Bold and immersive, The Variations is a novel of startling originality about music and the difficulty - or impossibility - of living with the past.

In A Girl's Story, Annie Ernaux revisits the summer of 1958, her first away from home, and recounts the first night she spent with a man.

Barely educated and valued since childhood strictly for his labour, Ernaux's father had grown into a hard, practical man who showed his family little affection. Narrating his slow ascent towards material comfort, Ernaux's cold observation in A Man's Place reveals the shame that haunted her father throughout his life.

Barely educated and valued since childhood strictly for his labour, Ernaux's father had grown into a hard, practical man who showed his family little affection. Narrating his slow ascent towards material comfort, Ernaux's cold observation in A Man's Place reveals the shame that haunted her father throughout his life.

Written in melodious and hypnotic 'slow prose', A New Name: Septology VI-VII is a transcendent exploration of the human condition by Jon Fosse, and a radically other reading experience - incantatory, hypnotic, and utterly unique.

Long considered one of Simone de Beauvoir's masterpieces, a profoundly moving recounting of her mother's death.

In The Books of Jacob, Tokarczuk traverses the Hapsburg and Ottoman Empires and the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in search of Jacob Frank, a highly controversial historical figure from the eighteenth century and the leader of a mysterious, heretical Jewish splinter group that converted at different times to both Islam and Catholicism.

A tender meditation on friendship and the importance of community, Brian is also a slantwise work of film criticism, one that is not removed from its subject matter, but rather explores with great feeling how art gives meaning to and enriches our lives.