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 …
Cycling Across the Middle East: An Interview with Rebecca Lowe
Rebecca Lowe is a British journalist specializing in the Middle East and human rights. Her book, The Slow Road to Tehran: A Revelatory Bike Ride through Europe and the Middle East (2022), was shortlisted for the Edward Stanford Travel Book of the Year Award 2023. Rebecca has written for the BBC, The Guardian, The Times, …
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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 …
The Palm-Wine Drinkard: Amos Tutuola
Published by Faber & Faber, 1952, 136 pages. This is the story of a man who does nothing but drink palm wine, something he has done since he was ten years old. His father, realizing that his son would never do anything else, gives him a palm-tree farm with 560,000 palm trees so that he …
The Gurkha’s Daughter: Prajwal Parajuly
Published by Quercus, 2013, 296 pages. A maid with a cleft lip dreams about going to India, a daughter tries to understand her father’s problems, a young woman chooses the wrong husband, and a young man gets so worked up about relatives visiting his tiny house that he ends up upsetting everyone around him. These …
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