By the early 1970s, Romain Gary had established himself as one of France's most popular and prolific novelists, journalists, and memoirists. Playing with novelistic categories and authorial voice, this work is a powerful testimony to the power of language - to express, to amuse, to deceive, and ultimately to speak difficult personal truths.

Tzvetan Todorov's book examines the history of the past century by analyzing its spectacular political conflicts and by offering moving profiles of individuals who, at great personal cost, resisted the strictures of the communist and Nazi regimes. .

As spring arrives in the Albanian mountain town of B, some strange things are emerging in the thaw. Bank robbers strike the National Bank. Old terrors are dredged up from the shipwreck of history. And ultra-explosive state secrets are threatening to flood the entire nation.

In the early fifteenth century, as winter falls away, the people of Albania know that their fate is sealed. They have refused to negotiate with the Ottoman Empire, and war is now inevitable. Soon enough dust kicked up by Turkish horses is spotted from a citadel.

From April 1942 to March 1944, Helene Berr, a recent graduate of the Sorbonne, kept a journal that is both an intensely moving, intimate, harrowing, appalling document and a text of astonishing literary maturity.

A comprehensive history of numbers and mathematics, in a three-volume set. It covers the art and science of numeration from Magnon Man to the electronic spreadsheet, and from Scandinavia to China, via the Classical World. There are explanatory figures and tables throughout.

A disturbing mix of tragedy, comedy, politics and sexuality.

Two Irish-American scholars from Harvard journey to Albania in the 1930s with a tape recorder in order to record the last genuinely oral epic singers. Their purpose, they say, is to show how Homer's epics might have been culled from a verbal tradition. The two dedicated scholars realise only too late that they have stumbled over an ants' nest.

In the mid-1930s, two Irish-American scholars arrive in a small town in Northern Albania to carry out research on the surviving tradition of spoken verse epics, recording the last of the wandering ballad-mongers. They hope to solve the mystery of Homer's authorship of The Iliad and The Odyssey .