Classical guitarist Satoshi Makino has toured the world and is at the height of his career when he first lays eyes on journalist Yoko Komine. Their bond forms instantly. Upon their first meeting, after Makino’s concert in Tokyo, they begin a conversation that will go on for years, with long spells of silence broken by powerful moments of connection. She’s drawn by Makino’s tender music and his sensitivity, and he is intrigued by Yoko’s refinement and intellect. But neither knows enough about love to see it blooming nor has the confidence to make the first move.

Ethiopia, 1935. With the threat of Mussolini's army looming, recently orphaned Hirut struggles to adapt to her new life as a maid. Her new employer, Kidane, an officer in Emperor Haile Selassie's army, rushes to mobilise his strongest men before the Italians invade. Hirut and the other women long to do more than care for the wounded and bury the dead. When Emperor Haile Selassie goes into exile and Ethiopia quickly loses hope, it is Hirut who offers a plan to maintain morale.

Narrated by Sir Derek Jacobi with great feeling and style who also read it for Radio 4’s book at bedtime broadcast. Set in the sweltering summer of 1938 in Portugal, a country under the Fascist shadow of Spain, Pereira Maintains tells a tale of reluctant heroism. An editor at a second-rate Lisbon newspaper, Dr Pereira, wants nothing to do with European politics. Something of a recluse, his closest confidante is a photograph of his late wife, and he is happy to immerse himself in stories from 19th-century French literature.

On a cold December evening, Mattie Banks packs a suitcase and leaves her family home. Sixteen years old and pregnant, she has already made the mistake that will ruin her life and disgrace her widowed mother. Boarding the 2857 bus, she sits with her case on her lap, hoping that the driver will take her away from disaster. Instead, Mattie witnesses an act of bravery by a woman named Rosa Parks that changes everything. But as Mattie strives to turn her life around, the dangers that first led her to run are never far away.

In the dying days of the Second World War, a group of Nazis frantically plot the next steps for their country. SS recruits gather east of Berlin to be trained for an audacious yet ill-fated mission to bring about a Fourth Reich. Three decades later, a young British diplomat in East Berlin is compromised after falling into a honey-trap. He contacts Major Edgar, a veteran British spymaster, now retired. Edgar is drawn into an unlikely alliance with an old adversary, Viktor, the veteran Russian spymaster.  

With a compassionate realism and narrative sweep that recall the work of Charles Dickens, this magnificent novel captures all the cruelty and corruption, dignity and heroism, of India. The time is 1975. The place is an unnamed city by the sea. The government has just declared a State of Emergency, in whose upheavals four strangers - a spirited widow, a young student uprooted from his idyllic hill station, and two tailors who have fled the caste violence of their native village - will be thrust together, forced to share one cramped apartment and an uncertain future. 

The epic of Thesus, the boy-king of Eleusis, ritually preordained to die after one year of marriage to the sacred queen but who defies God's decree and claims his inheritance - the throne of Athens. This re-creation of a Greek myth is written by the author of The Last of the Wine.

Autumn 1928. Three young women are on their way to India, each with a new life in mind. Rose, a beautiful but naive bride-to-be, is anxious about leaving her family and marrying a man she hardly knows. Victoria, her bridesmaid couldn't be happier to get away from her overbearing mother, and is determined to find herself a husband. And Viva, their inexperienced chaperone, is in search of the India of her childhood, ghosts from the past and freedom.

Roya loves nothing better than to while away the hours in the local stationery shop run by Mr. Fakhri. The store, stocked with fountain pens, shiny ink bottles and thick pads of writing paper, also carries translations of literature from all over the world. And when Mr. Fakhri introduces her to his other favorite customer - handsome Bahman, with his burning passion for justice and a shared love for Rumi's poetry - Roya loses her heart at once. But around them, life in Tehran is changing. On the eve of their marriage, Roya heads to the town square to meet with Bahman.

On the eve of an unusual voyage, a young woman reviews her life. Her story begins with a 'beautiful visit' to friends in the country which serves as an awakening experience. What follows is an account of her struggle to retain the mood of her visit.

Hetty Heinrich is a young girl growing up under Nazi rule. With an SS Officer father, a brother in the Luftwaffe and a member of the BDM, Hetty is the epitome of a perfect German child. But Walter changes everything. Blond-haired, blue-eyed, perfect-in-every-way Walter. The boy who saved her life. A Jew. As she falls more and more in love with a man who is against all she has been taught, Hetty begins to question everything. Will the steady march of dark forces destroy their world, or can love ultimately triumph?

Woodrow Wilson Nickel, age 105, feels his life ebbing away. But when he learns giraffes are going extinct, he finds himself recalling the unforgettable experience he cannot take to his grave. It’s 1938. The Great Depression lingers. Hitler is threatening Europe, and world-weary Americans long for wonder. They find it in two giraffes who miraculously survive a hurricane while crossing the Atlantic. What follows is a twelve-day road trip in a custom truck to become Southern California’s first giraffes. Behind the wheel is the young Dust Bowl rowdy Woodrow.

Eve and Liza, Mother and Daughter, live a quiet life in their remote home; a rustic gatehouse of a country mansion. At first glance their lives appear quite ordinary, except that Liza has almost no knowledge of the outside world, has never played with a child her own age and has witnessed her mother commit murder, on multiple occasions.

Jean Paget is just twenty years old and working in Malaya when the Japanese invasion begins. When she is captured she joins a group of other European women and children whom the Japanese force to march for miles through the jungle. While on the march, the group run into some Australian prisoners, one of whom, Joe Harman, helps them steal some food, and is horrifically punished by the Japanese as a result.

A band of savage 13-year-old boys reject the adult world as illusory, hypocritical, and sentimental, and train themselves in a brutal callousness they call 'objectivity'. When the mother of one of them begins an affair with a ship's officer, he and his friends idealise the man at first; but it is not long before they conclude that he is in fact soft and romantic. They regard this disallusionment as an act of betrayal on his part - and the retribution is deliberate and horrifying.