International fiction
Weather by Jenny Offill
If I were more paranoid than I am willing to admit, I would be ruminating very seriously on when and how Jenny Offill (or her agents) entered my brain, extracted many of my thoughts, concerns, and neuroses, and put them…
Indelicacy by Amina Cain
Vitória is a cleaning woman in a museum, but longs to be a writer. She meets and swiftly marries a wealthy man, who wants her to do nothing but relax. With this new-found leisure, Vitória works diligently, obsessively, on her…
Topics of Conversation by Miranda Popkey
Miranda Popkey’s debut novel is a narrative told in ten conversations that occur between 2000 and 2017. The unnamed female narrator converses with her employer, her mother, a group of friends left at a house party, a man she has…
Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982 by Cho Nam-joo
When Kim Jiyoung starts exhibiting bizarre behaviours, her husband takes her to a psychiatrist. What follows is a succinct account of Jiyoung’s life, from birth to elementary school, from the office to her days at home caring for a small…
Here We Are by Graham Swift
Graham Swift knows that life is a haphazard business, that experience and understanding, memory too, do not emerge in orderly fashion. He also knows that the dramas of life are tiny pools in the great flood of years. His novels…
The Night Watchman by Louise Erdrich
Native American author Louise Erdrich’s new novel, set amongst the inhabitants of the Turtle Mountain Reservation, is a welldrawn and sprawling portrait of a community in peril. Based in part on Erdrich’s grandfather’s own efforts in the mid1950s to stop…
Apeirogon by Colum McCann
This is quite a surprising novel in its structure made up of a series of numbered passages. Every passage is connected in some way and at times not in ways that are immediately obvious. It is based on two real-life…
Adults by Emma Jane Unsworth
Jenny McLaine, writer and Instagram addict, should have it together. She’s thirty-five, she owns her own house, and she’s a successful feminist columnist. Only, her famous photographer boyfriend has left her for one of the Insta-famous, she’s getting fired from…
Djinn Patrol on the Purple Line by Deepa Anappara
Have you ever been through periods when most books you pick up fail to ignite that magical spark? I’ve just emerged from one and Djinn Patrol on the Purple Line has been my saviour. Set in an imaginary Indian city…
Highfire by Eoin Colfer
Vern is a dragon. The last one, in fact, and as such he is made up of about twenty per cent misery and bitterness, and eighty per cent sarcasm. He spends his life hiding alone in the Louisiana swamps –…