International fiction
Are You Happy Now by Hanna Jameson
Hanna Jameson’s Are You Happy Now follows two overlapping and imperfect love stories, both of which begin at the same time and place as a frightening worldwide phenomenon. The novel’s four protagonists – Yun, Emory, Andrew, and Fin – are…
Sweet, Soft, Plenty Rhythm by Laura Warrell
It’s 2013 and Circus is a divorced 40-year-old jazz musician. He is selfish, obsessed with women, and afraid he will never make it big – he lives for music. He barely sees his 15-year-old daughter, Koko, and has just found…
Victory City by Salman Rushdie
Before we consider Salman Rushdie’s new novel, let’s pause for a moment to reflect on the dreadful, violent, and public attack on him last year. Incredibly, this act of terror did not deter his heart, although the physical repercussions remain…
Age of Vice by Deepti Kapoor
This latest release from Deepti Kapoor is not your conventional crime thriller-slash-police procedural. It is very far from it. Rather, Kapoor has delivered an expansive, cinematic literary thriller.
At the outset, five people are killed when an expensive car ploughs…
Euphoria by Elin Cullhed
Struggling with the demands of young children and a writing career, Swedish author Elin Cullhed became obsessed by the life of poet and author Sylvia Plath. Plath famously tried to carve out time for her writing as she dealt with…
Dead-End Memories by Banana Yoshimoto & Asa Yoneda (trans.)
Banana Yoshimoto’s acclaimed and internationally beloved 1988 novella Kitchen was one of my favourite reads of this year, and it was always going to be a hard act to follow. With Dead-End Memories, I had nothing to worry about…
Ghost Music by An Yu
You’ve just woken up. Your dream, which was once so vivid and tightly held in your grasp, has now slipped through your fingers as your body begins to awaken more by the second. All that’s left are whispers of memories…
Our Share of Night by Mariana Enríquez & Megan McDowell (trans.)
Deeply unsettling yet riveting, Our Share of Night is the latest contribution from Argentine writer Mariana Enríquez to the Latin American horror genre. Tying together Argentinian folklore with occult canon, Enríquez creates a vivid world backdropped by political violence and…
Motherthing by Ainslie Hogarth
To paraphrase Charles Dickens in A Christmas Carol, the mother-in-law was dead to begin with. Laura Lamb, complex, manipulative mother of Ralph, has taken her own life in the basement of his childhood home. Now Abi is left to…
Illuminations by Alan Moore
Alan Moore is the big beardy guy who gets pointed at when I’m asked, ‘Hey, who singlehandedly transformed superhero comics into dark, gritty and occasionally poetic narratives back in the 1980s?’ Moore’s re-envisioning of the genre brought superheroes’ flaws to…
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