Mehmet Shehu was the presumed heir to the ailing dictator. So sure was the world that he was next in line, he was known as The Successor. And then, shortly before he was to assume power, he was found dead. But, did he commit suicide or was he murdered? Thi

Sacrificed to further a father's blood-soaked career; sacrificed for the common good; sacrificed, then forgotten. In his compelling prequel to "The Successor", Kadare draws us into a land deprived of choice, a country under a reign of terror. Published here in English for the first time, the spellbinding "Agamemnon's Daughter", written in Albania in the 1980s and smuggled into France a few pages at a time, reveals a world where fear is an instrument of power, but the individual survives despite the odds. From the winner of the first Man Booker International Prize comes a searing story of love...

Each day, inhabitants of a small community in the French Alps find another of their ewes with its throat cut. When one of the villagers is also killed people begin to wonder - could it be the work of a werewolf? Commissaire Adamsberg is called to investigate.

Puckish and playful, Georges Perec infused avant-garde and experimental fiction with a wit and wonder that belied the serious concerns and concepts that underpinned it. A prominent member of the OuLiPo, and an abiding influence on fiction writers today, Perec used formal constraints to dazzling effect in such works as A Void--a murder mystery that contains nary an "e"--and Life A User's Manual, in which an apartment building, systematically canvassed, unfolds secrets and, ultimately offers a reflection on creation, destruction, and the devotion to art.

Before embarking on...