Meet Keiko. Keiko is 36 years old. She's never had a boyfriend, and she's been working in the same supermarket for eighteen years. Keiko's family wishes she'd get a proper job. Her friends wonder why she won't get married. But Keiko knows what makes her happy, and she's not going to let anyone come between her and her convenience store.

On a hot summer’s day in a poor suburb of Tokyo we meet three women: 30-year-old Natsu, her older sister, Makiko, and Makiko’s teenage daughter, Midoriko. Makiko, an ageing hostess despairing the loss of her looks, has travelled to Tokyo in search of breast-enhancement surgery. She's accompanied by Midoriko, who has recently stopped speaking, finding herself unable to deal with her own changing body and her mother’s self-obsession. Her silence dominates Natsu’s rundown apartment, providing a catalyst for each woman to grapple with their own anxieties. 

A young woman walks into an employment agency and requests a job that has the following traits: It’s close to her home, and it requires no reading, no writing, and, ideally, very little thinking. Her first gig - watching the hidden-camera feed of an author suspected of storing contraband goods - turns out to be inconvenient. Her next gives way to the supernatural: announcing advertisements for shops that mysteriously disappear. As she moves from job to job, it becomes increasingly apparent that she's not searching for the easiest job at all but something altogether more meaningful.

How does the world see you? Nine characters illuminate an unknowable woman. From the school art teacher who sees a spark of talent in her, to the man whose fleeting passion with her could change his life, to the female student whose friendship turns into love. Deeply affecting and luminous, this kaleidoscopic novella explores the nature of intimacy and how each connection you make forms who you are. 

Antonia is ready for her life to start. A young woman from a small town in southern Italy, she wants to pursue her long-held dream of writing a novel. But when she moves to Milan and meets the alluring and charismatic Vittorio, he upends her world and changes her priorities. Their whirlwind relationship is as thrilling as it is painful: he doesn't share Antonia's faith in love and can't reciprocate her feelings.

Ms Kim Jiyoung has started acting strangely. Ms Kim Jiyoung is depressed. Ms Kim Jiyoung is mad. Ms Kim Jiyoung is her own woman. Ms Kim Jiyoung is every woman. Ms Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982 is the South Korean sensation which has got the whole world talking. The life story of one young woman born halfway across the globe at the end of the 20th century raises questions about endemic misogyny and institutional oppression which are relevant to us all.

The woman in the purple skirt seems to live in a world of her own. She appears to glide through crowded streets without acknowledging any reaction her presence elicits. Each afternoon, she sits on the same park bench, eating a pastry and ignoring the local children who make a game of trying to get her attention. She may not know it, but the woman in the purple skirt being watched. Someone is following her, always perched just out of sight, monitoring which buses she takes, what she eats, whom she speaks to.

In Heaven, a 14-year-old boy is tormented for having a lazy eye. Instead of resisting, he chooses to suffer in silence. The only person who understands what he is going through is a female classmate, Kojima, who experiences similar treatment at the hands of her bullies. Providing each other with immeasurable consolation at a time in their lives when they need it most, the two young friends grow closer than ever. But what, ultimately, is the nature of a friendship when your shared bond is terror?

When the engaging Tom Grainger moves into each of three women's lives, things start to change. The women, whose paths have already crossed, find their fates are about to collide.

Yeongdo, Korea - 1911. In a small fishing village on the banks of the East Sea, a club-footed, cleft-lipped man marries a 15-year-old girl. The couple have one child: their beloved daughter, Sunja. When Sunja falls pregnant by a married yakuza, the family face ruin. But then, Isak, a Christian minister, offers her a chance of salvation: a new life in Japan as his wife. Following a man she barely knows to a hostile country in which she has no friends and no home, and whose language she cannot speak, Sunja's salvation is just the beginning of her story.

Early this morning, several hours before my arrest, I was woken by an earth tremor. I mention the incident not to suggest that there was a connection - that somehow the fault lines in my life came crashing together in a form of a couple of policemen - for in Tokyo we have a quake like this every month. I am simply relating the sequence of events as it happened. It has been an unusual day, and I would hate to forget anything....

From her place in the store, Klara, an Artificial Friend with outstanding observational qualities, watches carefully the behaviour of those who come in to browse and of those who pass in the street outside. She remains hopeful a customer will soon choose her, but when the possibility emerges that her circumstances may change for ever, Klara is warned not to invest too much in the promises of humans.

In this exquisite story of family, food, grief and endurance, Michelle Zauner proves herself far more than a dazzling singer, songwriter and guitarist. With humour and heart, she tells of growing up the only Asian American kid at her school in Eugene, Oregon; of struggling with her mother's particular high expectations of her; of a painful adolescence; of treasured months spent in her grandmother's tiny apartment in Seoul, where she and her mother would bond, late at night, over heaping plates of food.

Soseki Natsume's comic masterpiece, I Am a Cat, satirizes the foolishness of upper-middle class Japanese society during the Meiji era. With acerbic wit and sardonic perspective, it follows the whimsical adventures of a world-weary stray kitten who comments on the follies and foibles of the people around him. A classic of Japanese literature, I Am a Cat is one of Soseki's best-known novels. Considered by many as the greatest writer in modern Japanese history, Soseki's I Am a Cat is a classic novel sure to be enjoyed for years to come.

An interpreter has come to The Hague to escape New York and work at the International Court. A woman of many languages and identities, she is looking for a place to finally call home. She's drawn into simmering personal dramas: her lover, Adriaan, is separated from his wife but still entangled in his marriage. Her friend Jana witnesses a seemingly random act of violence, a crime the interpreter becomes increasingly obsessed with as she befriends the victim's sister.