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The Last Patriarch tells the story of Mimoun. Born in Morocco, from the first 'thwhap' that he receives from his father as a baby, he is singled out as a problematic child.

Wharton brings empathy, passion and a novelist's eye for detail to this series of essays on France at the outbreak of World War I.

Ours Are the Streets makes for uncomfortable reading, as especially as the spectre of the 7/7 bombings haunt the pages. It’s got a lot going for it, but does run the risk of retreading well-covered ground depending on what you’ve seen or read beforehand.

Like so many others, Lev is on his way from Eastern Europe to Britain, seeking work. He is a tiny part of a vast diaspora that is changing British society.

Wildly different as these stories might seem, they share a humane scepticism, a talent for the unexpected, and a vast and humane rage with the state of human affairs. Powerful stuff.

Survivor, genius, perfumer, killer: this is Jean-Baptiste Grenouille. He is abandoned on the filthy streets of Paris as a child, but grows up to discover he has an extraordinary gift: a sense of smell more powerful than any other human's.

A dizzy, impressionistic and occasionally downright demented  portrait of a city on the edge of revolution, Petersburg takes its place among the great city-novels like Ulysses and Berlin Alexanderplatz.

...a strange and affecting read: an astounding confabulation of myth, memory and heartache.

Beasts of No Nation gives us an extraordinary portrait of the chaos and violence of war. It is a gripping and remarkable debut.

The book is well drawn and very French, yet sounds so urgently British/London, it's charming and quick to read and allows an insight into the txt-ridden, low motivation, high octane lives of kids today, distractions, influences and warts, and all.

Short story collection from the bad boy of Euro-lit. As wise as it is hilarious, Fame is a gloriously twisted handbook to modern life.

Maupassant's collection of classic short stories set in 19th-century Paris chronicles marriage, relationships and class difference.

The Last Brother is a powerful, poetic novel that sheds new light on a little-explored aspect of 20th-century history- Vichy French-occupied Madagascar. Translated from the French, this novel is set in a Madagascar oblivious to the rest of the world.

The narrator of Kamchatka looks back to a pivotal moment in his childhood in Argentina, trying to make sense of the traumatic events that tore his family apart.

The seven stories in this book are short enough to be read on the shortest of train journeys.

László Krasnahorkai's novel Satantango, first published in Hungary during the dying years of Communism and now newly translated into English by George Szirtes, is a desolate and terrifying vision of a moribund society, shot through with black farce and prophetic satire.

None can doubt the gusto with which he has told his story. And, after all, what greater subject is there for a novelist than flaming love and burning hatred?

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.

The Changeling is the story of a famous novelist, Kogito, and how he keeps a connection alive with his film director friend, Goro, who has recently killed himself by jumping off a building in the city.

From an Americanized Moscow to the shores of the Hebrides, these stories have a haunting sense of place and a knack for freeze-framing each characterís life just at the moment when the past breaks the surface

Kingsolver tells stories of hope, momentary joy and powerful endurance.

Teresa Solana's third instalment of the twin detective series introduces us to a recession hit Barcelona where the rich throw their money around and everyone else struggles to make it to payday

It's 3 a.m. and Elizabeth Gilbert is sobbing on the bathroom floor. She's in her thirties, she has a husband, a house, they're trying for a baby - and she doesn't want any of it.

In this disturbing novel, David Albahari takes one of the many infamous moments of Nazi history, and personalises it in the most extraordinary way.

This book is a transcript of conversations (written from memory) between the author and two celebrated artists: Samuel Beckett and the Dutch painter Bram van Velde.

Claudia Piñeiro’s Thursday Night Widows is a whodunnit, a black comedy, a social portrait and a prophecy, a timely dissection of the disintegration of a privileged class and an important addition to 21st Century Latin American fiction.

The Last Quarter of the Moon is an epic odyssey through the last century as told through the eyes of an aged member of the Evenki tribe, a clan of nomads who once roamed the remote forests of north-eastern China with their herds of reindeer.

Eight short stories, written over the past twenty years: surrealistic political fables, ghost stories, tales of failed and perverse love, and stories about the destructive effects of superstition and ignorance.

Kati Hirschel is not your typical Turkish lady, for a start she is half German, she runs her own crime novel book store and she refuses to be the glamorous, obedient woman her boyfriend wants her to be

It's a combustible combination and Ghosh makes the most of it. From the first page he plunges the reader into the lives of the rich and poor, black and white, high caste and low, natives and colonials. He is damning about the damage wreaked by the British opium trade not only on those addicted to the drug but also on the Indian farmers forced to grow poppies instead of grain.

Undoubtedly these are stories that take effort and reward re-reading, but they are also playful, occasionally laugh out loud funny. It is a deft and subtle collection that should see Kanai reach a much wider audience outside of her native Japan.

Alienation and solitude have long been a focus for European literature, and the loneliness of the individual in a fractured society is as relevant today as it was in the 1950s in these two books.

Zola's racy tone is faithfully rendered in these spirited versions by Douglas Parmee.

In January 1943, a heavily pregnant woman resides alone in Rome, having left her family and all that is known to her behind in Germany. 

On a winter day in New York City, Crispin Salvador's dead body is fished from the Hudson River. A scion and controversial figure in Filipino literature, Salvador has been working for years on an expose of the Filipino ruling families - the manuscript of which is now missing.

A devastating event renders elderly Paavo mute, and drives Salme, his wife, to sell her story. A shrewd businesswoman, she'll use the money to help her daughter, but she won't tell her husband.

The Three Fat Men is unmistakably a communist fairytale, an allegory of the Russian Revolution for good Soviet children. But it's not merely a historical curiosity, and nor should it be dismissed as crude propaganda.

Amos Oz's new fiction presents a surreal and unsettling portrait of a village in Israel. A picture of the community takes shape across seven stories, in which a group of characters appear and return.

On one level Q is a straightforward historical thriller set against the violent and confusing backdrop of the northern Reformation. On that level alone it can stand as one of the best stories of recent time.

Brodeck's Report is a beautifully written, lyrical condemnation of small-minded evil. Of course, the Anderer's murder plays out in the wake of a much, much larger crime against twentieth-century European humanity, but the careful intensity with which Claudel/Brodeck unveils the horrible death of a single man somehow jolts the heart as painfully as the story of the millions condemned to the death camps.

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

Born in the US and reared in a series of provincial households in Mexico, Harrison Shepherd is mostly a liability to his social-climbing mother, Salomé; his fortunes remaining insecure as Salomé finds her rich men-friends always on the losing side of the Mexican Revolution.

If you're going to write a big, ambitious novel about human infamy, you could do worse than to start with Mordechai Chaim Rumkowski, the Nazi-approved leader of the Jews of the Lodz Ghetto

A beautiful and mysterious woman arrives by accident at a country house, settles down and enacts a bizarre punishment on the father and son, owners of the estate, who both set out to woo her.

Moving, compelling and full of superb characters, World Cup Wishes is a poignant and thoroughly satisfying novel of the people we call friends, and the dreams we have for ourselves and others.

American playwright Joshua and English writer Natalie share a vexed five-year history of sporadic encounters, explosive drunkenness and failed intercourse, all spliced with the occasional sad intimation of true love.

Shiro Hamao's pair of gulp-sized short stories, 'The Devil's Disciple' and 'Did He Kill Them?' are published in English for the first time, and the only disappointment is that we cannot reach for more of his work.

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.