‘I’ll send it anyway’, said the publicist when I intimated that Clemens Meyer and I didn’t gel. (I’d DNF’ed All the Lights and have no interest in the sex-trade novel.)
This book offers a very intricate, highly precise collage of images, each capturing something about the times we live in. It shows various versions of the discontent and crises tha
Marion Brunet is one of France’s best-known writers for young adults; this is her first novel for a general adult readership, but the issues it raises are very much those of youn
The once-invisible, pseudonymous couple who together comprise ‘Lars Kepler’ are no longer a mystery. After the immense success of their first book, The Hypnotist, the hidden id
An inexplicable pattern of vandalism is happening across the German city of Hamburg. Every night, vehicles are being torched. Is there more to this than simply wanton destruction?
Lucky Per is extraordinary in many ways, but perhaps the most extraordinary is that it is only now available in English (in two separate translations – the other is A Fortunate M
A Girl Called Eel is an unusual take on the coming-of-age novel. In a single sentence, punctuated with commas and paragraph breaks, Ali Zamir tells us the story of Eel’s attempt
‘Her white face had the frozen and inscrutable quality of a mask.’ Kadare’s haunting memoir begins conventionally enough, with a phone call announcing the imminent death of h
In 2018 the Strega prize for best Italian fiction was awarded to Helena Janeczek, a Polish-German novelist writing in Italian, for La Ragazza con la Leica. Janeczek’s Italian is
Graham Greene once called Norway ‘a little patch of careless culture at the edge of the sea and of the forest’, and before 22 July 2011, that was how we felt – tucked away at
