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The Loneliness of Souza by Kiran Desai (Penguin) — a documentary filmmaker returns to Goa after a long absence to find a city both familiar and completely changed, and people who force her to confront what she has been recording instead of living. Kiran Desai — Booker Prize winner for The Inheritance of Loss — brings the same quality of tender, merciless attention to this smaller, more concentrated canvas. Published by Penguin.

Strange News from Another Star by Hermann Hesse (Penguin) — the strange, beautiful late stories in which Hesse uses the old forms of fairy tale and parable as containers for the most modern of anxieties about consciousness, meaning, and the relationship between reason and feeling. A Penguin Little Black Classic showing a dimension of Hesse that readers who know only Siddhartha will find surprising — lighter in tone, no less serious in inquiry. Published by Penguin.

The Castle by Franz Kafka (Penguin Modern Classics) — K. arrives claiming to be a land surveyor summoned by the Castle, which governs everything from its hill above the village and yet is constitutionally unable to communicate clearly with anyone. Kafka’s final and longest novel — in some respects even more unsettling than The Trial, its system not malevolent but opaque, indifferent, and irreducibly mysterious. Published by Penguin Modern Classics.

The Trial by Franz Kafka (Penguin Modern Classics) — Josef K. is arrested on his thirtieth birthday for a crime no one will name, tried by a court whose logic responds to no argument he is capable of making. Kafka’s masterwork of institutional power and individual powerlessness — simultaneously bureaucratic satire, existential nightmare, and prophetic anticipation of the totalitarian state. The authoritative Penguin Modern Classics edition. Published by Penguin Modern Classics.

Japanese Ghost Stories by Lafcadio Hearn (Penguin Modern Classics) — the finest Western engagement with the Japanese supernatural tradition, written by the American writer who settled in Japan in the 1890s and spent his life transmitting a culture that fascinated him completely. These stories of the dead who linger and the spirits who inhabit the liminal spaces are atmospheric, culturally illuminating, and genuinely unsettling. Published by Penguin Modern Classics.

Bonjour Tristesse by Françoise Sagan (Penguin Modern Classics) — written at eighteen, published to enormous scandal in 1954, this perfect short novel follows seventeen-year-old Cécile as she sets in motion a scheme to protect her summer that destroys something she did not know she valued. One of the sharpest analyses ever written of adolescent cruelty — cool, precise, and slightly amused by its narrator. Published by Penguin Modern Classics.

The Imitation of the Rose by Clarice Lispector (Penguin) — one of the most disturbing and most formally perfect short stories of the twentieth century, in which a woman’s too-perfectly-ordered house reveals a mind at the edge of breakdown. This Penguin Little Black Classic gathers it alongside other essential Lispector works — a concentrated introduction to a writer who uses ordinary surfaces to reveal extraordinary inner states. Published by Penguin.

White Nights by Fyodor Dostoevsky (Penguin Modern Classics) — a larger, fresh edition of Dostoevsky’s most delicate work: the novella of four conversations on a St Petersburg bridge between a lonely young man and Nastenka, a young woman waiting for someone else. Literature’s most precise account of romantic longing in a hundred pages, with an introduction situating it in Dostoevsky’s early development. Published by Penguin Modern Classics.