International fiction
Held by Anne Michaels
Fellow fans of Anne Michaels’ novels will have learnt the art of patience: Michaels’ prize-winning debut, Fugitive Pieces (a key touchstone in my personal reading autobiography, as it will be for many people) was written in 1997, and was followed…
Death Valley by Melissa Broder
A woman drives out to a Best Western motel in the desert alone. A Best Western connoisseur, she is looking to find comfort and to remedy the overwhelming emptiness she feels. Her father is on life support in hospital, and…
Welcome to the Hyunam-dong Bookshop by Hwang Bo-reum & Shanna Tan (trans.)
As a reader, you’ve probably been asked numerous times by non-readers in your life, ‘Why do you like to read so much?’ And if you’re like me, your first thought might be, ‘How can I possibly explain this to you?’…
The Premonition by Banana Yoshimoto & Asa Yoneda (trans.)
‘I had a premonition of setting out on a journey and getting lost inside a distant tide as the sun went down, ending up far, far away from where I started.’
Although Yayoi lives a happy life with her quintessentially…
And Then She Fell by Alicia Elliott
Alice is a member of the Mohawk nation and a new mother living in Toronto with Steve, her loving, white, professor husband. Steve specialises in the study of her tribe and is even learning to speak Mohawk. Alice is unsure…
Light Over Liskeard by Louis de Bernières
If all the computers and machines in the world stopped due to a cyber attack, then in all probability humanity would dissolve into anarchy and at its bleakest would be obliterated – unless you were a survivalist. Louis de Bernière’s…
Roman Stories by Jhumpa Lahiri & Todd Portnowitz (trans.)
For the uninitiated, Roman Stories is just the kind of short story collection you’d expect from Pulitzer Prize-winning multi-lingual author Jhumpa Lahiri.
Originally written in Italian and then translated into English, Roman Stories gives us a snippet of the lives…
Rouge: A Novel by Mona Awad
A modern fairytale meets cult meets critique of our obsession with looking young forever. Mona Awad’s latest novel follows skincare-obsessed Mirabelle as she returns to California for her mother’s funeral, where she must face the (literal) demons of her past…
Days at the Morisaki Bookshop by Satoshi Yagisawa & Eric Ozawa (trans.)
Born and raised in Kyushu, a southern island of Japan, Takako relocates to Tokyo to pursue life in the big city after graduating from a local college. Life seems to be going quite well until, one Friday night in June…
Wednesday's Child by Yiyun Li
It’s hard to believe that the 11 stories that make up Wednesday’s Child were written over a span of 14 years. Yiyun Li has made them feel as if they belong together, as if they were written to exist together…
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