by Sasa Stanisic | Bosnia and Herzegovina
Fleeing the violence and destruction of his native Bosnia with his family for safety in Germany, Aleksandar Krsmanoviæ remains haunted by the past and his memories of Asija, the mysterious girl he had tried to save and whose fate he is desperate to discover
by Georgi Gospodinov | Bulgaria
A young writer marriage breaks up after his wife becomes pregnant and he decides to create his own version of a "natural novel" assembled from the bits and pieces of everyday life.
by Miroslav Krleža | Croatia
A middle-aged lawyer, whose life and career have been eminently respectable and respected, inadvertently blurts out an honest thought at a party attended by the local elite. From this moment, all hell breaks loose.
by Jaan Kross | Estonia
Faced with a dire financial crisis in Russia, Professor Martens orchestrates a major loan from the French government to stave off famine; as time passes, however, he realizes that he has managed to perpetuate a brutal regime that keeps its political prisoners in chains.
by Anthony Doerr | France
A blind French girl on the run from the German occupation and a German orphan-turned-Resistance tracker struggle with respective beliefs after meeting on the Brittany coast.
by Markus Zusak | Germany
Trying to make sense of the horrors of World War II, Death relates the story of Liesel--a young German girl whose book-stealing and story-telling talents help sustain her family and the Jewish man they are hiding, as well as their neighbors.
by Umberto Eco | Italy
The year is 1327. Franciscans in a wealthy Italian abbey are suspected of heresy, and Brother William of Baskerville arrives to investigate. His delicate mission is suddenly overshadowed by seven bizarre deaths that take place in seven days and nights of apocalyptic terror. The body of one monk is found in a cask of pigs' blood, another is floating in a bathhouse, still another is crushed at the foot of a cliff.
by Paolo Giordano | Italy
Misfits Alice and Mattia bond as teens over shared experiences of suffering before mathematically gifted Mattia accepts a research position that takes him far away, a situation that restores their isolation before they meet by chance years later.
by Ricardas Gavelis | Lithuania
Detailing a man's mental breakdown—and his obsession with a seductress named Lolita, the omnipresent "them," and the need to uncover what's "really going on"—this is an epic, paranoid novel about the surreal absurdities and horrors of life under Soviet rule.
by Anne Frank | Netherlands
Includes each of the versions of Anne's world-famous diary including the 'A' and 'B' diaries now in continuous, readable form, and the definitive text edited by Mirjam Pressler. For the first time readers have access to Anne's letters, personal reminiscences, daydreams, essays and notebook of favourite quotes. Also included are background essays by notable scholars, as well as numerous photographs of the Franks and the other occupants of the annexe.
by Olga Tokarczuk | Poland
A seventeenth-century Dutch anatomist discovers the Achilles tendon by dissecting his own amputated leg. Chopin's heart is carried back to Warsaw in secret by his adoring sister. A woman must return to her native Poland in order to poison her terminally ill high school sweetheart, and a young man slowly descends into madness when his wife and child mysteriously vanish during a vacation and just as suddenly reappear. Through these brilliantly imagined characters and stories, interwoven with haunting, playful, and revelatory meditations, Flights explores what it means to be a traveler, a wanderer, a body in motion not only through space but through time.
by Eca de Queiroz | Portugal
Lascivious anti-heroes Teodoro and Teodorico,are dragged from their narrow Lisbon lives into exotic encounters with Chinese mandarins, the Devil (in the guise of a dark-suited civil servant)and Jesus Christ Himself.
by Norman Manea | Romania
A haunting memoir vividly re-creating Norman Manea’s harrowing childhood in Fascist Romania while providing indelible portraits of Ceausescu’s dictatorship and the pre- and post-Communist eras.
by Fyodor Dostoyevsky | Russia
Determined to overreach his humanity and assert his untrammelled individual will, Raskolnikov, an impoverished student living in the St. Petersburg of the Tsars, commits an act of murder and theft and sets into motion a story which, for its excrutiating suspense, its atmospheric vividness, and its profundity of characterization and vision, is almost unequaled in the literatures of the world.
by Viktor Pelevin | Russia
When Tatarsky, a frustrated poet, takes a job as an advertising copywriter, he finds he has a talent for putting distinctively Russian twists on Western-style ads. But his success leads him into a surreal world of spin doctors, gangsters, drug trips, and the spirit of Che Guevera, who, by way of a Ouija board, communicates theories of consumer theology.
by Milos Crnjanski (Tsernianski) | Serbia
Eighteenth century Serbs flee the tyranny of the Ottoman Empire as two brothers, a soldier and a merchant, and a woman, who is wife to one and mistress to the other, face the displacement and sorrows of war.
by Miguel Delibes | Spain
Mario Collado, a high school teacher in San Diego, Spain, dies in his sleep at the age of 49, leaving his wife, Carmen, and five children. As Carmen watches over the corpse of her husband during the hours between the wake and the Mass and burial, she muses over their life together.
by Carlos Ruiz Zafón | Spain
A boy named Daniel selects a novel from a library of rare books, enjoying it so much that he searches for the rest of the author's works, only to discover that someone is destroying every book the author has ever written.
by Joseph Kanon | Turkey
In 1945 Istanbul, American undercover agent Leon Bauer's attempt to save a life leads to a desperate manhunt, a game of shifting loyalties, and an unexpected love affair.
by Andrey Kurkov | Ukraine
A wannabe novelist lives with his pet, a penguin named Misha that he began looking after when the local zoo could no longer afford to keep him. To keep himself going and Misha in frozen fish, Viktor takes a job preparing advance obituaries for a local paper. Sounds promising, until Viktor's obits turn out to be a kind of hit list — the people he writes about wind up getting murdered.
by Jonathan Safran Foer | Ukraine
Follows a young writer as he travels to Eastern Europe on a quest to find Augustine, the woman who saved his grandfather from the Nazis, and discovers an unexpected past that will resonate far into the future.
by Kazuo Ishiguro | United Kingdom
Masuji Ono is a bohemian artist and purveyor of the night life who became a propagandist for Japanese imperialism during the war. But the war is over. Japan lost, Ono's wife and son have been killed, and many young people blame the imperialists for leading the country to disaster. What's left for Ono?
by Emily Bronte | United Kingdom
In nineteenth-century Yorkshire, the tumultuous relationship between a headstrong girl and a foundling boy wreaks havoc on them and those around them, as well as the next generation.