When a young woman in Renaissance Italy is taken by her husband, the Duke of Ferrara, to a remote villa, she realises he intends to kill her... Richly told, by the author of Hamnet.
A ship sails to a fictitious Ottoman island in 1901, bearing three passengers: the daughter of the deposed sultan, her doctor husband, and the royal chemist. They are met with rumours of pl... read more
The life of the black Georgian composer and abolitionist (1729-1780), thrillingly imagined. Born on a slave ship, his owner gave him, as a two-year-old, to three sisters living in Greenwich.... read more
Reymont was a Polish novelist who won the Nobel prize in 1924; this is his magnum opus, an epic of nearly 1000 pages set in the C19th, about a small Polish village. At its centre are a weal... read more
Vicenzo Fontano, the elderly owner of a bookshop, looks back over their conjoined lives on the eve of its closure for redevelopment by greedy speculators. Political and cultural dissidents, ... read more
A powerful novel spanning forty years of friendship between two women. Events in Karachi in 1988 look rather different when seen from present day London, when each has power and an altered a... read more
Born in Austrian Galicia in what is now Ukraine, Schulz is one of the great Eastern European writers of the C20th. Sadly - and oddly - he has been out of print for several years; we are ther... read more
These tales of cats in a Tokyo suburb weave a beguiling portrait of the local human inhabitants. What is it with cats and the Japanese literary scene? Murakami, Hiraide, Kawamura...