ButterThe cult Japanese bestseller about a female gourmet cook and serial killer and the journalist intent on cracking her case, inspired by a true story, and translated by Polly Barton. There are two things that I can simply not tolerate: feminists and margarine. Gourmet cook Manako Kajii sits in Tokyo Detention Centre convicted of the serial murders of lonely businessmen, who she is said to have seduced with her delicious home cooking. The case has

from the 1917 Balfour Declaration to the destruction of Palestine in 1948

A pithy and brilliant introduction to Susan Sontag’s writing on women

Matt Owens was born and raised in Texas

offers a powerful counter-narrative to the literary landscape of Malay fiction dominated by male writers

The tree distributes its wealth—its abundance of sweet

Lacoste then turns his attention to Ibn Khaldun’s majestic Universal History

What's left to say

and Israel Rosenfield

and the Dionne Quints

but also to arrive at symmetry and wholeness

Ex-library

Syed Hussein Alatas analyses the origins of the myth of the ‘lazy native’ from the 16th to the 20th century in Malaysia