the death of a cadet reveals how completely the institution will protect itself against any truth that threatens its dignity. Written at twenty-six from personal experience — the Peruvian military burned copies publicly. A landmark of Latin American literature. 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.

Immortality by Milan Kundera (Faber) — Kundera’s most ambitious novel: a meditation on fame, identity, and what it means to be a person in a world saturated with images of people that outlast, distort, and ultimately replace the originals. Formally extraordinary — Kundera appears as a character, converses with his creations, and moves between Paris and nineteenth-century Germany with complete confidence. The summit of his novelistic achievement. Published by Faber & Faber.