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
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
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
Flemish collaboration in WW2, by the author of War and Turpentine, who bought an old house in Ghent only to discover, after twenty years, that a previous occupant was an SS officer. Hertmans... read more
A long novel in which an artist watches versions of himself slip away into alcohol and loneliness. (Previously published as three separate paperbacks).
The Chagos Archipelago was appropriated from Mauritius by Britain in the 1960s and its inhabitants deported (with one suitcase each) to Mauritius and the UK in 1967-1973 to make way for the ... read more
Already known to many as the author of the superb black comedy Death and the Penguin and others, Kurkov - a Russian-born Ukrainian - has recently been a tireless commentator on the Russian i... read more
Born in Victorian Sydney, she was presented at Court to Queen Victoria and then married a Prussian count. The marriage was unhappy, and her subsequent marriage to Bertrand Russell's brother ... read more
This early C19th disabled artist excelled as a miniaturist, having taught herself how to paint by holding a brush in her teeth. Contracted to a travelling showman at the age of thirteen as a... read more
Shortlisted for both the Women's Fiction Prize (2022) and the Booker (2021), this stirring novel pulls together the lives of a fictional female aviator in the 1950s aiming to circumnavigate ... read more
Entertaining and intriguing - if the dear reader can be persuaded to overlook the fatuous and needy title and its horrid, self-promoting exclamation mark.
The first violinist of the Takacs Quartet ruminates on the work of Bartók, Britten, Dvořák and Elgar in relation to ideas of home, exile, nostalgia and place, the hope and even dread of r... read more
Another in the 'No 1 Ladies' Detective Agency' series from the master of 'sofa suspense': you'll find yourself safe in the middle of your seat rather than anywhere uncomfortably near its edg... read more
The fifth and final book in the Barbarotti series sees the investigator take on a cold case, in which the chief witness/suspect of course turns out to be a particularly slippery and terrifyi... read more
A body is discovered in the grounds of Chernobyl, apparently murdered in the hours before the explosion... The radioactive exclusion zone is a suitably disturbing setting for the pursuit of ... read more
A deft and powerful retelling of the myth of Medusa - the only mortal born to a family of gods, whose life was upended by Athene's revenge on Poseidon. Haynes' work is always exciting.
Two families tangled in a story of forbidden love, from the Georgian author (who writes in German) of the bestselling The Eighth Life. This is considerably shorter than that first, excellent... read more
In 2011 Taseer was kidnapped in Lahore by Taliban-affiliated gunmen; only a few months earlier his father, the governer of the province Punjab, had been murdered. It is thought that Taseer w... read more
A former editor of The Times Literary Supplement argues that the trajectory of Rome's richest man presents pertinent questions about the intertwining of money, ambition, and power.
The cleverness of crickets, crows, cockatoos: a fascinating study of the relationship between genes and behaviour. (The book is published in the US as some eagle-eyed readers will perceive).
The remarkable story of the author's Jewish grandmother, whose bestselling Viennese cookbook was expropriated by the Nazis after the Anschluss in 1938 and republished for decades under a fal... read more
An Alpine hotel with a room missing, a private bank in Switzerland, skullduggery over an inheritance, a ravishing young woman - just some of the layers in this fiendish onion of a novel.