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Jacob Frank, an 18th-century Jewish messiah, across Poland and Turkey in 900 pages numbered backwards.

Four generations of a Korean family in Japan from 1910; Min Jin Lee's epic.

A distillery family in Shandong during the Japanese invasion; Mo Yan's Nobel novel behind Zhang Yimou's film.

Two Peking opera stars across fifty years of Chinese history; the only Chinese Palme d'Or.

A family through forty years of Chinese history, from the civil war to the Cultural Revolution.

Jet Li tells the King of Qin three versions of a story, each in a different colour.