Smilla Jaspersen, the resourceful, tenacious and bloody-minded Greenlander heroine, has won the hearts of readers the world over in her quest to find the truth behind the death of a six year-old boy.

Poet and pervert, Humbert becomes obsessed by 12 year-old Lolita and seeks to possess her, first carnally and then artistically. This is Nabokov's best known novel which brought him worldwide fame and was later made into a film.

Having formed a band of partisans to resist the Nazi forces occupying Italy, Primo Levi was captured and sent to Auschwitz. In these 2 works he describes his time there and his flight away from that hell

Janet grew up with her father, her mother, she was told, died when she was three. But now, living an ocean away from her childhood home, she unexpectedly inherits a house. The house had belonged to her mother, who in fact lived long into Janet's adulthood. In shock, she travels north with the key and finds an old stone cottage.

It's the summer of 1965, and the streets of Queens, New York shimmer in a heatwave. One July morning, Ruth Malone wakes to find a bedroom window wide open and her two young children missing. After a desperate search, the police make a horrifying discovery. Noting Ruth's perfectly made-up face and provocative clothing, the empty liquor bottles and love letters that litter her apartment, the detectives leap to convenient conclusions, fuelled by neighbourhood...