Not all are hidden by luxuriant, pointy moustaches... The painter's only novel is a baroque and decadent tale set in the 1930s, first published in 1944.
A quiet and thoughtful novel about a girl growing up on an island off the Welsh coast before WW2, whose horizons are altered by the arrival of two ethnographers.
Acute, sensitive novel about a writer's psychic collapse. (The US edition has a different title - Dartmouth Park, which is far more Jane Austen than the contents.)
In this debut novel by a fine poet, a young woman's table-waiting, mould-spraying life of urban precariousness is disrupted by a glamorous stranger with a shared enemy.
A spin on Huckleberry Finn, this harrowing (and characteristically witty) account of his adventures is narrated by James, a runaway slave. It's a scary reflection on racism today.
A production of Hamlet in Palestine and the complexities of home-coming: inevitably theatre is political and there are consequences. By the British-Palestinian author of The Parisian.
The latest in Penguin's handsome and imaginative anthologies of national literatures: a hundred years of stories from the colonial period to the present.
A slim, charming and witty riff on Proustian themes - the shallowness of society, the impossibility of love, the enduring power of art... Life-affirming!
In the wake of the success of Baron Bagge in 2022, here's another tight novella by the Austrian mid-C20th novelist, this time about the fear of revenge after WW2.
An excellent Catalan novel from the 1970s, about flight and return, in which the Civil War still looms over the tail-end of Franco's era and modernity blooms. A marvellous evocation of Barce... read more
The story of the inimitable Maria Callas - conflicted, disappointed, ambitious and supremely gifted - and of her love affair with Aristotle Onassis - by the author of The Fortune Hunter, My ... read more
Somerset Maugham appears as one of two narrators in this atmospheric novel of love, truth, secrecy and betrayal in 1920s' colonial Penang. Eng's airy storytelling is a rare gift: he gives hi... read more
A Chicago detective thinks he's found a piece of paradise in the west of Ireland... but all that glisters is not gold. Some of it is coldly gleaming revenge.
We're in Verona Island here, not Lilliput, and the action is set in a brothel in 1954, where the eponymous Mrs and her 19-year-old business opportunity, Carita, seek to assert their agency i... read more
Drawing on the author's own experiences of WW2, the novel's protagonist rebels against the pressures of family and politics in Fascist Italy. First published in 1949. By the author of Forbid... read more
A woman goes missing; decades later, her children still have no answers - but the East Anglian village where they grew up begins to offer up its secrets.
Tokyo, an astonishly good cook and multiple murders. This is not a who-dunnit but a why-dunnit - and there is much to savour, both malicious and delicious.
This love story tacks between an English boarding school and the Western Front. A moving historical debut; compelling and unexpectedly funny (for the Somme).