The Taliban have disappeared from Kabul's streets, but the long shadows of their brutal regime remain....

In his short life, 11-year-old Fawad has known more grief than most: his father and brother have been killed; his sister has been abducted; and Fawad and his mother, Mariya, must rely on the charity of family to eke out a hand-to-mouth existence.

But despite their struggles, Fawad's love of life never fades.

Mariya then finds a position as housekeeper for a charismatic Western woman, Georgie, whom Fawad discovers is caught up in a dangerous love affair with the infamous Afghan warlord Haji Khan.

Cyprus, 1955 - a guerrilla war is raging and four Greek brothers are growing up to the familiar sounds of exploding bombs and sniper fire.

Determined to avenge the death of his elder brother and to win the heart of his beloved Praxi, young Loukis joins a cell of schoolboy terrorists operating in the mountains. But when his cohorts blow themselves up in a freak accident, he returns home in shock, yearning for the warm embrace of his family - and of his sweetheart.

But his adored Praxi is now married to someone else, and playing at her feet is a young toddler...

Fierce snowstorms have battered Upper Austria, paralysing the region in the grip of an early and unforgiving winter.

Nine-year-old Traudi wakes up to find she's alone in the house. Cut off from the nearby hamlet of Hallstatt, she senses something is wrong. Then, when daylight fades and she catches sight of blood stains on the snow, she realises she may not be as alone as she had previously thought.

As Traudi prays for her family's return, the local mountain rescue team receive an emergency call. Leo Hirsch, the group's leader, is battling a loss of his own and finds the mission a welcome distraction, little knowing that this rescue will turn out to be like nothing he has encountered before.

Cara, Lillian and Emilia are three women of a certain age who have only one thing in common – a love of animals.

Sadly, on the Mediterranean island they call home, they witness appalling animal cruelty and after learning of a puppy’s death in a cardboard crushing machine, the three friends decide to do something about it.

They then find themselves responsible for one of the most intriguing, and in some quarters celebrated, crime sprees in modern Cypriot history.

Untethered is more than a tale about animal rescue, it’s a story of love, loss and the incredible power of female friendship.

After fleeing their home in Romania, Mala and her family travel to France to make an offering to Sara e Kali – patron saint of the Roma whose statue rests in a small church in Saintes Maries de la Mer. Once the family’s pilgrimage is complete, they seek refuge among their own during a time when anti-Roma sentiment is running high. As the government begins to expel hundreds of foreign-born ‘gypsies’, a local man arrives at the travellers’ camp wanting to learn about the Roma and it falls to Mala to tell their story.

Five stories covering one thousand years, The Words That Made Us chronicles the mistrust, misunderstandings and monstrous cruelty that has followed a scattered nation whose only crime was that of being different.