Item category 1: World Paperback

Jacques Deza has been told he has a gift: he can see through people; guess just from their faces what will become of them. When he encounters the enigmatic Bertram Tupra at a party, Deza is persuaded to join a mysterious underground group. His task: to observe an assortment of people - politician...

Originally published in Arabic in 1956-7, this is the first part of 'The Cairo Trilogy' by the 1988 Nobel Prize winner. It tells the story of an Egyptian family in pre-war Cairo and offers an insight into the mores of Muslim culture.

In the opening volume of Proust's great novel, the narrator travels backwards in time in order to tell the story of a love affair that had taken place before his own birth. Swann's jealous love for Odette provides a prophetic model of the narrator's own relationships. All Proust's great themes - ...

Sofia may have escaped from Fog Island, but the she can't escape the horror. Thanks to Sofia, cult-leader Franz Oswald is now in custody awaiting trial for the horrific things that took place there. With the help of a fashionable lawyer, Franz is spinning a web of revenge that stretches far outsi...

In the Jin captial of Zhongdu, Guo Jing learns the truth of his father's death and finds he is now betrothed, against his will, to two women. Neither of them is his sweetheart Lotus Huang. Torn between following his heart and fulfilling his filial duty, he journeys through the country of his pare...

Tucked away down a Kyoto backstreet lies the extraordinary Kamogawa Diner. Running this unique establishment are a father-daughter duo who serve more than just mouth-watering feasts. The pair have reinvented themselves as 'food detectives', offering a service that goes beyond traditional dining. ...

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.

Jacques Deza has been recruited into an undercover spy network by the inscrutable Bertram Tupra. But when he is forced to witness an act of horrifying brutality in a night-club, he finds himself falling apart, haunted by his own memories of the bloodshed of the Spanish Civil War. As Deza tries to...

'You did nothing.' Christine Steinmeyer knows the suicide note she found in her mailbox on Christmas Eve has nothing to do with her. But the man calling in to her radio show seems convinced otherwise. 'You let her die.' That's only the beginning. Bit by bit, her life is turned upside down. But wh...

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.