Clockwork Angel
Cassandra Clare

Tessa is soon caught in a dangerous love triangle where a wrong decision could prove fatal. She will need all her strength to save her brother and stay alive as she learns the chilling truth of what really lurks on London's streets after dark. Discover more about the mysterious and sexy Shadowhunters in this thrilling prequel trilogy to the bestselling "Mortal Instruments" sequence.

The Road to San Giovanni
Italo Calvino

In five elegant autobiographical meditations Calvino delves into his past, remembering awkward childhood walks with his father, a lifelong obsession with the cinema and fighting in the Italian Resistance against the Fascists. He also muses on the social contracts, language and sensations associated with emptying the kitchen rubbish and the shape he would, if asked, consider the world. These reflections on the nature of memory itself are engaging, witty, and lit through with Calvino's alchemical brilliance.

A WAY IN THE WORLD
V.S. NAIPAUL

This vastly innovative novel explores colonial inheritance through a series of narratives that span continents, swing back and forth between past and present and delve into both autobiography and fiction. Naipaul offers a personal choice of examples of Spanish and British imperial history in the Caribbean, including an imagined vision of Raleigh's last expedition and an introduction to Francisco de Miranda, a would-be liberator and precursor to Bolivar, which are placed within a context of echoing modernity and framed by two more personal, heavily autobiographical sections sketching the narrator an eloquent yet humble man of Indian descent who grew up in Trinidad but spent much of his adult life in England and Africa. Meditative and dramatic, these historical reconstructions, imbued with Naipaul's acute perception, drawn with his deft and sensitive touch, and told in his beautifully wrought prose, are transmuted into an astonishing novel exploring the profound and mysterious effect of history on the individual.

MAO'S GREAT FAMINE
FRANK DIKOTTER
Shortlisted for the BBC Samuel Johnson Prize for Non-Fiction 2011 .

Between 1958 and 1962, 45 million Chinese people were worked, starved or beaten to death. Mao Zedong threw his country into a frenzy with the Great Leap Forward, an attempt to catch up with and overtake the Western world in less than fifteen years. It leads to one of the greatest catastrophes the world has ever known.
Dikotter's extraordinary research within Chinese archives brings together for the first time what happened in the corridors of power with the everyday experiences of ordinary people, giving voice to the dead and disenfranchised. This groundbreaking account definitively recasts the history of the People's Republic of China.

HOTEL BOSPHORUS
The first Kath Hirschel Murder Mystery

Kati Hirschel, in her thirties, is the proud owner of Istanbul's only crime bookshop. When the German director of a film starring an old school friend is found murdered in his hotel room Kati cannot resist the temptation to start her own maverick investigation. After all her friend Petra is the police's principal suspect and reading all those detective novels must have taught Kati something.
This is a crime story but also a wonderful book about Istanbul and Turkish society. It uses humor, social commentary and even erotic fantasy to expose Western European prejudices about Turkey as well as Turkish stereotyping of other Europeans.

THE MISTRESS 'S DAUGHTER
A.M. HOMES

On the day that Homes was born in 1961, she was given up for adoption. Her birth parents were a twenty-two year old woman and an older married man with whom she was having an affair. Thirty years later, out of the blue, Homes was contacted by a lawyer on behalf of her birth mother, and they began to correspond; her biological father contacted her soon after.
These two individuals and their effect on the adult Homes are strange and unexpected, and the story spirals into something utterly raw and hilarious, heartbreaking and absurd. Along the way, Homes describes the clash between her childhood fantasies of her birth parents and the disappointing reality.

SOLAR
Ian McEwan

A compulsive womaniser, Michael Beard finds his fifth marriage floundering. When Beard's professional and personal worlds collide in a freak accident, an opportunity presents itself for Beard to extricate himself from his marital mess, reinvigorate his career and save the world from environmental disaster.  

A visit from the goon squad
Jennifer Egan

A novel that circles the lives of Bennie Salazar, an aging former punk rocker and record executive, and Sasha, the passionate, troubled young woman he employs. Although Bennie and Sasha never discover each other's pasts, the reader does, in detail, along with the secret lives of a host of other characters whose paths intersect with theirs.

Let the great world spin
Colum McCann

In the dawning light of a late-summer morning, the people of lower Manhattan stand hushed, staring up in disbelief at the Twin Towers. It is August 1974, and a mysterious tightrope walker is running, dancing, leaping between the towers, suspended a quarter mile above the ground. In the streets below, a slew of ordinary lives become extraordinary in bestselling novelist Colum McCann's stunningly intricate portrait of a city and its people.

Last night in twisted river
John Irving

In 1954, in the cookhouse of a logging and sawmill settlement in northern New Hampshire, a twelve-year-old boy mistakes the local constable's girlfriend for a bear. Both the twelve-year-old and his father become fugitives, pursued by the constable. Their lone protector is a fiercely libertarian logger, once a river driver, who befriends them.

Theodore Boone
John Grisham

Grisham's first book for kids is the story of amiable thirteen-year old Theo who loves the law, haunts the courthouse, and helps his classmates and friends with their own legal troubles, say a looming foreclosure, a nasty divorce, or a runaway dog. He lives in a generic-sounding city with pleasant lawyer parents and goes to the gentlest middle school ever.  And someone in this very nice situation is about to get away with murder.

The Inspector and Silence
Hakan Nesser

The Swedes are certainly going great guns at the moment.  Here we have another great Swedish detective, Inspector Van Veeteren, who   is a completely different character from Wallander.  He is nearing retirement age and is dreaming of taking a pleasant little job as an assistant in a local book shop.  He is thinking about his forthcoming summer holiday and goes into a travel agent, where he waits behind an attractive woman whom he recognizes from a previous case.  She is booking a solo holiday in Crete.  He knows the location and the hotel - all good.  He leaves the shop and contacts another travel agent, with whom he books himself into the hotel at the same date.

Commited, a love story
Elizabeth Gilbert

At the end of her bestselling memoir Eat, Pray, Love, Elizabeth Gilbert fell in love with Felipe , Brazilian-born man of Australian citizenship who'd been living in Indonesia when they met. Resettling in America, the couple swore eternal fidelity to each other, but also swore to never, ever, under any circumstances get legally married. But providence intervened one day in the form of the U.S. government, who, after unexpectedly detaining Felipe at an American border crossing, gave the couple a choice: they could either get married, or Felipe would never be allowed to enter the country again. The result is Committed, a witty and intelligent contemplation of marriage that debunks myths, unthreads fears and suggests that sometimes even the most romantic of souls must trade in her amorous fantasies for the humbling responsibility of adulthood. Gilbert's memoir is ultimately a clear-eyed celebration of love, with all the complexity and consequence that real love, in the real world, actually entails.

Privileges
Jonathan Dee

Smart, socially gifted, and chronically impatient, Adam and Cynthia Morey are so perfect for each other that united they become a kind of fortress against the world. In their hurry to start a new life, they marry young and have two children before Cynthia reaches the age of twenty-five.

The Whisperers
John Connolly

The border between Maine and Canada is porous. Anything can be smuggled across it: drugs, cash, weapons, and people. Now a group of disenchanted former soldiers has begun its own smuggling operation, and what is being moved is infinitely stranger and more terrifying than anyone can imagine. Anyone, that is, except private detective Charlie Parker, who has his own intimate knowledge of the darkness in men's hearts. But the soldiers' actions have attracted the attention of the reclusive Herod, a man with a taste for the strange. And where Herod goes, so too does the shadowy figure that he calls the Captain. To defeat them, Parker must form an uneasy alliance with a man he fears more than any other, the killer known as the Collector...

Mistress
Anita Nair

A literary tour de force from one of India's most exciting writers. Traveling to India to interview a world-famous musician, Christopher Stewart, a handsome, young, American scholar, becomes absorbed into the luxurious orbit of Koman and his niece Radha, a beautiful young woman unhappily married to a materialistic, ambitious husband, and with whom Christopher begins a passionate affair.

1000 years of annoying the French
Stephen Clarke

Was the Battle of Hastings a French victory? William the Conqueror was Norman and hated the French. Were the Brits really responsible for the death of Joan of Arc? The French sentenced her to death for wearing trousers. Was the guillotine a French invention? This book looks at what has really been going on since 1066.

Writing Arabic
From Script to Type
Stefan F. Moginet

This book, abundatly illustrated with examples, clearly presents the development of Arabic writing styles, from the begining with reed pens to twenty-first-century computerized typesetting. For those interested in the extraordinary history of writing.

Also in french : Du calame à l'ordinateur.