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Nights of Plague by Orhan Pamuk (Faber) — the Ottoman island of Mingheria, 1901: a deadly plague spreading through a population whose Muslim and Greek communities are held in delicate balance, and a governor and his princess wife at the centre of a crisis that is simultaneously medical, political, and historical. Pamuk’s pandemic novel — begun before COVID-19, completed during it — at his most historically ambitious. Published by Faber & Faber.

Come Rain or Come Shine by Kazuo Ishiguro (Faber) — in the space of a single evening, a journey, a meal, a game of cards, everything is decided or not decided between a man and a woman who have known each other for fifteen years. Ishiguro’s short story as compressed and precisely balanced as a Japanese object — few pages that repay repeated reading. Part of the Faber Stories series. Published by Faber & Faber.

Conversations with Friends by Sally Rooney (Faber) — Frances, twenty-one, a spoken-word poet in Dublin, falls in love with Nick, a married man ten years older, and the affair dismantles the emotional self-sufficiency she was absolutely sure she possessed. Rooney’s debut established her as the defining voice of a generation — a writer who takes seriously the specific emotional and political reality of being young and intelligent and precarious in contemporary Europe. Published by Faber & Faber.

The Festival of Insignificance by Milan Kundera (Faber) — four old friends meet in a Paris park, and in their conversation Kundera finds the vehicle for a final meditation on the questions that have occupied him for six decades: the nature of art, the comedy of existence, the possibility that what we think matters does not, and that this might be not a tragedy but a liberation. Barely a hundred and twenty pages — the perfect capstone to one of the great bodies of work in twentieth-century literature. Published by Faber & Faber.

The Discreet Hero by Mario Vargas Llosa (Faber) — two Peruvian men face simple choices: one refuses to sell his house to a developer, one refuses to pay extortion money. In the simplicity of these choices, Vargas Llosa finds the substance of a meditation on what honour costs and what it is worth. Among his most warmly human novels — lighter in tone than his major works but no less precise. The ideal entry point for readers new to Vargas Llosa. Published by Faber & Faber.

The War of the End of the World by Mario Vargas Llosa (Faber) — a holy man and his thousands of followers in the Brazilian backcountry face four military expeditions from the newly formed Republic in one of the most extraordinary episodes in South American history. Vargas Llosa’s most ambitious novel — vast in scope, intricate in structure, overwhelming in historical and human detail. One of the defining Latin American novels and a genuine masterpiece of world literature. Published by Faber & Faber.

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 Museum of Innocence by Orhan Pamuk (Faber) — Kemal Basmaci falls in love in 1975 Istanbul, and when Füsun disappears into another world, he spends years collecting every object that carries the trace of their time together and builds a museum. Simultaneously a love story, a portrait of Istanbul across three decades, and a genuinely novel form — a novel whose narrator builds, in the text and in reality, a museum in Istanbul that readers can visit. 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.

Fear and Trembling by Amélie Nothomb (Faber) — a young Belgian woman arrives in Tokyo to begin her career at a large corporation and descends, through a series of small errors and corrections, to the bottom of the organisational hierarchy. Winner of the Grand Prix du roman de l’Académie française — a wickedly sharp novel about the collision between Western individualism and Japanese corporate culture, told with deadpan precision and dark comedy. Perfect in its brevity. Published by Faber & Faber.

The Book of Laughter and Forgetting by Milan Kundera (Faber) — seven stories that are also one story, linked by the themes of memory and forgetting, political power, and the laughter that both subverts and accompanies it. Written after Kundera was stripped of his Czech citizenship and forced into exile — simultaneously a private grief and a political act, an insistence that the things totalitarianism destroys (memory, complexity, the individual voice) matter. 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.

Who Killed Palomino Molero? by Mario Vargas Llosa (Faber) — a young air force pilot, beloved and gentle, is found tortured and murdered in a small Peruvian coastal town. Lieutenant Lituma investigates in the heat and the dust, and what he finds is a story of desire, hierarchy, and the cruelties that class and power arrange in any society that refuses to examine them honestly. Vargas Llosa at his most economical — devastating in barely a hundred and sixty pages. 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.

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.

Good Omens by Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman (Corgi) — the angel Aziraphale and the demon Crowley, grown fond of Earth after millennia of residence, would prefer the Apocalypse not to happen. Pratchett and Gaiman’s collaborative novel is one of the funniest, most inventive, and most warmly humane books ever written about the end of everything — taking theology seriously and joking about it simultaneously. Essential for fans of either author. Published by Corgi.