Item category 1: World Paperback

Eileen Chang's dark romance opens with Julie, living at a convent school in Hong Kong on the eve of the Japanese invasion. Her mother, Rachel, long divorced from Julie's opium-addict father, saunters around the world with various lovers. Recollections of Julie's horrifying but privileged childhoo...

A young slave girl accompanies her owner on an expedition into the African interior in search of a mythical city. In unfamiliar terrain, the party gets lost. One by one, our narrator's companions disappear, leaving her to take refuge in the hollow of a baobab tree. There, she finds the space and ...

Twenty-four-year-old Andreas, a disillusioned German soldier, is travelling on a troop train to the Eastern Front when he has an awful premonition that he will die in exactly five days. As he hurtles towards his death, he reflects on the chaos around him - the naïve soldiers, the painfully thin ...

One clear ice-cold January morning shortly after dawn, a wolf crosses the border between Poland and Germany. His trail leads all the way to Berlin, connecting the lives of disparate individuals whose paths intersect and diverge. On an icy motorway 80km outside the city, a fuel tanker jack-knifes ...

In prewar Budapest three families live side by side on Katalin Street, their lives closely intertwined. A game is played by the four children in which Bálint, the promising son of the Major, invariably chooses Irén Elekes, the headmaster's dutiful elder daughter, over her younger sister, the sc...

It is summer 1989 and fifteen-year-old Clotilde is on holiday with her parents in Corsica. On a twisty mountain road, their car comes off at a curve and plunges into a ravine. Only Clotilde survives. Twenty-seven years later, she returns to Corsica with her husband and their sulky teenage daughte...

In a hushed, Italian town after the Second World War, Elsa lives with her parents in the house where she was born. Twenty-seven and unmarried, she is of constant concern to her mother, whose status anxiety manifests itself in acute hypochondria. Elsa hopes to live a life different to the one she'...

When a body is found in a church in the far north of Norway, the trail leads to an offshore oil rig. Searching the rooms of one of the rig workers, detective Kirsten Nigaard finds a pile of photos taken with a long-lens camera. The subject of the photos is Martin Servaz. And someone has been watc...

Two wild Germanic brothers, Armin and Wulf, are held hostage in Rome to keep their father from rebelling against the Roman Empire. There they are moulded into ideal Roman soldiers; brave, disciplined, ruthless. Then a conspiracy arises that threatens the Emperor and they alone must decide whether...

At the turn of the nineteenth century, the Gaza province of Mozambique is drowning in a torrent of war. Imani, a fifteen-year-old girl, struggles with her cultural identity as she is torn between her VaChopi roots and the occupying Portuguese. Her life becomes further fractured as her family is b...