Rich and multilayered, with elements of both memoir and fiction, Dominique Eddé's Kite defies categorization. Beginning in the 1960s and ending in the late '80s, it is at once a narrative of a passionate, and ultimately tragic, relationship between Mali and Farid and the simultaneous decline of Egyptian-Lebanese society. Densely populated with myriad characters, Kite chronicles the casualties of social conventions, religious divisions and cultural clichés. The differences between East and West are central to the tension of Eddé's book and share the responsibility for an unavoidable impasse between the lovers. This fragmented narrative—written in several voices that reflect the fragmented lives of those caught up in the madness of war—calls into question an entire way of living and thinking.

In lyrical, elegant, original and often startling prose, Eddé weaves together multiple strands—meditating on the nature of language, investigating the concept of the novel, and powerfully depicting the experience of being blind. Deftly evoking the intellectual scene of Beirut in the '60s, Lebanon's mountainscapes and the urban settings of Cairo, Paris and London, Kite probes memory with a curious mix of irony and melancholy, ending up in a place beyond hope and despair.

Born in Lebanon, Dominique Eddé is the author of several novels including Pourquoi il fait si sombre? (Why is it so Dark?) as well as an essay on Jean Genet and a book of interviews with the psychoanalyst André Green. She lives in Turkey.

"On my cell-phone the time is 3.00 a.m. I am not holding a religion in my hand to check the hour, just a cell phone to orient me. This is a June morning and it is cold here. I turn in my bed and close my eyes. The map of Kenya appears first vaguely on my mind. It has no in-land features but this shape I see is definitely hers. Burning borders. Red inside. It is not the red of wine or even Christmas. We are not in celebration. Inside burning borders she is a deep reddish brown color; angry red. Coffee red."

Philo Ikonya is a Kenyan poet and novelist. She is known for speaking out against injustice and corruption. She has written extensively on governance, mass poverty and post-election violence in Kenya. She was arrested several times, and brutally in 2009, for speaking out. Teacher, lecturer and editor, she has been in exile in Norway since December 2009. She is the author of several books.

Nadine Gordimer is one of our most telling contemporary writers. With each new work, she attacks—with a clear-eyed fierceness, a lack of sentimentality, and a deep understanding of the darkest depths of the human soul—her eternal themes: the inextricable link between personal and communal history; the inescapable moral ambiguities of daily life; the political and racial tensions that persist in her homeland, South Africa. And in each new work is fresh evidence of her literary genius: in the sharpness of her psychological insights, the stark beauty of her language, the complexity of her characters, and the difficult choices with which they are faced.

In No Time Like the Present, Gordimer trains her keen eye on Steve and Jabulile, an interracial couple living in a newly, tentatively, free South Africa. They have a daughter, Sindiswa; they move to the suburbs; Steve becomes a lecturer at a university; Jabulile trains to become a lawyer; there is another child, a boy this time. There is nothing so extraordinary about their lives, and yet, in telling their story and the stories of their friends and families, Gordimer manages to capture the tortured, fragmented essence of a nation struggling to define itself post-apartheid.

The subject is contemporary, but Gordimer's treatment is, as ever, timeless. In No Time Like the Present, she shows herself once again a master novelist, at the height of her prodigious powers.

1880. South Africa. A country torn apart by greed. Frances Irvine, left destitute by her father's sudden death, is forced to travel from the security and familiarity of her privileged English life to marry Edwin Matthews, an ambitious but penniless young doctor in South Africa. They are posted to a smallpox station on the vast, inhospitable plains of the Karoo but she is so caught up in her own sense of entitlement and loss of status that she cannot recognise its hidden beauty nor the honour and integrity of the man she has married. All her hopes for happiness seem destroyed when her husband exposes the epidemic that is devastating the native community in the diamond-mining town of Kimberley. Here, the gleaming houses of the rich disguise the poverty of a labour force under coercion, and Frances is drawn into a ruthless world of wealth and opportunity, where influential men will go to any lengths to keep the mines in operation. Passionately caught up with the man her husband is fighting to bring down, she must make a fateful choice.

The Fever Tree is a powerful and moving novel set against the raw backdrop of nineteenth-century Colonial South Africa, its deprivation and beauty alive in equal measure. Above all it is an achingly poignant love story, saving the best and most profound moments of truth and redemption until the last pages.

The Spider King's Daughter is a modern-day Romeo and Juliet set against the backdrop of a changing Lagos, a city torn between tradition and modernity, corruption and truth, love and family loyalty. Seventeen-year-old Abike Johnson is the favourite child of her wealthy father. She lives in a sprawling mansion in Lagos, protected by armed guards and ferried everywhere in a huge black jeep. But being her father's favourite comes with uncomfortable duties, and she is often lonely behind the high walls of her house. A world away from Abike's mansion, in the city's slums, lives a seventeen-year-old hawker struggling to make sense of the world. His family lost everything after his father's death and now he runs after cars on the roadside selling ice cream to support his mother and sister. When Abike buys ice cream from the hawker one day, they strike up an unlikely and tentative romance, defying the prejudices of Nigerian society. But as they grow closer, revelations from the past threaten their relationship and both Abike and the hawker must decide where their loyalties lie.