Item category 1: World Paperback

In November 2021, an inflatable dinghy carrying migrants from France to the United Kingdom capsized in the Channel causing the death of 27 people on board. Despite receiving numerous calls for help, the French authorities wrongly told the migrants they were in British waters and had to call the B...

The Icelandic Psychological Association has prepared a test. They call it a sensitivity assessment - a way of measuring a person's empathy. It is, they insist, merely a tool for identifying people who need extra resources. People with moral disorders. People who are likely to offend. In a few day...

Giuseppe Levi, the father, is a scientist, consumed by his work and a mania for hiking - when he isn't provoked into angry remonstration by someone misspeaking or misbehaving or wearing the wrong thing. Giuseppe is Jewish, married to Lidia, a Catholic, though neither is religious; they live in th...

In a cosy photography studio in the mountains between this world and the next, someone is waking up as if from a dream. A kind man will hand them a hot cup of tea and gently explain that, having reached the end of their life, they have one final task. There is a stack of photos on their lap, one ...

Realising he and she are the very worst kind of people, our unnamed middle-aged narrator embarks on a highly dubious road trip through Switzerland with his terminally ill and terminally drunken mother. They try unsuccessfully to give away or squander the fortune she has amassed from investing in ...

Nathalia Guitry was a successful photographer. Until the day she caught a murder on camera. At therapy, Doctor Faber suggests a way out of her creative block: she must write stories about the people she sees in the building opposite, floor by floor. Starting with the actor turned YouTube life coa...

In many ways, the brothers Carl and Roy Opgard have succeeded in life. Or at least they've had as much success as is possible in a small town like Os where they've had to kill their way to the top. Carl manages the area's swanky spa hotel, while Roy has made ambitious plans for an amusement park ...

Set in the post-martial-law era of late-1980s Taipei, 'Notes of a Crocodile' is a coming-of-age story of queer misfits discovering love, friendship, and artistic affinity while hardly studying at Taiwan's most prestigious university. Told through the eyes of an anonymous lesbian narrator nickname...

Napoleon's invasion of Russia forms the backdrop for Tolstoy's literary masterpiece. Often considered the greatest novel in any language, 'War and Peace' is also a philosophical meditation on the tension between free will and fate.