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My Name Is Red by Orhan Pamuk (Faber) — Constantinople, 1591: a master miniaturist is murdered, and the detective who must identify the killer is also in love with the murdered man’s niece. A murder mystery, a love story, and a meditation on art, style, and the threat that Western perspective posed to the Islamic painting tradition — narrated by a corpse, a dog, a tree, and the colour red itself. Winner of the Nobel Prize. 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.

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.

The Book of Laughter and Forgetting by Milan Kundera (Faber) — seven stories that are also one story, linked by the themes of memory and forgetting, political power, and the laughter that both subverts and accompanies it. Written after Kundera was stripped of his Czech citizenship and forced into exile — simultaneously a private grief and a political act, an insistence that the things totalitarianism destroys (memory, complexity, the individual voice) matter. Published by Faber & Faber.

The Time of the Hero by Mario Vargas Llosa (Faber) — young cadets at a Lima military academy navigate the rituals of institutional brutality presented as education, until the death of a cadet reveals how completely the institution will protect itself against any truth that threatens its dignity. Written at twenty-six from personal experience — the Peruvian military burned copies publicly. A landmark of Latin American literature. Published by Faber & Faber.

Who Killed Palomino Molero? by Mario Vargas Llosa (Faber) — a young air force pilot, beloved and gentle, is found tortured and murdered in a small Peruvian coastal town. Lieutenant Lituma investigates in the heat and the dust, and what he finds is a story of desire, hierarchy, and the cruelties that class and power arrange in any society that refuses to examine them honestly. Vargas Llosa at his most economical — devastating in barely a hundred and sixty pages. Published by Faber & Faber.

Immortality by Milan Kundera (Faber) — Kundera’s most ambitious novel: a meditation on fame, identity, and what it means to be a person in a world saturated with images of people that outlast, distort, and ultimately replace the originals. Formally extraordinary — Kundera appears as a character, converses with his creations, and moves between Paris and nineteenth-century Germany with complete confidence. The summit of his novelistic achievement. Published by Faber & Faber.

Greek Lessons by Han Kang (Penguin) — a man losing his sight and his ancient Greek, word by word; a woman who has lost her languages and is trying to find a new one. Between them, something begins that neither has words for. The Nobel Prize winner writes about language itself — about the way it both constitutes and fails us, about the particular vulnerability of a person stripped of the words that define their inner life. Quietly devastating. Published by Penguin.

The Collected Stories by Lydia Davis (Penguin Modern Classics) — four decades of stories, some a sentence long and some several pages, each turning a single thought or observation until every facet catches light. Davis is the most original American fiction writer of her generation, her influences French, her method empirical, her results completely unlike anyone else’s. A book that changes how you think about what a story can be. Published by Penguin Modern Classics.

The Loneliness of Souza by Kiran Desai (Penguin) — a documentary filmmaker returns to Goa after a long absence to find a city both familiar and completely changed, and people who force her to confront what she has been recording instead of living. Kiran Desai — Booker Prize winner for The Inheritance of Loss — brings the same quality of tender, merciless attention to this smaller, more concentrated canvas. Published by Penguin.

Some Japanese Ghosts by Lafcadio Hearn (Penguin) — the most perfectly constructed ghost stories in world literature: ‘Mujina’, ‘Yuki-Onna’, ‘The Story of Mimi-Nashi-Hoichi’, gathered in a Penguin Little Black Classic. Brief, precise, and atmospheric in a way that has influenced Japanese horror fiction and film for over a century — the meeting point of the Western short story and the Japanese kaidan tradition. Published by Penguin.

The Deal of a Lifetime by Fredrik Backman (Penguin) — a masterful novella in which a dying CEO tells his estranged son a story about a boy in a hospital and the deal he traded away without knowing its cost. Backman’s emotional ambush is perfectly timed — brief enough to read in one sitting, deep enough to stay with you for a long time. Published by Penguin.

Flesh by David Szalay (Jonathan Cape) — a novel of two people in a relationship that resists all ordinary categories, rendered in prose of uncommon precision. Szalay traces desire and its complications with the observational intelligence of a writer at the height of his gifts — a short, concentrated, and genuinely accomplished work of contemporary British fiction. Published by Jonathan Cape.

The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Mark Haddon (Vintage) — narrated by Christopher Boone, a fifteen-year-old with extraordinary mathematical ability, as he investigates the murder of his neighbour’s dog. Simultaneously a detective story, a portrait of neurodiversity, and a moving father-son narrative. Winner of the Whitbread Book of the Year Award.

Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage by Haruki Murakami (Vintage) — Tsukuru, still haunted by his friends’ inexplicable rejection sixteen years earlier, finally seeks the truth. Murakami’s most emotionally direct novel — about friendship, loss, and the wounds that shape a life. Translated by Philip Gabriel.