International fiction
How Much of These Hills Is Gold by C. Pam Zhang
‘Generations of authors have molded the mythology of the American West for their own purposes … I take the lesson that what we call history is not granite but sandstone – soft, given form by its carver.’ – C. Pam…
Exciting Times by Naoise Dolan
Ava is an Irish expat living in Hong Kong, teaching English to privileged Hongkonger children. She is in her twenties, and is a rudderless kind of high-achiever: intelligent, but unable (or unwilling) to focus her ability. Miserable in her shared…
The Glass Hotel by Emily St. John Mandel
Paul is a young recovering drug addict, struggling through a degree in finance he couldn’t care less about. Having lost the trust of his widowed mother, his hopes of studying musical composition are crushed when he’s sent to college in…
All This Could Be Yours by Jami Attenberg
Jami Attenberg can do bleak humour. She can skewer and summarise characters with one scathing sentence. She is the lord of mockery, the lady of irony, but, more than anything else, she is the queen when it comes to writing…
Hamnet by Maggie O’Farrell
In 1596, a young boy named Hamnet died. About four years later, his father wrote the most famous play in English history: Hamlet. This is the story of that boy and his mother.
I took three separate courses on…
The Mirror and the Light by Hilary Mantel
After fourteen attempts at starting this review for The Mirror & the Light, I had to stop and ask myself, ‘Why is this so difficult?’. I think the answer is that, for many, this final book in the Wolf…
Weather by Jenny Offill
If I were more paranoid than I am willing to admit, I would be ruminating very seriously on when and how Jenny Offill (or her agents) entered my brain, extracted many of my thoughts, concerns, and neuroses, and put them…
Indelicacy by Amina Cain
Vitória is a cleaning woman in a museum, but longs to be a writer. She meets and swiftly marries a wealthy man, who wants her to do nothing but relax. With this new-found leisure, Vitória works diligently, obsessively, on her…
Topics of Conversation by Miranda Popkey
Miranda Popkey’s debut novel is a narrative told in ten conversations that occur between 2000 and 2017. The unnamed female narrator converses with her employer, her mother, a group of friends left at a house party, a man she has…
Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982 by Cho Nam-joo
When Kim Jiyoung starts exhibiting bizarre behaviours, her husband takes her to a psychiatrist. What follows is a succinct account of Jiyoung’s life, from birth to elementary school, from the office to her days at home caring for a small…
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