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At a family wedding Mevlut catches sight of a girl with whom he falls in love. After a secret courtship of letters passed via his cousin, she agrees to elope with him, and on a dark night the two come together for the first time. As they rush to catch a train to Istanbul, Mevlut realises he has been misled. But the die is cast, and the situation will determine the rest of his days.

Over the next four decades in Istanbul, Mevlut works various jobs to support his loving wife and family; work that gives him a special perspective on his rapidly changing city and the people who live there. And every evening he walks the streets, selling his wares and dreaming his dreams.

A magnificent novel. (Wall Street Journal)

Powerful and moving. (TLS 'Books of the Year')

Magnificent . . . Prepare to fall in love with this everyman, this vendor of street-level history whose cry echoes down the years. (Independent on Sunday)

Life-affirming story telling at its best. Written with humour, warmth and generosity, capturing the country's political upheaval and the extraordinariness of ordinary human life . . . A dazzling portrait of the author's beloved Istanbul. (Mail on Sunday)

A polyphonic novel about desire, memory, change and the lost pleasures of walking around Istanbul's long-gone neighbourhoods. (FT 'Books of the Year')

With its comedy, sentiment, melodrama and voracious curiosity about the urban habitat, this is Pamuk's most Dickensian work . . . City and soul converge. (Independent)

Venetia Aldridge QC is a distinguished barrister. When she agrees to defend Garry Ashe, accused of the brutal murder of his aunt, it is one more opportunity to triumph in her career as a criminal lawyer. But just four weeks later, Miss Aldridge is found dead.

The New York Trilogy is an astonishing and original book: three cleverly interconnected novels that exploit the elements of standard detective fiction and achieve a new genre that is all the more gripping for its starkness.

"A gentle, moving tragicomedy... Ishiguro gives us a vignette of a moment in cultural history which is as complete, in its own way, as Washington Square" (London Review of Books)

" A work of spare elegance: refined, understated, economic" (Sunday Times)

'Auster at the top of his game. This superb novel about human folly turns out to be tremendously wise.' (New Statesman)

Poems selected by Ted Hughes

A novel of memory and loss, set between London of the 1930s and Shanghai between the wars.

In one of the most acclaimed and original novels of recent years, Kazuo Ishiguro imagines the lives of a group of students growing up in a darkly skewered version of contemporary England.

'In Mario Vargas Llosa's latest novel there are two stories - that of Paul Gauguin, the Post-Impressionist painter, and that of Paul Gauguin's grandmother, Flora Tristan . . . what makes the novel so illuminating is the continuity between their parallel lives . . . the novel is highly accomplished and teems with characters, ideas and incident - Gauguin and Flora may have thought they were masters of their own destiny, but this novel powerfully suggests that even that may have been an illusion - like paradise itself.' Literary Review

In Praise of the Stepmother is a witty and subtle meditation on the mysterious nature of human happiness and the corrupting power of innocence. 

Six days ago, a man blew himself up by the side of a road in northern Wisconsin ...

Nikos Kazantzakis' most popular and enduring novel, has its origins in the author's own experiences of mining and harvesting in the Peleponnesus in the 1920s.

A piercing scream, shattering the evening calm, brings Superintendent Adam Dalgliesh hurrying from his literary party to the nearby Steen Psychiatric Clinic, where he discovers the body of a woman sprawled on the basement floor, a chisel thrust through her heart.

The young women of Nightingale House are there to learn to nurse and comfort the suffering.

'Do not on any account miss this if you want both a good read and some absolutely superb writing.' (John Braine)

Two men lie in a welter of blood in the vestry of St Matthew's Church, Paddington, their throats brutally slashed.

A thrilling murder mystery, My Name is Red is also a stunning meditation on love, artistic devotion and the tensions between East and West.