Read Snow

A murder among Ottoman miniaturists in 1591 Istanbul, told by everyone including the colour red.

Russians remember the end of the Soviet Union and the 1990s; Alexievich's chorus.

Solzhenitsyn's literary investigation of the camps from 227 witnesses; the abridged edition is enough.

The last day of Trujillo, the Dominican dictator, and a woman who returns; Vargas Llosa.

Choice architecture and how a default option changes what people do; Thaler's Nobel idea.

Read Conversation in the Cathedral, Mario Vargas Llosa's great novel of power, corruption and Lima

Four generations of a Lubeck merchant family in decline; Mann's Nobel novel at 26.

Seven years in a Davos sanatorium arguing about Europe before 1914.