In a Balkan country mending from years of conflict, Natalia, a young doctor, arrives on a mission of mercy at an orphanage by the sea. By the time she and her lifelong friend Zóra begin to inoculate the children there, she feels age-old superstitions and secrets gathering everywhere around her. Secrets her outwardly cheerful hosts have chosen not to tell her. Secrets involving the strange family digging for something in the surrounding vineyards. Secrets hidden in the landscape itself.

But Natalia is also confronting a private, hurtful mystery of her own: the inexplicable circumstances surrounding her beloved grandfather's recent death. After telling her grandmother that he was on his way to meet Natalia, he instead set off for a ramshackle settlement none of their family had ever heard of and died there alone. A famed physician, her grandfather must have known that he was too ill to travel. Why he left home becomes a riddle Natalia is compelled to unravel.

Grief struck and searching for clues to her grandfather's final state of mind, she turns to the stories he told her when she was a child. But his most extraordinary story of all is the one her grandfather never told her, the one Natalia must discover for herself. "These stories," Natalia comes to understand, "run like secret rivers through all the other stories" of her grandfather's life. And it is ultimately within these rich, luminous narratives that she will find the answer she is looking for.

Téa Obreht was born in Belgrade in the former Yugoslavia in 1985 and has lived in the United States since the age of twelve. Her writing has been published in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Harper's, and The Guardian. She has been named by The New Yorker as one of the twenty best American fiction writers under forty and included in the National Book Foundation's list of 5 Under 35. Téa Obreht lives in New York.

Kati Hirschel is the proud owner of Istanbul's only crime bookshop. When the German director of a film starring an old school friend is found murdered in his hotel room, Kati cannot resist the temptation to start her own maverick investigation. After all, her friend is the police's principal suspect and reading all those detective novels must have taught Kati something! A crime story as well as a wonderful book about Istanbul and Turkish society, Hotel Bosphorus is told with humour, social insight and sincerity.

In this autobiographical story, Wiazemsky's writes about her mother Claire as a young woman. At twenty-seven, Claire is still under the sway of a domineering father, the acclaimed author François Mauriac. With the Second World War raging, her desire for freedom prompts her to join the Red Cross in southern France, where she faces the horrors of war with a youthful naïveté and audacity. When, having survived the months of bombing and bloodied patients, Claire realizes that rather than quelling her spirit her experiences have left her thirsting for more, she sets out for the heart of the fallen enemy: war-torn Berlin.

Claire pities the German citizens in their desperation and is moved by the desolation of the once thriving metropolis. Yet, despite the devastation of war, there is life and love to be found there, as the ruined city becomes a magical and emotionally charged backdrop for a passionate romance.

Anne Wiazemsky is an acclaimed French actress, author and filmmaker born in West Berlin . She has written several award winning novels: Filles bien élevées (La Société des Gens de Lettres Grand Prix for the Novel, 1988), Canines (Goncourt Prize, 1993), Hymnes á l'amour (1996, prix RTL-Lire), and Une poignée de gens (The French Academy's Grand Prix, 1998). Wiazemsky was married to the director Jean-Luc Godard and appeared in his films La Chinoise and Weekend. She lives in France.

In the Contentin peninsula on the northern coast of Brittany, lies a village that to all intents and purposes might just be at the end of the world. Amid this desolation, a stranger appears in the cafe and begins stirring up suspicion about the village's lighthouse keeper, now retired. An old grandmother wanders the beaches, looking for a child named Michel. Meanwhile, a woman arrives from the south. The man of her life has just died and she throws herself into her work, cataloguing her surroundings in obsessive detail. The villagers seem to be guarding old secrets about events in their past. But what actually happened? Who were the victims? Who is seeking answers—and why? This mystery has the force of a Greek tragedy unravelled, as secrets and answers slowly come to light. Set in a vast, empty landscape where the sea endlessly breaks on the rugged shore, The Breakers is as fascinating about the seascape and the birdlife as it is about the inhabitants of the village and the events that unfolded so long ago.