International fiction
Exhibit by R.O. Kwon
Jin feels stuck. She’s at a crossroads in her career as a photographer, and lately she’s been unsatisfied with her marriage to her college sweetheart, Phillip. Phillip has begun expressing his desire for children, which Jin has never felt any…
Scaffolding by Lauren Elkin
Anna lives in an apartment in the Belleville neighbourhood of Paris. It’s 2019. In her late 30s, she’s recently suffered a painful miscarriage and has deferred returning to work as a psychotherapist. Her husband David is a lawyer currently living…
Briefly Very Beautiful by Roz Dineen
In a world past the brink of apocalypse, Cass is raising her three children in The City on her own. Her husband Nathaniel is a medic in a war in a foreign land, leaving her alone in a world where…
Parade by Rachel Cusk
Rachel Cusk’s Outline trilogy was so innovative and exciting that it transformed how many people think about fiction. Cusk’s new novel successfully continues her inventive style.
It starts with a famous artist who begins painting scenes that are upside down…
Swift River by Essie Chambers
Some novels have such a powerful atmosphere that the sense of place and emotional weather stays with you forever, easily summoned to mind by the mere mention of the book’s title. Other works have characters so real they seem to…
All Fours by Miranda July
There are many people out there who don’t need a review to tell them that their next essential book to read is anything Miranda July writes, whenever that happens to be released. To you fellow devotees, I say that All…
The North Wind (The Four Winds, Book 1) by Alexandria Warwick
Wren of Edgewood lives in a world perpetually in winter. An orphan hardened by the inherent powerlessness of her situation and the struggles of being the sole provider for herself and her sister, she has always sought to protect her…
Antiquity by Hanna Johansson & Kira Josefsson (trans.)
Our narrator – lonely, introspective, of uncertain reliability – is on the Greek island of Ermoupolis, drawn there by her adoration for and desire to please an older woman, Helena. However, Helena’s younger daughter, Olga, provides at first a source…
The Coast Road by Alan Murrin
Izzy Keaveney is in an unhappy marriage; her friend Colette Crowley ruefully observes, ‘So what if your husband’s a bit of a bully, they all are in their own way.’ It’s 1994 in a small coastal town in County Donegal…
Long Island by Colm Tóibín
Colm Tóibín’s new novel, Long Island, reunites readers with Eilis Lacey, the heroine from his wildly successful novel Brooklyn, published in 2009. It is a favourite of mine and many Readings customers, too. I was excited not only…
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