International Fiction reviews
Foe by Iain Reid
Living in isolation amid farming land predominantly owned by big industry and the government, Hen and Junior receive a late-night visitor. Terrance is an employee of Outermore; an organisation origin…
Love is Blind by William Boyd
I have to confess that William Boyd is one of my favourite authors; his Any Human Heart is probably his best but Love is Blind comes close. It’s an exotic and sad love story that kept me wanting more…
Melmoth by Sarah Perry
Melmoth is watching every dark and wicked act. You can feel her eyes on you wherever you are. Her eternal loneliness draws her to those who believe they can’t be redeemed. She is both feared and long…
Transcription by Kate Atkinson
Kate Atkinson has a gift for blending fiction with historical detail. Life After Life (2013) and its companion, A God in Ruins (2015), are brilliant evocations of England, set predominantly during Wo…
Killing Commendatore by Haruki Murakami
Smoothly, calmly, Haruki Murakami leads us out to the latest outpost of his fictional universe. We survey the hillside and the lonely house in which the narrator has come to live. Once, it belonged t…
Women Talking by Miriam Toews
Between 2005 and 2009, in a remote Mennonite colony in Bolivia, hundreds of girls and women would wake every morning feeling bruised, abused, and battered. This was attributed for many years to ghost…
Berta Isla by Javier Marías
Impermanence and identity are at the heart of Javier Marías’ latest work, a literary spy tale in which Oxford undergraduate Tomás is recruited into the British secret service after event in the town …
At Dusk by Hwang Sok-yong
At Dusk is a small but powerful novel from one of South Korea’s most esteemed novelists. Hwang Sok-yong, born in 1943, has witnessed enormous political and historical change in his homeland and was a…
Now We Shall Be Entirely Free by Andrew Miller
English author Andrew Miller has been winning awards for his writing ever since his first book, Ingenious Pain, was published in 1997 and won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, the International IM…
Take Nothing With You by Patrick Gale
In an attempt to rebound from his previous relationship, Eustace meets the calm and confident Theo on a dating app. Twenty years his junior, Theo is stationed on a military base, and their romance is…
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