Item category 1: World Paperback

Bringing together Mishima's preoccupations with violence, desire, religious life and the history of Japan, this novel is based on an actual incident, the burning of a celebrated temple.

If one theme unifies the 11 tales collected here, it is that of longing. Written after her return from Kenya and during the dark days of the Nazi occupation, they derive their themes and locales from Isak Dinesen's childhood in Denmark.

Viktor is lonely, with only Misha, his penguin, for company. He is desperate to earn a living as a writer. He gets a break when the editor-in-chief of a major newspaper commissions him to write obituaries of Kiev's VIP's. But are his worries now over?

What initially appears to be a plain account of the lives of Jewish emigrants in Norfolk, Austria, America and Manchester, merges into an overwhelming evocation of the experience of exile and the loss of homeland.

Ten different and thoroughly dissimilar novels intertwine as the beginning of each book, interrupted at a critical moment of suspense, leads into yet another novel reflecting yet another literary mode.

The people of Oran are in the grip of a virulent plague. Cut off from the rest of the world, they each respond in their own way to the challenge of the deadly bacillus. It is through the eyes of Dr. Rieux that we witness the course of the epidemic.

This is a collection of six short stories from the cult Japanese writer, exploring the violence beneath the surface of modern Japan.

Anna Karenina provides a vast panorama of contemporary life in Russia and of humanity in general. Anna is a sophisticated woman who abandons her empty existence as a wife and turns to her lover Count Vronsky to fulfil her passionate nature.

When brutal landowner Fyodor Karamazov is murdered, the lives of his sons are changed irrevocably: Mitya is placed under suspicion; Ivan's mental tortures drive him to breakdown; Alyosha tries to heal the family's rifts; and there is always the shadow of their bastard half-brother, Smerdyakov.