This is a sad book, a beautiful book. It’s about the death of a father – the death of the narrator’s father, the death also of Georgi Gospodinov’s father. (As so often in his work, Gospodinov is both participant and observer.) Death and the Gardener is enquiring about the human condition; it
‘That night, he had no idea he was walking over a cemetery. A secret cemetery with no gravestones or crosses, and only two dead bodies. There would be three by the time he left.’ These are the opening lines of a compulsive novel, the first translated into English by Spanish author Rosa Ribas, wh
In Irene Solà’s fantastical third novel, animals reign supreme. From the woods that surround the remote Catalonian farmhouse where old Bernadeta with her ‘lizard lids’ lies dying, they come to stalk the pages: wolves, owls, foxes, spiders. The house, too, is a creature, with an ‘entrance &#
Jérôme Prieur’s Zombie Proust, translated from the original Proust fantôme (2001) by Nancy Kline and published by Les Fugitives, reanimates the enigma of one of modern literature’s totemic figures, Marcel Proust. Habitually read as a roman à clef, À la recherche du temps perdu tantalises Pr
This is the story of a young Iranian couple, Behzad and Nahid, who flee Iran after the 1979 Revolution and settle and have a family in West Germany. Their story is told in four sections – each one narrated by a different member of the family – taking place at ten yearly intervals, often coincidi
Didier Eribon is probably best known to Anglophone readers for his memoir Return to Reims. There, he writes about his re-engagement with his family after decades of estrangement, during which he moved to Paris, became a university teacher and public intellectual and came out as a gay man. This book
