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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.

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.

Ten women, ten stories, one unknowable man — Hiromi Kawakami’s formally inventive novel traces Mr Nishino’s life through the perspectives of those who loved him. A cumulative portrait built from memory and angle: a meditation on love and the gap between experience and truth.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

Margaret Atwood’s underrated 1979 novel — three people in Toronto navigating a suicide’s aftermath, failing marriages, and emotional paralysis. Precise, unsentimental, and rich in Atwood’s characteristic irony, this portrait of small cruelties and accumulated distances is one of her most accomplished works.

Halldór Laxness’s singular philosophical comedy — a young emissary investigates why an Icelandic pastor has stopped conducting services and discovers a community with its own relationship to Christianity, paganism, and the supernatural. Deadpan, strange, and ultimately profound from Iceland’s Nobel laureate.

Vonnegut’s prescient 1952 debut dystopia — a near-future America where machines have replaced human labour and the engineers who manage them form a ruling class. His satirical intelligence is already fully formed: dark comedy, humanism, and anger at dehumanising systems that feel more relevant than ever.

Haruki Murakami’s rich, immersive novel — a portrait painter, a hidden painting, and a world where reality and imagination dissolve. Drawing on Japanese history and Western music, a 700-page work of extraordinary texture and depth from a writer at the full height of his extraordinary powers.