International fiction
Old God’s Time by Sebastian Barry
Tom Kettle is an Irish detective who has recently retired to a home overlooking the Irish sea. It’s unclear at first how long he has been leading this solitary existence, but his life is thrown into turmoil when two younger…
I Have Some Questions for You by Rebecca Makkai
In 1995, a girl was murdered on the grounds of her elite private boarding school in New Hampshire, and Bodie Kane suspects the wrong man went to prison. Bodie is the host of a successful podcast about the lives of…
Cursed Bread by Sophie Mackintosh
In 1951, le pain maudit – or ‘the cursed bread’ – was at the centre of a mass poisoning event that tore through the small village of Pont-Saint-Esprit, leaving seven villagers dead and 50 interned in asylums. The cause of…
Birnam Wood by Eleanor Catton
It has almost been a decade since Eleanor Catton published her Booker Prize-winning, epic, historical, astrological magnum opus The Luminaries, and I have been waiting with bated breath ever since. Unsatisfied with resting on her laurels, Birnam Wood is…
Old Babes in the Wood by Margaret Atwood
Margaret Atwood is back with yet another stunning collection of short stories, her first since 2014’s Stone Mattress. Atwood has a knack for zeroing in on society and the various idiosyncrasies that make us human. This is evident in…
Bad Cree by Jessica Johns
Mackenzie wakes from her nightmare holding the severed head of a crow. Previously she’d only brought back tree branches, and they’d immediately vanished. Mackenzie’s dreams become more frequent and eventually the horror spills over into her waking life. Crows follow…
Are You Happy Now by Hanna Jameson
Hanna Jameson’s Are You Happy Now follows two overlapping and imperfect love stories, both of which begin at the same time and place as a frightening worldwide phenomenon. The novel’s four protagonists – Yun, Emory, Andrew, and Fin – are…
Sweet, Soft, Plenty Rhythm by Laura Warrell
It’s 2013 and Circus is a divorced 40-year-old jazz musician. He is selfish, obsessed with women, and afraid he will never make it big – he lives for music. He barely sees his 15-year-old daughter, Koko, and has just found…
Victory City by Salman Rushdie
Before we consider Salman Rushdie’s new novel, let’s pause for a moment to reflect on the dreadful, violent, and public attack on him last year. Incredibly, this act of terror did not deter his heart, although the physical repercussions remain…
Age of Vice by Deepti Kapoor
This latest release from Deepti Kapoor is not your conventional crime thriller-slash-police procedural. It is very far from it. Rather, Kapoor has delivered an expansive, cinematic literary thriller.
At the outset, five people are killed when an expensive car ploughs…
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