Translated from Japanese by Jim Rion.Published by Pushkin Vertigo, 2023, 348 pages. Original version published in 1973. Japan 1947. The end of the Second World War has resulted in social upheaval, and the aristocracy has lost its privileges, which earns it the moniker of the “sunset clan”. This novel is about one of these families. …
Category: Fiction
Eurotrash: Christian Kracht
Translated from German by Daniel BowlesPublished by Serpent's Tail, 2024, 190 pages. Original version published in 2021. “So I shall go on a trip with her, I’d thought, and maybe it will be her last.” A man takes his 80-year-old mother for a trip around their native Switzerland, revisiting places from their past—and in the …
Homesick: Jennifer Croft
Published by Charco Press, 2022, 219 pages. “All of us are anything, everything, brimming with secrets. Above all we are the shelter we seek out in others and the safe havens we become for those we choose to love.” Amy and Zoe are sisters. Amy is older by three years and is very protective of …
Heart Lamp—Selected Stories: Banu Mushtaq
Translated from Kannada by Deepa BhasthiPublished by Penguin India / And Other Stories, 2025, 216 pages. Original versions of stories first published in 2013 and 2023. A woman whose husband leaves her for another woman is saved by her children; a man who becomes obsessed with a pair of high-heeled shoes forces his wife to …
Time Shelter: Georgi Gospodinov
Translated from Bulgarian by Angela RodelPublished by Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2023, 304 pages. Original version published in 2020. What if there was a way to turn back the clock and live in the past? A geriatric psychiatrist called Gaustine, living in Zurich, believes that patients with dementia and Alzheimer’s can be helped by going into …
Polite Conversations: Usha Raman
Published by Bee Fiction, 2024, 416 pages. “Beneath the thin fabric that packaged families, there were so many tangled threads, little knots of resentment and bundles of unexpressed anger that reveal themselves in unexpected ways. How much energy they spent on hiding them from view, maintaining the fiction of smoothness, of harmony, of normalcy—whatever that …
The Annual Banquet of the Gravediggers’ Guild: Mathias Enard
Translated from French by Frank WynnePublished by Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2023, 486 pages. Original version published in 2020. David Mazon, a student of ethnography in Paris, moves for a year to La Pierre-Saint-Christophe, a village in the Deux-Sèvres region of western France, to conduct research for his thesis on agrarian life. He finds a place to …
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Mephisto: Klaus Mann
Translated from German by Robin SmythPublished by Penguin, 1977, 263 pages. Original version published in 1936. “What do men want from me? Why do they pursue me? Why are they so hard? All I am is a perfectly ordinary actor...” Hendrik Höfgen is, first and foremost, an actor. In fact, that could describe him entirely. …
Mother India: Prayaag Akbar
Published by Fourth Estate, 2024, 168 pages Mayang is a young man working for Kashyap, a right-wing content producer in Delhi. Kashyap’s only criteria is to rile people up: there is no question of journalistic integrity or fact-checking. As Kashyap puts it, “To make an impact on the internet you don’t need ideas, you need …
Four Seasons in Japan: Nick Bradley
Published by Penguin, 2023, 326 pages. Flo is an American translator working in Tokyo. She is unhappy—her partner Yuki is planning to leave for the US, and Flo cannot bring herself to leave Tokyo and join her. She has not told her two friends, Kyoko and Makoto, anything about Yuki and does not confide in …
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