198 x 129 mm

Piercing by Ryu Murakami (Bloomsbury) — Kazuki, quiet and seemingly ordinary, is methodically planning a murder with great care. A slim, wickedly precise psychological thriller about the relationship between violence and intimacy, written in the sparse, disturbing style that made In the Miso Soup an international sensation. A masterclass in literary horror that illuminates rather than merely disturbs — not for the faint-hearted. Published by Bloomsbury.

Beautiful World, Where Are You by Sally Rooney (Faber) — Alice and Eileen, best friends in their early thirties in Dublin, navigating professional lives, romantic complications, and the persistent sense that the world they expected has not arrived. Rooney’s most spacious novel — uncertain in ways that its predecessors were not, attempting to find beauty and goodness in a world that feels neither. For readers who have followed her development with care. 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.

Come Rain or Come Shine by Kazuo Ishiguro (Faber) — in the space of a single evening, a journey, a meal, a game of cards, everything is decided or not decided between a man and a woman who have known each other for fifteen years. Ishiguro’s short story as compressed and precisely balanced as a Japanese object — few pages that repay repeated reading. Part of the Faber Stories series. Published by Faber & Faber.

The Festival of Insignificance by Milan Kundera (Faber) — four old friends meet in a Paris park, and in their conversation Kundera finds the vehicle for a final meditation on the questions that have occupied him for six decades: the nature of art, the comedy of existence, the possibility that what we think matters does not, and that this might be not a tragedy but a liberation. Barely a hundred and twenty pages — the perfect capstone to one of the great bodies of work in twentieth-century literature. Published by Faber & Faber.

The Buried Giant by Kazuo Ishiguro (Faber) — in a post-Arthurian Britain veiled in mist and forgetting, an elderly couple journey to find their son, gradually discovering the nature and purpose of a collective amnesia that has settled over the entire country. What do we owe to a painful past we might prefer to forget? Ishiguro’s most mythological novel — profound, strange, and unforgettable from a Nobel laureate at the height of his powers. Published by Faber & Faber.

The War of the End of the World by Mario Vargas Llosa (Faber) — a holy man and his thousands of followers in the Brazilian backcountry face four military expeditions from the newly formed Republic in one of the most extraordinary episodes in South American history. Vargas Llosa’s most ambitious novel — vast in scope, intricate in structure, overwhelming in historical and human detail. One of the defining Latin American novels and a genuine masterpiece of world literature. Published by Faber & Faber.

The Feast of the Goat by Mario Vargas Llosa (Faber) — 1961, the Dominican Republic: five men wait in a car to assassinate the dictator Trujillo, who has governed with a terror so complete it has become the atmosphere of daily life. Vargas Llosa’s most formally accomplished novel — about the nature of absolute power, what it does to those who exercise it and those who submit to it. One of the great political novels of the twenty-first century. Published by Faber & Faber.

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.

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.