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A 30-something painter in Tokyo is abandoned by his wife and finds himself holed up in the mountain home of a famous artist. When he discovers a strange painting in the attic, he unintentionally opens a circle of mysterious circumstances. To close it, he must complete a journey that involves a ringing bell, a two-foot-high physical manifestation of an Idea, a dapper businessman who lives across the valley, a precocious 13-year-old girl, a Nazi assassination attempt during World War II in Vienna, a pit in the woods behind the artist’s home and an underworld haunted by Double Metaphors.

When he hears her favourite Beatles song, Toru Watanabe recalls his first love Naoko, the girlfriend of his best friend Kizuki. Immediately he is transported back almost 20 years to his student days in Tokyo, adrift in a world of uneasy friendships, casual sex, passion, loss and desire - to a time when an impetuous young woman called Midori marches into his life and he has to choose between the future and the past.

Christmas, 1983. In the aftermath of yet another furious argument, seven-year-old Andrev’s mother lets him in on a secret: his father is, in fact, not his father. And so begins a new kind of childhood, in which fathers come and go, arriving in red Volvos and sweeping his mother off her feet. Fathers can be magicians or murderers, artists or canoe enthusiasts, and, like growing pains, or the weather, they appear uninvited and leave without warning. Fathers are drawn to his mother like moths to a flame – but even she can’t control how they behave.

Nicholas has plenty of reasons to feel unstable: he’s fifteen, the child of divorced parents, living with his absent dad in the bleak Chicago suburbs, and an outsider at school. Then, one day in geometry class, he forgets how to breathe. The doctor says it’s just panic, but Nicholas suspects that his real problem might not be a psychiatric one: maybe the Greek god Pan is trapped inside his body.

Wormold is a vacuum cleaner salesman in a city of power cuts. His adolescent daughter spends his money with a skill that amazes him, so when a mysterious Englishman offers him an extra income he's tempted. In return all he has to do is carry out a little espionage and file a few reports. But when his fake reports start coming true, things suddenly get more complicated and Havana becomes a threatening place.

Chemist Elizabeth Zott is not your average woman. In fact, Elizabeth Zott would be the first to point out that there is no such thing. But it's the early 1960s and her all-male team at Hastings Research Institute take a very unscientific view of equality. Except for one: Calvin Evans; the lonely, brilliant Nobel-prize-nominated grudge-holder who falls in love with—of all things—her mind. True chemistry results.

Drifters in search of work, George and simple-minded friend Lennie have nothing in the world except each other - and a dream. A dream that one day they will have some land of their own. Eventually they find work on a ranch, but their hopes are doomed as Lennie - struggling against extreme cruelty, misunderstanding and jealousy - becomes a victim of his own strength.

No collection of Japanese literature is complete without Natsume Soseki's Kokoro, his most famous novel and the last he completed before his death. Published here in the first new translation in more than 50 years, Kokoro - meaning "heart" - is the story of a subtle and poignant friendship between two unnamed characters, a young man and an enigmatic elder whom he calls "Sensei".

In 1922, Count Alexander Rostov is deemed an unrepentant aristocrat by a Bolshevik tribunal, and is sentenced to house arrest in the Metropol, a grand hotel across the street from the Kremlin. Rostov, an indomitable man of erudition and wit, has never worked a day in his life, and must now live in an attic room while some of the most tumultuous decades in Russian history are unfolding outside the hotel’s doors. Unexpectedly, his reduced circumstances provide him entry into a much larger world of emotional discovery.

Two kids meet in a hospital gaming room in 1987. One is visiting her sister, the other is recovering from a car crash. The days and months are long there. Their love of video games becomes a shared world—of joy, escape and fierce competition. But all too soon that time is over, fades from view. When the pair spot each other eight years later in a crowded train station, they are catapulted back to that moment. The spark is immediate, and together they get to work on what they love—making games.

This sprawling and often brutal novel, set in the rich farmlands of California's Salinas Valley, follows the intertwined destinies of two families - the Trasks and the Hamiltons - whose generations helplessly reenact the fall of Adam and Eve and the poisonous rivalry of Cain and Abel.

For years, rumors of the "Marsh Girl" have haunted Barkley Cove, a quiet town on the North Carolina coast. So in late 1969, when handsome Chase Andrews is found dead, the locals immediately suspect Kya Clark, the so-called Marsh Girl. But Kya is not what they say. Sensitive and intelligent, she has survived for years alone in the marsh that she calls home, finding friends in the gulls and lessons in the sand.

Poet Ocean Vuong’s debut novel is a shattering portrait of a family, a first love, and the redemptive power of storytelling. On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous is a letter from a son to a mother who cannot read. Written when the speaker, Little Dog, is in his late 20s, the letter unearths a family’s history that began before he was born - a history whose epicenter is rooted in Vietnam - and serves as a doorway into parts of his life his mother has never known, all of it leading to an unforgettable revelation.

Celebrating its 75th anniversary, John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men remains one of America's most widely read and beloved novels. Here is Steinbeck’s dramatic adaptation of his novel-as-play, which received the New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award for Best Play in 1937-1938 and has featured a number of actors who have played the iconic roles of George and Lennie on stage and film, including James Earl Jones, John Malkovich and Gary Sinise.

A leak is traced to a small sub-section of the secret service, sparking off the inevitable security checks, tensions and suspicions. The sort of atmosphere, perhaps, where mistakes could be made? For Maurice Castle, it is the end of the line anyway, and time for him to retire to live peacefully with his wife and child. But no-one escapes so easily from the lonely, isolated, neurotic world of the SIS.

Anne and Marco Conti seem to have it all—a loving relationship, a wonderful home, and their beautiful baby, Cora. But one night, when they are at a dinner party next door, a terrible crime is committed. Suspicion immediately lands on the parents. But the truth is a much more complicated story.

The Republic of Gilead offers Offred only one function: to breed. If she deviates, she will, like dissenters, be hanged at the wall or sent out to die slowly of radiation sickness. But even a repressive state cannot obliterate desire - neither Offred's nor that of the two men on which her future hangs. Brilliantly conceived and executed, this powerful evocation of 21st-century America gives full rein to Margaret Atwood's devastating irony, wit and astute perception.

Winner of the British Book Awards, Lifetime Achievement Award, 2007.
The hill people and the Mexicans arrived on the same day. It was a Wednesday, early in September 1952. The Cardinals were five games behind the Dodgers with two weeks to go, and the season looked hopeless. The cotton, however, was waist high to my father, almost over my head, and he and my grandfather could be heard before supper whispering words that were seldom heard. It could be a 'good crop'.

Nanao ‘the unluckiest assassin in the world’ has been hired to deliver a birthday present to a guest at a luxury Tokyo Hotel. It seems like a simple assignment but by the time he leaves the guest's room one man is dead and more will soon follow. As events spiral out of control as it becomes clear several different killers, with varying missions, are all taking a stay in the hotel at the same time. And they're all particularly interested in a young woman with a photographic memory, hiding out on one of the twenty floors.

“The first of my father’s illusions was that bears could survive the life lived by human beings, and the second was that human beings could survive a life led in hotels.” So says John Berry, son of a hapless dreamer, brother to a cadre of eccentric siblings, and chronicler of the lives lived, the loves experienced, the deaths met, and the strange times encountered by the family Berry. Hoteliers, pet-bear owners, friends of Freud (the animal trainer and vaudevillian, that is), and playthings of mad fate, they “dream on” in a funny, sad, outrageous, and moving novel.