A Gentleman in Moscow by Amor Towles, is a novel about Count Alexander Ilyich Rostov, a Russian aristocrat who is condemned by Communists to spend the rest of his life confined in the Metropol, the capital’s most glamorous hotel.

The novel is a story of how a woman named Aomame begins to notice strange changes occurring in the world. She is quickly caught up in a plot involving Sakigake, a religious cult, and her childhood love, Tengo, and embarks on a journey to discover what is “real”

Murakami’s “After Dark” is about a young woman called Mari Asai who encounters several people in one night in downtown Tokyo. Through her interactions with these other characters, Mari is able to form a closer connection with her sister and also learn more about herself.

This sweeping epic of post-war Albania was Kadare’s first novel.

Birthday Stories is a 2002 short story anthology edited by Japanese author Haruki Murakami. Despite the theme’s happy connotations most of the short stories have a dark, melancholic atmosphere.

In this haunting work of journalistic investigation, Haruki Murakami tells the story of the horrific terrorist attack on Japanese soil that shook the entire world.

In a Tokyo suburb, a young man named Toru Okada searches for his wife’s missing cat—and then for his wife as well—in a netherworld beneath the city’s placid surface. As these searches intersect, he encounters a bizarre group of allies and antagonists.

His life was like his recurring nightmare: a train to nowhere. But an ordinary life has a way of taking an extraordinary turn. Add a girl whose ears are so exquisite that, when uncovered, they improve sex a thousand-fold, a runaway friend, a right-wing politico, an ovine-obsessed professor and a manic-depressive in a sheep outfit, implicate them in a hunt for a sheep, that may or may not be running the world, and eth upshot is another singular masterpiece from Japan’s finest novelist.