A man and a woman meet in Lisbon and fall in love. City of Ulysses is their story, and the city’s love story besides. It is a story that leads readers down multiple paths, through myth and history, reality and fantasy, literature and the visual arts, the past and the present, male and female relations, the crisis of civilisation and the need to reimagine the world.

Andre Diniz tells the extraordinary story of Mauricio Hora, who lives in one of the most dangerous slums (favelas) in Rio, Brazil. In spite of the odds, Hora has made a name for himself internationally as a photographer. We are led from his challenging childhood, living with his drug dealer father, up to the present day."

Rio de Janeiro. A family hotel whose clients reflect Brazilian society, multi-racial, with starkly contrasting backgrounds, and destitute. Rio is the perfect backdrop with its dictatorships, drug wars, child gangs and violent policing tactics. The first victim is found decapitated in bed, the head lying on the floor of his room. An eerie Mona Lisa smile on the victim's face and no evidence of a struggle indicate a murderer received as a friend. Other hotel guests are eventually killed, all decapitated. A classical crime novel in one way but really an opportunity for the author to describe Brazilian society, especially those left behind. Fascinating back stories are told such as that of the maid who dreams of making it in television soaps, and the female pimp who has survived incestuous rape, wrapped in a suspenseful intrigue that could have been thought up by Ruth Rendell.

On Mount Gurugu, overlooking the Spanish enclave of Melilla on the North African coast, desperate migrants gather before attempting to scale the city's walls and gain asylum on European soil. Inspired by firsthand accounts, Juan Tomas Avila Laurel has written an urgent novel, by turns funny and sad, bringing a distinctly African perspective to a major issue of our time.