On struggling farms, in Dublin's rain-drenched streets, or in parched exile in Franco's Spain, McGahern's characters wage a confused but touching war against the facts of life.

    But it is Anthony as a husband and lover that intrigues her most. She looks at the nature of his love for his wife, Rose and at his love for Kate Field. The author does say that some of it is imagined and she cannot prove what she says happened or is said, but she is "sure of it" herself.

    There are over seven hundred letters in this impressive collection, dating from Larkin's late teens until close to his death at the age of sixty-three in 1985. Early letters to school friends, including the writer Kingsley Amis, form a portrait of the young artist, full of jazz, literature, and obscenities. Later correspondents include the novelist Barbara Pym (whose fictional portraits of genteel English country life Larkin so admired), Robert Conquest, Andrew Motion, and Julian Barnes.In his Introduction, Anthony Thwaite writes: "What is remarkable, for all the masks he put on, is how consistently Larkin emerges, whoever he is writing to . . . [The letters] are an informal record of the lonely, gregarious . . . intolerant, compassionate, eloquent, foul-mouthed, harsh and humorous Philip Larkin, who was not only one of the finest poets of our time but also a compulsive and entertaining letter-writer."

    Utterly accurate in its depiction of historical and military events and astoundingly rich in detail, Cafe Berlin is vivid and compelling.

    Mistero Buffo, or The Comic Mysteries, is based on research into mediaeval mystery plays; The Accidental Death of an Anarchist concerns the "accidental" (or not) death of an anarchist railwork who "fell" (or was pushed) to his death from a police headquarters window in 1969; Trumpets and Raspberries is "A deeply subversive farce" (The Guardian) in which the boss of Italy's biggest car manufacturer FIAT, is mistaken for a left wing terrorist.

    Here is Denisov, who fears his greatest accomplishment in life will be the treatise he wrote and tore up. He is betrothed to Lora, an incessant talker who dreams of having a fluffy tail. We also read of Natasha, who searches Leningrad and her memory for her lost love; of Dmitry Ilich's elaborate seduction of Olga Mikhailovna; and more. In the tradition of such writers as Gogol and Chekhov, Tatyana Tolstaya transforms ordinary lives into something magical and strange.Translated from the Russian by Jamey GambrellFrom the Trade Paperback edition.

    Set in resistance France, this is a grand and passionate story of forbidden love between an English Special Operations Executive and a German Abwehr officer.