International fiction
On the Line: Notes from a Factory by Joseph Ponthus
I’ve been thinking a lot about On the Line since I read its final pages. Written in French (À la ligne) this book is a piece of autofiction in verse. Its narrator, like its author, is a social…
Lonely Castle in the Mirror by Mizuki Tsujimura
Kokoro doesn’t want to go back to school. After enduring painful bullying at the hands of her classmates, her whole body seems to rebel at the idea of returning to Yukishina No. 5 Junior High. Barricading herself at home, one…
Hot Stew by Fiona Mozley
‘And I’m just fed up with the hypocrisy. People have sex for loads of different reasons. And, well, we have sex for money.’
Precious didn’t ask to be the figurehead of a movement. But when the brothel where she lives…
Higher Ground by Anke Stellin
I have not been able to stop thinking about Anke Stelling’s brilliant novel Higher Ground. In trying to nail down just what made me want to pick it up again and again, I’d say the primary reason is the…
First Person Singular by Haruki Murakami
A traveller takes a drink with a melancholy monkeyworking in a run-down inn. A writer stumbles across a fictitious jazz record he made up for an old review as a joke. A man finds himself drawn to a mysterious woman…
We Run the Tides by Vendela Vida
Coming-of-age novels about female friendship are always going to the top of my reading pile, especially if you add in a mysterious disappearance, and tie the whole thing together with a wickedly funny 13-year-old narrator. I’ve been eagerly anticipating Vendela…
Asylum Road by Olivia Sudjic
Even after five years together the only time Luke and Anya are at ease in one another’s company is when they’re listening to true crime podcasts together. Driving from London to Provence for a romantic getaway, Anya notes that ‘sometimes…
The Office of Historical Corrections: A Novella and Stories by Danielle Evans
Danielle Evans’s collection of short stories, The Office of Historical Corrections, has been much lauded in the US. The collection has been nominated for multiple prizes, and the New Yorker describes it as ‘sublime short stories of race, grief…
The Committed by Viet Thanh Nguyen
Viet Thanh Nguyen won the Pulitzer Prize in 2016 for his novel The Sympathizer and the titular character of that book returns here in The Committed. This time the Sympathizer has surfaced in Paris in the eighties as a…
Light Perpetual by Francis Spufford
It starts with a bang. November 1944. A Saturday lunchtime on the Bexford high street, a fictional South London neighbourhood. There’s a buzz at Woolworths, the kind explained by wartime rationing: a gleaming delivery of saucepans, the first in years…
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