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In luminous, lyrical prose, Fletcher vividly evokes the haunting, wild landscape of the Scottish Highlands in this story ultimately concerned with the transformative power of nature, and the importance of kindness and hope.

The exhausted nurse, Hana; the maimed thief, Caravaggio; the wary bomb-defuser, Kip: each is haunted by the riddle of the English patient, the nameless burn victim who lies in an upstairs room.

Against the backdrop of the anniversary of the 1917 Russian Revolution, myth and reality constantly collide and even merge in Olga Slavnikova's novel, which was awarded the Russian Booker Prize in 2006.

This collection, with its themes of the supernatural was, therefore, something of a departure for a writer who was well-known for his more humanitarian and liberal views.

The writer and illustrator Alasdair Gray, best known for his first novel, Lanark (1982), proves in this collection to be also an exceptional writer of short fiction.

In Japan the older generation may still adhere to strict codes of behaviour – codes that relegate women (and especially mothers) to lowly, almost servile, positions, but which also demand the acceptance of blame for transgressions – but the young, meanwhile, are drifting towards a looser, anarchical way of living, bringing pressures of a different kind to bear.

From silent hidden love to a lifetime reminiscence of an immigrant's England.

The premise is thrilling indeed: in 1945 a plane crashes on a glacier in Iceland, containing both American and German military. The reason for their joint presence, as eventually revealed by Indriđason during the course of his novel, is a juicy conspiracy theory that is outrageous, yet thrillingly believable.

Arkansas veers between languid and lazy, humour-filled and joyful and bleak and violent with ease. Swin and Kyle are two con-artists, hustlers, scammers, petty criminals and summer buddies, who spend their evenings working for a crime boss they've never met, transporting illicit and stolen goods, doing dodgy deals in trailer parks and getting in and out of trouble. Their days are spent living the high life, in paradise- a neglected state park in Arkansas. But a shot rings out in the dark and changes their lives, propelling them from youthful exuberance to survival extinct.

Riba is the enraging, pitiable, unfashionably likeable protagonist of Enrique Vila-Matas' new novel Dublinesque.

Peter Hobbs' debut novel is a sustained and beautiful piece of writing about one man's crisis of faith in extremis; it is almost unremittingly bleak but all the more powerful for so being.

Night and day, dark and light, the rise and set of the sun, all within twenty four hours. What if this began to change?

Two brides, fifty years apart, journey to the little island in support of their husband's enthusiasm for its potential. 

The fictional city of Santa Teresa on the Mexico-US border draws in lost souls: convicts and academics, an American sportswriter, a teenage student with her widowed father, and a reclusive, 'missing' writer. But there is a darker side still.

Beautiful and bleak short fiction by the reclusive author of The Catcher in the Rye.

The Elephant Keepers' Children is just silly enough to be clever and just mad enough to make perfect sense.

Behind a crumbling facade of seeming normality, secrets begin to stir within the Lux family home. Jean Lux, constrained academic wife and guilty mother, is waiting for excitement - and it will come from an unexpected source.

A thoughtful novel about family and other loving relationships, and our need to belong.

Sixteen bite-sized tales around the theme of the perfect crime.

...a fun, breezy, artful, if sometimes too long, book about fighting the good fight against the Man.

A chef, a portraitist and a barber are taken hostage in a coup to overthrow their boss, the President.

A sharply observed, warm and witty exposé of life in the low-income outskirts of Paris.

The novel is based upon the true story of the nineteenth century Dante Club, an illustrious gathering of the some of the finest American minds of the day. The Club, comprising the poets and Harvard Professors Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, James Russell Lowell and Oliver Wendell Holmes, and their publisher J.T. Fields, dedicated themselves to the task of producing the first American translation of Dante's Divine Comedy, which was finally published in 1867.

The story is based upon the life of the romantic poet and philosopher Friedrich von Hardenberg, who wrote under the name Novalis, but Lively has written much more than a fictionalised biography of the man.

Shortlisted for the 2005 Orange Award for New Writers, Freudenberger's debut is a collection of five stories set in India and South-East Asia

It's no fun being male and forty: the days of kids-free, carefree, relationships are over, there's pressure to earn the money to pay for the inflated lifestyle bred by the success so eagerly striven for, and it takes much more work to keep in shape.

Every weekend, in basements and parking lots across the country, young men with good white-collar jobs and absent fathers take off their shoes and shirts and fight each other barehanded for as long as they have to.

The mummy and daddy of all Russian social novels, Gogol's masterpiece is equals parts rambling picaresque, Dickensian social tapestry, absurdist farce and caustic satire.

Part classic country house novel, part surreal fantasy, The Uninvited Guests marks a very different approach for Sadie Jones

With her experiences of three cultures - born in London of Bengali parents, and brought up on the east coast of America - Lahiri has been blessed with a selection of many narrative colours on her fictional palette.

Divakaruni embroiders a colourful tapestry of life in India and America, weaving tales of two continents with perception and sensitivity.

One Night At the Call Centre is a comedic look at modern India's interactions with the West, taking place in a call centre where we learn about the lives behind the voices on the end of the line when we try to change our mobile phone billing plan

A famous writer dies, and his fractured family deal with their grief in various different ways. What follows is a quiet, muted musing on loss, guilt and family relationships.

Neu-Drontheim: a projected city of 50,000 houses that was to be built on the Norwegian coast by the invading Germans during the Second World War. It was a grand scheme – the Reich’s architect Albert Speer had a 25-metre plaster model of its design constructed – but defeat brought a halt to the work.

Although Sophie lives what could be described as a 'normal' young person's life in New York - searching for the right job, the right apartment and the right partner - Bank has transcended this ordinariness by making her quick, sympathetic and likeable.

The Birdman, our narrator, climbs out on to his window ledge every single day to test himself, to see if he can manage to kill himself, and yet he never does.

Astride the Wheel is a short and unassuming novel that tackles impressively large themes. A portrait of an individual spiritual journey, it also reflects the momentous changes in Indian society during the sixties, as experienced in the rural hinterland of the state of Orissa.

Muir's psychological thriller quickly draws you into the worlds of two very damaged people and the claustrophobic environment in which they are supposed to be recovering.

The stories in this collection explore themes of war, romance, emigration and Lebanon rich yet complex society.

After more than 300 years of fiscal prudence and guaranteed discretion in all matters, the exclusive London family bank of Trevelyan-Tubal is in a spot of bother.

A hilarious satire on digital consumerism and the death of the attention span, Shteyngart is masterful in never labouring a point and being constantly surprising, satirical and funny in this sign of the times book.

This collection of stories explores the intimate workings of a woman's heart and mind.

Wetzel’s stories catch people when some part of their lives has been put on pause, leaving them so adrift only acts of obsession or self-destruction provide direction.

Debut novelist Ben Masters comes to us on a wave of expectation. Following the student protests of last year, we all want to know just who are these students of the noughties, filled with the passion of revolution in their hearts and the dancing feet of David Byrne in their retro loafers.

This startling debut by Mohsin Hamid is a tightly packed exploration of Lahore's down and outers.

Luka and the Fire of Life (a loose sequel to Haroun and the Sea of Stories) brings together the language and conventions of the digital landscape with the mythologies of literary and bardic tradition.

Decapolis brings together ten writers from across Europe, who have each written snapshots of life in their cities.