By Juan Gabriel Vásquez - No sooner does he get to know Ricardo Laverde in a seedy billiard hall in Bogotá than Antonio Yammara realises that the ex-pilot has a secret. Antonio's fascination with his new friend's life grows until the day Ricardo receives a mysterious, unmarked cassette. Shortly afterwards, he is shot dead on a street corner. Yammara's investigation into what happened leads back to the early 1960s, marijuana smuggling and a time before the cocaine trade trapped Colombia in a living nightmare.

By Janna Eliot - Spokes is made up of stories from across the Traveller world, featuring British Gypsies, settled and still travelling; Irish Travellers, East European Roma; and people whose Romani background has remained under wraps in the face of a hostile world. There's an old violinist, a middle-aged mechanic, a young radio presenter, a schoolboy, a retired banker, a tealady and a teacher. Sometimes humorous, sometimes tragic; every story is based on real incidents.

By Zahra Hankir - Nineteen Arab women journalists speak out about what it’s like to report on their changing homelands in this first-of-its-kind essay collection, with a foreword by CNN chief international anchor Christiane Amanpour. 304pp

By Toni Morrison - Spanning the birth of the Civil Rights movement, Vietnam, the counter-culture and politics of the late 1970s, deftly manipulating past, present and future, this novel reveals the interior lives of the citizens of the town with astonishing clarity. Starkly evoking the clashes that have bedevilled the American century: between race and racelessness; religion and magic; promiscuity and fidelity; individuality and belonging. pp336

By César Aira - In the town square of Coronel Pringles stands a lime tree from which the author’s father used to brew a sedative tea. This Proustian infusion evokes dark memories of the 1955 anti-Perónist revolution, which dashed the family’s middle-class dreams. The Lime Tree is a portrait of the artist as a child and a lucid analysis of a family's social trajectory. 256pp

Two venturesome women on a journey through the land of their fathers and mothers. A wrong turn. A bad decision. They had no idea, when they arrived in Morocco, that their usual freedoms as young European women would not be available. So, when the spry Saleh presents himself as their guide and saviour, they embrace his offer.

Ah Hock is an ordinary, uneducated man born in a Malaysian fishing village and now trying to make his way in a country that promises riches and security to everyone, but delivers them only to a chosen few. With Asian society changing around him, like many he remains trapped in a world of poorly paid jobs that just about allow him to keep his head above water but ultimately lead him to murder a migrant worker from Bangladesh. This is a portrait of an outsider like no other, an anti-nostalgic view of human life and the ravages of hope.

In the terrifying atmosphere of late 1970s Buenos Aires, a young militant couple engaged in the resistance against the military regime adopt a child. Matters had reached a nadir; people were informing on friends and family members, who were then captured by the regime and subjected to horrific torture. Amid this ever-growing oppression, the couple and their baby flee to Brazil, believing it to be a more tranquil country in which to raise a family and pursue their lives.

Set in the village of al-Awafi in Oman, we encounter three sisters: Mayya, who marries Abdallah after a heartbreak; Asma, who marries from a sense of duty; and Khawla, who rejects all offers while waiting for her beloved, who has emigrated to Canada. These three women and their families witness Oman evolve from a traditional, slave-owning society slowly redefining itself after the colonial era, to the crossroads of its complex present. Elegantly structured and taut, Celestial Bodies is a coiled spring of a novel, telling of Oman's coming-of-age through the prism of one family's losses and loves.

Alone in his room in a London madrasah, Musah tries on an abaya, a hijab and a shawl: he has crossed over - to outsiders he has become a Muslim woman. In a Pakistani haveli, his cousin, the nubile Iram, waits to fulfil the will of Dadaji, their grandfather. She and Musa must marry. When Musa's siblings and friends step in to help him fight tradition and achieve what he wants - a love match - their efforts lead to outrage, hilarity and, ultimately, tragedy.

By Negar Djavadi (tr by Tina Kover) – Iran/France
Kimiâ Sadr fled Iran at the age of ten in the company of her mother and sisters to join her father in France. Now twenty-five and facing the future she has built for herself as well as the prospect of a new generation, Kimiâ is inundated by her own memories and the stories of her ancestors, which come to her in unstoppable, uncontainable waves. In the waiting room of a Parisian fertility clinic, generations of flamboyant Sadrs return to her, including her formidable great-grandfather Montazemolmolk, with his harem of fifty-two wives, and her parents, Darius and Sara, stalwart opponents of each regime that befalls them.
In this high-spirited, kaleidoscopic story, key moments of Iranian history, politics, and culture punctuate stories of family drama and triumph. Yet it is Kimiâ herself––punk-rock aficionado, storyteller extraordinaire, a Scheherazade of our time, and above all a modern woman divided between family traditions and her own “disorientalization”––who forms the heart of this bestselling and beloved novel. 320pp

By Akwaeke Emezi – Nigeria (hardback £10)
Ada is the second child of Saul, a Nigerian doctor, and his Malaysian wife Saachi, a nurse. When Ada is still a child, Saachi leaves to work abroad, first in Saudi Arabia and then in the UK. Although she visits her family in Nigeria once or twice each year, she will never again live in the home she once made with her proud and impatient husband. At 16, Ada also leaves Nigeria, for the United States, where she spends her turbulent college years in Virginia. All the while, there is a claim on her head , “for being born incorrectly, for not returning, for crossing the ocean sifted with death”. While the effects of this claim might read like a curse, they are really a manifestation of a demand that she follow a predestined path. Ada is an ogbanje, a spirit child who is born repeatedly to the same parents, taunting and torturing them with many reincarnations. While most ogbanjes die as children, Ada survives into adulthood, constantly struggling against a pull towards self-annihilation.
When Ada finds a measure of peace, it is not a consequence of eliminating any of her selves: instead, it emanates from accepting that she is “a village full of faces and a compound full of bones, translucent thousands”. When we return to Nigeria, the narrator is Ada: not the tortured Ada who made her way tentatively into earlier chapters in the form of poems and diary entries, but a voice infused with We’s poetic cadence and Asughara’s blistering yet intimate tone. It is a fitting culmination for the extraordinary journeyFreshwater charts, a manifestation of Ada’s realisation that she is irrevocably an amalgamation of all her varied and even divergent selves. 240pp

by Khaled Khalifa (tr by Leri Price) – Syria
Khalifa portrays his native city under the grip of the Assad regimes though the lives of one family over three generations. In the once beautiful city of Aleppo, the family descends into tragedy and ruin. Irrepressible Sawsan flirts with militias, the ruling party, and finally religion, seeking but never finding salvation. She and her siblings and mother are slowly choked in violence and decay, as their lives are plundered by a brutal regime. Set between the 1960s and 2000s, the novel unravels the systems of fear and control under Assad. With eloquence and startling honesty, it speaks of the persecution of a whole society. The story shifts in time and between characters, but Aleppo as a character is a constant, its culture and cuisine, a city with a vibrant life. Khalifa, in lush and sensual prose, chronicles the collapse of the city: “Cities die, just like people.” 256pp

By Min Jin Lee – Korea/Japan
Yeongdo, Korea 1911. In a small fishing village on the banks of the East Sea, a club-footed, cleft-lipped man marries a fifteen-year-old girl. The couple have one child, their beloved daughter Sunja. When Sunja falls pregnant by a married yakuza, the family face ruin. But then Isak, a Christian minister, offers her a chance of salvation: a new life in Japan as his wife.
Following a man she barely knows to a hostile country in which she has no friends, no home, and whose language she cannot speak, Sunja's salvation is just the beginning of her story. Through eight decades and four generations, Pachinko is an epic tale of family, identity, love, death and survival. 560pp

By Sulaiman Addonia – Eritrea/Sudan
Saba arrives in an East African refugee camp as a young girl, devastated to have had to abandon her books as her family fled. In this crowded and often hostile place, she must carve out her new existence, always protecting her mute brother Hagos.
A moving portrait of a woman of courage and intelligence, an insider’s view of the textures of life in a refugee camp, and a compelling story of exile, survival and love, Silence is My Mother Tongue bears vivid testimony to the power of imagination and illusion and the infinite reach of human minds to reinvent themselves. This subversive and sensual novel dissects society’s ability to wage war on its own women and explores the stories we must tell to survive in a broken, inhospitable environment. 308pp

By Joanne Hillhouse – Antigua/Barbados. Zahara is a loner. She's brilliant on the guitar but in everyday life she doesn't really fit in. Then she meets Shaka, himself a musical genius and the first boy who really gets her. They discover that they share a special bond, their passion for music, and Zahara finds herself a part, not just of Shaka's life, but also that of his boys, the Lion Crew. When they all get roles in a summer musical, Zahara, Shaka, and the rest of the Lion Crew use the opportunity to work on a secret project. But the Crew gets much more than they bargained for when they uncover a dark secret linking Shaka and Zahara's families and they're forced to confront some uncomfortable truths about class, colour, and relationships on the Caribbean island of Antigua. 280pp

By Kamal Abdullayev - Azerbaijan. Translated from Azerbaijani by Anne Thompson, this is a novel narrating the imaginary life of medieval icons. When a young researcher accidentally comes across a manuscript in the Manuscripts Institute, he discovers the unexpected but well-known epic Kitabi Dada Korkud, combined with the history of Azerbaijani shah and poet Shah Ismail's life set in an entirely new interpretation. 210pp

By Ayesha Haruna Attah – Ghana. Aminah lives an idyllic life until she is brutally separated from her home and forced on a journey that turns her from a daydreamer into a resilient woman. Wurche, the willful daughter of a chief, is desperate to play an important role in her father's court. These two women's lives converge as infighting among Wurche's people threatens the region, during the height of the slave trade at the end of the 19th century. Set in pre-colonial Ghana, The Hundred Wells of Salaga is a story of courage, forgiveness, love and freedom. Through the experiences of Aminah and Wurche, it offers a remarkable view of slavery and how the scramble for Africa affected the lives of everyday people. 234pp

By Orhan Pamuk - Turkey. The Museum of Innocence - set in Istanbul between 1975 and today - tells the story of Kemal, the son of one of Istanbul's richest families, and of his obsessive love for a poor and distant relation, the beautiful Fusun, who is a shop-girl in a small boutique. In his romantic pursuit of Füsun over the next eight years, Kemal compulsively amasses a collection of objects that chronicles his lovelorn progress-a museum that is both a map of a society and of his heart. The novel depicts a panoramic view of life in Istanbul as it chronicles this long, obsessive love affair; and Pamuk beautifully captures the identity crisis experienced by Istanbul's upper classes that find themselves caught between traditional and westernised ways of being. 752pp

By Reni Eddo-Lodge – UK
Writing on black life in Britain has long been the poor relation of its African American equivalent, not least because, in the hierarchy of suffering, the daily slights endured by black Britons do not bear comparison to the existential threat to African American lives. She’s strong on the pervasive racial marginalisation of black people, for example in the depiction of the working class that still so often comes with the prefix “white”. It’s striking that the discourse on race today is stronger in tone than in the 70s suburban world in which I grew up, where British people were (usually) polite to the point of rudeness; the stakes are higher now. 288pp

By Olga Tokarczuk – Poland
Flights interweaves travel narratives and reflections on travel with an in-depth exploration of the human body, broaching life, death, motion, and migration. From the seventeenth century, we have the story of the Dutch anatomist Philip Verheyen, who dissected and drew pictures of his own amputated leg. From the eighteenth century, we have the story of a North African-born slave turned Austrian courtier stuffed and put on display after his death. In the nineteenth century, we follow Chopin's heart as it makes the covert journey from Paris to Warsaw. In the present we have the trials of a wife accompanying her much older husband as he teaches a course on a cruise ship in the Greek islands, and the harrowing story of a young husband whose wife and child mysteriously vanish on a holiday on a Croatian island.  432pp

By Ahlam Bsharat (tr Nancy Roberts) – Palestine
A young adult book. With irony and poignant teenage idealism, Butterfly draws us into her world of adult hypocrisy, sibling rivalries, girlfriends' power plays, unrequited love...not to mention the political tension of life under occupation. As she observes her fragile environment with all its conflicts, Butterfly is compelled to question everything around her. Is her father a collaborator for the occupiers? Will Nizar ever give her the sign she's waiting for? How will her friendship with the activist Mays and the airhead Haya survive the unpredictable storms ahead? And why is 'honour' such a dangerous word, anyway?

By Arundhati Roy – India
In a graveyard outside the walls of Old Delhi, a resident unrolls a threadbare Persian carpet. On a concrete sidewalk, a baby suddenly appears, just after midnight. In a snowy valley, a bereaved father writes a letter to his five-year-old daughter about the people who came to her funeral. In a second-floor apartment, a lone woman chain-smokes as she reads through her old notebooks. At the Jannat Guest House, two people who have known each other all their lives sleep with their arms wrapped around each other, as though they have just met. A braided narrative of astonishing force and originality, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness is at once a love story and a provocation-a novel as inventive as it is emotionally engaging. It is told with a whisper, in a shout, through joyous tears and sometimes with a bitter laugh. Its heroes, both present and departed, have been broken by the world we live in-and then mended by love. For this reason, they will never surrender.

By Margarita Khemlin (tr Melanie Moore) - Ukraine
Set in the Ukrainian SSR, The Investigator is rooted in a specific time and place. Lilia Vorobeichik’s death is given as 18 May 1952, barely 10 months before the death of Stalin, whose rule brought untold suffering to the region. The forced collectivization of the late 1920s and ensuing Holodomor, a man-made famine that claimed the lives of up to seven million Ukrainians, was swiftly followed by the brutal Nazi occupation. One of The Investigator’s most arresting features is the powerful vignettes Khemlin weaves out of the community’s recent past, often dropped almost casually into conversation. One woman witnessed the Nazis burning children alive; another remembers that during the famine people were “raking the last seeds of grain from under little children’s pillows on an order from above.” Still another speaks scornfully about the upsurge in weddings that followed the famine: people were “drinking too much out of sheer joy at being alive.

Note: Melanie Moore is a ‘distance member’ of our group. We’ve been waiting for this for ages

By Juan Tomas Avila Laurel - Melilla
On Mount Gurugu, overlooking the Spanish enclave of Melilla on the North African coast, desperate migrants gather before attempting to scale the city’s walls and gain asylum on European soil. Inspired by first-hand accounts, Juan Tomás Ávila Laurel has written an urgent novel, by turns funny and sad, bringing a distinctly African perspective to a major issue of our time.