International fiction
The Paying Guests by Sarah Waters
Set in London in 1922 – a city still reeling after World War I and in the midst of a rapidly transforming social order – Sarah Waters’s sixth novel addresses the crumbling prestige of the genteel class and the transitioning…
The Bone Clocks by David Mitchell
In his award-winning 2004 novel, Cloud Atlas, British author David Mitchell interwove six disparate stories to form a narrative tapestry, taking the reader on a journey from 1850 to a post-apocalyptic future. Mitchell clearly realised from the positive reception…
We Are Not Ourselves by Matthew Thomas
We Are Not Ourselves, Michael Thomas’s debut novel, caused quite a stir at the London Book Fair last year, sparking a bidding war between UK and US publishers for the rights. There was much competition among Readings staff, too…
Trilobites and Other Stories by Breece D’J Pancake
It’s inevitable that when reading Trilobites, the collected short stories of Breece D’J Pancake, that we come to consider the backstory of the author. This slim volume was pulled together after Pancake took his own life, at the age…
The Zone of Interest by Martin Amis
The prophecy in Macbeth is fulfilled when, after so much murderous blood has been spilt, he sees no sense in stopping, which according to Martin Amis is the precise nature of the Holocaust. Opening with a witch’s cauldron and climaxing…
Vogliamo Tutto (we want everything) by Nanni Balestrini
The student and worker movements of the late sixties in France and Italy are often not well understood these days. More often than not, they are depicted in contemporary film and literature as the backdrop to a romance or coming-of-age…
To Rise Again at a Decent Hour by Joshua Ferris
New York dentist Paul O’Rourke is an avowed atheist in search of something to believe in. Disaffected and lonely after a succession of failed relationships, which saw him less ‘whipped’ than ‘gripped’, he flits from obsession to obsession – golf…
The Sleepwalker’s Guide to Dancing by Mira Jacob
The Sleepwalker’s Guide to Dancing is a hefty 500-page, multi-generational family saga. The novel follows the story of an Indian family who immigrate to America, moving between three timelines – India in the 1970s, New Mexico in the 1980s, and…
Hild by Nicola Griffith
We open on three-year-old Hild, lying, ear to the ground, absorbing the cadence of her world: birds, trees, earth. She is disturbed, though not frightened, by the arrival of her mother’s lady with the news her father, a would-be king…
Breakfast with the Borgias by D.B.C. Pierre
For those familiar with the comedic horror of D.B.C. Pierre’s fiction, worry not about the conventional beginning as this novella soon descends into a tightly wound pressure cooker reminiscent of Edgar Allan Poe, both hilarious and horrific. The opening string…
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