Translated from Japanese by Jay Rubin and Philip GabrielPublished by Vintage Prepare to walk into Haruki Murakami’s strange world. You can slip through the thin barrier between this world and an alternate one simply by taking an emergency exit off a highway or ghost-writing a particular book. Things are just a bit off in this …
Keeping readers on edge: An interview with Stuart Turton
Photo: Charlotte Graham Stuart Turton is a British novelist and journalist. His first book, The Seven Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle, won the First Novel Award at the 2018 Costa Book Awards, and Best Novel at the Books Are My Bag Readers Awards. His second novel, The Devil and the Dark Water, won the 2020 Books …
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Consolations of the Forest—Alone in a Cabin in the Middle Taiga: Sylvain Tesson
Translated from French by Linda CoverdalePublished by Penguin “I’d promised myself that before I turned forty I would live as a hermit deep in the woods.” That was Sylvain Tesson’s promise to himself, a promise that he kept. Tesson spent six months in a cabin on the shore of Lake Baikal in Siberia from February …
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Death in Her Hands: Ottessa Moshfegh
Published by Penguin Press “Her name was Magda. Nobody will ever know who killed her. It wasn’t me. Here is her dead body.” Vesta, a woman in her 70s, has recently been widowed. After her husband’s death, she sells her house and buys an isolated cabin near a lake across the country, where she lives …
Manhattan Beach: Jennifer Egan
Published by Scribner New York, 1934. Eddie takes his 11-year-old daughter Anna to a meeting with Dexter Styles, a gangster who has married the daughter of a well-known New York senator. As they drive up to Styles’s house by the beach, Anna notices that her father is nervous, something that is unusual for him. Eddie …
The Snow Leopard: Peter Matthiessen
Published by Vintage and Penguin I read The Snow Leopard when I was in my early 20s, and I loved it enough to put it on my list of 10 favourite books—where it has stayed since then. Published in 1978, The Snow Leopard is a classic, blending travel and philosophy. Peter Matthiessen was an American …
A Case of Exploding Mangoes: Mohammed Hanif
Published by Vintage Books and Random House A plane is parked on a runway, and a group of men is walking towards it. They include General Zia ul-Haq, the President of Pakistan; Arnold Raphael, the American Ambassador to Pakistan; and General Akhtar Abdur Rahman, the head of the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), Pakistan’s secret service. The …
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Moving easily among different genres: An interview with Jerry Pinto
Photo: Jerry Pinto Jerry Pinto is an Indian poet, writer and translator. His first novel, Em and the Big Hoom, won several awards, including The Hindu Literary Prize, the Sahitya Akademy Award, Crossword Book Award (Fiction) and the Windham-Campbell Literature Prizes (Fiction). His biography of the Bollywood actress, Helen: The Life and Times of an …
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Suraiya Hasan Bose—Weaving a Legacy: Radhika Singh
Published by Tarapress “Suraiya Hasan Bose is a name inscribed into the craft map of Andhra Pradesh. It speaks of a lifetime of passion and commitment to the cause of handloom from pre-Independence India to the present day.” This book pays tribute to Suraiya Hasan Bose and her lifelong association with Indian handlooms, especially those …
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Shuggie Bain: Douglas Stuart
Published by Picador Shuggie Bain is a compelling story about addiction and its fallout, set in the working-class community in Glasgow. Shuggie Bain’s mother Agnes is an alcoholic. Shuggie’s father Big Shug, a taxi driver, is Agnes’s second husband. She has two children, Catherine and Leek, from her first husband. Agnes and the children live …
