Item category 1: World Paperback

Imprisoned in Chateau Gaillard, Marguerite of Burgundy has fallen into disgrace. Her infidelity has left her estranged husband, King Louis X of France, with neither heir nor wife, and few options left to remedy his situation.

This classic, begun as a novel concerned with the psychology of a crime and the process of guilt, surpasses itself to take on the tragic force of myth.

Fraught, disturbing and beautiful, 'The Vegetarian' is a novel about modern day South Korea, but also a novel about shame, desire, and our faltering attempts to understand others, from one imprisoned body to another.

Gwangju, South Korea, 1980. In the wake of a viciously suppressed student uprising, a boy searches for his friend's corpse, a consciousness searches for its abandoned body, and a brutalised country searches for a voice. In a sequence of interconnected chapters the victims and the bereaved encount...

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 back alley in Tokyo, there is a café which has been serving carefully brewed coffee for more than one hundred years. But this coffee shop offers its customers a unique experience: the chance to travel back in time. In this novel, we meet four visitors, each of whom is hoping to make u...

Keiko has never really fitted in. At school and university people find her odd and her family worries she'll never be normal. To appease them, Keiko takes a job at a newly opened convenience store. Here, she finds peace and purpose in the simple, daily tasks and routine interactions. She is, she ...

Deep underground, 39 women live imprisoned in a cage. Watched over by guards, the women have no memory of how they got there and only vague notions of their lives before. As the burn of electric light merges day into night and numberless years pass, a young girl - the fortieth prisoner - sits alo...

It is Spring. A young woman, left by her husband, starts a new life in a Tokyo apartment. 'Territory of Light' follows her over the course of a year, as she struggles to bring up her two-year-old daughter alone. Her new home is filled with light, streaming through the windows, so bright you have ...

Survivor, genius, perfumer, killer: this is Jean-Baptiste Grenouille. He is abandoned on the filthy streets as a child, but grows up to discover he has an extraordinary gift: a sense of smell more powerful than any other human's. Soon, he is creating the most sublime fragrances in Paris. Yet ther...