Item category 1: World Paperback

Originally published in Arabic in 1956-7, this is the first part of 'The Cairo Trilogy' by the 1988 Nobel Prize winner. It tells the story of an Egyptian family in pre-war Cairo and offers an insight into the mores of Muslim culture.

Viktor Zolotaryov - last seen in 'Death and the Penguin' fleeing mafia vengeance on an Antarctica-bound flight booked for Penguin Misha - seizes, once there, a heaven-sent opportunity to return to Kiev with a new identity.

Moving between Paris, Andalucia and Lanzarote, this novel is a thought provoking, sometimes shocking, examination of the modern world, the trials of old age and the death of love.

This is Simone de Beauvoir's first novel, written as an act of revenge against the woman who nearly destroyed her relationship with Jean-Paul Sartre. Devastatingly ironic, it is one of the century's most powerful pieces of autobiographical fiction.

Set in the great human maelstrom of Tokyo, this book is a thinking man's ghost story. When Harada, a jaded TV scriptwriter, runs into his long-dead parents one night, he enters the womb of a city whose living inhabitants have perhaps lost their souls. Can Harada save his?

This is the third part of 'The Cairo Trilogy', by the winner of the 1988 Nobel Prize for Literature. It is an Egyptian family saga featuring the bullying, pompous patriarch Al-Sayyid Ahmed and his long-suffering family. This book takes the family into the middle of the 20th century.

Sophia wakes up one morning to find that a tree has appeared overnight in the garden of her Paris house. She asks her neighbours to dig around the tree to find out if something has been buried. But they find nothing but soil under the tree. A few weeks later, Sophia disappears. Then her burnt bod...

Disappearances, destruction and death spread throughout Moscow like wildfire, and Margarita has discovered that her lover has vanished in the chaos. Making a bargain with the devil, she decides to try a little black magic of her own to save the man she loves.

'The Kill' is the second volume in Zola's great cycle of 20 novels, Les Rougon-Macquart, and the first to establish Paris - the capital of modernity - as the centre of Zola's narrative world. The novel combines into a single, powerful vision the twin themes of lust for money and lust for pleasure.