As this novel – by the most prominent Catalan writer of the twentieth century, brought to us for the first time in a pitch-perfect translation by Maruxa Relaño and Martha Tennent – opens, our narrator tells us ‘There was no need to go to the Excelsior to see films the summer they came with th
Sara Mesa’s Four by Four is a novel of secrets revealed gradually. Its three sections progressively, though obliquely, uncover the happenings at Wybranwy College, an isolated boarding school that may be a refuge from the outside world, or an enclosure for those in its grounds. In the first p
The Day My Grandfather Was a Hero is an evocative novella set in Austria in spring 1945, during the final months of the Second World War. Thirteen-year-old Nelli has lost everything – including her memory – in a bombing raid, and has been taken in by a kind farmer and his family. The story unfol
One day eleven-year-old Elly goes missing while cycling to her judo class at the nearby sports centre. No explanation for her disappearance is ever uncovered, and for Elly’s family the world detaches from its axis. Her parents, Judith and Hamid, and her older sister, Ines, are immersed in a limbo
I long wanted to read Jason Lutes classic graphic trilogy of the Weimar Republic, but decided not to do so until it was available in its entirety. A ten-year gap between the publication of parts two and three ensured my wait was longer than expected. It seems disproportionate that this much-anticipa
Those who read Scandinavian crime fiction have not been surprised at the revelations of violent neo-Nazi movements in the Nordic countries. This subculture has been laceratingly exposed by several writers, and finds echoes in novels by two of the best female writers in Sweden, Camilla Lackberg and Ã
