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 …
Tag: Fiction
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 …
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 …
Not a River: Selva Almada
Translated from Spanish by Annie McDermottPublished by Charco Press, 2024, 99 pages. Original version published in 2021. Three men go to an island in the Paraná Delta in Argentina to fish: two middle-aged men, El Negro and Enero, and a younger one, Tilo, son of their dead friend Eusebio. They are haunted by the death …
Middlemarch—A Study of Provincial Life: George Eliot
Published by Penguin / Everyman's Library, first published in 1871-72, 364 pages. Welcome to Middlemarch: an English town in the Midlands, during the late 1800s, home to dreamers, idealists, people trying to remake themselves, and people on the make. They represent a cross-section of society: landowners, traders, estate managers, artists, clerics and workers. The people …
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