by Laurent Binet

A famous semiotician has been killed. Call the police! And the post-structuralists!  It's 1980, and Roland Barthes has been struck by a van on a Paris street. He'll later die in the hospital, and the incident initially appears to be an accident.

 

by Alexander Boldizar

Muzhduk the Ugli the Fourth is a 300–pound boulder–throwing mountain man from Siberia whose tribal homeland is stolen by an American lawyer out to build a butterfly conservatory for wealthy tourists.

 

by James William Brown

Aliki is a self-described old crone, the last of a fading breed of lamenters: professional mourners who remember the dead by composing a poem of the deceased's life.

 

by Stephan Collishaw

"For a full hour I sat at my desk and stared up at the two photographs. One by one I smoked a packet of twenty Prima cigarettes.... The earth, I felt, was beginning to shift, and the long dead were stirring."

 

by Andrea Camilleri

A vivid historical novel based on the true story of the five Sacco brothers who fought the violence of the Mafia, the treachery of the fascists, and the corruption of the police and courts in 1920s Sicily.

 

by Matias Faldbakken

Waiting for Godot meets Kitchen Confidential meets Seinfeld, in this hilarious, beautifully written, gleefully postmodernist novel.

 

 

Valeria is a whale in a puddle. She harrumphs her daily way through her backwater village, finding equal fault with the new, the old, the foreign, and the familiar.

 

A Boy and His Dog at the End of the World
 

by Charlie Fletcher

Since the Gelding rendered most humans infertile, the global population has dwindled to a mere few thousand. Griz has never had neighbors or been in a crowd, though he and siblings Ferg and Bar are familiar with the concepts from photographs, homeschooling, and handed-down stories. 

 

by Georgina Harding

Despite their vastly different backgrounds, Tinu and Safta  developed a deep friendship. But then war descends and changes everything.

 

by Ninni Holmqvist

This is the Second Reserve Bank Unit, into which the State herds women 50 and up, and men 60 and over, to use for biological material. They're fattened like calves, but there's civic-duty payback: mandatory organ donation, culminating in the final "gift" of their lungs and hearts.

 

by Ismail Kadare

Traitor or hero? The people of Gjirokaster endlessly debate the role of Dr. Gurameto in hosting a regal dinner for the commander of the Nazi army invading their ancient Albanian city.

 

by N. M. Kelby

 A shattering of glass, and seven-year-old Marie Claire's village is in rubble. Her grandmother is dead, everyone is dead. She flees to the root cellar of her grandmothers house and waits.

 

enney

 

To live on a leeside is to be sheltered from the wind, and Siobhan's life is on both a literal and figurative leeside. She is content in her small, sealed world until an American scholar of Irish poetry comes to visit and begins to show her possibilities of life beyond. 

 

by Ivan Klíma

Eloquently limns the troubling dilemma of a life set free too late. Like so many of his contemporaries behind the Iron Curtain, talented filmmaker Pavel Fuka, protagonist of this post- revolutionary novel, tried to survive the dark years with his integrity and ambition intact.

 

Setting:  Czechoslavakia

by Elizabeth Kostova

Alexandra is headed to her new job teaching English when she discovers that she has accidentally picked up an old woman's satchel, containing a beautiful box labeled with the name Stoyan Lazarov and filled with ashes.

 

 

by Dorthe Nors

All Sonja wants is to learn how to drive. Unfortunately, despite her best efforts, things aren't going well. Her first instructor terrifies her, her second instructor lusts after her, and Sonja's driving skills remain shaky at best. And the rest of her life isn't going so well, either.

 

by Rosella Postorino

Forced to eat what might kill them, the tasters begin to divide into The Fanatics, those loyal to Hitler, and the women like Rosa who insist they aren't Nazis, even as they risk their lives every day for Hitler's.

 

by Ismet Prcic

He is advised that in order to make peace with the corrosive guilt he harbors over leaving behind his family behind, he must "write everything." The result is a great rattlebag of memories, confessions, and fictions.

 

by José Saramago

In 1953, Saramago submitted a manuscript for a novel to a publisher.  His manuscript was written at night, after his day job. After no response, Saramago published nothing for another 20 years. Decades later the manuscript resurfaced, accompanied by a publication offer, which Saramago curtly declined. 

 

by Jody Shields

When a young woman's body is discovered in the summer of 1910 Vienna, the Inspector's wife is certain the figs found in her stomach during the autopsy are the clue to the identity of the murderer -- for there are no fresh figs in Vienna at this time of year.

 

by Yrsa Sigurðardóttir

Aldis hates her job working in a rural juvenile detention center . The boys are difficult, the owners are unpleasant, and there are mysterious noises at night. And then two of the boys go astray ...

 

by El Torres

Someone is committing barbarous murders throughout Barcelona, focusing on locations designed by renowned visionary architect Antoni Gaudi. The police have no clues, but a young woman is thrust into the investigation by a man resembling the late Gaudi himself.