In this groundbreaking novel, Fumiko Hayashi tells the powerful story of tormented love and one woman's struggle to navigate the cruel realities of postwar Japan. The novel's characters, particularly its resilient heroine Koda Yukiko, find themselves trapped in their own drifting, unable to break out of the morass of indecisiveness. Set in the years during and after World War II, their lives and damaged psyches reflect the confusion of the times in which they live.

Floating Clouds follows Yukiko as she moves from the physically lush and beautiful surroundings of Japanese-occupied French Indochina to the desolation and chaos of postwar Japan. Hayashi's spare, affecting novel presents a rare portrait of Japanese colonialism and the harshness of Japan's postwar experience from the perspective of a woman. Its rich cast of characters, drawn from the back alleys of urban Japan and the low rungs of society, offers an unforgettable portrait of Japanese society after the war.

First published in 1951, Floating Clouds is a classic of modern Japanese literature and was later made into a film by legendary Japanese director Mikio Naruse.

Ray, a British-Asian woman in her mid-thirties arrives in the afternoon heat of a small village in India. She has come to live there for several months to make a documentary about the place. For this is no ordinary Indian village—the women collecting water at the well, the men chopping wood in the early morning light have all been found guilty of murder. The village is, in fact, an open prison.Set in a village modelled on a real-life open prison in India, The Village is a story about violence and the true meaning of justice, about trying to marry moral ideals with reality. Nikita Lalwani has written a dazzling, heartfelt and original novel.

Nikita Lalwani was born in Rajasthan and raised in Cardiff. Her first novel Gifted was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize and shortlisted for the Costa First Novel Award and won the Desmond Elliott Prize. She lives in London.

Thirst is about many forms of desire—and most particularly, at its heart, about love unexpectedly found and lost during a difficult time (WWII) and in an unlikely spot: within a hastily arranged union between two young people who begin their marriage as complete strangers. The lovers are Vasanti, an intelligent woman who has nonetheless grown up naive and protected; and Baba, the scion of a prominent Brahmin family who longs to study in London, thus escaping the family compound in Bombay. The novel moves between the lushness of India and the sombre grayness of London during the Blitz, even as Ghatage brilliantly unwinds the story of two conflicted people who, slowly but surely, learn to tolerate, then like, then passionately love each other just as their worlds fall apart.

Shree Ghatage is the author of the short story collection Awake When All the World is Asleep, which won the Thomas H. Raddall Atlantic Fiction Award and was shortlisted for several other awards, and the novel Brahma's Dream, a Kiriyama Notable Book. Ghatage and her family moved to Canada in the early 1980s, spent several years in the Maritime provinces, and now live in Calgary, Alberta, Canada.

Sita, Detective Lalli's niece—and occasional Watson—runs into former classmate Anais at Mumbai airport. Even as the friends catch up, Anais hands over a cardboard box she is carrying to a waiting woman, nonchalantly informing the traumatized lady that the box contains her son's ashes. Some days later, Anais herself turns up dead in the slimy Mithi River, a pink nylon rope wrapped ritually around her neck.What does the cardboard box with human remains have to do with Anais's murder? And what significance do the peculiar knots round her neck have? Lalli must find answers, fast, if she is to prevent more deaths. "Every great city deserves at least one paperback detective. London has Adam Dalgliesh … Shanghai has earnest Inspector Chen… and Mumbai has razor-sharp, retired policewoman Lalli LR… Last Resort for tricky cases." —Times of India