Fiction in translation

The successful writer Oki has reached middle age and is filled with regrets.

Ogata Shingo is growing old, and his memory is failing him.

The novel tells the story of a middle-class UNESCO engineer called Walter Faber, who believes in rational, calculated world.

Life is a Dream (1931) is Gyula Krudy's magical collection of ten short stories.

'A truly great translation .

Since the original, prewar translation there has been no completely new rendering of the French original into English.

Since the original, prewar translation there has been no completely new rendering of the French original into English.

One of Soseki's most beloved works of fiction, the novel depicts the 23-year-old Sanshiro leaving the sleepy countryside for the first time in his life to experience the constantly moving 'real world' of Tokyo, its women and university.

On one level the novel is about the homecoming of Lavretsky, who, broken and disillusioned by a failed marriage, returns to his estate and finds love again - only to lose it.

The Story of the Stone (c.

When Jean Macquart arrives in the peasant community of Beauce, where farmers have worked the same land for generations, he quickly finds himself involved in the corrupt affairs of the local Fouan family.

Rumours that a ghost stalks the dark passages and cellars of the Paris Opera House, wreaking havoc, have long been rife among staff and performers.

Chevalier d'Albert fantasizes about his ideal lover, yet every woman he meets falls short of his exacting standards of female perfection.

A new translation by David Horrocks.

Adam Pollo, an amnesiac ex-student, has broken into an empty seaside villa.

Fran ois Besson listens to a tape recording of a girl contemplating suicide.

In these nine unforgettable and impressionistic 'tales of little madness', the Nobel Prize-winning author Le Cl zio explores how the physical sensations we experience every day can be as strong as feelings of love or hate, with their power to bring chaos to our lives.

For Chancelade, the world is teeming with beauty, wonder and possibilities.

The Strange Tales of Pu Songling (1640-1715) are exquisite and amusing miniatures that are regarded as the pinnacle of classical Chinese fiction.

First published in 1877, these three stories are dominated by questions of doubt, love, loneliness and religious experience, and together form a triumphant conclusion to Flaubert's literary career.

Eileen Chang is one of the great writers of twentieth-century China, where she enjoys a passionate following both on the mainland and in Taiwan.

You only find true love once.

When Arkady Petrovich comes home from college, his father finds his eager, naive son changed almost beyond recognition, for the impressionable Arkady has fallen under the powerful influence of the friend accompanying him.

In 1851, at the age of twenty-two, Tolstoy joined the Russian army and travelled to the Caucasus as a soldier.

In Evil Hour is the thrilling story of a Colombian society menaced by rumour and paranoia by the Nobel Laureate Gabriel Garc a M rquez, author of the One Hundred Years of Solitude and Love in the Time of Cholera.

Sweeping through crumbling towns, travelling fairs and windswept ports, Gabriel Garc a M rquez introduces a host of extraordinary characters and communities in his mesmerising tales of everyday life: smugglers, bagpipers, the President and Pope at the funeral of Macondo's revered matriarch; a very old angel with enormous wings.

'A breath of fresh cold air .

Innocent Erendira and Other Stories is a collection of short stories from the Nobel Prize winner and author of One Hundred Years of Solitude and Love in the Time of Cholera, Gabriel Garcia Marquez.

Nobel Prize winner and author of One Hundred Years of Solitude and Love in the Time of Cholera, Gabriel Garc a M rquez blends the natural with supernatural in Of Love and Other Demons - a novel which explores community, superstition and collective hysteria.

Hermann Hesse's moving and inspirational chronicle of spiritual enlightenment, with an introduction by Paulo Coehlo Siddhartha is perhaps the most important and compelling moral allegory our troubled century has produced.

The General in his Labyrinth is the compelling tale of Sim n Bol var, a hero who has been forgotten and whose power is fading, retracing his steps down the Magdalena River by the Nobel Laureate Gabriel Garc a M rquez, author of One Hundred Years of Solitude and Love in the Time of Cholera.

The ten stories collected in this volume demonstrate Tolstoy's artistic prowess displayed over five decades - experimenting with prose styles and drawing on his own experiences with humour, realism and compassion.

Having spent some time in Rome, Antonio - the handsomest young man in Catania - returns to his native town with the reputation of being a playboy and with a long list of amorous adventures behind him.

From the reign of the Tsars in the early 19th century to the collapse of the Soviet Union and beyond, the short story has long occupied a central place in Russian culture.

Set in the taverns of Paris, this is perhaps the first classical tragedy of working-class people living in the slums of a city.

The Story of the Stone (c.

The most renowned of all works of Scandinavian literature and our most extensive source of Norse mythologyWritten in Iceland a century after the close of the Viking Age, The Prose Edda tells ancient stories of the Norse creation epic and recounts the battles that follow as gods, giants, dwarves and elves struggle for survival.

In Berlin there lived a man called Albinus.

Considered by Andr Gide to be one of the ten greatest novels in the French language, mile Zola's Germinal is a brutal depiction of the poverty of a mining community in northern France tienne Lantier, an unemployed railway worker, is a clever but uneducated young man with a dangerous temper.

Throughout his life Isaac Babel was torn by opposing forces, by the desire both to remain faithful to his Jewish roots and yet to be free of them.

Turgenev's first major prose work is a series of twenty-five Sketches: the observations and anecdotes of the author during his travels through Russia satisfying his passion for hunting.

'The Kreutzer Sonata' is the self-lacerating confession of a man consumed by sexual jealousy and eaten up by shame and eventually driven to murder his wife.

Unworldly young Effi Briest is married off to Baron von Innstetten, an austere and ambitious civil servant twice her age, who has little time for his new wife.

Sentimental Education begins with the hero - Frederic Moreau - leaving Paris and returning to the provinces and his mother.

In the final years of his life, Chekhov had reached the height of his powers as a dramatist, and also produced some of the stories that rank among his masterpieces.

Chichikov, a mysterious stranger, arrives in the provincial town of 'N', visiting a succession of landowners and making each a strange offer.

Born to drunken parents in the slums of Paris, Nana lives in squalor until she is discovered at the Th tre des Vari t s.

Dostoyevsky's great novel of suffering and sickness, innocence and greedReturning to St Petersburg from a Swiss sanatorium, the gentle and na ve epileptic Prince Myshkin - the titular 'idiot' - pays a visit to his distant relative General Yepanchin and proceeds to charm the General, his wife, and his three daughters.

'A masterpiece' Julian BarnesFlaubert's erotically charged and psychologically acute portrayal of a married woman's affair caused a moral outcry on its publication in 1857.

Meursault leads an apparently unremarkable bachelor life in Algiers until he commits a random act of violence.