Kennedy's Brain
by Henning Mankell, translated from the Swedish by Laurie Thompson
Publisher: The New Press
Available at: Amazon

When a Swedish archaeologist returns from a dig in Greece to discover that her son has died under what she believes to be mysterious circumstances, she embarks on a journey to Australia, Spain, Mozambique, and into the underworld of AIDS, piecing together the story of a life that was altogether different than what she imagined. Manning, who is a master of suspense and atmosphere, has written a parable about the limits of knowledge, which will keep readers on the edge of their seats.

A Pigeon and a Boy
by Meir Shalev, translated from the Hebrew by Evan Fallenberg
Publisher: Schocken Books
Available at: Amazon

What is home? This is the question posed, in a variety of forms, in a richly textured novel that won the top literary prize in Israel in 2006. A homing pigeon dispatched during the 1948 War of Independence carries a gift that will inform the destiny of many people over the next half century, and it falls to a tour guide to tell their stories, which reveal at every turn the shaping power of love. He himself embodies that force, and the house he builds, with a legacy from his mother, comes to stand for the ancient idea of home.

Chronicle in Stone
by Ismail Kadare, translated from the Albanian by Arishi Pipá, edited with an introduction by David Bellos
Publisher: Arcade
Available at: Amazon

This magical novel, narrated by a boy on the verge of adolescence, brings to life the daily incidents and rhythms of his city of stone, in southern Albania, which in World War II was occupied first by the Italians, then the Greeks, and finally the Germans. Witchcraft is in the air, and a crazed inventor drinks thirty cups of coffee in a row, and the rain licks at the stone: emblems of an order that a precocious boy registers page by disquieting page.

The Reluctant Fundamentalist
By Mohsin Hamid
Publisher: Harcourt
Available at: Amazon

A Princeton graduate from Pakistan buttonholes an American one afternoon, in a café in Lahore, to tell him the story of his rise and fall in the New World. The tragedy of 9/11 is what triggers his decision to abandon a prestigious job with a valuation firm in New York and a woman that he loves (in vain) to return to his homeland, where the revenge that he exacts on the country that took him in is both fearsome and illuminating. This is the story of failed love, whose victims are not just a young man and a woman, but all of us.