In 1282 AD, the Kingdom of Sicily is under the rule of a tyrannical French king and subject to his brutal Angevin army. Daily acts of violence and persecution are commonplace in a once-prosperous realm. For twenty-year-old Aetna Vespiri, daughter of a revered Sicilian knight, survival has become second nature. As a child, she witnessed the destruction of her family’s vineyard by Angevin soldiers and spent the next decade learning the tenets of stiletto-blade combat. Years later in Palermo, Aetna fends off a nefarious sergeant and sparks an uprising against the Angevin occupation.

A modern masterpiece from one of Italy's most acclaimed authors, My Brilliant Friend is a rich, intense, and generous-hearted story about two friends, Elena and Lila, who represent the story of a nation and the nature of friendship.

In a country teetering on the brink of civil war, two young people meet - sensual, fiercely independent Nadia and gentle, restrained Saeed. They embark on a furtive love affair, and are soon cloistered in a premature intimacy by the unrest roiling their city. When it explodes, turning familiar streets into a patchwork of checkpoints and bomb blasts, they begin to hear whispers about doors - doors that can whisk people far away, if perilously and for a price. As the violence escalates, Nadia and Saeed decide that they no longer have a choice.

Composed in the last years of Roberto Bolaño's life, 2666 was greeted across Europe and Latin America as his highest achievement, surpassing even his previous work in its strangeness, beauty, and scope. Its throng of unforgettable characters includes academics and convicts, an American sportswriter, an elusive German novelist, and a teenage student and her widowed, mentally unstable father. Their lives intersect in the urban sprawl of Santa Teresa - a fictional Juárez - on the U.S.-Mexico border.

In The First Man, Albert Camus tells the story of Jacques Cormery, a boy who lived a life much like his own. Camus summons up the sights, sounds, and textures of a childhood circumscribed by poverty and a father's death yet redeemed by the austere beauty of Algeria and the boy's attachment to his nearly deaf-mute mother. The result is a moving journey through the lost landscape of youth that also discloses the wellsprings of Camus's aesthetic powers and moral vision.

A moving novel on the power of friendship in our darkest times, from internationally renowned writer and speaker Elif Shafak. In the pulsating moments after she has been murdered and left in a dumpster outside Istanbul, Tequila Leila enters a state of heightened awareness. Her heart has stopped beating, but her brain is still active - for 10 minutes 38 seconds. While the Turkish sun rises and her friends sleep soundly nearby, she remembers her life - and the lives of others, outcasts like her.

Written by the much-admired Italo-Palestinian journalist Rula Jebreal, Miral is a novel that focuses on remarkable women whose lives unfold in the turbulent political climate along the borders of Israel and Palestine. The story begins with Hind, a woman who sacrifices everything to establish a school for refugee Palestinian girls in East Jerusalem. Years later, Miral arrives at the school after her mother commits suicide.

When pulp-fiction writer Lior Tirosh returns to his homeland in East Africa, much has changed. Palestina - a Jewish state established in the early 20th century - is constructing a massive border wall to keep out African refugees. Unrest in the capital, Ararat, is at fever pitch. While searching for his missing niece, Tirosh begins to act as though he is a detective from one of his own novels. He is pursued by ruthless members of the state's security apparatus while unearthing deadly conspiracies and impossible realities.

Nofar is an average teenage girl - so average, in fact, that she's almost invisible. Serving customers ice cream all summer long, she is desperate for some kind of escape. But one afternoon, a terrible lie slips from her tongue. And suddenly everyone wants to talk to her: the press, her schoolmates, and even the boy upstairs. He is the only one who knows the truth, and he is demanding a price for his silence.

Naples, 1931. A bitter wind stalks the city streets, and murder lies at its chilled heart. When Maestro Vezzi, one of the world's greatest tenors, is found brutally murdered in his dressing room at Naples' famous San Carlo theater, the enigmatic and aloof Commissario Ricciardi is called to investigate. Arrogant and bad-tempered, Vezzi was hated by many. But with the livelihoods of the opera at stake, who would have committed such a callous act?

On the windswept shores of an East German island, Bettina Heilstrom struggles to build a life from the ashes. World War II has ended, and her country is torn apart. Longing for a family, she marries Werner, an older bureaucrat who adores her. But after joining the fledgling secret police, he is drawn deep into its dark mission and becomes a dangerous man.

Spain, 2020. When expat fugitive Jack Cleland watches his girlfriend die, gunned down in a pursuit involving officer Cristina Sanchez Pradell, he promises to exact his revenge by destroying the policewoman. Cristina's aunt Ana has been deaf-blind for the entirety of her adult life: the victim of a rare condition named Usher Syndrome. Ana is the centre of Cristina's world - and of Cleland's cruel plan. John Mackenzie - an ingenious yet irascible Glaswegian investigator - is seconded to aid the Spanish authorities in their manhunt.

The English-language debut of the acclaimed international bestseller - Anywhere but Home crosses continents, cultures, and generations to tell a sweeping story of self-discovery, finding your own place in a new world, and the revelatory mysteries of being a family.

Born in the Hispanic barrio of Los Angeles, Gregory Reeves grew up in poverty, survived the killing fields of Vietnam, and is now a lawyer in San Francisco. Though he has successfully survived this hard journey, Gregory’s life has suddenly gone off the rails thanks to an illusory and wrongheaded quest that has left him feeling lost and listless. To find what he is missing and what his heart truly wants, he must return to his roots. Only by excavating the past can he see the way to his future.

The year is 1994, and South Africa is in political turmoil as its first democratic election looms. Against a backdrop of apartheid and racial violence, traumatized artist Yolanda Petersen returns from the Appalachian foothills to the land of her youth at the behest of her mother. While there Yolanda longs to reconnect with her estranged daughter, Ingrid, the product of an illegal mixed-race affair with a white man. But Ingrid is missing, and as Yolanda quickly discovers, she isn’t the only woman in Cape Town desperate to protect her own.