1Q84   Book One & Book Two
Haruki Murakami

The year is 1984. Aomame sits in a taxi on the expressway in Tokyo. Her work is not the kind which can be discussed in public but she is in a hurry to carry out an assignment and, with the traffic at a stand-still, the driver proposes a solution. She agrees, but as a result of her actions starts to feel increasingly detached from the real world.

1Q84   Book 3
Haruki Murakami

At the close of Book Two, Aomame and Tengo found themselves in perilous situations, threatened and confused. In this third book, both are pursued by persons and forces they do not know and cannot understand. As they begin to decipher more about the strange world into which they have slipped, so they sense their destinies converging.

SOLO
Rana Dasgupta

"Solo" recounts the life and daydreams of a reclusive one-hundred-year-old man from Bulgaria. Before the man lost his sight, he read this story in a magazine: a group of explorers came upon a community of parrots speaking the language of a society that had been wiped out in a recent catastrophe. Astonished by their discovery, they put the parrots in cages and sent them home so that linguists could record what remained of the lost language. But the parrots, already traumatised by the devastation they had recently witnessed, died on the way.
Solo is ... utterly unforgettable in its humanity (The Guardian).

A Man of Parts
David Lodge

In A Man of Parts David Lodge has given us a biographical novel about H G Wells that treats mainly of his period of greatest influence and mischief, between the publication of The Time Machine in 1895 when the author was 29 and his bestselling Outline of History in 1919.

THE LAST MAN IN TOWER    
Aravind Adiga

A tale of one man refusing to leave his home in the face of property development. Tower A is a relic from a co-operative housing society established in the 1950s. When a property developer offers to buy out the residents for eye-watering sums, the principled yet arrogant teacher is the only one to refuse the offer, determined not to surrender his sentimental attachment to his home and his right to live in it, in the name of greed. His neighbours gradually relinquish any similar qualms they might have and, in a typically blunt satirical premise take matters into their own hands, determined to seize their slice of the new Mumbai as it transforms from stinky slum to silvery skyscrapers at dizzying, almost gravity-defying speed.

THE BOOK OF LIFE
Stuart Nadler

Forced together on a trip from Manhattan to Rhode Island, a father and son attempt to renew their bond over lobster, cigarettes, and a buried secret. A pure-hearted artist finds his devotion cruelly tested, while his true love tries to repent for the biggest mistake of her life. Unwittingly thrust into an open marriage, a man struggles to reconnect with his newly devout son. And in the book's daring first story, an arrogant businessman begins a forbidden affair during the High Holidays. Written in clear, crystalline prose, The Book of Life comprises seven stunning tales about faith, family, grief, love, temptation, and redemption that signal the arrival of a bold and exciting new writer.

Clockwork Angel
Cassandra Clare

Tessa is soon caught in a dangerous love triangle where a wrong decision could prove fatal. She will need all her strength to save her brother and stay alive as she learns the chilling truth of what really lurks on London's streets after dark. Discover more about the mysterious and sexy Shadowhunters in this thrilling prequel trilogy to the bestselling "Mortal Instruments" sequence.

The Road to San Giovanni
Italo Calvino

In five elegant autobiographical meditations Calvino delves into his past, remembering awkward childhood walks with his father, a lifelong obsession with the cinema and fighting in the Italian Resistance against the Fascists. He also muses on the social contracts, language and sensations associated with emptying the kitchen rubbish and the shape he would, if asked, consider the world. These reflections on the nature of memory itself are engaging, witty, and lit through with Calvino's alchemical brilliance.

A WAY IN THE WORLD
V.S. NAIPAUL

This vastly innovative novel explores colonial inheritance through a series of narratives that span continents, swing back and forth between past and present and delve into both autobiography and fiction. Naipaul offers a personal choice of examples of Spanish and British imperial history in the Caribbean, including an imagined vision of Raleigh's last expedition and an introduction to Francisco de Miranda, a would-be liberator and precursor to Bolivar, which are placed within a context of echoing modernity and framed by two more personal, heavily autobiographical sections sketching the narrator an eloquent yet humble man of Indian descent who grew up in Trinidad but spent much of his adult life in England and Africa. Meditative and dramatic, these historical reconstructions, imbued with Naipaul's acute perception, drawn with his deft and sensitive touch, and told in his beautifully wrought prose, are transmuted into an astonishing novel exploring the profound and mysterious effect of history on the individual.

MAO'S GREAT FAMINE
FRANK DIKOTTER
Shortlisted for the BBC Samuel Johnson Prize for Non-Fiction 2011 .

Between 1958 and 1962, 45 million Chinese people were worked, starved or beaten to death. Mao Zedong threw his country into a frenzy with the Great Leap Forward, an attempt to catch up with and overtake the Western world in less than fifteen years. It leads to one of the greatest catastrophes the world has ever known.
Dikotter's extraordinary research within Chinese archives brings together for the first time what happened in the corridors of power with the everyday experiences of ordinary people, giving voice to the dead and disenfranchised. This groundbreaking account definitively recasts the history of the People's Republic of China.

SOLAR
Ian McEwan

A compulsive womaniser, Michael Beard finds his fifth marriage floundering. When Beard's professional and personal worlds collide in a freak accident, an opportunity presents itself for Beard to extricate himself from his marital mess, reinvigorate his career and save the world from environmental disaster.  

Let the great world spin
Colum McCann

In the dawning light of a late-summer morning, the people of lower Manhattan stand hushed, staring up in disbelief at the Twin Towers. It is August 1974, and a mysterious tightrope walker is running, dancing, leaping between the towers, suspended a quarter mile above the ground. In the streets below, a slew of ordinary lives become extraordinary in bestselling novelist Colum McCann's stunningly intricate portrait of a city and its people.

Privileges
Jonathan Dee

Smart, socially gifted, and chronically impatient, Adam and Cynthia Morey are so perfect for each other that united they become a kind of fortress against the world. In their hurry to start a new life, they marry young and have two children before Cynthia reaches the age of twenty-five.

The Whisperers
John Connolly

The border between Maine and Canada is porous. Anything can be smuggled across it: drugs, cash, weapons, and people. Now a group of disenchanted former soldiers has begun its own smuggling operation, and what is being moved is infinitely stranger and more terrifying than anyone can imagine. Anyone, that is, except private detective Charlie Parker, who has his own intimate knowledge of the darkness in men's hearts. But the soldiers' actions have attracted the attention of the reclusive Herod, a man with a taste for the strange. And where Herod goes, so too does the shadowy figure that he calls the Captain. To defeat them, Parker must form an uneasy alliance with a man he fears more than any other, the killer known as the Collector...

1000 years of annoying the French
Stephen Clarke

Was the Battle of Hastings a French victory? William the Conqueror was Norman and hated the French. Were the Brits really responsible for the death of Joan of Arc? The French sentenced her to death for wearing trousers. Was the guillotine a French invention? This book looks at what has really been going on since 1066.

Writing Arabic
From Script to Type
Stefan F. Moginet

This book, abundatly illustrated with examples, clearly presents the development of Arabic writing styles, from the begining with reed pens to twenty-first-century computerized typesetting. For those interested in the extraordinary history of writing.

Also in french : Du calame à l'ordinateur.