OMA BOOKS

1963: a young woman moves to Reykjavik to be a writer, not a beauty queen.

1918: a queer teenager in Reykjavik lives for the cinema as the Spanish flu strikes.

A German student is found murdered at the University of Iceland in Reykjavik.

A Reykjavik murder leads Erlendur to an old rape case and a nation’s gene bank.

A slacker lives with his mother in downtown Reykjavik, until her girlfriend moves in.

A young man’s slide into schizophrenia, from a Reykjavik childhood to the Kleppur asylum.

A country girl works as a maid in Reykjavik as Iceland debates a US air base.

1829: a farm family in the north of Iceland must lodge a woman condemned to death.

A young policeman takes a post in Siglufjörður, a snowbound town in Iceland’s far north.

A young Kosovan in Helsinki, and his mother’s married life in Yugoslav Kosovo.

1938: in Helsinki, a lawyer’s secretary hides her civil-war past as fascism rises.

In a Helsinki drowning in climate collapse, a poet searches for his missing wife.

Detective Maria Kallio’s first case: a death at a choir party in a villa near Helsinki.

A Sámi girl in northern Sweden sees her reindeer calf killed, and the village looks away.

1944: a Finnish midwife follows her SS lover to a prison camp in Lapland.

1960s: two boys in Pajala, in Sweden’s far north, dream of rock’n’roll.

A lonely old woman in an Oslo tower block decides to leave some trace of her life.

1989: as the Berlin Wall falls, an Oslo man’s marriage and his mother’s health fail.

With the first snow in Oslo, women start to disappear, each leaving a snowman.

From 1945: three generations of women and two half-brothers in an Oslo flat.

At 25, a young man quits university and sits out a crisis in his brother’s Oslo flat.

An Oslo detective uncovers drug money and corruption behind a riverside murder.

A starving young writer wanders Kristiania, today’s Oslo, too proud to ask for help.

A Bergen private eye reopens the case of a girl who vanished 25 years ago.

1988–2002: a young writer’s student years, drinking and failures in Bergen.

1941–66: Tallinn under Soviet, Nazi, then Soviet rule, through a man who serves all.

15th century: in medieval Tallinn, an apothecary hunts a killer through the town.

Friends and lovers piece together the life of a young Stockholm man after his death.

A Stockholm hypnotist is drawn back to his craft to question a massacre’s survivor.

A student leads a double life dealing cocaine to Stockholm’s rich.

A Stockholm journalist and a hacker dig into a rich family’s dark past.

1981: in Blackeberg, a bullied boy befriends the strange girl next door.

Nine people shot dead on a Stockholm bus on a rainy November night.

A Stockholm doctor’s summer diary, as he plans to free a patient from her husband.

A young idealist quits the civil service for Stockholm’s bohemians.

1969–89: a mother and daughter endure Soviet Latvia, between Riga and the countryside.

Two bodies on a raft lead a Swedish detective to Riga as Latvia breaks from Moscow.

1922: a count is sentenced to spend his life inside Moscow’s Hotel Metropol.

1953 onwards: three Moscow schoolfriends grow into the dissident generation.

2028: a day in the life of the Tsar’s enforcer in a new, walled-off Moscow.

1934: students from Moscow’s Arbat district grow up as Stalin’s purges begin.

A Soviet scholar recalls the elite Moscow building his childhood friends vanished from.

A drunk’s train ride out of Moscow, told one station and one drink at a time.

1930s: the devil comes to Moscow and turns its writers’ world upside down.

1812: Moscow’s old families face Napoleon, and the city burns.

1941–44: the siege of Leningrad, told through the diaries of those inside it.

1942: two prisoners must find a dozen eggs in besieged Leningrad.

1941: a family tries to survive the first winter of the siege of Leningrad.

A poor student in Petersburg’s hot, crowded tenements kills a pawnbroker.

A translator from Jutland learns to drive, and to live, in Copenhagen.

A sidelined Copenhagen detective reopens the case of a vanished politician.

1920s: a Copenhagen painter becomes Lili Elbe, a pioneer of gender transition.

1941: Heisenberg visits Bohr in occupied Copenhagen. What did they say?

A boy falls from a Copenhagen roof; Smilla reads his tracks in the snow.

1920s: a working-class girl grows up in Vesterbro, dreaming of being a poet.

1848–1945: the sailors of Marstal, a small Danish port, and the women they leave behind.

Five centuries of Vilnius, seen through the eyes of travellers and outsiders.

1920s: in Wilno, today’s Vilnius, a mother raises her son for glory in France.

A Minsk teenager wakes from a ten-year coma into Lukashenko’s unchanged Belarus.

A Dublin mother fights to hold her family together as Ireland slides into tyranny.

Two Trinity students fall in with an older married couple in today’s Dublin.

A woman gathers her large Dublin family for a brother’s wake, and the past returns.

A Dublin detective investigates a child’s murder in the woods where he once went missing.

Working-class Northside Dubliners form a soul band.

A lazy Dublin student writes a novel whose characters rebel against their author.

16 June 1904: one day in Dublin, following Leopold Bloom across the city.

1985: a coal merchant in New Ross discovers what the local convent hides.

1960s: a widow in Enniscorthy slowly rebuilds her life and finds her own voice.

A retired Berlin professor befriends African refugees camped in the city.

1929: a Cologne detective transferred to Berlin works vice as the Republic cracks.

1955: a young Englishman joins a secret tunnel dug under the Berlin border.

1936: a Berlin private eye investigates a double murder during the Olympics.

A diary of the fall of Berlin and the mass rapes that followed.

A Berlin couple secretly leave anti-Hitler postcards across the city during the war.

An English writer lodges in Weimar Berlin as the Nazis take power.

A boy robbed on the train to Berlin gets the city’s kids to help catch the thief.

Released from prison, Franz Biberkopf tries to go straight in Berlin.

1982–89: an educated family in a Dresden villa quarter as East Germany decays.

February 1945: the bombing of Dresden, and the city before and after.

1945: an American prisoner of war survives the firebombing of Dresden.

1686: a young Amsterdam bride receives a dollhouse that seems to predict her life.

Two couples meet in an Amsterdam restaurant to discuss what their sons have done.

In an Amsterdam bar, a former Paris lawyer confesses to a stranger.

Two years hidden in an Amsterdam canal house behind a movable bookcase.

An Amsterdam coffee broker frames a searing attack on Dutch colonial rule in Java.

17th century: Vermeer’s paintings as windows from Delft onto the first global trade.

1664: a young maid enters the household of the painter Vermeer in Delft.

Emptying his late mother’s Warsaw flat, a son sorts through her books and her life.

1937: a Jewish boxer rises as a gangster’s enforcer in Warsaw’s underworld.

A Warsaw prosecutor investigates a death during a group therapy weekend.

1939–45: Warsaw’s zookeepers hide Jews in the empty cages and villa of the zoo.

1943: a Jewish widow with false papers is arrested in occupied Warsaw.

1930s: a young writer returns to Krochmalna Street and his childhood love in Warsaw.

1943: Marek Edelman, last leader of the ghetto uprising, looks back at Warsaw.

1939–43: the Warsaw ghetto, from its walling to the uprising, in an archivist’s notes.

A Jewish pianist survives the Warsaw ghetto and the city’s destruction.

1870s: a rich Warsaw merchant ruins himself for a cold aristocrat.

An eccentric old woman in a remote Silesian hamlet suspects animals of killing hunters.

A thousand years of Wrocław, once Breslau, a city passed between nations.

1933: a Breslau detective investigates a grisly murder as the Nazis take power.

1915: Céline’s lost novel, among pimps and deserters in London’s underworld.

1974: a Greek and a Turkish Cypriot meet secretly in a Nicosia tavern.

Twelve Black British women, most of them Londoners, across a century of lives.

A London surgeon’s Saturday collides with the march against the Iraq war.

A young Bangladeshi bride builds a life in a tower block off Brick Lane.

1975–1999: two wartime friends and their families in multicultural north London.

Orwell washes dishes in Paris hotel kitchens, then tramps across London.

One June day, Clarissa Dalloway walks through London to buy flowers for her party.

1886: an anarchist plot to bomb Greenwich goes wrong in the fogs of London.

A beautiful young man stays young in London while his portrait ages.

Holmes and Watson meet in London and solve their first case together.

An orphan falls in with Fagin’s gang of boy thieves in London.

Days before retiring, Rebus investigates the murder of a Russian poet in Edinburgh.

A road-rage attack during the Festival draws strangers into an Edinburgh mystery.

The residents of one New Town tenement, first serialised in an Edinburgh newspaper.

Heroin, friendship and despair among young men in Leith, Edinburgh’s port.

1930s: an unorthodox teacher shapes her chosen girls at an Edinburgh school.

EU officials in Brussels plan a jubilee while a pig runs loose in the streets.

Baudelaire’s furious notes on Brussels, the city he fled to and came to hate.

A lonely English teacher at a Brussels girls’ school, thinly disguised as Villette.

A boy grows up among his hard-drinking father and uncles in a Flemish village.

1939–47: a boy grows up in Flanders through the German occupation.

A widower wanders the silent canals of Bruges, haunted by his dead wife.

A struggling Kyiv writer with a pet penguin is hired to write obituaries in advance.

1910s: a lonely girl grows up in a rich, cold family in Kyiv.

A family in Kyiv waits as armies fight over the city in the civil war.

Two centuries of Odesa, from imperial port to Soviet city.

1900s: Benya Krik and the Jewish gangsters of Odesa’s Moldavanka district.

The first Czech astronaut drifts through space, remembering Prague and his past.

1599: a young doctor finds a murdered woman in the snow of Emperor Rudolf’s Prague.

1942: two parachutists try to kill Heydrich, the Nazi ruler of Prague.

1939–45: daily life in Prague under Nazi occupation, remembered and researched.

A Prague sex worker’s furious, funny monologue on the city after communism.

1968: love and exile in Prague, before and after the Prague Spring.

For 35 years, a Prague cellar worker has crushed banned books, saving the best.

A Prague dog-seller goes cheerfully to war for Austria-Hungary.

A dreamlike tale of Prague’s old Jewish ghetto and its legendary clay giant.

1928–1990: a modernist glass villa in Brno and the lives it shelters.

An American ex-spy follows her husband to Luxembourg and suspects the neighbours.

1828 and today: Luxembourg farmers leave for Brazil; Montenegrin refugees arrive.

A Paris couple hires the perfect nanny; the first page tells you how it ends.

Evicted, a former record-shop owner drifts from sofa to sofa across today’s Paris.

A jaded Sorbonne professor watches Paris change after an Islamic party wins power.

1937–45: a Hungarian Jewish student between Paris and wartime Budapest.

1870s to today: a family’s netsuke pass from Paris to a Vienna palace and the Nazis.

In a grand Paris apartment building, a concierge and a gifted girl hide their inner lives.

June 1940: Parisians flee the advancing German army, and the city empties.

A detective who has lost his memory searches the streets of Paris for his own past.

1920s: young, poor and happy in Hemingway’s Paris of cafés and writers.

A foul-mouthed girl gets two days in Paris, and the metro is on strike.

Twenty hours on the Paris–Rome train, as a man rethinks leaving his wife.

Orwell washes dishes in Paris hotel kitchens, then tramps across London.

Breton wanders Paris after a mysterious young woman he met by chance in the street.

1858: Les Halles, the vast new food market, as a stage for hunger and plenty.

Prose poems of the modern city: crowds, cafés, windows and strangers.

1815–1832: from the sewers to the barricades, the Paris of the poor.

1819: in a shabby Latin Quarter boarding house, a young man learns what Paris costs.

A Marseille cop hunts the killers of two childhood friends in the city’s poor north.

Refugees in Marseille chase the visas and berths that could get them out of France.

1815: a Marseille sailor is betrayed on his wedding day and jailed in the Château d’If.

1937: a country boy works in a Vienna tobacco shop and befriends Sigmund Freud.

1870s to today: a family’s netsuke pass from Paris to a Vienna palace and the Nazis.

A half-Jewish Viennese family and its stories, across the 20th century.

1902: a young doctor and a detective solve a medium’s murder in Freud’s Vienna.

From a wing chair at a Viennese dinner party, a writer rages at his old friends.

A Vienna piano teacher, still living with her mother, begins an affair with a pupil.

In postwar Vienna, divided in four, a writer looks for a friend who died, or didn’t.

1890s–1930s: Zweig’s memoir of Vienna’s golden age, lost to two world wars.

1913: in Vienna, a gifted man drifts as the empire plans a jubilee it will never see.

A Viennese doctor’s night of temptation ends at a secret masked orgy.

A son follows his father’s dementia in their Vorarlberg village.

A woman wakes in an Alpine hunting lodge, cut off from the world by an invisible wall.

Four struggling artists drink and drift in Petržalka, Bratislava’s concrete suburb.

A country boy stokes a Bratislava hotel’s boiler and rises to rule its underworld.

1937–45: a Hungarian Jewish student between Paris and wartime Budapest.

A Brazilian ghostwriter lands in Budapest and falls for Hungarian.

A writer and her secretive housekeeper, over twenty years in Budapest.

1944: a Budapest teenager is deported to Auschwitz, and comes home.

A wealthy Budapest marriage, told in turn by the wife, the husband and the maid.

A quiet maid serves a middle-class Budapest family, until one night.

Two boys’ gangs fight over a vacant lot in Budapest.

1960s: a poor boy’s childhood in a village on the eastern Hungarian plain.

Rain, mud and swindlers in a collapsing collective farm on the Hungarian plain.

A British writer follows Liechtenstein’s footballers through a hopeless World Cup bid.

A small, weak cow in the Liechtenstein Alps prays to give the most milk of all.

1903: three days of violence in Kishinev, and how they shaped the century after.

A bet sends a British comedian to Chișinău to beat the Moldovan football team at tennis.

Bialik’s furious poem on the Kishinev pogrom.

A Bern teacher walks out of class and follows a dead doctor’s words into Salazar’s Lisbon.

A penniless idler loves and wanders around Bern in Walser’s last novel.

A dying Bern inspector investigates a policeman’s murder and an old enemy.

1907–14: a young engineer visits a Davos sanatorium and stays seven years.

An orphan is sent to live with her gruff grandfather high above Maienfeld.

Five voices recall a Ljubljana woman who vanished during the Second World War.

After a failed suicide, a young woman wakes in a Ljubljana asylum with days to live.

Crime stories set in the streets and districts of Zagreb.

A Zagreb journalist sends his cousin to report from Iraq, and it goes badly wrong.

Writers from East and West gather in Zagreb for a conference, and a body turns up.

West’s epic journey through Yugoslavia, from Zagreb to Macedonia.

A young woman returns to her Dalmatian seaside suburb to learn why her brother died.

1942: two SS drivers gas Belgrade’s Jews; a teacher today tries to imagine them.

West’s epic journey through Yugoslavia, from Zagreb to Macedonia.

A Jewish survivor walks postwar Novi Sad, haunted by the family and friends he lost.

1980s: a teacher in Bucharest lives in a strange house and dreams of escape.

1935–44: a Jewish writer records Bucharest’s slide into fascism, day by day.

Paul Morand’s portrait of Bucharest, the “Paris of the East”.

An Englishman lives among the villagers and Roma of Transylvania and Maramureș.

1904–14: Transylvanian aristocrats gamble and love as their world nears its end.

An English bride arrives in San Marino to marry, and the engagement falls through.

1992: a cellist plays for 22 days where a mortar killed 22 people in the siege.

A Chicago writer of Bosnian origin travels back to Sarajevo, chasing an old killing.

An eleven-year-old’s diary of Sarajevo under siege.

Goytisolo’s dispatches from Sarajevo under siege.

West’s epic journey through Yugoslavia, from Zagreb to Macedonia.

A boy from Višegrad remembers his town before the war, and returns as a man.

1516–1914: four centuries of Višegrad, told through its Ottoman stone bridge.

A clerk’s honeymoon in Monte Carlo turns into a hunt for a system to beat the casino.

An American teacher in Sofia and his troubled desire for a young hustler.

A young Kosovan in Helsinki, and his mother’s married life in Yugoslav Kosovo.

An American teaches English in postwar Pristina, with The Old Man and the Sea.

An imaginary Andorra, complete with a sea: an American hides out in its grand hotel.

Not the real Andorra: a parable town turns on a boy it believes is Jewish.

1978: a girl grows up in Titograd, today’s Podgorica, and keeps coming back.

Wives in today’s Skopje speak, wryly and sharply, about the men they married.

Twin sisters joined at the head grow up in Skopje as Yugoslavia falls apart.

West’s epic journey through Yugoslavia, from Zagreb to Macedonia.

The Pope is dead, and the cardinals are locked inside the Vatican to choose the next.

A symbologist races through Rome’s churches to save the Vatican’s conclave.

A swindle claims the Pope is held prisoner in the Vatican’s cellars.

Locals, migrants and visitors in the Rome of today.

A satanist sect and a has-been writer crash a tycoon’s lavish party in a Rome park.

A year in Rome with newborn twins, as a writer walks the city and its past.

79–64 BC: Cicero’s rise through the courts and backrooms of republican Rome.

A symbologist races through Rome’s churches to save the Vatican’s conclave.

1941–47: a widow and her son struggle through bombed Rome.

Twenty hours on the Paris–Rome train, as a man rethinks leaving his wife.

1940s: boys from Rome’s postwar slums live by petty theft on the city’s edges.

A screenwriter’s marriage falls apart during a film shoot in Rome and Capri.

2nd century: the dying emperor Hadrian looks back on his life and on Rome.

A swindle claims the Pope is held prisoner in the Vatican’s cellars.

AD 64: Nero’s Rome burns, and a Roman officer falls for a Christian girl.

A young French priest comes to Rome to defend his book before the Vatican.

Stendhal’s walks through Rome: churches, gossip and ruins.

1950s: two girls grow up in a poor, violent neighbourhood of Naples.

Inside the Camorra, the crime clans that run Naples and its hinterland.

1944: a British intelligence officer’s diary of Naples just after liberation.

Naples under Allied occupation: starving, corrupt and burning with life.

1981: the Guide’s chosen successor is found dead in his Tirana bedroom.

1990: a girl in Durrës learns that everything she was taught about Albania was false.

2004: a young American poet on a fellowship in Madrid, as the train bombings strike.

A Madrid editor grows obsessed with a couple she watched at breakfast, until his murder.

1620s: a soldier and swordsman for hire in the streets of Madrid.

1943: three days in Madrid, around one café and its hundreds of customers.

A blind poet’s last night wandering Madrid’s taverns and cells.

1870s: two women, one rich, one poor, love the same man in Madrid.

14th century: a serf’s son rises in Barcelona as Santa Maria del Mar is built.

1945: a boy finds a forgotten novel in the Cemetery of Forgotten Books, in Barcelona.

1930s–40s: a young woman in Gràcia lives through the Republic and the war.

An orphan comes to study in postwar Barcelona and lodges with her strange family.

Orwell joins the militias and watches revolutionary Barcelona turn on itself.

An Angolan father and son wait for a better life in the shacks on Lisbon’s outskirts.

A Bern teacher walks out of class and follows a dead doctor’s words into Salazar’s Lisbon.

A teenage girl’s murder leads a Lisbon detective back to Nazi gold and wartime Portugal.

1938: a quiet newspaper editor wakes up to Salazar’s Lisbon in a stifling summer.

1936: Pessoa’s alter ego returns to a rain-soaked Lisbon as fascism rises.

A bookkeeper in the Baixa dreams his life away in fragments, above Rua dos Douradores.

1942: a refugee in Lisbon trades the story of his life for two tickets to America.

1800s: a boy in Porto befriends Midnight, an African healer brought there as a slave.

Workers on the edges of Athens and Piraeus, as the debt crisis takes hold.

An Athens inspector chases the murder of a TV reporter who was on to a story.

Henry Miller travels Greece, starting in Athens with a larger-than-life guide.

5th century BC: a rich Athenian gives his fortune away and finds no friends left.

416 BC: a dinner party in Athens where Socrates and friends speak in praise of love.

Socrates mocked on the Athenian stage, as a father tries to dodge his debts.

1939–57: a family’s story unfolds around Spinalonga, Crete’s leper colony.

1910s: a bookish narrator and the exuberant Zorba reopen a lignite mine on Crete.

1940–42: a humble priest shelters Valletta’s people in the catacombs during the siege.

1919 and 1940s: the hunt for the mysterious V. leads to Valletta.

1565: the Knights hold Malta against the Ottomans, and Valletta is built after.

1974: a Greek and a Turkish Cypriot meet secretly in a Nicosia tavern.

Durrell’s years in Cyprus, as the island slides toward conflict.

1972–74: a couple’s glamorous hotel in Famagusta, as war approaches Cyprus.