A collection of stories, in which, a husband and wife wait for a train as their relationship unspools silently around them, a woman contemplates the idea of her lover dying as she queues in a bank, and an almost impossibly uncomfortably lunch culminates in a passionate kiss.

Wisconsin, 1941. With all the men off to war, Fritzi and her sisters must learn men's work and the All-Girl Filling Station is born, complete with neat little caps, short skirts, and roller-skates. Their peace doesn't last long though: skilled women are needed to fly planes for the war effort...

The Danes are the happiest people in the world, and pay the highest taxes. 'Neutral' Sweden is one of the biggest arms manufacturers in the world. Finns have the largest per capita gun ownership after the US and Yemen. 54 per cent of Icelanders believe in elves. Norway is the richest country on earth. This book deals with Nordic countries.

Trapped in a London flat, Beth remembers a transgressive love affair in 1960s' Paris. The most famous writer in Russia takes his last breath in a stationmaster's cottage, miles from Moscow. A father, finally free of his daughter's demands, embarks on a long swim from his Canadian lakeside retreat.

They gave us democracy, philosophy, poetry, rational science, the joke. They built the Parthenon and the Library of Alexandria. But who were the ancient Greeks? And what was it that enabled them to achieve so much? This title offers a revelatory way of viewing this geographically scattered people, and more.

A wide-ranging volume of essays from the Booker Prize-winning author, dealing with matters literary, artistic, political and philosophical. Outlined are some of the influences that led Kelman to create literary art, from music to Russian writers, from the steel industry to the Kurds in Turkey.

The crisis in Europe is not over, it's getting worse. In this narrative of Europe's economic rise and spectacular fall, the author, former finance minister of Greece, shows that the origins of the collapse go far deeper than our leaders are prepared to admit - and that we have done nothing so far to fix them.