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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.

The finest short stories about romantic love — from Chekhov, Joyce, Mansfield, Munro, and many others, spanning centuries and continents. Diana Secker Tesdell’s Everyman’s Library selection captures love in all its elation, anguish, and comedy: a beautiful, portable, endlessly rewarding collection.

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 celebrated novel about an unexpected friendship between a woman and her former teacher that gradually becomes something more. Quiet, tender, and deeply affecting — a love story told through sake, food, and walks in parks, with prose of extraordinary sensory attention.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

Margaret Atwood’s taut, psychologically complex novel — a Canadian journalist’s Caribbean escape becomes entanglement in a coup and genuine danger. A thriller that explores voyeurism, bodily autonomy, and political complacency, and one of Atwood’s most formally accomplished early works.

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.

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.

Hiromi Kawakami’s quietly mesmerising novella about memory, longing, and the strange persistence of past love. Prose of understated precision that accumulates into something deeply moving — essential for readers who love her work and a perfect introduction for those discovering her for the first time.

Sheila Heti’s luminous, philosophically ambitious novel about grief and what it means to be alive — told partly from inside a leaf. Meditative, essayistic, and genuinely challenging, Pure Colour asks large questions with the open intelligence that makes Heti one of literature’s most distinctive voices.