In a remote Austrian valley during WW1, a woman tries to provide for her family after her husband is drafted into the army. Based on the author's own family history. Powerful, succinct.
A PhD student thinks she's identified the first female British artist, then discovers an error in her research. An Icelandic novella about ambition and untruth.
AZ conjures lives, relationships, families, political upheavals in just a few paragraphs. This clever, tranquil novella begins with a professor telling his stepdaughter a bedtime story about... read more
Smoky, noirish novel that follows an actress from her childhood in provincial Hungary to the glamour - and strictures - of her career behind the Iron Curtain.
Escape to the West and life in the East through the eyes of a young woman loyal to the GDR: oppression in conflict with idealism. First published in East Germany in 1963.
Irreverent, witty and often barmy novel about how people make sense of war. Begins in 1940 with a young woman running naked down the boulevard du Montparnasse.
The subtle and growing bonds between two couples in occupied Turin: this is a classic of wartime Italian fiction, translated now into English for the first time. Bassani called it "successfu... read more
Five stories - from a young artist and a deserting soldier to an old man reminiscing beneath a lime tree - all interwoven by the common threads of war, memory and German history.
Strange and serene novel from the great Hungarian writer: for centuries the grandson of Prince Genji has been searching for a mythical garden and now wanders the grounds of an ancient Kyoto ... read more
A novel about the harrowing life of the great Russian poetess. She was involved with both Pasternak and Rilke; her daughter died in the Moscow famine; her husband was executed; and she herse... 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
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
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
New translation of the 1936 bestselling Austrian novella in which a cavalry officer rides through Russian guns into a world of enchanted love... With a foreword, rather surprisingly, by Patt... 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
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...
The fragmented recollections of a handful of survivors of the earthquake that struck the northern Friuli in 1976. Their tiny village high in the Julian Alps, beneath the immense karstic mass... read more
Illness and healing and its effects on a woman's body - this debut novella won an English PEN award for the translation. From the indefatigable and dauntless Peirene Press.
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
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.
An intelligent novel about the wounds of geography and history in modern Turkey: a centenarian artist begins to reveal her suppressed past and family secrets unspool.