Let the Great World Spin
by Colum McCann | 
TransAtlantic
by Colum McCann | 
This Side of Brightness
by Colum McCann | 
Zoli
by Colum McCann | 
The Beginning of Spring
by Penelope Fitzgerald | 
To the Hermitage
by Malcolm Bradbury | 
The Right Hand of Sleep
by John Wray | 
A City of Bells
by Elizabeth Goudge | 
The Translator
by John Crowley | 
Riven Rock
by T. Coraghessan Boyle | 
Requiem for a Lost Empire
by Andrei Makine | 
The Pursuit of Happiness
by Douglas Kennedy | 
Losing Nelson
by Barry Unsworth | 
Signals of Distress
by Jim Crace | 
The People's Act of Love
by James Meek | 
The Anatomist
by Federico Andahazi | 
The Other Side of the Sun
by Madeleine L'Engle | 
Consider the Lily
by Elizabeth Buchan | 
The Short History of a Prince
by Jane Hamilton | 
The First Circle
by Alexander Solzhenitsyn |
Taking his inspiration from biographical facts, novelist Colum McCann tells the erotically charged story of the Russian dancer Rudolf Nureyev through the cast of those who knew him: there is Anna Vasileva, Rudi's first ballet teacher, who rescues her protégé from the stunted life of his provincial town; Yulia, whose sexual and artistic ambitions are thwarted by her Soviet-sanctioned marriage; and Victor, the Venezuelan street hustler, who reveals the lurid underside of the gay celebrity set. Spanning four decades and many worlds, from the horrors of the Second World War to the wild abandon of New York in the eighties, Dancer is peopled by a large cast of characters, obscure and famous: doormen and shoemakers, nurses and translators, Margot Fonteyn, Eric Bruhn and John Lennon. And at the heart of the spectacle stands the artist himself, willful, lustful, and driven by a never-to-be-met need for perfection.