Item category 1: World Paperback

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...

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...

'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...

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...

Born with a congenital muscle disorder, Shaka Isawa has severe spine curvature and uses an electric wheelchair and ventilator. Within the limits of her care home, her life is lived online: she studies, she tweets indignantly, she posts outrageous stories on an erotica website. One day, a new male...

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...

First off, I'm not a violent man. Quite the opposite. I didn't even kill anyone until I was 42. Björn has been given an ultimatum: repair his work-life balance, or his wife Katharina will leave him - and take their daughter. He reluctantly starts a mindfulness class and to his surprise, it's a r...

In the blue dusk of a spring evening, a man is drawn to a lonely, beautiful stranger across a station platform. She follows him home, and over one heady night of wine and cigarettes, recounts to him the devastating story of her life.

Millennial expat couple Anna and Tom are living the dream in Berlin, in a bright, plant-filled apartment in Neukolln. They are young digital creatives, freelancers without too many constraints. They have a passion for food, progressive politics, sexual experimentation and Berlin's twenty-four-hou...

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.