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89 Words Followed by a Dream by Milan Kundera (Faber) — Kundera’s final work, completed shortly before his death in 2023: short prose pieces gathered around the question of what it means to be at the end of a long life and a long literary career, to look back at the words you have written and find them both yours and not yours. As concentrated and as precisely formed as everything he wrote. The capstone of one of literature’s great bodies of work. Published by Faber & Faber.

Lord of the Flies by William Golding (Faber) — British schoolboys stranded on a tropical island build a society that collapses into savagery within weeks — not because they are particularly bad, but because Golding believes savagery is one of human nature’s fundamental possibilities, always present beneath the conventions that ordinarily contain it. One of the essential British novels, in the Faber & Faber edition. Published by Faber & Faber.

Intermezzo by Sally Rooney (Faber) — Margaret and Ivan are siblings reconciling after their father’s death, navigating an unexpected closeness that neither has words for. Rooney’s fourth novel is her most formally ambitious and emotionally confrontational — approaching a taboo subject with the same clear-eyed intelligence she brings to everything, refusing both sensationalism and comfortable elision. Her most mature and most challenging novel. Published by Faber & Faber.

Let the Old Dead Make Room for the Young Dead by Milan Kundera (Faber) — a young man visits his dying elderly father and finds himself unable to say what needs to be said before time runs out. Among the most painful and most perfectly formed things Kundera ever wrote: a meditation on time, parenthood, and the words that remain unsaid between people who love each other. Part of the Faber Stories series. Published by Faber & Faber.

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.

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.

Solaris by Stanislaw Lem (Faber) — a spacecraft orbits a planet whose ocean may or may not be alive, may or may not be intelligent, and materialises from the scientists’ subconscious the people they have lost. The most profound science fiction novel ever written about the impossibility of genuine contact with a genuinely alien intelligence — and about the impossibility of escaping the contents of one’s own mind. Tarkovsky made it into one of the great films; the novel is better. 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 Unconsoled by Kazuo Ishiguro (Faber) — a celebrated pianist arrives in a Central European city to give a concert of enormous civic importance, and finds himself drawn into an endless succession of encounters and detours whose aggregate logic is the logic of a dream. Deliberately structured as an extended dream, demanding complete surrender — a novel about the impossibility of presence and the gap between our obligations and our capacity to fulfil them. Extraordinary. 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.

Nocturnes by Kazuo Ishiguro (Faber) — five stories linked by music: a Venice gondolier, a London jazz guitarist, a cellist in Rome, a failed musician in an English pub, and a saxophonist in a luxury hotel. Each story requires its compression and nothing more; together they constitute something as sustained and as resonant as a novel — about the gap between what we imagined our lives would be and what they have actually become. Essential Ishiguro. 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.

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.