After years of absence, American travel writer Max Gate returns to Bengal, to the beach home of his longtime friend, the businessman Byron Mallick. The occasion is a funeral: for Damini, fervent investigative journalist and founder of a women's shelter, with whom Max once collaborated, until ultimately she scorned the book he wrote on their work together. It is irrefutable that Byron Mallick donated not milk, but milk adulterated with chalk, to the women and children at Damini's shelter-but did he also, to save his reputation, have her killed? The weight of this question burdens each character in this intricate, superbly crafted novel-Max; his former brother-in-law Piers O'Reilly, convinced of Byron's guilt; and Damini's cousin and Byron's former ward Ela, whose affair with Max has haunted both their lives, ending his marriage and setting him unaccountably adrift. Sunetra Gupta's consummate prose recreates the ache and complication of memory, as Max considers the tantalizing ambiguities of each of their pasts, the exquisite layers of emotion and action out of which, perhaps, the truth about Byron may be revealed.

Sunetra Gupta's previous four novels have been awarded the Sahitya Akademi Award, the Southern Arts Literature Prize, shortlisted for the Crossword Award, and long listed for the Orange Prize. She was born in Calcutta and now lives in Oxford, where she is a professor of theoretical epidemiology at Oxford University.

Kamin Mohammadi was nine years old when her family fled Iran during the 1979 Revolution. Bewildered by the seismic changes in her homeland, she turned her back on the past and spent her teenage years trying to fit in with British attitudes to family, food and freedom. She was twenty-seven before she returned to Iran, drawn inexorably back by memories of her grandmother's house in Abadan, with its traditional inner courtyard, its noisy gatherings and its very walls steeped in history.

The Cypress Tree is Kamin's account of her journey home, to rediscover her Iranian self and to discover for the first time the story of her family: a sprawling clan that sprang from humble roots to bloom during the affluent, Biba-clad 1960s, only to be shaken by the horrors of the Iran-Iraq War and the heartbreak of exile, and toughened by the struggle for democracy that continues today.

Kamin Mohammadi was born in Iran in 1969 and exiled to the UK in 1979. She is an experienced journalist, travel writer and broadcaster who has written for the British and international press including The Times, The Financial Times, Harpers Bazaar, Marie Claire and the Guardian as well as co-authoring The Lonely Planet Guide to Iran. She is currently living in Italy.

Award-winning, internationally acclaimed author Anita Desai ruminates on art and memory, illusion and disillusion, and the sharp divide between life's expectations and its realities in three perfectly etched novellas. Set in India in the not-too-distant past, the stories' dramas illuminate the ways in which Indian culture can nourish or suffocate. All are served up with Desai's characteristic perspicuity, subtle humor, and sensitive writing.

Overwhelmed by their own lack of purpose, the men and women who populate these tales set out on unexpected journeys that present them with a fresh sense of hope and opportunity. Like so many flies in a spider’s web, however, they cannot escape their surroundings—as none of us can. An impeccable craftsman, Desai elegantly reveals our human frailties and the power of place.

Returning home from work, Rinko is shocked to find that her flat is totally empty. Gone are her TV set, fridge and furniture, gone are all her kitchen tools, including the old Meiji mortar she has inherited from her grandmother and the Le Creuset casserole she has bought with her first salary. Gone, above all, is her Indian boyfriend, the maître d' of the restaurant next door to the one she works in. She has no choice but to go back to her native village and her mother, on which she turned her back ten years ago as a fifteen-year-old girl.

There she decides to open a very special restaurant, one that serves food for only one couple every day, according to their personal tastes and wishes. A concubine rediscovers her love for life, a girl is able to conquer the heart of her lover, a surly man is transformed into a lovable gentleman – all this happens at the The Snail, the magic restaurant whose delicate food can heal any heartache and help its customers find love again.

Born in 1973, Ito Ogawa is a Japanese singer and the author of several children's books. The Restaurant of Love Regained, her first novel, is a bestseller in Japan and has been adapted into a successful movie. Ito runs a hugely popular website where she offers daily recipes of Japanese cuisine.