International fiction
An Untamed State by Roxane Gay
Roxane Gay has made her name as a professor of creative writing, feminist essayist, and commentator on politics and popular culture. She embodies the feminist precept, ‘the personal is political’. Her book of essays Bad Feminist came out this year…
Summertime by Vanessa LaFaye
The threat of havoc to social order and a general sense of impending danger loom large in this novel, with tensions building right from the opening pages when an alligator drags a baby in a bassinet down to the river…
See How Small by Scott Blackwood
It’s late evening in a small town in Texas. Three teenage girls are finishing their shift at a family-run ice cream store when two strange men appear. The girls are stripped and bound, the store is set alight, and the…
Portrait of a Man by Georges Perec
The works of the late Georges Perec are as difficult as they are sundry. Portrait of a Man was written several years before Perec’s first published novel, Things, a book which also has the distinction of being one of…
Let Me be Frank with You by Richard Ford
One of Richard Ford’s greatest gifts to modern literature is Frank Bascombe. Frank’s dryly humorous voice first appeared in The Sportswriter, which is widely regarded as Ford’s breakthrough novel, both commercially and critically. Frank has reappeared three more times…
The American Lover by Rose Tremain
Tremain has won many prestigious writing awards over the years, including the Orange Prize for her novel The Road Home, so we already know we are in the hands of an artist. This wonderful collection of short, smart and…
Frog by Mo Yan
So revered is Chinese author Mo Yan’s body of work that he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2012. Frog was published in Chinese in 2009 and has now been translated by Howard Goldblatt into English. This is…
Wolf in White Van by John Darnielle
John Darnielle, the musician behind the band The Mountain Goats, is known for his ability to create story within song. In his debut novel, Wolf in White Van, Darnielle proves that his mastery of language is not confined to…
Euphoria by Lily King
Bronislaw Malinowski, the esteemed godfather of modern anthropology, claimed that ethnology is in the sadly ludicrous, if not tragic, position that at the very moment when it puts its house in order, the material melts away with sudden rapidity. Thus…
I Refuse by Per Petterson
I’ve been curious about Per Petterson, who almost shares my surname, since I noticed his novels on the shelf when I first started work at Readings. Six years later, and having just read his latest novel, I Refuse, I…
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