International fiction
The Prophets by Robert Jones Jr.
Though we’re only at the start of 2021, Robert Jones Jr.’s debut The Prophets already feels like one of the big books of the year. Set on an antebellum plantation in the deep south of Mississippi, The Prophets is Jones’s…
A Town Called Solace by Mary Lawson
It’s wonderful to start the year reading a novel that’s tender, well-written and hard to put down. This book is set in rural Toronto in 1972, and the landscape and weather affect the mood of the story. The story is…
Fake Accounts by Lauren Oyler
I know it takes years for a book to be written, edited and printed, but Lauren Oyler’s debut novel Fake Accounts feels so immediate that it’s hard to believe it wasn’t written last week and just beamed into my hands…
A Net For Small Fishes by Lucy Jago
Last year’s big historical fiction release was Hilary Mantel’s hefty conclusion to her brilliant Tudor-era trilogy The Mirror and the Light. This year’s could well be historian Lucy Jago’s A Net for Small Fishes.
Fast forward from the…
The First Woman by Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi
1970s Uganda: halfway through Idi Amin’s terrible reign. The First Woman details the coming of age of Kirabo, a headstrong young woman from a small Ugandan village who begins to feel the terrible absence of her unknown mother as she…
Milk Fed by Melissa Broder
Milk Fed, Melissa Broder’s latest novel (following The Pisces), is a funny, sexy feast of a story about indulgence, self-denial and female love. Rachel is a bored, lonely and cynical atheistic Jewish girl in her mid-20s who works…
Unquiet by Linn Ullmann
I must admit that I was initially drawn to this book thanks to a number of glowing endorsements from writers I admire – Rachel Cusk, Ali Smith, Deborah Levy among them – and a striking photograph on its jacket by…
There's No Such Thing as an Easy Job by Kikuko Tsumura
A truer sentiment than the title of this work of Japanese fiction could hardly be imagined at this time, but this pre-pandemic piece of writing follows its 36-year-old narrator’s search for a meaningful working life. Having ‘burnt out’ at her…
Luster by Raven Leilani
There’s been some hype for this book and rightly so. It’s great to enjoy a debut novel as much as I enjoyed Luster. It follows Edie, a Black woman in her early 20s, as she becomes involved with Eric…
The Silence by Don DeLillo
On an aeroplane a man recites flight data to his partner, half listening and writing in her notebook in the adjacent seat. Their conversation, spanning several pages, has somewhat of a stilted back and forth, as they each regard each…
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