The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro (Faber) — Stevens, a perfect butler, takes a rare motoring holiday and is finally alone with the question he has spent his life not asking: whether the life he gave to perfect service was a life worth giving. Booker Prize winner 1989 — a masterpiece of first-person narration in which every sentence means more than it says, and Stevens’s careful prose becomes the vehicle for a tragedy of unacknowledged feeling and unrecoverable time. 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.

Loving Sabotage by Amélie Nothomb (Faber) — Nothomb’s childhood at an elite Chinese school for diplomatic children in 1970s Beijing, where the children of foreign embassies formed their own closed world with its own cruelties. Simultaneously a comedy of manners and a disturbing account of how social worlds form and enforce themselves, written with characteristic self-deprecating humour and psychological precision. Ideal for readers who loved Fear and Trembling. Published by Faber & Faber.

Laughable Loves by Milan Kundera (Faber) — seven stories set in 1960s Czechoslovakia, in which men and women navigate the gap between public performance and private reality with a mixture of weariness, ingenuity, and erotic energy. The early short fiction in which Kundera’s characteristic voice first becomes fully itself: philosophical intelligence, erotic comedy, and Central European melancholy in perfect balance. The ideal introduction to his work. Published by Faber & Faber.

Life Is Elsewhere by Milan Kundera (Faber) — Jaromil, a poet in Communist Czechoslovakia, is the product of a mother so completely invested in his genius that she has made him incapable of any relationship not mediated by her approval. One of Kundera’s most psychologically acute novels — a portrait of artistic narcissism whose implications extend far beyond its historical setting. Underrated even among Kundera devotees. Essential reading. Published by Faber & Faber.

Conversations in the Cathedral by Mario Vargas Llosa (Faber) — two men in a Lima bar ask when Peru screwed itself up, and the novel’s extraordinary formal structure — intertwining time frames and voices — reconstructs the answer across five hundred pages. Considered by many critics Vargas Llosa’s greatest achievement: the structure itself enacts the argument, that corruption is not dramatic but gradual, not an event but an environment. Published by Faber & Faber.

The Joke by Milan Kundera (Faber) — a sardonic postcard written in 1948 ends Ludvík’s university career and his future; fifteen years later, his revenge arrives too late to mean what he intended. Kundera’s first novel, suppressed after the Soviet invasion, in which his characteristic themes first find full expression: the relationship between the personal and the political, between love and power, between memory and the self that remembers. Published by Faber & Faber.

The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera (Faber) — Tomas and Tereza in the shadow of the Prague Spring: a love story that becomes a sustained philosophical inquiry into whether life, happening only once and therefore never rehearsed or corrected, is unbearably light or unbearably heavy. Kundera’s narrating voice — ironic, erudite, playfully direct — was something genuinely new in world fiction. The essential starting point for his extraordinary body of work. Published by Faber & Faber.

Origin by Dan Brown (Corgi) — a futurist genius is about to announce a discovery that will answer where we come from and where we are going. Before he can speak, he is assassinated. Robert Langdon races through Gaudí’s Sagrada Família and the Guggenheim Bilbao to find what the genius discovered and who killed him. Brown’s most philosophically ambitious Langdon novel — a thriller about science, religion, and the nature of human destiny. Published by Corgi.

Inferno by Dan Brown (Corgi) — Robert Langdon wakes in Florence with a gunshot wound and no memory of the previous forty-eight hours. A code encoded in Botticelli’s Map of Hell leads him through the most beautiful buildings of Florence, Venice, and Istanbul in a race to prevent a catastrophe of Dante-esque proportions. The fourth Langdon novel combines Renaissance art history and Dante scholarship with Brown’s trademark plotting velocity. Published by Corgi.

Deception Point by Dan Brown (Corgi) — a NASA satellite detects a meteorite in the Arctic containing unmistakable evidence of extraterrestrial life, and the scientist sent to verify it finds herself in mortal danger in one of the most inhospitable environments on earth. Brown’s Antarctic thriller combines scientific detail with the breakneck plotting that has made him the bestselling thriller writer in the world — relentless pacing and high-concept suspense. Published by Corgi.