Nocturnes, by Kazuo Ishiguro

Described by the New York Times as ‘an original and remarkable genius’, Kazuo Ishiguro is the author of six novels, including Never Let Me Go and The Remains of the Day.

Now in Nocturnes, a sublime story cycle, he explores ideas of love, music and the passing of time. From the piazzas of Italy to the Malvern Hills, a London flat to the ‘hush-hush floor’ of an exclusive Hollywood hotel, the characters we encounter range from young dreamers to cafe musicians to faded stars, all of them at some moment of reckoning.

Gentle, intimate and witty, this quintet is marked by a haunting theme: the struggle to keep alive a sense of life’s romance, even as one gets older, relationships flounder and youthful hopes recede.

Watch the trailer.

The Interrogator, by Andrew Williams

Spring, 1941. The armies of the Reich are masters of Europe. Britain stands alone, dependent on her battered navy for survival, while Hitler’s submarines – his ‘grey wolves’ – prey on the Atlantic convoys that are the country’s only lifeline. Lieutenant Douglas Lindsay is amongst just a handful of men picked up when his ship is torpedoed. Unable to free himself from the memories of that night at sea, he becomes an interrogator with naval intelligence, questioning captured U-Boat crews.

He is convinced the Germans have broken British naval codes, but he’s a lone voice, a damaged outsider, and his superiors begin to wonder – can he really be trusted when so much is at stake? As the Blitz reduces Britain’s cities to rubble and losses at sea mount, Lindsay becomes increasingly isolated and desperate. No one will believe him, not even his lover, Mary Henderson, who works at the very heart of the intelligence establishment.

Lindsay decides to risk all in one last throw of the dice, setting a trap for his prize captive – and nemisis – U-Boat Commander Jürgen Mohr, the man who sent his ship to its doom.

Burial, by Neil Cross

Can your guiltiest secret ever be buried?

Nathan has never been able to forget the worst night of his life: the party that led to the sudden, shocking death of a young woman. Only he and Bob, an untrustworthy old acquaintance, know what really happened and they have resolved to keep it that way. But one rainy night, years later, Bob appears at Nathan’s door with terrifying news, and old wounds are suddenly reopened, threatening to tear Nathan’s whole world apart. Because Nathan has his own secrets now. Secrets that could destroy everything he has fought to build. And maybe Bob doesn’t realise just how far Nathan will go to protect them…

Read an extract from Burial, and listen to an interview with the author.

The Elegance of the Hedgehog, by Muriel Barbery

The Elegance of the Hedgehog focuses on two super-smart, super-solitary female characters — each of whom goes to great lengths to hide and protect her rich inner life from others — and the unlikely friendship that grows up between them. “Unlikely” because one is a 54-year-old concierge (“poor, discreet and insignificant”) of a luxury apartment building in Paris and the other a 12-year-old girl who lives in the building (“My parents are rich, my family is rich and my sister and I are, therefore, as good as rich”). The young girl is planning to kill herself on her 13th birthday, to avoid the mediocrity that she is sure will come with growing up, unless she is able to find something to make life worth living.

This light but ultimately affecting novel has been a tremendous success for its author, Muriel Barbery. This is her second novel; the first, Gourmet Rhapsody, was well reviewed but did not achieve the same kind of meteoric success. Since its publication in France in 2006, The Elegance of the Hedgehog has been translated into 31 languages and received many literary prizes. It was first published in English in 2008 by Gallic Books.

Read an interview with the author.

The Last Station, by Jay Parini

By 1910, Leo Tolstoy, the world’s most famous author, had become an almost religious figure, surrounded on his lavish estate by family and followers alike. Set in the tumultuous last year of the count’s life, The Last Station centres on the battle for his soul waged by his wife and his leading disciple. Torn between his professed doctrine of poverty and chastity on the one hand and the reality of his enormous wealth, his thirteen children, and a life of hedonism on the other, Tolstoy makes a dramatic flight from his home. Too ill to continue beyond the tiny station of Astapovo, he believes he is dying alone, while outside over one hundred newspapermen are awaiting hourly reports on his condition. Narrated in six different voices, including Tolstoy’s own from his diaries and literary works, The Last Station is a richly inventive novel that dances bewitchingly between fact and fiction.

Occupied City, by David Peace

Tokyo, 26 January, 1948. As the third year of the US Occupation of Japan begins, a man enters a downtown bank. He speaks of an outbreak of dysentery and says he is a doctor, sent by the Occupation authorities, to treat anyone who might have been exposed.

Clear liquid is poured into sixteen teacups. Sixteen employees of the bank drink this liquid according to strict instructions. Within minutes twelve of them are dead, the other four unconscious. The man disappears along with some, but not all, of the bank’s money. And so begins the biggest manhunt in Japanese history.

In Occupied City, David Peace dramatizes and explores the rumours of complicity, conspiracy and cover-up that surround the chilling case of the Teikoku Bank Massacre: of the man who was convicted of the crime, of the legacy of biological warfare programmes, and of the victims and survivors themselves.

The second part of his acclaimed Tokyo Trilogy – and an extraordinary picture of a city in mourning – Occupied City is further evidence of this novelist’s singular and formidable talent.

The Naked Name of Love, by Sanjida O’Connell

In 1865, as Darwin’s new theory of evolution begins to sweep aside old certainties, a young Jesuit priest and plant-hunter sets out into an unknown world. He is driven by twin passions: for science and for his faith. Travelling across the Eastern Steppes of Mongolia in the company of a Buddhist monk and a local horseman, Joseph’s journey is fraught with danger, both physical and spiritual. But it is Namuunaa, the gifted shaman woman who saves his life, who offers a greater challenge: she will teach him what it is to love.

A story of East meeting West and of a love that transcends culture, faith and, ultimately, tragedy, this is both a novel on an epic scale and an astonishingly intimate story.

Blackmoor, by Edward Hogan

Beth is an albino, half blind, and given to looking at the world out of the corner of her eye. Her neighbours in the Derbyshire town of Blackmoor have always thought she was ‘touched’, and when a series of bizarre happenings shake the very foundations of the village, they are confirmed in their opinion that Beth is an ill omen. The neighbours say that Beth eats dirt from the flowerbeds, and that smoke rises from her lawn. By the end of the year, she is dead.

A decade later her son, Vincent, treated like a bad omen by his father George is living in a pleasant suburb miles from Blackmoor. There the bird-watching teenager stumbles towards the buried secrets of his mother’s life and death in the abandoned village. It’s the story of a community that fell apart, a young woman whose face didn’t fit, and a past that refuses to go away.

The Lacuna, by Barbara Kingsolver

The Lacuna is the story of a man’s search for safety in the grinding jaws of two nations, at a moment when the entire world seemed bent on reinventing itself at any cost.

Born in the US, reared in a series of provisional households in Mexico, Harrison Shepherd is mostly a liability to his social-climbing flapper mother, Salomé. From a coastal island jungle to the unpaved neighbourhoods of 1930s Mexico City, through a disastrous stint at a military school in Virginia and back again, his fortunes never steady as Salomé finds her rich men-friends always on the losing side of the Mexican Revolution. Sometimes she gives her son cigarettes instead of supper.

He aims for invisibility, observing his world and recording everything with a peculiar selfless irony in his notebooks. Life is whatever he learns from servants putting him to work in the kitchen, errands he runs in the streets, and one fateful day, by mixing plaster for famed Mexican muralist Diego Rivera. Making himself useful in the household of the muralist, his wife Frida Kahlo, and exiled Bolshevik leader Lev Trotsky, young Shepherd inadvertently casts his lot with art and revolution, and the howling gossip and reportage that dictate public opinion.

A violent upheaval sends him north to a nation newly caught up in the internationalist goodwill of World War II. In the mountain city of Asheville, North Carolina, he remakes himself in America’s hopeful image. Under the watch of his peerless stenographer, Violet Brown, he finds an extraordinary use for his talents of observation. But political winds continue to push him between north and south, in a plot that turns many times on the unspeakable breach – the lacuna – between truth and public presumption.

This is a gripping story of identity, connection with our past, and the power of words to create or devastate. Like no other novel yet written, it illuminates an era when bold internationalism gave way to a post-war landscape of narrowly defined ‘Americanism’. Crossing two decades, from the vibrant revolutionary murals of Mexico City to the halls of a Congress bent on eradicating the colour red, The Lacuna is as deep and rich as the New World itself.

Read an interview with the author.

Sea of Poppies, by Amitav Ghosh

At the heart of this epic saga, set just before the Opium Wars, is an old slaving-ship, The Ibis. Its destiny is a tumultuous voyage across the Indian Ocean, its crew a motley array of sailors and stowaways, coolies and convicts. In a time of colonial upheaval, fate has thrown together a truly diverse cast of Indians and Westerners, from a bankrupt Raja to a widowed villager, from an evangelical English opium trader to a mulatto American freedman.

As their old family ties are washed away they, like their historical counterparts, come to view themselves as jahaj-bhais or ship-brothers. An unlikely dynasty is born, which will span continents, races and generations. The vast sweep of this historical adventure spans the lush poppy fields of the Ganges, the rolling high seas, and the exotic backstreets of China. But it is the panorama of characters, whose diaspora encapsulates the vexed colonial history of the East itself, which makes Sea of Poppies so breathtakingly alive – a masterpiece from one of the world’s finest novelists.

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