International fiction
Bird Life by Anna Smaill
Bird Life is a profoundly poignant and mesmerising second novel from Booker Prize-nominated Anna Smaill. Set in Tokyo, the novel follows two women, Dinah and Yasuko, who are dealing with trauma from recent loss. Dinah is haunted by the sudden…
My Friends by Hisham Matar
From the very first page, Hisham Matar’s My Friends bursts with bittersweet nostalgia for places and friendships lost, found, and changed. This timely, mournful novel spans a day as the main character Khaled walks across London, and reflects on the…
Come and Get It by Kiley Reid
Campus novels are all the rage, aren’t they? That intoxicating mix of students going wild and the power held by academic sorts. Love affairs. Friendships. Enormous questions about life choices. Kiley Reid’s second novel does explore all the above, but…
Water by John Boyne
This is the first of a projected group of books to be followed by Fire, Earth and Air. The narrator is Vanessa Carvin, a woman fleeing an unknown family tragedy or scandal in Dublin. She has come to…
Baumgartner by Paul Auster
The opening chapter of this book is a beautifully modulated introduction to the life of philosophy professor and 71-year-old widower Sy Baumgartner. Sy roams the rooms of his brownstone, burning his hand on a saucepan that he boiled dry, wondering…
Let Us Descend by Jesmyn Ward
Jesmyn Ward’s new novel, Let Us Descend, has been eagerly anticipated since it was announced, and comes six years after her last. Ward has won the National Book Award twice – for Sing, Unburied, Sing (2017) and Salvage the…
I Hear You're Rich: Stories by Diane Williams
Diane Williams, the ‘godmother of flash fiction’, returns with a stunning collection of stories that beguile and unsettle you with their realistic charms and tragedies.
In the first story ‘Oriel?’, a soon-to-be mother feels anxiety over what to name her…
The Postcard by Anne Berest & Tina Kover (trans.)
A postcard arrives in the Berest family’s mail in 2003, containing only four handwritten words, each the given name of a relative who died in the Holocaust. ‘Who could have written this terrible thing?’ wonders Lélia, the granddaughter and niece…
Good Material by Dolly Alderton
Dolly Alderton has done it again. Whether you’re a regular fan, or this is your first experience of a Dolly Alderton book, you won’t be disappointed.
In Good Material, we follow 35-year-old Andy, who has just been dumped by…
The Future by Naomi Alderman
The author of the brilliant dystopian novel The Power, which won the Women’s Prize for Fiction in 2017, has given us another fable about the near future, this time skewering the digital tech titans and their escape plans for…
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