Item category 1: World Paperback

The second part of 'The Cairo Trilogy' by the winner of the 1988 Nobel Prize for Literature. It is a true-life Egyptian family saga featuring the bullying, pompous, belching, self-adoring patriarch Al-Sayyid Ahmed and his long-suffering family in domestic turmoil, with feuding in-laws.

This is the third part of 'The Cairo Trilogy', by the winner of the 1988 Nobel Prize for Literature. It is an Egyptian family saga featuring the bullying, pompous patriarch Al-Sayyid Ahmed and his long-suffering family. This book takes the family into the middle of the 20th century.

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.

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...

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...

Hidden in the heart of the old city of Barcelona is a labyrinthine library of obscure and forgotten titles that have long gone out of print. A man brings his 10-year-old son to the library and allows him to choose one book to keep. But as he grows up, several people seem inordinately interested i...

In a small town in Sweden, it appears to be an ordinary day. But look more closely, and you'll see a mysterious masked figure approaching a bank. Two hours later, chaos has descended. A bungled attempted robbery has developed into a hostage situation - and the offender is refusing to communicate ...

A shy young man leaves his home in rural Turkey to learn a trade in 1920s Berlin. The city's crowded streets, thriving arts scene, passionate politics and seedy cabarets provide the backdrop for a chance meeting with a woman, which will haunt him for the rest of his life, in this emotionally powe...

Hildur Rúnarsdottir is the only police detective in the isolated Westfjords of Iceland, desperately trying to forget her traumatic past by burying herself in her cases. Once Jakob Johanson, a Finnish police trainee with a knitting hobby, begins to work alongside Hildur to escape his own complica...

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 ...