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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.

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 taut, unsettling portrait of a woman on holiday who becomes obsessed with a young mother on the beach — and with her own buried ambivalence as a mother. A meditation on maternal love, resentment, and guilt treated with characteristic directness and complete truth.

The third Neapolitan novel — Elena and Lila through 1970s Italy’s political tumult, the labour movement, and the complexities of feminism. Ferrante’s most explicitly political volume traces two women navigating class, identity, and the tension between personal life and collective action.

The second Neapolitan novel — Lila married and constrained, Elena escaped to university and finding liberation complicated by loss. Ferrante traces their diverging paths with ferocity and psychological depth: richer, darker, and more complete than its predecessor, and equally essential.

Irving Stone’s celebrated biographical novel of Vincent van Gogh — an immersive, passionately researched account of the painter’s obsessive genius, poverty, and tragic life. The definitive fictional portrait of van Gogh, which has introduced generations of readers to one of art history’s most transcendent careers.

A giant frog arrives at a Tokyo bank employee’s apartment with a mission: together they must prevent an earthquake from destroying the city. Murakami’s celebrated story about heroism, invisibility, and saving the world without recognition — beautifully illustrated and a perfect introduction to his magical realism.