198 x 129 mm

Conversations in the Cathedral by Mario Vargas Llosa (Faber) — two men in a Lima bar ask when Peru screwed itself up, and the novel’s extraordinary formal structure — intertwining time frames and voices — reconstructs the answer across five hundred pages. Considered by many critics Vargas Llosa’s greatest achievement: the structure itself enacts the argument, that corruption is not dramatic but gradual, not an event but an environment. Published by Faber & Faber.

The Joke by Milan Kundera (Faber) — a sardonic postcard written in 1948 ends Ludvík’s university career and his future; fifteen years later, his revenge arrives too late to mean what he intended. Kundera’s first novel, suppressed after the Soviet invasion, in which his characteristic themes first find full expression: the relationship between the personal and the political, between love and power, between memory and the self that remembers. Published by Faber & Faber.

In a Place of Darkness by Stuart MacBride (Corgi) — the latest Logan McRae thriller, set in the wind-scoured landscape of Aberdeen where a body found in circumstances suggesting a serial killer leads McRae toward something he was not prepared to find. MacBride combines the atmospheric intensity of Nordic noir with the black comedy and psychological depth that have made his series one of the most consistently acclaimed in British crime fiction. 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.

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.