Joseph Delaney used to be an English teacher, before becoming the best-selling author of the Spook's series, which has been published in 30 countries and sold over 4.5 million copies worldwide. The first book, The Spook's Apprentice, was adapted into a major motion picture starring Jeff Bridges and Julianne Moore.

Joseph Delaney

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Thomas Mann

Thomas Mann described Joseph and His Brothers as his ‘pyramid’: his greatest literary achievement, although the Nazi regime in his homeland did their best to tear it down on its first publication. A vivid and dazzlingly ambitious epic, it retells the biblical story of Joseph, whose dreams and visions set him apart from his siblings and lead him first to slavery and ultimately to power and prestige in Egypt. With rich detail and unexpected humour, Mann paints the lost landscapes of Egypt, Canaan and Palestine and brings to life the great characters of Genesis – patriarchs, pharaohs, avenged sisters and jealous brothers – in a story of epic grandeur with a family drama at its heart. 
 
John E. Woods' translation is considered the definitive English version: a rich and immersive reading experience and a towering achievement of its own.

Joseph and His Brothers

Franz Kafka

A terrifying psychological trip into the life of one Joseph K., an ordinary man who wakes up one day to find himself accused of a crime he did not commit, a crime whose nature is never revealed to him. Once arrested, he is released, but must report to court on a regular basis - an event that proves maddening, as nothing is ever resolved. As he grows more uncertain of his fate, his personal life - including work at a bank and his relations with his landlady and a young woman who lives next door - becomes increasingly unpredictable. As K. tries to gain control, he succeeds only in accelerating his own excruciating downward spiral.

The Trial

Penguin Classics

Isaac Bashevis Singer

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The Penitent is the story of Joseph Shapiro, a disillusioned and aimless man who discovers a purpose to his life through the Jewish faith. Following his journey as he flees Nazi persecution in Poland in 1939, through wealth and a failed marriage in New York, and on to Israel, it charts his transformation from worldly confusion to spiritual certainty in orthodox Judaism. This powerful work is an examination of the nature of faith, the question of identity and the notion of how to lead a good life.

The Penitent

J.M.G. Le Clézio

In these nine unforgettable and impressionistic 'tales of little madness', the Nobel Prize-winning author Le Clézio explores how the physical sensations we experience every day can be as strong as feelings of love or hate, with their power to bring chaos to our lives. In 'The Day that Beaumont became Acquainted with his Pain', a man with toothache spends the night seeking ways to disown his throbbing jaw; in 'Fever', Roch finds his mind transported by sunstroke; while in 'A Day of Old Age' little Joseph tries to comprehend the physical suffering of a dying old woman. Set in a timeless, spaceless universe, these experimental and haunting works portray the landscape of the human consciousness with dazzling verbal dexterity and power.

Fever

Andreas Karkavitsas

Stripped of their ancestral lands and persecuted by other proud dynasties, the once illustrious Eumorphopoulos family have been brought low. But when their rivals begin to falter, two Eumorphopoulos brothers, Aristodemus and Dimitrakis, resolve to restore their line's ancient glory. Yet they disagree about the best path forward: do they look to the ancient past - to long-lost language and culture - or to the ideology and technology of the present. . . 
 
The Archeologist, Andreas Karkavitsas' masterpiece, is at once a powerful allegory for the questions facing Greek nationalism at the turn of the century, as well as a vision of Europe that, conceived on the precipice of the First World War, now resounds with tragedy. 
 
Also included in this edition are a selection of 'sea tales' - folk stories told to Karakvitas by sailors, fishermen and sponge-divers during his travels in the Mediterranean. Staples of Greek literature, these four sea stories are considered some of Karakvitsas' greatest achievements.

The Archeologist and Selected Sea Stories

Yuko Tsushima

Mitch and Yonko haven’t spoken in a year. As children, they were inseparable, raised together in an orphanage outside Tokyo—but ever since the sudden death of Mitch’s brother, they’ve been mourning in their private ways, worlds apart. In the aftermath of the Fukushima nuclear catastrophe, they choose to reunite, finding each other in a city undone by disaster. 
 
Mitch and Yonko have drifted apart, but they will always be bound together. Because long ago they witnessed an unspeakable tragedy, a tragedy that they’ve kept secret for their entire lives. They never speak of it, but it’s all around them. Like history, it repeats itself. 
 
Yuko Tsushima’s sweeping and consuming novel is a metaphysical saga of postwar Japan. Wildcat Dome is a hugely ambitious exploration of denial, of the ways in which countries and their citizens avoid telling the truth—a tale of guilt, loss, and inevitable reckoning. 
 
'Tsushima evades any label, her fiction transcends gender to focus on the existential loneliness that is at the heart of humanity.' Japan Times

Wildcat Dome

Yukio Mishima

The Osugi family have come to a realization. Each of them hails from a different planet. Father from Mars, mother from Jupiter, son from Mercury and daughter from Venus. Already seen as oddballs in their small Japanese town in the 1960s, this extra-terrestrial knowledge brings them closer together; they climb mountains to wait for UFOs, study at home together and regard their human neighbours with a kindly benevolence. 
 
But Father, Juichiro, is worried about the bomb. He writes letters to Khrushchev, trying to warn everyone he can of the terrible threat. After all, humans may be terribly flawed, but aren't they worth saving? He sends out a coded message in the newspaper to find other aliens. But there are other extra-terrestrials out there, ones who do not look so kindly on the flaws and foibles of humans. And a charming young man, who claims to be from Venus too, tempts daughter Akiko away from the family . . .

Beautiful Star

Hans Fallada

Berlin, 1940, and the city is filled with fear. At the house on 55 Jablonski Strasse, its various occupants try to live under Nazi rule in their different ways: the bullying Hitler loyalists the Persickes, the retired judge Fromm and the unassuming couple Otto and Anna Quangel. Then the Quangels receive the news that their beloved son has been killed fighting in France. Shocked out of their quiet existence, they begin a silent campaign of defiance, and a deadly game of cat and mouse develops between the Quangels and the ambitious Gestapo inspector Escherich. When petty criminals Kluge and Borkhausen also become involved, deception, betrayal and murder ensue, tightening the noose around the Quangels' necks ...

Alone in Berlin

Jacob, a Jewish slave held in a mountain village after escaping a massacre by Cossacks, will be killed if he tries to escape. The one saving grace is his love for his master's daughter, Wanda. They begin a secret affair, trying to avoid the cruelty of the other villagers, until one day Jacob's fortunes unexpectedly change. Now he must choose between his need to be with his people and his love for Wanda, who in turn will also discover the meaning of brutality. In The Slave, published in 1962, Isaac Bashevis Singer creates a dreamlike portrayal of isolation, rejection, love and the meaning of sacrifice.

The Slave

Ernesto Sabato

Sabato's dark, philosophical novel is woven around a violent crime committed by Alejandra, the daughter of a prominent Argentinian family. Alejandra's act entwines the lives of three men: her father, Fernanda Vidal, a man who believes himself hunted by a secret organization of the blind, her troubled lover, Martin and Bruno, a writer who loved her mother. Exploring the tumult of Buenos Aires in the 1950s, On Heroes and Tombs leads its reader into a world of passion, philosophy and paranoia.

On Heroes and Tombs

Yasunari Kawabata

With the Second World War only a few years in the past, and Japan still reeling from its effects, two half sisters - born to the same father but different mothers - struggle to make sense of the new world in which they are coming of age. Asako, the younger, has become obsessed with locating a third sibling, while also experiencing love for the first time, while Momoko, their father's first child - haunted by the loss of her kamikaze boyfriend and their final, disturbing days together - seeks comfort in a series of unhealthy romances. And both sisters find themselves unable to outrun the legacies of their late mothers. A thoughtful, probing novel about the enduring traumas of war, the unbreakable bonds of family and the inescapability of the past, The Rainbow is a searing, melancholy work from one of Japan's greatest writers.

The Rainbow

Lao She

Mr Ma and his son Ma Wei run an antiques shop nestled in a quiet street by St Paul's Cathedral in London, where, far from their native Peking, they struggle to navigate the bustling pavements and myriad social conventions of 1920s English society. The Mas must negotiate love, money, misunderstandings and the London smog, aided and hindered by a cast of brilliantly drawn characters: their well-meaning landlady Mrs Weddeburn, her carefree daughter Mary, old China hand Reverend Ely and his formidable wife. 
 
Both a bitingly funny satire of Sino-British relations, and an emotionally powerful story of the experience of Chinese immigrants to the United Kingdom at the turn of the twentieth century, Mr Ma and Son is a compelling, witty novel from one of China's most celebrated writers.

Mr Ma and Son

Mario Benedetti

They met when they were teenagers. Quiet, poor, perhaps even a little dull, Miguel fell for languid Alicia during their long walks back from school. Then Lucas arrived and changed everything, entrancing Alicia with his confident bohemian charm. Miguel could not compete. But he stuck around and, against all the odds, was the one Alicia ended up marrying. 
 
Now, eleven years later, their marriage has begun to fray, and Alicia sets out to see Lucas again. Yet gnawing at each member of the ménage a trois is the knowledge that, somewhere along the line, something has gone badly awry. 
 
In a final heady whirl of sex and obsession, treachery and blame, they all struggle to ascertain: who among them is to blame?

Who Among Us?

Georges Simenon

It's not because you're foreigners. It's because you aren't foreign enough ... or else that you are too foreign 
 
Just as the Krull house sits on the edge of a rural French town, the family occupies a marginal place in the life of the community around them. Snubbed by the locals despite having lived there for decades, they rely on trade with passing sailors to earn a living. When their relative arrives unannounced from Germany, with his unsettling, nonchalant ways, the family becomes the target of increasing suspicion and the scapegoat for a terrible crime. 
 
Written on the eve of the Second World War, The Krull House is a taut, strangely prophetic novel about how distrust and hostility towards outsiders descends into hate-filled violence. 
 
'Irresistible...read him at your peril, avoid him at your loss' Sunday Times

The Krull House

Emile Zola

Set in the taverns of Paris, this is perhaps the first classical tragedy of working-class people living in the slums of a city. The Drinking Den (1877) is part of the Rougon-Macquart series, a naturalistic history of two branches of a family traced through several generations. Zola's work was influenced by contemporary theories of heredity and experimental science, and the behaviour of the two families is shown to be conditioned by environment and inherited characteristics, chiefly drunkenness and mental instability.

The Drinking Den

Peter Handke

We join the young Austrian teenager Filib Kobal's journey from his home in Carinthia to Slovenia on the trail of his older brother Gregor, whom he never knew. He is armed only with two of Gregor's books: a copy book from agricultural school, and a Slovenian-German dictionary, in which Gregor has marked certain words. To piece together an image of his brother, he pours over Gregor's notebook and marked dictionary. In the latter, he discovers new words which translate into timeless images of the earth and its people. Filip finds he can associate himself with this discovery. The resulting investigation of the laws of language and naming becomes a transformative investigation of himself and the world around him.

Repetition

Alfred Döblin

The subject of this book is the life of the former cement-worker and haulier Franz Biberkopf in Berlin. As our story begins, he has just been released from prison, where he did time for some stupid stuff, and now he is back in Berlin, determined to go straight. 
 
To begin with, he succeeds. But then he gets involved in a set-to with an unpredictable external agency that looks an awful lot like fate. 
 
 To see and hear this will be worthwhile for many readers who, like Franz Biberkopf, fill out a human skin, but, again like Franz Biberkopf, happen to want more from life than a piece of bread . . .

Berlin Alexanderplatz

Max Frisch

The novel tells the story of a middle-class UNESCO engineer called Walter Faber, who believes in rational, calculated world. Strange events undermine his security - an emergency landing in a Mexican desert against all odds, his friend Joachim hangs himself in the Mexican jungle, and he falls in love with a woman who dies of a concussion, he has an incestuous affair. Finally Faber becomes ill with stomach cancer, but it is too late for him to change his life.

Homo Faber

Oh Jung-hee

In this emblematic selection of her stories, Oh Jung-hee probes beneath the surface of seemingly quotidian lives to expose nightmarish family configurations warped by desertion, psychosis, and death. In ‘Chinatown’ a young girl living on the edge of the city’s Chinese community comes of age among mundane violences, collisions with adult sexuality and the American occupation; in ‘The Garden Party’ a woman grapples with her conflicting identities of wife, mother and writer at an alcohol-fuelled gathering. Throughout a career spanning six decades, Oh Jung-hee has drawn comparisons to Alice Munro, Virginia Woolf, and Joyce Carol Oates, and is assuredly a trailblazing writer.

Chinatown

Inger Christensen

This is the story of a young woman who is spirited away to St. Petersburg from Copenhagen by a lovestruck admirer. When she dies after the Russian Revolution, her ashes are carried back to Denmark, igniting a chain reaction of further stories, told and retold by the women in her family against a shifting ground of meaning. We meet murderers and fable-like characters, such as the hilarious and unsettling Viktor Blanke, who manages to seduce not one but three generations of mothers and daughters. Natalja, we discover, cannot be held in one place. Rather than giving in to the tragedy that befalls her, she wills herself to become someone else, reinventing her family’s narrative one irresistible tale at a time.Tantalizing and full of wit, this remarkable, shape-shifting novel is available in English for the first time.

Natalja's Stories

‘I bear within me the seed, the rudiments, the possibility of life's capacities and endeavours. Where might I be, if I were not here?’ 
 
Buddenbrooks is one of the original, and greatest, of family chronicles: the story of four generations of a wealthy and bourgeois German family as they experience all the anguish and rewards of human life: births, marriages, divorces, deaths, madness, bankruptcy and artistic achievement. Richly realized and profoundly moving, Thomas Mann’s first great novel was published when he was only twenty-five, and was one of the two books for which he won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1929. 
 
John E. Woods’ elegant translation is widely acclaimed as the best available English version.

Buddenbrooks

Gun-Britt Sundström

‘I want to have him, I really do. I just don’t want him to have me.’ 
 
Martina and Gustav, students in 1970s Stockholm, meet and fall immediately into coupledom. But what is coupledom? A route to marriage? A declaration of co-dependency? A new dimension of commitment and responsibility? A sexual confrontation? Or is it a habit that an intelligent person must consider breaking? Martina and Gustav discuss their relationship endlessly, between themselves and with others, as they try to make it work. 
 
Engagement, set during a time of social change and political upheaval, sees Martina trying to engage with the world on her own terms. Unwilling to marry, she finds herself in a state of permanent engagement while her friends settle down to marriage and children; uncertain of the world’s future, she engages with demos, sit-ins and philosophy seminars in her quest for a new blueprint for joy. First published in 1976, when it was heralded as an instant classic, Engagement remains as relevant, hilarious and heartbreaking today.

Engagement

Leo Tolstoy

This volume includes Family Happiness; The Kreutzer Sonata; The Devil and Father Sergius. The four stories are all about love, but they take very different attitudes towards it. Tolstoy knows that jis readers have fallen in love and also, often, fallen out of it; they have wanted to kill their loved ones; they have lusted vigorously; or desperately sought the approval and even worship of others - Tolstoy depends on our own memories to entagle us in his tragic stories.

The Kreutzer Sonata and Other Stories

Henri-Pierre Roché

In free-spirited Paris, Jules and Jim live a carefree, bohemian existence. They write in cafés, travel when the mood takes them, and share the women they love without jealousy. Women like Lucie, flawless, an abbess, and Odile, impulsive, mischievous, almost feral. But it is Kate - with a smile the two friends had determined to always follow before they even met her, but capricious enough to jump in the Seine from spite - who steals their hearts most thoroughly. 
 
Henri-Pierre Roché was in his mid-seventies when he wrote this, his autobiographical debut novel. The inspiration for the legendary film, it captures perfectly with excitement and great humour the tenderness of three people in love with each other and with life.

Jules et Jim

Fyodor Dostoyevsky

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'The mystery of human existence lies not in staying alive, but in finding something to live for' 
 
The murder of brutal landowner Fyodor Karamazov changes the lives of his sons irrevocably: Mitya, the sensualist, whose bitter rivalry with his father immediately places him under suspicion for parricide; Ivan, the intellectual, driven to breakdown; the spiritual Alyosha, who tries to heal the family's rifts; and the shadowy figure of their bastard half-brother, Smerdyakov. Dostoyevsky's dark masterwork evokes a world where the lines between innocence and corruption, good and evil, blur, and everyone's faith in humanity is tested.

The Brothers Karamazov

When Jean Macquart arrives in the peasant community of Beauce, where farmers have worked the same land for generations, he quickly finds himself involved in the corrupt affairs of the local Fouan family. Aging and Lear-like, Old Man Fouan has decided to divide his land between his three children: his penny-pinching daughter Fanny, his eldest son - a far from holy figure known as 'Jesus Christ' - and the lecherous Buteau, Macquart's friend. But in a community where land is everything, sibling rivalry quickly turns to brutal hatred, as Buteau declares himself unsatisfied with his lot. Part of the vast Rougon-Macquart cycle, The Earth was regarded by Zola as his greatest novel. A fascinating portrayal of a struggling but decadent community, it offers a compelling exploration of the destructive nature of human ignorance and greed

The Earth

Maigret and fellow inspector Lognon clash in their investigations into the murder of an unknown young woman in Paris. Maigret endeavours to piece together the story of the girl and in doing so uncovers details about her past and her character that lead him to the truth behind her tragic demise.

Maigret and the Dead Girl

Inspector Maigret

Cao Xueqin

The Story of the Stone (c. 1760), also known by the title of The Dream of the Red Chamber, is the great novel of manners in Chinese literature. 
Divided into five volumes, of which The Warning Voice is the third, it charts the glory and decline of the illustrious Jia family (a story which closely accords with the fortunes of the author's own family). The two main characters, Bao-yu and Dai-yu, are set against a rich tapestry of humour, realistic detail and delicate poetry, which accurately reflects the ritualized hurly-burly of Chinese family life. But over and above the novel hangs the constant reminder that there is another plane of existence - a theme which affirms the Buddhist belief in a supernatural scheme of things.

The Story of the Stone (Volume III)

Gabriel García Márquez

An acknowledged masterpiece, this is the story of seven generations of the Buendía family and of Macondo, the town they have built. Though little more than a settlement surrounded by mountains, Macondo has its wars and disasters, even its wonders and miracles. A microcosm of Columbian life, its secrets lie hidden, encoded in a book and only Aureliano Buendía can fathom its mysteries and reveal its shrouded destiny. Blending political reality with magic realism, fantasy with comic invention, One Hundred Years of Solitude is one of the most daringly original works of the twentieth century.

One Hundred Years of Solitude

The Castle is the story of K., the unwanted Land Surveyor who is never to be admitted to the Castle nor accepted in the village, and yet cannot go home. As he encounters dualities of certainty and doubt, hope and fear, and reason and nonsense, K.'s struggles in the absurd, labyrinthine world where he finds himself seem to reveal an inexplicable truth about the nature of existence. Kafka began The Castle in 1922 and it was never finished, yet this, the last of his three great novels, draws fascinating conclusions that make it feel strangely complete.

The Castle

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