Item category 1: World Paperback

Alaa is haunted by his grandmother's memories of being displaced from Jaffa and becoming a refugee in her homeland after the Nakba. Ariel, Alaa's neighbour and friend, is a liberal Zionist, critical of the military occupation of the West Bank and Gaza yet faithful to the project of Israel. When h...

A teenager in pre-revolutionary Tehran, Massoumeh is an ordinary girl, passionate about learning. On her way to school she meets a local man and falls in love - but when her family discover his letters they accuse her of bringing them into dishonour. She is badly beaten by her brother, and her pa...

Botchan is a modern young man from the Tokyo metropolis, sent to the ultra-traditional Matsuyama district as a maths teacher after his the death of his parents. Cynical, rebellious and immature, Botchan finds himself facing several tests, from the pupils - prone to playing tricks on their new, na...

Working as a cook on a merchant ship, a woman comes to know and love Samsa, a woman who gives her the nickname 'Boulder'. When Samsa gets a job in Reykjavik and the couple decides to move there together, Samsa decides that she wants to have a child. She is already forty and can't bear to let the ...

Following a devastating earthquake and tsunami, a young man in Japan finds a stray dog outside a convenience store. The dog's tag says 'Tamon', a name evocative of the guardian deity of the north. The man decides to keep Tamon, becoming the first in a series of owners as the dog journeys south to...

A strange and beguiling novel about three women struggling to determine their own lives in contemporary Tokyo, from Japan's most exciting young writer, Mieko Kawakami.

On a hot summer's day in a poor suburb of Tokyo we meet three women: thirty-year-old Natsuko, her older sister Makiko, and Makiko's teenage daughter Midoriko. Makiko, an ageing hostess despairing the loss of her looks, has travelled to Tokyo in search of breast enhancement surgery. She's accompan...

Growing up poor, Yasmine vowed she would always protect her little brother from harm. She broke her promise on the day she left home, abandoning Fadi to his life in the Stockholm slums. Now, five years later, Yasmine still carries the guilt of leaving him behind. Then she hears a rumour that he i...

Under the regime of the so-called Brotherhood, two young people are publicly executed for having loved each other. In response, their mothers begin a secret correspondence, their only outlet for the grief they share and each woman's personal reckoning with a leadership that would take her beloved...

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.

Satoshi looks like an innocent schoolboy but he is really a viciously cunning psychopath. Kimura's young son is in a coma thanks to him, and Kimura has tracked him onto the bullet train headed from Tokyo to Morioka to exact his revenge. But Kimura soon discovers that they are not the only dangero...

Gourmet cook Manako Kajii sits in Tokyo Detention Centre convicted of the serial murders of lonely businessmen, who she is said to have seduced with her delicious home cooking. The case has captured the nation's imagination but Kajii refuses to speak with the press, entertaining no visitors. That...

Gourmet cook Manako Kajii sits in Tokyo Detention Centre convicted of the serial murders of lonely businessmen, who she is said to have seduced with her delicious home cooking. The case has captured the nation's imagination but Kajii refuses to speak with the press, entertaining no visitors. That...

A young woman is left by her husband without warning, then she is asked by her sick best friend to look after her four-year-old son. In the twilight of an Icelandic November, the pair set off on a tour of the island, and an unlikely friendship develops. A story shot-through with laughter and a di...

Cabinet 13 looks exactly like any normal filing cabinet. Except this cabinet is filled with files on the 'symptomers', people whose weird abilities and bizarre experiences might just mark the emergence of a new species. But to Mr Kong, the harried office worker who spends his days looking after t...

'Can't I Go Instead' follows the lives of the daughter of a Korean nobleman and her maidservant in the early 20th century. When the daughter's suitor is arrested as a Korean Independence activist, and she is implicated during the investigation, she is quickly forced into marriage to one of her fa...

On a cold winter evening in a secluded fjord in Iceland, a neighbour visits the house of a family that has not been seen in a week. No one comes to the door when he knocks. After breaking down the back door, his worst fears are realised. Their home is now an horrific crime scene. Policeman Týr a...

Two investigators are put on the case of a murdered Russian general. Their stumbling researches take them all over Europe until eventually it dawns on them that they are merely pawns in a game in which the KGB are the key players.

'The Castle' is the story of K., the unwanted Land Surveyor who is never to be admitted to the Castle nor accepted in the village, and yet cannot go home. As he encounters dualities of certainty and doubt, hope and fear, and reason and nonsense, K.'s struggles in the absurd, labyrinthine world wh...

'Celestial Bodies' is set in the village of al-Awafi in Oman, where we encounter three sisters: Mayya, who marries Abdallah after a heartbreak; Asma, who marries from a sense of duty; and Khawla who rejects all offers while waiting for her beloved, who has emigrated to Canada. These three women a...