International fiction
Yellowface by Rebecca F Kuang
June Hayward has always wanted to be a writer, but she’s not so good at the whole coming up with her own ideas thing. Her friend Athena Liu, on the other hand, is a star. Her debut novel was a…
The Girls of Summer by Katie Bishop
Seventeen-year-old Rachel is island-hopping with a friend in Greece when she meets charming and handsome Alistair. Rachel falls in love with him, even though he is 20 years older and insists they have to keep their relationship a secret. Flash…
Chain-Gang All-Stars by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah
In a near-future United States, the incarcerated people in the private prison system fight each other to the death in a bid to win their freedom. This is Chain-Gang All-Stars: a wildly popular televised ‘sport’ and the crown jewel in…
Sad Girl Novel by Pip Finkemeyer
Set in Berlin, we meet two best friends, Kim and Bel, who lead very different lives. Kim is an aspiring author, already planning the world tours, the book signings, and awards won for her novel, even though she’s rewritten the…
The House of Doors by Tan Twan Eng
This is Tan Twan Eng’s first book in over 10 years, and the long-awaited successor to his Booker-shortlisted The Garden of Evening Mists. The story opens with Lesley Hamlyn, a widow seemingly stranded in the bright and open loneliness…
The Ferryman by Justin Cronin
In 2010, Justin Cronin’s third novel, The Passage, was released into the world. The Stephen King-like apocalyptic sensation became an instant bestseller, describing a catastrophic military-engineered virus created from bats ...
Fast forward to 2023 and Cronin’s new book…
Owlish by Dorothy Tse & Natascha Bruce (trans.)
In a world not quite our own, in a city that is not quite Hong Kong, a middle-aged professor is falling in love with a doll who is not quite human. Such reads the premise of Dorothy Tse’s entrancing Owlish…
The Guest by Emma Cline
The Guest is the second novel by Emma Cline, following her acclaimed 2016 debut The Girls. I read The Girls years ago and loved it, so I was very excited to find out that Cline was finally publishing a…
Forbidden Notebook by Alba de Céspedes & Ann Goldstein (trans.)
It is late autumn in 1950 and 43-year-old Valeria goes out to buy cigarettes for her husband. In the tobacco shop, she sees a stack of black, shiny, thick notebooks. She buys one on impulse but is immediately consumed with…
August Blue by Deborah Levy
Deborah Levy’s new novel unfolds like a dream – surreal, beguiling, enigmatic. As with most of Levy’s work, it creates a singular world, influenced by Duras and de Beauvoir and the films of Chantal Akerman, but mostly requiring navigation on…
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