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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.

Commie queens Patricia and Lucretia find themselves dancing and strutting their way to oblivion in this 70s/80s Polish underground novel, where sex is everywhere, carelessness and carefreeness are synonymous and Soviet soldiers are easily lead, mostly into bed.

Juli Zeh's The Method is a sharp and unsettling slice of an Orwellian near-future: a plausible, prophetic world ruled by a mysterious body for whom intellect and individual freedom are inconsequential.

In Other Words, the journal of the BCLT, is something of a strange beast: it looks like an a academic journal, but reads like a chaotic, passionate, thrilling and exasperating conversation between all your cleverest friends

This slim book, mournfully consigns the Soviet Union to history's dustbin in a riot of paranoid psychedelia, wild satire and mordant wit.

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.

Both poignant and funny, this unusual French novel explores homelessness, friendship, love and loss.

Petterson’s characters are embedded in the landscape and the seasons, the drifting snows of winter and the burning sunshine of high summer.

For 15-year-old Michael Berg, a chance meeting with an older woman leads to far more than he ever imagined.

Snow is a profoundly modern and universal novel, interested less in the real-life historical drama that forms the backdrop than in the emotional and moral dilemma of Jakob Torn

Claudio Fratta is a gentle man, a garden designer, naturally solitary. He is obsessed by the need to take revenge on the loan shark who bankrupted his father, and with the pursuit of an enigmatic, alluring  woman , one of his clients.

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

Using strikingly poetic imagery and language, Okamoto paints two arresting portraits of frustrated talent and longing.

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.

Grossman's epic panorama of the Second World War, the Holocaust and Stalin's postwar campaign of antisemitism is uncompromising in its realism and often harrowing in its depiction of the brutalities of battle and genocide.

A serial killer is on the loose - a killer of the worst kind. Abducting children and murdering them in an undetectable way that confounds the police.

It will soon be fifty years since Vasily Grossman died - worn out by a lifetime of witnessing horror and brutality, and by the unfriendly attentions of the Soviet state - and  only now is he beginning to be acknowledged as one of the greatest writers of the twentieth century.

Babi Yar is the name of a ravine on the outskirts of Kiev, where between 1941 and 1943 the Nazis murdered untold numbers of Jews, Roma, the disabled, Ukrainian resisters and hostages.

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.

In this strange, understated yet compelling debut novel, Venezuelan writer Alberto Barrera Tyszka explores the meaning of sickness: physical, mental and social.

Unashamedly hyper-intellectual, and proud to wear its considerable erudition on its sleeve, this collection of essays by poet and translator Arkadii Dragomoshchenko is a gift to culture-hungry readers.

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

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.

It’s perfect tabloid fodder right from the start in this wickedly funny and scathingly brilliant Catalonian crime novel.

Lorenzo Cuni hovers on the edge of adulthood. A child who is all too aware of his status as an oustider, more intelligent and persipcacious than most, Lorenzo adapts his character to conform to his parents' and peers' expectations. Taking upon himself his father's declaration that he is a 'normal child', Lorenzo constructs an elaborate fantasy: that he is likeable and liked enough to join the most popular children in school on a ski trip. Instead, he intends to spend the week in his parents' basement with a supply of food, books and television. The period of self-enforced solitude is going to plan when his beautiful and disturbed half-sister Olivia arrives and insists on sharing the basement with him…

What makes Pigeon Post stand out is that its first-person monologue of writerly inertia goes to so many places, ranging wide territories of time and memory to interrogate the real and imaginary pasts of its cast of characters.

Andrei Makine's eleventh novel is a delicate portrait of a man's failed love affair, in more ways than one

Summer in northern Norway: endless hours of light, clouds of mosquitoes, kilometre after kilometre of rocky terrain and stunted trees. Into this barren landscape trek four geology students, three of them Norwegian, one – Alfred Issendorf – Dutch. Each is there to conduct research, Alfred specifically to find evidence of meteorites.

This collection first appeared in print in Prague before 1968, but was then banned. The seven stories are all concerned with love, or rather with complex erotic games.

Aleksandar is Comrade-in-Chief of fishing, the best magician in the non-aligned States and painter of unfinished things. He knows the first chapter of Marx's Das Kapital by heart but spends most of his time playing football in the Bosnian town of Visegrad on the banks of the river Drina.

Winner of the Best Finnish Crime Novel of the Year Award in 2010, The Healer is a fantastic introduction to a promising new name in Scandinavian Crime.

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.

One of the greatest Holocaust memoirs, Night records Elie Wiesel's childhood in Transylvania, his deportation, his separation from his family and his journey with his dying father through the inferno of the concentration camps.

György Dragomán has succeeded in conjuring up not only a realsitic voice for his young protagonist Djata but also a sense of what it means to live in a country in which the state security services watch your every move and can take you away at any time.

An affair between a canny Latin and a flighty English woman form the central thread in a brilliantly woven tapestry of Oxford life, at once affectionate in its insight and hilarious in its ironic portrayals of Senior Common Room worthies.

A Dream in Polar Fog is one of these stories: a gorgeous symphony in arctic colours that's by turns tender, funny, tragic and grim

Ngugi's most recent novel is a sprawling, fierce, scalding epic that turns a pitiless gaze on a postcolonial African dictatorship in the fictional country of Aburiria.

The story centres on Juana, a young girl growing up in humble surroundings in rural Andalusia. When tragedy strikes, she has no choice but to leave everything she knows and holds dear behind as her family is forced to move to Barcelona in search of employment.

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.

All Men are Liars is both a suspenseful murder mystery and a witty observation on the unreliability of memory from one of Argentina's most celebrated contemporary authors.

This tense, intriguing crime novel draws the reader into the mystery of a small town with a dark, secret at its heart.

You are invited to listen into a scholarly conversation about the role of books in society over the ages between two intellectual friends, or in Eco's style 'a book about books', which is at once erudite and entertaining, philosophical and personal.

It is Christmas Eve, and 55-year-old Professor Pål Andersen is alone, drinking coffee and cognac in his living room. Lost in thought, he looks out of the window and sees a man strangle a woman in the apartment across the street.

Expanding their Modern Classics series, Penguin have now published two collections of novellas and short stories by the celebrated Chinese writer Eileen Chang, containing several perfectly-formed examples of her writing about 30s and 40s Hong Kong and Shanghai.

King of Tuzla both a brutally honest coming-of-age novel and an important addition to the literature of modern war.

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

This latest collection of short stories by Dutch writer Cees Nooteboom is immensely readable and entertaining.

Karl Ove Knausgaard's A Death In The Family is an experiment that has paid off handsomely in his native Norway, where the author has emerged as one of the leaders of his country's new generation of literary talent.

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.

The aptly-titled English translation of Pierre Siniac's novel Ferdinaud Céline is a story of scandal, intrigue and conspiracy, in more ways than one.