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.

Kafka on the Shore interweaves between two parallel plots to tell the story of Kafka Tamura — a 15-year-old boy who runs away from home to escape an Oedipal curse and Nakata — an elderly Japanese man who has an uncanny ability to speak to cats due to a childhood accident and who spends his days locating and returning …

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.

From the moment that Gjorg’s brother is killed by a neighbour, his own life is forfeit: for the code of Kanun requires Gjorg to kill his brother’s murderer and then in turn be hunted down.

When he hears her favourite Beatles song, Toru Watanabe recalls his first love Naoko, the girlfriend of his best friend Kizuki. Immediately he is transported back almost twenty years to his student days in Tokyo, adrift in a world of uneasy friendships, casual sex, passion, loss and desire – to a time when an impetuous young woman called Midori marches into his life and he has to choose between the future and the past.