198 x 129 mm

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.

The Museum of Innocence by Orhan Pamuk (Faber) — Kemal Basmaci falls in love in 1975 Istanbul, and when Füsun disappears into another world, he spends years collecting every object that carries the trace of their time together and builds a museum. Simultaneously a love story, a portrait of Istanbul across three decades, and a genuinely novel form — a novel whose narrator builds, in the text and in reality, a museum in Istanbul that readers can visit. 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.

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.

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 Correspondent by Virginia Evans (Penguin) — a foreign correspondent returns to the country where a decade-old story still haunts her, and finds that the distance she has kept from her own life is no longer enough to protect her. Written with the clarity of someone who understands how journalism actually works — not as heroism but as daily compromise and judgement under pressure — a gripping narrative and serious inquiry into the ethics of witness. Published by Penguin.