Item category 1: World Paperback

When her mother emigrates to China for work, 20-year-old Chizu moves in with 71-year-old Ginko, an eccentric distant relative, taking a room in her ramshackle Tokyo home, with its two resident cats and the persistent rattle of passing trains. Living their lives in imperfect symmetry, they establi...

From the outside, Henry Hayden has a perfect life: he's a famous novelist with more money than he can spend, a grand house in the country, and a loyal, clever wife. But Henry has a dark side. If only the readers and critics who worship his every word knew that his success depends on a carefully m...

Based on true events, this is a heartbreaking story of love, family, hope, and survival set in post-World War II Italy about poor children from the south sent to live with families in the north to survive deprivation and the harsh winters.

Nana the cat is on a road trip. He is not sure where he's going or why, but it means he gets to sit in the front seat of a silver van with his beloved owner, Satoru. Side by side they cruise around Japan through the changing seasons, visiting old friends. There's the brusque farmer for whom cats ...

From a boy robbed of the power of speech and the friends he makes in a bakery in the mining town of Ugarte, Basque Country, to a group of comrades and their pet magpie in a military base in the dying days of Franco's dictatorship, and eventually adults with the weight of their existence on their ...

In the days leading up to Christmas, Domhildur delivers her 1,922nd baby. Beginnings and endings are her family trade; she comes from a long line of midwives on her mother's side and a long line of undertakers on her father's. She even lives in the apartment that she inherited from her grandaunt,...

A young woman is left by her husband without warning, then she is asked by her sick best friend to look after her four-year-old son. In the twilight of an Icelandic November, the pair set off on a tour of the island, and an unlikely friendship develops. A story shot-through with laughter and a di...

Jonas is starting to feel that life hasn't worked out the way he thought it would. Divorced and lonely, with nothing much to live for, he decides to buy a one-way ticket somewhere, anywhere, with no intention of coming back. When he ends up on the doorstep of Hotel Silence, which has definitely s...

Elsa has been in a coma for 5 months. With all hope of reviving her gone, her family must face the devastating fact that it might be time to turn off her life support. What they don't know is that in the past few weeks Elsa has regained partial consciousness - she just has no way of telling them....

Alaa is haunted by his grandmother's memories of being displaced from Jaffa and becoming a refugee in her homeland after the Nakba. Ariel, Alaa's neighbour and friend, is a liberal Zionist, critical of the military occupation of the West Bank and Gaza yet faithful to the project of Israel. When h...