Sex workers, private investigators and women unlucky in love are some of the characters that drive these vivid urban portraitsLife in urban areas of west Africa, one of the most diverse regions on Earth, is often a daily roller-coaster ride spiced by abundant drama and an astonishing array of striking characters. Many writers have attempted to capture...

The jigsaw of a repressed wife’s life is pieced together in the story of love triangle with an AI twistIntelligent sex robots may seem like a dream of the future, but that dream is a couple of centuries old. ETA Hoffmann’s 1816 story The Sandman imagines a young man falling for a lovely but “stiff and soulless” girl who turns out to be a clockwork creation....

A pulse-quickening novel about a tempestuous age-gap relationship at the time of the fall of the Berlin Wall has won the top prize for translated fiction. The German author and her translator discuss how it entwines the personal and political• Kairos wins the International Booker – news • Kairos by Jenny Erpenbeck – review‘What is a ‘no-brainer’?” the...

A sweeping and deeply reported analysis of US immigration policy, in all its hypocrisyKeldy had seen several of her brothers murdered, and narrowly escaped assassination herself, before she chose to leave Honduras with her two sons and take the migrant’s path north. This is a journey fraught with danger, but early in 2017 the family crossed the desert...

The victims of Nigeria’s bloody civil war are given a voice in this tale of a man’s quest to find his estranged brother‘This war has not merely grown out of the dark desires of evil men who had set upon their Igbo neighbours in the north, killing and wreaking destruction,” thinks Kunle, the protagonist of Chigozie Obioma’s third novel The Road to the...

The war reporter and author of The Perfect Storm brings us a real life medical thriller in which he is the protagonistOne might feel short-changed to read a book about death by Sebastian Junger that did not include some battlefield drama. After 1997’s The Perfect Storm, his bestselling account of a trawler disaster that became a blockbuster starring...