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Nino Haratischvili’s latest translated novel — a decades-spanning friendship between two women against a backdrop of political upheaval and displacement. From the Georgian author of The Eighth Life: epic sweep, emotional intensity, and characters who live in memory long after the final page.

Katie Kitamura’s precisely observed novel about a middle-aged actor as the boundaries between self and role begin to blur. Cool, analytical, and quietly devastating: Kitamura at her most psychologically intense, exploring performance, authenticity, and what we lose as we age.

Han Kang’s devastating novel about the 1980 Gwangju Uprising — told from multiple perspectives including the dead, a formally extraordinary meditation on political violence, trauma, and human solidarity. Essential reading for anyone interested in Korean history or the literature of atrocity.

The finest short fiction set in London — from Henry James and Arthur Morrison to Zadie Smith and Hanif Kureishi. Jerry White’s Everyman’s Library anthology creates a cumulative portrait of one of literature’s most obsessively written-about cities across more than a century of change.

Margaret Atwood’s prophetic 1985 dystopia — the Republic of Gilead, enforced reproductive servitude, and Offred’s act of witness and resistance. One of the most important novels of its century, never out of print and never less than urgently relevant. Essential literary and feminist fiction.

Hiromi Kawakami’s warm, funny novel set in a Tokyo thrift shop — owner, sister, and assistant navigating work, love, and the peculiar intimacy of sorting through other people’s discarded things. As subtle and precise as her best work, finding emotional complexity in the perfectly observed everyday.

Hiromi Kawakami’s lyrical linked stories about new beings on Earth after humanity’s end — carrying fragments of human memory and desire without understanding them. Closer to prose poetry than science fiction, and shortlisted for the International Booker Prize: quietly extraordinary.

Han Kang’s International Booker Prize winner — a woman stops eating meat and the violent, obsessive responses of those around her. Elliptical and deeply unsettling, The Vegetarian uses its premise to explore bodily autonomy, compliance, and what happens to women who simply refuse.

Elena Ferrante’s standalone novel after the Neapolitan tetralogy — a teenager’s obsessive search for her father’s disreputable sister, and the painful process of seeing parents clearly for the first time. Ferociously precise on adolescent disillusionment and the discovery of adult lies.

The fourth and final Neapolitan novel — sixty years of friendship, competition, love, and mystery brought to devastating conclusion. The full meaning of Elena and Lila’s extraordinary relationship comes into final focus in pages that are among the most powerful in contemporary fiction.

The first volume of Ferrante’s celebrated Neapolitan novels — the friendship of Elena and Lila from childhood in 1950s Naples. Intense, competitive, and one of literature’s greatest portraits of female friendship: the starting point for one of the great reading experiences in contemporary fiction.

Elena Ferrante’s incandescent, terrifying portrait of a woman whose life dissolves when her husband leaves. Compact, relentless, and ferociously psychologically precise: the novel that first showed international readers the full force of Ferrante’s gifts, and one of the defining feminist novels of the century.

J.M. Coetzee’s late story collection — including the title novella about an elderly Polish musician’s love for a younger Spanish woman, and accompanying stories meditating on desire, age, and human connection. Precise, morally serious, and characteristic of a Nobel laureate’s late mastery.

Salman Rushdie’s first novel — a wildly ambitious 1975 fantasy about an immortal Native American’s journey to an island outside time, drawing on Sufi philosophy and science fiction. Less polished than his mature work but essential for understanding the development of one of literature’s great imaginations.