Her memoir of running a small cinema in rural Hungary, the transformative magic of communal yet private experience in a place stale with resignation and nostalgia.
In the third book of this remarkable sequence, the Greeks sail for home after a decade of war, leaving Troy a wasteland, and taking with them the captive Trojan women.
A woman approaches a girl on a park bench in Mexico, saying that she recognises her: what follows leads movingly into the girl's relationship with her mother...Desai has been shortlisted for... read more
A reissue of one of Gallant's two novels: a mother and daughter wander from Venice to Cannes to Paris. Superficially glamorous, their lives are in fact constricted, their physical displaceme... read more
Another huge novel from the author of City On Fire. A teenage girl and her father navigate relationships, addiction and other threats to serenity in New York.
The narrator, an undercover agent in her mid-thirties, has been sent to spy on a group of eco-activists in France. A wry, sleuthing novel by the author of The Mars Room.
A lesbian couple - one of whom is an egotistical, bullying narcissist - decide to have children. The novel turns on what happens when the decent one finally determines to leave, taking at le... read more
This powerful story is set in 1851 in the Arctic: a Lutheran minister's Sami convert has a son who inconveniently has a love affair with the minister's daughter.
A handful of stories about five women whose recent experiences of difficult or painful events are leavened by life-enhancing - even life-altering - moments.
A gloriously comic short novel from 1975, in which a journalist saves a hare and walks away from a wearisome life into a series of adventures with the hare as companion. Like our protagonist... read more
A dark, funny reimagining of Shakespeare's Henriad. Hal is twenty-two, often drunk, drifting between parties, mass and his difficult family, until a shooting accident throws him into the pat... read more
A day with Monet - and his wife, children and grand-children - from before dawn to sundown - in the house and garden at Giverny. Figes' achievement in this novella is her delicate layering o... read more
Smuggled out of the Soviet Union in 1982, this novel first appeared in English in 1987 and soon disappeared, to be resurrected thanks to Susan Sontag's enthusiasm for a 'scruffy-looking' cop... read more
An exuberant romp of a thriller: career-driven journalist Rika finds that the best way to secure an interview with a maybe-serial-killer is through her stomach, trying out the rich recipes t... read more
An Irish engineer living alone in Bilbao is the pivot for this meditation on memory, loss and the routines by which we try to hold on to them. Duncan's sparing prose captures minute details ... read more
This glorious tapestry of a novel returns to Taylor's accustomed stomping ground - the university campus - with whisper-close third-person narration and minute observation worthy of his reve... read more
Reminiscent of Süskind's Perfume or Andrew Miller's Ingenious Pain, this is set in C18th France and involves a physical prodigy. In this case, it is his ability to eat... By the author of T... read more
A mother and her daughter navigate their betrayal by a ruthlessly self-regarding poet. Enright is superb at unpicking complex relationships and laying out their strands: we watch, spellbound... read more
A love affair and its aftermath, set in the closing years of the GDR. The girl is young, the man significantly older; the alteration in their love finds a parallel in the oppression of the r... read more
The murder of a teenager in a seaside town on the eve of the Brexit vote is painstakingly researched by a journalist: a mirror-ball of voyeurism, manipulation and hypocrisy.