International fiction
Elizabeth Finch by Julian Barnes
It’s clear that Julian Barnes’ latest novel, Elizabeth Finch, is informed by the author’s friendship with the late novelist and art historian Anita Brookner. Ever since Flaubert’s Parrot (shortlisted for the 1984 Booker Prize, won that year by guess…
Pure Colour by Sheila Heti
Mira and her father live in the first draft of existence: a world like our own, but where people have evolved from either birds, bears or fish. Mira is the most intense expression of a bird, engaging with the world…
The Candy House by Jennifer Egan
This is it. The one we’ve all been waiting for. Jennifer Egan’s follow-up to her Pulitzer Prize-winning, genre-bending A Visit from the Goon Squad. Taking the same patchwork form as Egan’s previous novel, each chapter in The Candy House…
The Sorrow Stone by Kári Gíslason
The Sorrow Stone by Kári Gíslason is without doubt the book I was most looking forward to reading this year. I have been an avid fan of his work since I read his extraordinary memoir The Promise of Iceland in…
Careering by Daisy Buchanan
Careering, the second novel from author and journalist Daisy Buchanan, is an ode to any woman – or any person, really – who has ever felt overwhelmed by a seemingly cavernous divide between their ‘dream’ career and their reality…
Paradais by Fernanda Melchor & Sophie Hughes (trans.)
With her award- winning English- language debut Hurricane Season, Mexican journalist and novelist Fernanda Melchor demonstrated her remarkable ability to grapple with violence on the page. In this dazzling, brutal novel about femicide, Melchor’s visceral prose told the story…
The Swimmers by Julie Otsuka
Julie Otsuka’s third novel, The Swimmers, opens in a strange but spellbinding way, with a cultural anthropology of a California swimming pool and the people who regularly swim in it. We meet them, the swimmers, deep underground, stroking the…
Mother’s Boy by Patrick Gale
This beautiful novel opens with our protagonist, Charles Causley, working furiously onboard a Royal Navy ship in the control room, deciphering coded messages and relayingthem to the captain of the ship during a naval battle.
The book then goes back…
The Voids by Ryan O’Connor
The narrator of this book is one of the last residents of a condemned apartment block in Glasgow. The local council has offered relocation money which has been accepted by most of his neighbours. As the flats are vacated, they…
All’s Well by Mona Awad
All’s Well by Mona Awad is dark and sharp. It is, like its namesake Shakespeare play, a ‘Problem’ – a wondrous blur between comedy and tragedy that deals with the issue ofchronic pain and its ‘treatment’.
We meet our protagonist…
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