International fiction
Greenwood by Michael Christie
Every generation experiences a catastrophe: history can be read as a series of apocalypses. Do you think the people affected by the Dust Bowl felt like the Plebs during the Fall of Rome? Will we all feel these same experiences…
Braised Pork by An Yu
Wu Jia Jia is abruptly widowed in her early thirties when her husband inexplicably drowns in the bath. Cast adrift with little money and even less sense of direction, she is haunted by the sketch her husband left behind of…
Strange Hotel by Eimear McBride
Hotels are strange places to exist – each is different, but there’s an element of same-ness to them. The room might be big or small, have blinds or curtains, be spotless or grimy, but there’s still the underlying uniformity of…
A Long Petal of the Sea by Isabel Allende
Isabel Allende is an incredible, prolific and successful author. She has written twenty-three books that have been translated into forty-two languages with more than 74 million copies sold across the world. Each story she tells is distinctive, accessible and always…
Such a Fun Age by Kiley Reid
Kiley Reid’s debut arrives after a major publisher bidding war. It is easy to see why – Such a Fun Age is an immensely readable and topical novel that opens with a volatile event that shapes everything that follows.
Emira…
Olive, Again by Elizabeth Strout
In Olive, Again, Elizabeth Strout returns to the familiar territory of Olive Kitteridge, the titular character of her 2008 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel and arguably the author’s most memorable creation. Set once again in the fictional coastal town of Crosby…
The Starless Sea by Erin Morgenstern
Erin Morgenstern’s award-winning debut novel The Night Circus is one of those wonderful books that swallows you whole, rendering the world of a magical carnival in such vivid prose that you can almost taste the caramel corn. Eight years after…
Beyond the Sea by Paul Lynch
Bolivar, an experienced, albeit aging, fisherman of meagre means and scant ambition in an unnamed South American seaside location, sets off with the inexperienced, teenaged Hector against conventional wisdom – in the face of inclement weather in a small skiff…
Body Tourists by Jane Rogers
Mortality, fear of aging and the desire to be young again have always been popular topics for fiction (just think The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde). In Body Tourists by Jane Rogers, which is set roughly twenty-five years…
In Love with George Eliot by Kathy O’Shaughnessy
I have been stuck at page thirty-nine of Middlemarch for going on four years now. So when the chance to read about being in love with George Eliot arose, I grabbed it in the hope of finding the spark of…