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Witty, compassionate and beautifully-written, this tale of love and loneliness, sadness and hope is always unpredictable, infused with a powerful sense of wonder.

Granta is offering us a sneak preview of the future of Spanish language writers - included in this eye-catching collection of short stories and extracts may be tomorrow's García Márquez, Allende, Vargas Llosa, or Borges.

A woman confesses her guilty secret to an obscene caller; a daughter trades with God for her father's life; a family re-enacts an unholy nativity.

Beautifully paced and written with a distinct voice, Snake Ropes is a story of sisterhood, love and determination that builds to an emotional conclusion.

This short collection of short short stories all take place in a particular 'spot'. The singular sense of place in each story gives the eccentrics, hoboes, lowlifes and meanos a specific place to carve their loneliness and reflection.

The Colour is a gripping drama of sacrifice and greed set during the mid-nineteenth-century gold rush in New Zealand.

Far from the Madding Crowd is perhaps the most pastoral of Hardy's Wessex novels. It tells the story of the young farmer Gabriel Oak and his love for and pursuit of the elusive Bathsheba Everdene, whose wayward nature leads her to both tragedy and true love.

Originally published in France in 2005, this novella describes the touching story of an unlikely friendship between two men, Monsieur Bark and Monsieur Linh.

With her government quietly gearing up for war in the Middle East, 20-year-old Tassie Keltjin, a 'half-Jewish' farmer's daughter from the plains of the Midwest, has come to the university town of Troy - a girl escaping her home to encounter the complex world of culture and politics.

So much has been written about London, from Dickens to Ackroyd to Monica Ali to Patrick Hamilton and on and on and more and more. Craig Taylor, the brilliantly funny author of A Million Tiny Plays About Britain has taken on the task of the definitive state of the nation (city). He has interviewed people from all walks of life, from economic migrants to middle-class poshos to refugees to tourists to artists, and everyone you can think of, in order to write Londoners, one of the most authentic books about London.

The White Castle, Orhan Pamuk's celebrated first novel, is the tale of a young Italian scholar captured by pirates and put up for auction at the Istanbul slave market. Acquired by a brilliant Turkish inventor, he is set to work on projects to entertain the jaded Sultan.

Lara Moorhouse is the central character and narrator of the story, around whom a harsh-reality of parental deceit unfolds, as she wakes up to her father's double-life in her early teenage years

The Gamal is as accomplished as it is original.

Torn from her mother, eight-year-old Anna Sands is relocated with other children to a large Yorkshire estate that has been opened up to evacuees by Thomas and Elizabeth Ashton, an enigmatic childless couple.

The author of the prizewinning Deafening returns with a poignant and compelling novel in ten stories.

Anna Funder finds authentic voices for characters who could have been overwhelmed as history rolls over them, drawing out the intensity of their political commitment and their dislocation as they are driven from Germany to London: 'by the magic of exile, whole categories of my identity were obliterated.'

Set in the exotic surroundings of Africa, Malaysia and the east, these stories variously appraise the glamour, folly, and rapacity of imperial adventure.

The eleven stories collected here share the theme of love, but they are more than simple love stories.

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

These books are a great idea, especially for anyone not yet converted to the idea that short stories make wonderful reading. And for those of you who need no persuading, here are some of the finest writers from the Picador list.

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.

McCarthy’s pared-down prose describes the wholesale annihilation of a society and all that it holds dear, but it also celebrates ingenuity and the will to survive in the face of utter hopelessness.

Told with humour, the stories are compelling, touching and sometimes painful. This is a wonderful read, easy to pick up and difficult to put down.

The Pleasant Light of Day, is a somewhat gentler affair (than Notes from a Turkish Whorehouse). ‘Uprooted’ is a sort of Irish version of ‘In the Neighbourhood’, weaving together the disparate lives of people drawn to one small coastal town, but the tone is elegiac rather than despairingly bitter.

Tim Winton is one of the finest authors currently at work anywhere in the world, and Breath builds upon his reputation for writing novels that carefully pick away at relationships which exist in the context of almost overpowering landscape.

Snowdrops is a taut, lean, icily involving novel that is as sharp as an arctic blast. Full of palpable danger, moral ambiguity and with a tense, suspense plot, this is a debut novel of rare power and conviction.

These stories are set in Steinbeck's birthplace, the rolling Salinas Valley in California. They explore the tensions between men and women, the individual and society, and humanity and the natural world.

Intense, emotional and impressive

Parched, arid and dusty lives, mirrored in the unremittingly harsh landscape of Australia, have become the stock-in-trade of Tim Winton.

Kiss Me First is a refreshing, skilfully-handled novel very much of our times.

This is a novel about immersion. It's about an ageing man and the allure of youth. It's also about the boundaries of myth and reality, and should feature on the EngLit syllabus for decades.

Bellow died in 2005; this collection of his shorter fiction is a worthy testament to his writing.

This collection of stories reads like a novel following Rose's life as she moves away from her impoverished roots and forges her own path in the world.

With its spare, colloquial narration and razor-sharp sense of how people really communicate, this collection went on to become one of the most influential pieces of literary fiction.

The best writing from the Subcontinent, selected to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of India's independence.

Ozick writes about bitterness, cruelty and compulsion with brutal acuity and tenderness.

From the Mouth of the Whale is a magical evocation of an enlightened mind and a vanished age.

Paley's 'tragi-comic stories resound with the cadences of the city where she was raised [New York] and are carried by the spoken word.(The Oxford Companion to English Literature.)

Dan Rhodes' new novel does that Dan Rhodes thing that Dan Rhodes does so well: talk about the extreme light and dark at the centre of the human condition in a wildly comedic way.

Stuart Evers' debut novel is an exercise in restraint and slow reveals. It occupies multiple time strands, cities and personalities as its protagonist escapes from, then returns to, his suffocating home town and the dark past he left behind.

The centre of the world: 1990s Manhattan. Victor Ward, a model with perfect abs and all the right friends, is seen and photographed everywhere, even in places he hasn’t been and with people he doesn’t know.

First published in 1877, these three stories are dominated by questions of doubt, love, loneliness and religious experience.

The Art of Fielding is the newest heavyweight contender for Great American novel of the world. It arrives on a garlanded float of its own mythology (there’s a companion book detailing the struggles to get it published) and has garnered countless praise from its obvious go-to influences like Jonathan Franzen and Jay McInerney as well as Orange Prize for Fiction winner Tea Obreht. So, now we’ve acknowledged that all signs point to everyone being destined to fall in love with this book, let’s just spoil it for you and say… you are destined to fall in love with this book.

Hey Yeah Right Get a Life, Helen Simpson's third collection of short stories, is about the hectic day-to-day whirlpool of women's lives- women who want to improve their lot, women who yearn to 'get a life' better than their own.

After the frenzied intensity of his last book, Mailman , Lennon presents us with one hundred very short, beautifully crafted vignettes that aptly capture the oddness of everyday life.

Orhan Pamuk needs no introduction to global audiences, but Silent House might. His second novel, originally published in 1983, it has only now been translated into English by Robert Finn. It's a surpise that it has taken this long, since Silent House is neither prologue nor footnote to Pamuk's celebrated career, but easily ranks alongside My Name is Red and Snow.

A man finds himself surrounded by women who are becoming paler, more silent and literally smaller.

Tower has an uncanny and slightly alarming gift for bringing society's downbeats to our appalled attention. Also like Pollock, he roots these unfortunates in the small, tortured worlds of their relationships, from which, it seems, there is little chance of escape.

The stories of Ryunosuke Akutagawa (1892-1927) paint a picture of a medieval Japan peopled by Shoguns and priests, vagrants and peasants.