Item category 1: World Paperback

This novel is a romantic, poignant tale, touched with moments of magic, graphic earthiness and bittersweet wit. A sumptuous feast of a novel, it relates the bizarre history of the all-female De La Garza family.

In this story of irreconcilable loves and infidelities, Milan Kundera addresses himself to the nature of 20th century "Being". The novel encompasses the extremes of comedy and tragedy, and embraces, it seems, all aspects of human existence.

This story is told by a young soldier in the trenches of Flanders during the First World War. Through his eyes we see the realities of war. Incidents are vividly described, but there is no sense of adventure, only the feeling of youth betrayed.

Each time he returns from his travels, Marco Polo is invited by Kublai Khan to describe the cities he has visited. But Calvino is describing only one city - Venice. Invisible Cities has been described as Calvino's most beautiful work.

Salt explores the complexities of the still young Trinidad where the roles of slave and land-owner still linger. Earl Lovelace is one of the pre-eminent novelists of the Caribbean, and in this novel he questions the nature of liberty and nationhood.

In an intense and brief narrative, a moment of confusion sets in motion a complex chain of events that forces the reader to cross and recross the divide between fantasy and reality.

From the acclaimed author of Spring Snow, this novel tells of a band of savage 13-year-old boys who reject the adult world as illusory, hypocritical and sentimental, and train themselves in a brutal callousness they call objectivity.

When proof-reader Raimundo Silva mistakenly alters a word in an historical text, he inadvertently changes the whole course of Portuguese history, and of his own life.

The First Man is a novel about Algeria, the relationship between the men and the land, and between Algerian French and Algerian Arab. It is a novel where the central character, Jacques Cormery, is of course Albert Camus himself.

The plot of Foucault's Pendulum ranges back and forth through the centuries, full of arcane knowledge, secret societies, love, death, passion and perversion. What starts as a fun way to play with the occult turns into a frantic search for the truth.