Item category 1: World Hardback

When a young man's girlfriend mysteriously vanishes, he sets his heart on finding the imaginary city where her true self lives. His search will lead him to take a job in a remote library with mysteries of its own. When he finally makes it to the walled city, a shadowless place of horned beasts an...

The boy grows up in a small village in south China listening to stories about the Colonel: some say he was a legendary army doctor during the war, some say he was a traitor to the Party, still others say he is a wicked sex machine. The stories are bawdy and mesmerizing, always larger than life. Y...

Salomé was bullied for years and no one did a single thing to help her. One day she finally snapped. Now at just sixteen years old, she's being held in a secure unit for young offenders Salomé's counsellor, the man whose good opinion is key to her release, is best known for his racist gaffes on...

It's 1989, and in a small town on the Austria-Hungary border, nobody talks about the war; the older residents pretend not to remember, and the younger ones are too busy making plans to leave. The walls are thin, the curtains twitch, there is a face at every window, and everyone knows what they ar...

She'd once come here to kill herself but now Mia Kruger has returned to the picturesque island of Hitra to escape from the violence and madness of her life as a police investigator. But when she is approached by 11-year-old Sofia asking for help in finding her missing friend, her old instincts ar...

Narrated by Frankie the cat, this is a story about grief, redemption and a laugh-out-loud tale of how our love for our (sometimes psychopathic) pets can keep us going through the hardest of times. Frankie lives a very simple life. He didn't ask to be a stray cat. But life isn't so bad, with days ...

Based on the Japanese myth of cats returning favours to humans who are kind to them, 'The Full Moon Coffee Shop' is the name of a peculiar cake cafe that is run by talking cats, which has no fixed location and instead materialises unpredictably on the night of a full moon. The protagonists of thi...

Mathilde was a member of the French resistance, who both impressed and horrified everyone with her cool capacity for violence. But now she's 63 and starting to lose her memory and behave erratically. This is a potentially dangerous situation, since Mathilde now makes her living as a contract killer.

In search of love and freedom, Birgit flees to Kaspar in West Berlin. It is only after her death that Kaspar discovers the price she paid to get there. He sets out to uncover her secrets in the East, meeting those she cared about, witnessing their oppression and determination first-hand. His sear...

When Hanna moves to Spain for an internship at the prestigious Prado gallery, she finds herself spending her days buried in the museum's stifling archives, and her nights alone in a tiny rented flat. Then one day she sees them; Tom, Samuel, and Leah. Glamorous and elegant, they are also foreigner...