On the night of January 31, 1953, a mountain of water, literally piled up out of the sea by a freak winter hurricane, swept down onto the Netherlands, demolishing the dikes protecting the country and wiping a quarter of its landmass from the map. It was the worst natural disaster to strike the Netherlands in three hundred years.

The morning of the storm, Armanda asks her sister, Lidy, to take her place on a visit to her godchild in the town of Zierikzee. In turn, Armanda will care for Lidy's two-year-old daughter and accompany Lidy’s husband to a party. The sisters, both of them young and beautiful, look so alike that no one may even notice. But what Armanda can’t know is that her little comedy is a provocation to fate: Lidy is headed for the center of the deadly storm.

Margriet de Moor interweaves the stories of these two sisters, deftly alternating between the cataclysm and the long years of its grief-strewn aftermath. While Lidy struggles to survive, surrounded by people she barely knows, Armanda must master the future, trying to live out the life of her missing sister as if it were her own.

The moment of reckoning has come for Captain Mitsos Avgustìs. After twelve years at sea it is time to go home to the Island on which he was born: home to his wife Flora, his two daughters, his son, a granddaughter he has never met, and Litsa, his lover from all those years ago, a modern-day Penelope awaiting the return of her Ulysses. It will take all Avgustis's courage and strength to face the squalls and storms on land after a lifetime at sea - and all the while, he must resist the ocean's siren song bidding him return, tempting him back to the cargo vessel, the Athos III, that he so reluctantly left. It is there that his demons lurk, there that his terrible secrets are buried, there that his true home lies. Statuesque like Poseidon, gruff yet tender, a true legend of the seven seas, Avgustis's will learn that no matter how many or how varied one's experiences of life have been, there is always something new to learn. And the price of learning certain lessons so late in life can be terribly steep. He will seek comfort in the gentle rolling of the ocean's swell and the silent currents that have healed sailors' wounds since time immemorial. A sweeping saga about love and hope set in modern-day Greece, Swell is Karystiani's most moving and gripping novel yet.

The heroine of this enigmatic, razor-sharp, and thoroughly contemporary novel is seventeen-year-old Sacha Naimann, born in Moscow. Sacha lives in Berlin now with her two younger siblings and, until recently, her mother. She is precocious, independent, skeptical and, since her stepfather murdered her mother several months ago, an orphan. Unlike most of her companions, she doesn't dream of getting out the tough housing project where they live. Her dreams are different: she wants to write a novel about her mother; and she wants to end the life of Vadim, the man who murdered her.

What strikes the reader most in this exceptional novel is Sacha's voice—candid, self-confident, mature and childlike at the same time—a voice so like the voices of many of her generation with its characteristic mix of worldliness and innocence, skepticism and enthusiasm. This is Sacha's story and it is as touching as any in recent literature.

Germany's Freundin Magazine called Broken Glass Park "a ruthless, entertaining portrayal of life on the margins of society." But Sacha's story does not remain on the margins; it goes straight to the heart of what it means to be seventeen in these the first years of the new century.

When Aliide Truu, an older woman living alone in the Estonian countryside, finds a disheveled girl huddled in her front yard, she suppresses her misgivings and offers her shelter. Zara is a young sex-trafficking victim on the run from her captors, but a photo she carries with her soon makes it clear that her arrival at Aliide’s home is no coincidence. Survivors both, Aliide and Zara engage in a complex arithmetic of suspicion and revelation to distill each other’s motives; gradually, their stories emerge, the culmination of a tragic family drama of rivalry, lust, and loss that played out during the worst years of Estonia’s Soviet occupation.

Sofi Oksanen establishes herself as one the most important voices of her generation with this intricately woven tale, whose stakes are almost unbearably high from the first page to the last. Purge is a fiercely compelling and damning novel about the corrosive effects of shame, and of life in a time and place where to survive is to be implicated.

It is 1953, and the last great transcontinental air race from London to Christchurch, New Zealand is about to begin. But even before the KLM plane has left the runway, it has already become famous as the bride flight. Of its 60 emigrating passengers, many are brides-to-be flying out to join their fiances on the other side of the world. Among them are Ada, Marjorie and Esther, each of them with their own reasons for wanting to leave behind the hardships of post-war life at home, and their own pasts. During the trip they meet Frank, a charismatic bachelor, who will come to have a dramatic influence on their lives, and who exerts a continued hold over each of the women as they follow their very different paths in New Zealand. It is only when they meet again, years later at Frank's funeral, that the three women - now brides in black - get to hear each other's stories for the first time and realise just how closely their lives have been bound together by what happened on the bride flight.