International fiction
Sing, Unburied, Sing by Jesmyn Ward
Sing, Unburied, Sing is an intensely lyrical, bruising novel. Jesmyn Ward writes the kind of sumptuous prose in which every line thrills you with its poetry – even the rippling effect of air on a car window is imagined into…
Little Fires Everywhere by Celeste Ng
Celeste Ng’s second novel, Little Fires Everywhere, opens with the line: ‘Everyone in Shaker Heights was talking about it that summer: how Isabelle, the last of the Richardson children, had finally gone around the bend and burned the house…
Forest Dark by Nicole Krauss
Nicole Krauss’s new novel opens with the disappearance of Jules Epstein. A wealthy, retired New York lawyer, he has vanished in Tel Aviv. What’s more concerning is that he seems to have been vanishing for a while. His apartment in…
My Absolute Darling by Gabriel Tallent
Sometimes, it’s a single character that makes a novel unforgettable; sometimes an intense plot puts you in a book’s grip; other times still, it’s the writer’s craft that draws you in and keeps you there. But when these three elements…
Autumn by Karl Ove Knausgaard
Karl Ove Knausgaard has this way of taking a phenomenon that otherwise seems spent – whether it be kinds of interactions or relationships, or the human face, or an object like a standard 1970s telephone – and turning it and…
The Burning Girl by Claire Messud
Claire Messud is the accomplished author of acclaimed novels The Woman Upstairs and The Emperor’s Children. The Burning Girl, is a mesmerising history of the friendship between two teenage girls. Julia and Cassie have known each other since…
he by John Connolly
In his author’s note to he, a novel based on the life of Stan Laurel, John Connolly explains his desire to contemplate the underlying emotions behind this half of one of the greatest comedy duos of all time. The…
The Red-Haired Woman by Orhan Pamuk
When a book starts with a quote from Nietzsche about Oedipus, you know you can expect fathers, sons, mothers and lovers to become entangled with devastating consequences. When th eauthor is a previous winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature…
The City Always Wins by Omar Robert Hamilton
The City Always Wins captures, in form and content, the frenzied optimism and the violent, reactionary turn of the Arab Spring as it unfolded in Tahrir Square, Cairo. We witness the action through the eyes of a group of young…
The Party by Elizabeth Day
Usually when you read a book, you make up your mind about the main character fairly quickly, or at least about whether they’re basically good or bad. But that’s not the case in this book. Martin Gilmour is accused again…
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