Expatina's Secret Pleasures

Now that he's been short-listed for the Booker Prize for The Northern Clemency, fans might discover Hensher's other literate and humorous novels. Pleasured is set not long before the fall of the Berlin Wall. The plot is a funny one: can the East German government be brought down by handing out free Ecstasy? But the themes — loss and connection — are serious.

Best known for Under the Frog, his hilarious yet stirring novel of the Hungarian Revolution experienced by a men's basketball team, Tibor Fischer here writes what few would dare, a comic novel about agoraphobia. And how great a title is that?

Austerlitz is considered Sebald's masterpiece and deservedly so, but this novel by the late, great German novelist/British professor is charming and poignant, with precise, incandescent prose. What begins as the story of a walking tour of Suffolk ends as a meditation on mortality.

All I need to decide not to read a book as a rule is a cover note that it involves someone who's dying — but this funny, moving, shocking novel is the exception to the rule and I've read it several times.

I couldn't believe I bought a book about rock climbers, something about which I knew little and cared less. But I did, because I like Mawer. And I found a jewel: is an un-put-down-able mystery, a celebral yet emotional tale of love and betrayal.

How to get pesky elderly British relatives out of the way? Set up a retirement home that reeks of the Raj and is in farway Bangalore. A delightful book about never giving up.

A novel in the form of short stories about how one man (Klima's alter ego) gets by in Communist Prague when he is no longer allowed to teach at the university. It's all the more devastating for Klima's gentle tone.

A marvellous journey through circular tales as a young man tries to find out the truth about his father. Crumey is that strange bird, an extremely intellectual writer who's also inventive and witty. The first novel of his I read was the engagingly titled Mobius Dick.