'Fear and Trembling' tells the story of a young woman who spends a year working at a Japanese firm. She soon learns that at the Yumimoto Corporation hierarchy means everything, and her time there soon turns into a comic nightmare of terror and self-abasement.

Tired of reality shows, the television audience wants blood. One day, while out taking a walk in the Jardin des Plantes, Pannonique is piled into a cattle-truck. It seems, anyone can be picked up and hauled off to the studio without a notice. This book tells the story of this reality TV death camp which has become the nation's obsession.

In 'The Character of Rain', we learn that divinity is a difficult thing from which to recover, particularly if, like the child in this story, you have spent the first two and a half years of life in a nearly vegetative state.

From France's 'literary lioness' (Elle), The Book of Proper Names is the story of the hapless orphan girl, Plectrude. Raised by her aunt, and unaware of the dark secret behind her past, she is a troubled but dreamy child who is both blessed and cursed by her intoxicating eyes. Discovered to have enormous gifts as a dancer, she is accepted at Paris's most prestigious ballet school where she ...

Tells the story of a reality TV death camp, which has become the nation's obsession - an amoral spectacle played out through the media. This book is a satire on the modern predilection for reality television and celebrity, in which the audience at home develops a taste for blood.

Recounting the formative journeys of her youth, from Tokyo to Peking to Paris to New York, the author presents an examination of the self.

A novel about a young girl already stripped of illusions. The daughter of diplomats posted to Peking in the mid-seventies, the unnamed narrator of this novel charges about her tightly enclosed world on her 'horse' (bicycle). But she also learns life's hardest rule: that if she wants to be loved, she must be cruel in return.

When Blanche's mother, who finds her own daughter rather colourless, bookish and dull, is also dazzled by Christa, she soon invites her to stay at the family house. Suddenly Christa can do no wrong and, as Blanche's parents scour their address books for long-lost friends to invite to dinner to meet the newcomer, their friendship sours and Blanche's already negligible self-confidence goes into a ..