Item category 1: World Paperback

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 ...

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...

'Clean' begins with an inescapable fact: a girl has died. Told by Estela, a maid to a wealthy, middle class family who speaks to us from a locked room, we hear of her plight and the circumstances that led to this moment. As we enter into her account of her daily existence, we see how her apparent...

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...

Matsui is the driver of a taxi the colour of the night sky. Every night between the hours of 1 am and 4.30 am, Matsui guides his taxi around the streets of Tokyo, collecting passengers and their stories. Seen through the eyes of a cast of colourful characters, 'Goodnight Tokyo' takes the reader o...

When Hirase, a young woman from Tokyo, arranges an appointment with the Go-Between, she doesn't expect a teenager to show up. Dressed preppy-style in a duffel coat and carrying a notebook, he invites the dead back into the real world - at least, this is what Hirase has pieced together from his we...

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...

Tara Selter has slipped out of time. Every morning, she wakes up to the 18th of November. She no longer expects to wake up to the 19th of November, and she no longer remembers the 17th of November as if it were yesterday. She comes to know the shape of the day like the back of her hand - the grey...

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.

Self-regard, in the works of Annie Ernaux, is always excruciatingly painful and an exacting process. Here, Ernaux revisits the peculiar kind of self-examination possible when one examines oneself in the aftermath of a love affair and, sometimes even, through the eyes of the lost beloved.