Translated from German by Tess LewisPublished by And Other Stories, 2023, 495 pages. Original version published in 2020. East Germany, November 1989. The Berlin Wall has fallen. Carl Bischoff, a student, is heading home, summoned by a telegram from his parents saying, “we need help please do come immediately your parents”. When Carl gets home, …
Category: Fiction
The Eighth Life (for Brilka): Nino Haratischvili
Translated from German by Charlotte Collins and Ruth Martin.Published by Scribe, 2019, 934 pages. Original version published in 2014. “And I’m afraid of these stories. These stories that constantly run in parallel, chaotically; that appear in the foreground, conceal themselves, interrupt one another. Because they connect and break through each other, they betray and mislead, …
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Wandering Stars: Tommy Orange
Published by Harvill Secker, 2024, 317 pages. “We come from prisoners of a long war that didn’t stop even when it stopped.” In 2018, Tommy Orange published his debut novel, There There, which follows a group of Native Americans in Oakland, California, as they prepare for a powwow. Wandering Stars, in a sense, nests that …
The Ghost Woods: C.J. Cooke
Published by Harper Collins Publishers, 2022, 408 pages. Lichen Hall, the Scottish Borders. A place where unmarried pregnant women are sent to give birth and where their babies are given up for adoption. It is not an institution in the way the Magdalene Laundries were; Mrs. Whitlock, the owner of Lichen Hall, has set up …
The Fury and Cries of Women: Angèle Rawiri
Translated from French by Sara HanaburghPublished by University of Virginia Press, 2014, 223 pages. Original version published in 1989. This book by Angèle Rawiri, considered the first novelist from Gabon, is about the position of women in a society that has modernized without ridding itself of traditional roles. Emilienne, a woman in a fictional African …
The Remains: Margo Glantz
Translated from Spanish by Ellen JonesPublished by Charco Press, 2023, 134 pages. Original version published in 2002. “Life is an absurd wound”(from La Última Curda by Cátulo Castillo and Aníbal Triolo) Nora García, a cellist, drives to a village in Mexico for the funeral of her ex-husband Juan, a renowned composer and pianist. As she …
Venus in Copper: Lindsey Davis
Published by Arrow Books / Random House, 1991, 318 pages. Rome, AD 71. Marcus Didius Falco, a private investigator who sometimes works for the Emperor Vespasian, is in jail, mostly because he has earned the enmity of the Chief Spy Anacrites. Falco had been sent to Campania by the emperor to clear up Anacrites’s mess, …
The Extinction of Irena Rey: Jennifer Croft
Published by Scribe, 2024, 309 pages. “It was our seventh pilgrimage to the village at the edge of the primeval forest where she lived. ... She loved that forest as much as we loved her books, which, without a fraction of a second’s hesitation, we would have laid down our lives to defend. We treated …
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Perestroika—An Eye for an Eye, A Tooth for a Tooth: João Cerqueira
Translated from Portuguese by Garry Craig PowellPublished by 8th House Publishing, 2024, 394 pages. Original version published in 2024. This is the portrait of a dictatorship and its aftermath, told through the lives of ordinary people as well as those in power. Set in a fictional Eastern European country called Slavia, the first part of …
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The Wildings: Nilanjana Roy
Published by Pushkin Press, 2012, 322 pages. The stray cats of Nizamuddin are on edge. They sense a new cat in their neighbourhood. This is no ordinary feline: this is a Sender. The cats of Nizamuddin, an old neighbourhood of Delhi, can communicate with each other over long distances, not just by mews but by …
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