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 formally unique meditation on whiteness, grief, and consolation — lyric fragments centred on white objects that become vessels for personal and historical sorrow. Between poetry, essay, and novel: a profoundly moving work unlike anything else in contemporary literature.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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 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 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.

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.

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.

Kurt Vonnegut’s essential story collection — science fiction, satire, and something stranger, spanning two decades and including Harrison Bergeron and other classics. Short, fast, and deceptively simple: stories that arrive quickly and leave behind ideas that expand in the mind for days.

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.