The Summer of the Dancing Bear is Bianca Lakoseljac's first novel. Set in the former Yugoslavia, it is the story of the "rite of passage" of a fourteen-year-old girl befriended by a Gypsy clan. The novel explores Kata's search for a viable identity, acceptance of death, and understanding of love, through the journey of solving the mystery of a missing two-year-old girl that occurred when Kata was eight. The story is set in a village community polarized by racial intolerance between the villagers and the Gypsies, where she grows up under the tutelage of her grandmother.

Paris, 1975. Sifting through the letters of condolence after her mother's death, Camille discovers a strange missive sent by someone she does not know. She thinks it is probably an error. But then, every Tuesday, a new letter arrives, recounting a tale of two impossible loves, four broken destinies, until the final dénouement destroys everything in its inevitable path. Little by little, Camille begins to piece together the puzzle and is shocked to realise that this story has a direct bearing upon her own life.

Alternating Camille's story and the mysterious letters from the unknown correspondent, Grémillon transports us to the years between 1939 and 1943 to tell a powerful story of friendship and secrets between women, and of surrogacy, passionate love, jealousy, revenge and reconciliation.

The Confidant is a thrilling debut novel that blends a historical setting and page-turning psychological suspense with a virtuoso literary style. Together with its success in France, translation rights have been sold in 18 territories.

At Dreams & Desires, 50-year-old Emma's quaint bookshop in Milan dedicated to romantic fiction, the passionate bookseller serves coffee and tea to her customers and completes order slips in pen rather than using a computer. One day, she finds a mysterious handwritten note stuck between the pages of a novel. The message is from her high school sweetheart Frederico, who is now a successful architect in New York and whom she hasn't seen in thirty years. When she finally meets Frederico again, Emma is convinced that her life is about to turn into a romance novel—an intercontinental fairy tale between Milan and New York, between two post office boxes and two lovers who are separated by the Atlantic Ocean and half a life. But Frederico is married, and their epistolary romance, punctuated by once-a-year sojourns on the island of Belle Ile, seems to have no future.

Paola Calvetti's PO Box Love is an ode to old-fashioned relationships (the ones that last a lifetime), old-fashioned habits (such as writing letters by hand in fountain pen) and old-fashioned notions (such as politeness, and the great lost art of conversation), and will enchant readers of such perennial favorites as 84 Charing Cross Road by Helene Hanff and Same Time Next Year by Bernard Slade.

Everything eventually reaches its appointed place in time and space. Maria Matios's dramatic family saga, Hardly Ever Otherwise, narrates the story of several western Ukrainian families during the last decades of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and expands upon the idea that "it isn't time that is important, but the human condition in time."

In Matios's multi-tiered plot, the grand passions of ordinary people are illuminated under the caliginous light of an ethereal mysticism, and digressions on love, envy, transgression, and atonement are woven into the story. The reader is submerged into a rich world populated by a grand cast of characters and ideas, which Matios animates with her prolific imagination and subtle wisdom.

Each character in this outstanding drama has an irrefutable alibi, a unique truth, and a private conflict with honor and duty. Her characters do not always act in accordance with logic and written-law, as the laws of honor clash with the laws of the heart. And this is why it is hardly ever otherwise.

Award-winning author Maria Matios was born in 1959, in the Ukraine. She is the author of seven books of poetry and five books of prose. In 2007, the novel Hardly Ever Otherwise earned Matios the Grand Prix at the Coronation of Words Competition. The title was also named book of the year. Her highly influential novel, Sweet Darusia, was named the best Ukrainian novel written in the fifteen year span after Ukrainian Independence in 1991, and earned Matios the Shevchenko National Prize in 2005.

In The Tenants of the Hotel Biron, Laura Marello takes the historical facts of a string of famous artists living in the Hotel Biron in Paris at the turn of the twentieth century and creates a fictional universe, framed by the aftermath of the torrid love affair between Auguste Rodin and his mistress, Camille Claudel.

Written as a series of manuscripts by the tenants, this novel vividly recreates a world where the ferment of creativity bubbled to the surface and caused an artistic and social revolution.

Manfred, a surly mountaineer recently abandoned by his wife, rents the upstairs apartment in his home in the Dolomites to Marina, a woman from the city, and her difficult young son. Deeply suspicious by nature, especially of women, Manfred spies obsessively on Marina, in whose shortcomings as a mother he finds resonances of his own mother's desertion of him in childhood. When Marina's frustration over her son's refusal to eat or sleep leads her to harm the child, Manfred steps in, and the silent power struggle between them escalates. Yet Manfred's attraction to Marina is as powerful as his distrust. In this alternately shocking and moving novel, Cristina Comencini has created a complex, psychologically profound portrait of two damaged, vulnerable people and the painful bond that develops between them as they are drawn into each other's worlds.

In Lagos, operatives of the Norwegian secret service extract Nwankwo, head of financial investigations for the Nigerian government, and deliver him to London. Felix, a junior prosecutor in Nice, is called to investigate the violent death of the wife of a powerful banker based in the Faroe Islands; his investigation takes him to London. In St. Petersburg, Lira Kazan, a journalist famed for her anti-corruption investigative work, decides to go to London to report on an oligarch involved in arms deals. Lira, Felix and Nwankwo become allies and witness a series of killings, obviously linked by financial and political interests. Isolated and terrified, the three are pursued by the oligarch's men, the Western secret services and goons sent by Nigerian oil magnates. At a dinner at Versailles to honor the oligarch, attended by the British Prime Minister and the French President, chaos is triggered by a series of tweets that disclose the foul play all have entered into.

Eva Joly was a prosecuting judge in France famous for her anti-corruption cases, including that against Elf-Aquitaine. She is now running in the French presidential elections. This is her first novel. It is co-authored by the French thriller author Judith Perrignon.

In love for the first time, Sira Quiroga leaves Madrid, along with everything she knows and cares about, to run away to Tangiers, Morocco with her lover Ramiro. She entrusts him with all her inheritance only to be left by him—pregnant, penniless and in trouble with the authorities. At her lowest ebb Sira falls back on the one skill she possesses: sewing. Moving to Tetouan, Sira survives by sewing beautiful clothes for the English mistress of one of the most powerful men in Morocco and for her German friends. As the women unguardedly gossip about their husbands and lovers, Sira is placed in a position very valuable to the British secret service, and she is soon forced to move to Madrid where great danger lies. The Seamstress is a grand and epic story that tells the story of Spain's civil war and Madrid in the Second World War, and reveals a world of wartime, glamour, espionage and passion.

Maria Dueñas is currently a professor at the University of Murcia. She has also taught at American universities and is currently writing her second novel.

Jerome is a calm man—at least, that's what he'd always believed. But when his daughter's boyfriend dies in an accident, he is overwhelmed by unexpected grief. As he struggles to make sense of the loss and his own reaction to it, he finds himself assailed by emotions and memories he has allowed to lie dormant: residual feelings for his ex-wife; a baffling new attraction to a stranger; a precarious friendship with a retired policeman; and, above all, unsettling questions about his own past and the family he never knew. In returning to the forests of his childhood and the darkest nights of the Second World War, Jerome gradually and painfully begins to piece together the truth of his own origins and the tragedy that his adoptive parents tried to bury.

Agnés Desarthe was born in Paris in 1966 and has written many books for children and teenagers, as well as adult fiction. She won the Prix du Livre Inter in 1996 for Un Secret sans importance and has had two previous novels translated into English: Five Photos of My Wife , which was short-listed for the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize, and Good Intentions.