International fiction
Euphoria by Elin Cullhed
Struggling with the demands of young children and a writing career, Swedish author Elin Cullhed became obsessed by the life of poet and author Sylvia Plath. Plath famously tried to carve out time for her writing as she dealt with…
Dead-End Memories by Banana Yoshimoto & Asa Yoneda (trans.)
Banana Yoshimoto’s acclaimed and internationally beloved 1988 novella Kitchen was one of my favourite reads of this year, and it was always going to be a hard act to follow. With Dead-End Memories, I had nothing to worry about…
Ghost Music by An Yu
You’ve just woken up. Your dream, which was once so vivid and tightly held in your grasp, has now slipped through your fingers as your body begins to awaken more by the second. All that’s left are whispers of memories…
Our Share of Night by Mariana Enríquez & Megan McDowell (trans.)
Deeply unsettling yet riveting, Our Share of Night is the latest contribution from Argentine writer Mariana Enríquez to the Latin American horror genre. Tying together Argentinian folklore with occult canon, Enríquez creates a vivid world backdropped by political violence and…
Motherthing by Ainslie Hogarth
To paraphrase Charles Dickens in A Christmas Carol, the mother-in-law was dead to begin with. Laura Lamb, complex, manipulative mother of Ralph, has taken her own life in the basement of his childhood home. Now Abi is left to…
Illuminations by Alan Moore
Alan Moore is the big beardy guy who gets pointed at when I’m asked, ‘Hey, who singlehandedly transformed superhero comics into dark, gritty and occasionally poetic narratives back in the 1980s?’ Moore’s re-envisioning of the genre brought superheroes’ flaws to…
The Passenger & Stella Maris by Cormac McCarthy
It is more than 15 years since Cormac McCarthy’s last novel was published, and for those of the faith the reward is rich indeed. Not one, but two novels published simultaneously in this, his 89th year.
In The Passenger…
Best of Friends by Kamila Shamsie
You are not just in safe hands with Women’s Prize winner Kamila Shamsie, you are in the hands of an artist. Her prose is seamless, her plotting propulsive and her characters are cleverly and richly drawn.
In Best of Friends…
She and Her Cat by Makoto Shinkai, Naruki Nagakawa & Ginny Tapley Takemori (trans.)
She and Her Cat is a collection of Japanese short stories centred around the power of connection one can have with their pets. In classic Japanese style, it evokes a slice-of-life feeling. While reading this book, I felt as if…
Lucy by the Sea by Elizabeth Strout
I don’t know about you, but Elizabeth Strout’s character Lucy Barton speaks to me and for me. And by that, I mean, her inner dialogue matches my own thought processes so often that reading about her is like sitting down…
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