The Girl on the Fridge 

Etgar Keret

PB £8.95

Illuminations

Eva Hoffman

HB £16.99

Isabel Merton is a renowned concert pianist, whose playing is marked by rare intensity, and for whom each performance is a plunge into the compelling world of the music. At the height of her career, she feels increasingly torn between the expressive musical realm she inhabits, and the fragmented life she leads as an itinerant artist, with its frequent flights, anonymous hotels and fortuitous, arbitrary encounters. Away from her New York home on a European tour, Isabel meets Anzor Islikhanov, a political exile from war-torn Chechnya driven by a bitter sense of injustice and a powerful desire to help and avenge his people.As their paths cross in several cities, they are drawn to each other both by their differences, and their seemingly parallel passions - until a menacing incident forces her to re-evaluate his actions and her own feelings - and throws her into a creative crisis.In this fiercely lyrical novel, Hoffman explores the luminous and dark faces of romanticism; our often unadmitted need for more than personal meaning; and the place and force of art in a world riven with violence.

Ministry of Special Cases 

Nathan Englander

PB £7.99

Kaddish Poznan chips the names off gravestones for a living, removing traces of disreputable ancestors for their more respectable kin. His wife Lillian works in insurance, earning money when people live longer than they fear. As Argentina's Dirty War unfolds around them, their sometimes hilarious misadventures are soon replaced by something much darker. A visit to the dreaded Ministry of Special Cases is only the start of Englander's stunning vision of a nation in the hold of corruption and torture, a place where absurdity, despair and hope are the end products of a bureaucracy run out of control.

The End of Mr. Y

Scarlett Thomas

PB £7.99

When Ariel Manto uncovers a copy of The End of Mr. Y in a second-hand bookshop, she can't believe her eyes. She knows enough about its author, the outlandish Victorian scientist Thomas Lumas, to know that copies are exceedingly rare. And, some say, cursed. With Mr. Y under her arm, Ariel finds herself thrust into a thrilling adventure of love, sex, death and time-travel .

Sashenka

Simon Montefiore

HB £12.99

Winter, 1916: In St Petersburg, Russia on the brink of revolution. Outside the Smolny Institute for Noble Young Ladies, an English governess is waiting for her young charge to be released from school. But so are the Tsar's secret police...Beautiful and headstrong, Sashenka Zeitlin is just sixteen. As her mother parties with Rasputin and her dissolute friends, Sashenka slips into the frozen night to play her part in a dangerous game of conspiracy and seduction. Twenty years on, Sashenka has a powerful husband with whom she has two children. Around her people are disappearing, but her own family is safe. But, she's about to embark on a forbidden love affair which will have devastating consequences. Sashenka's story lies hidden for half a century, until a young historian goes deep into Stalin's private archives and uncovers a heart-breaking tale of passion and betrayal, savage cruelty and unexpected heroism - and one woman forced to make an unbearable choice.

The Gift of Rain

Tan Twan Eng

PB £7.99

Penang, 1939. Sixteen-year-old Philip Hutton is a loner. Half English, half Chinese and feeling neither, he discovers a sense of belonging in an unexpected friendship with Hayato Endo, a Japanese diplomat.Philip shows his new friend around his adored island of Penang, and in return Endo trains him in the art and discipline of aikido. But such knowledge comes at a terrible price. The enigmatic Endo is bound by disciplines of his own and when the Japanese invade Malaya, threatening to destroy Philip's family and everything he loves, he realises that his trusted sensei - to whom he owes absolute loyalty - has been harbouring a devastating secret.Philip must risk everything in an attempt to save those he has placed in mortal danger and discover who and what he really is. With masterful and gorgeous narrative, replete with exotic and captivating images, sounds and aromas - of rain swept beaches, magical mountain temples, pungent spice warehouses, opulent colonial ballrooms and fetid and forbidding rainforests - Tan Twan Eng weaves a haunting and unforgettable story of betrayal, barbaric cruelty, steadfast courage and enduring love.

How the Soldier Repairs the Gramophone

Sasa Stanisic

HB £12.99

Aleksandar is Comrade-in-Chief of fishing, the best magician in the non-aligned States and painter of unfinished things. He knows the first chapter of Marx's Das Kapital by heart but spends most of his time playing football in the Bosnian town of Visegrad on the banks of the river Drina. When his grandfather, a master storyteller, dies of the fastest heart attack in the world while watching Carl Lewis's record, Aleksandar promises to carry on the tradition. However when the shadow of war spreads to Visegrad, the world as he knows it stops. Suddenly it is not important how heavy a spider's life weighs, or why Marko's horse is related to Superman. Suddenly it is important to have the right name and to pretend that the little Muslim girl Asija is his sister. Then Aleksandar's parents decide to flee to Germany and he must leave his new friend behind.

Away

Amy Bloom

PB £7.99

Amy Bloom's first novel for eight years revitalises the American road trip novel, from the perspective of a vulnerable but spirited woman. It paints a vivid, earthy and surprising picture of 1920s America, its smells and textures, its population of drifters and con artists, pimps and prostitutes. "Away" is storytelling at its finest - epic in sweep, but intimate and psychologically acute, moving but unsentimental.Like the novels of Sarah Waters, it is both richly authentic in its period detail, and fresh and contemporary in its style. But above all Bloom has created an unforgettable character in Lillian Leyb - her voice, haunted, damaged yet innocent, passionate, witty and unpretentious, is so believable and strong that her presence lingers long after the novel ends.

The Woman in the Fifth

Douglas Kennedy

PB £6.99

Harry Ricks is a man who has lost everything. A romantic mistake at the small American college where he used to teach has cost him his job, his marriage and his relationship with his only child. And when the ensuing scandal threatens to completely destroy him, he votes with his feet and flees...to Paris. He arrives in the French capital in the bleak midwinter, where a series of accidental encounters lands him in a grubby room in a grubby quarter, and a job as a nightwatchman for a sinister operation. Just when Harry begins to think that he has hit rock bottom, romance enters his life. Her name is Margit - an elegant, cultivated Hungarian emigre, long resident in Paris - widowed and, like Harry, alone.But though Harry is soon smitten with her, Margit keeps her distance. She will only see him at her apartment in the fifth arrondissement for a few hours twice a week, and remains guarded about her work, her past, her life. However, Harry's frustrations with her reticence are soon overshadowed by a ever-growing preoccupation that a dark force is at work in his life - as punishment begins to be meted out to anyone who has recently done him wrong. Before he knows it, he finds himself of increasing interest to the police and waking up in a nightmare from which there is no easy escape.

Human Love

Andrei Makine

HB £12.99

Elias Almeida, professional revolutionary, has seen mankind at its pitiless worst. Witness as a child to the death of both his parents in uprisings in Angola and the Congo, and later as a Soviet agent at the heart of African politics, he has observed murder, rape, pillage and starvation in the name of ideology, and suffered imprisonment and torture. Yet he continues to believe in a better world and the redeeming power of love - the love of humanity, and the love between individuals. And in his own case, the love of one woman, a Russian who rescued him from thugs one snowy night on the streets of Moscow ...Spanning forty years of Africa's tormented past as a battleground between East and West and ranging fromCuba toSiberia, this powerful, impassioned novel plumbs the depths of human nature, but shows the heights men and women are capable of reaching too.

The Impostor

Damon Galgut

HB £12.99