‘When I was in second grade, I found a piece of paper on my desk with the words, “You are a Jew”. I went home and asked: “Mum, what is a Jew?” She explained that people h
Early on in Andreï Makine’s latest novel, we recognise that we are going to be led into the heart of darkness by the use of a dual narrator and a framing device that are reminis
João Reis’ great success in The Translator’s Bride is to convince his audience that they are reading a work written at modernism’s mid-twentieth-century zenith. The stream-o
‘How much less does a spider’s death weigh than the death of a human being?’ a boy called Aleksandar asks himself on the day his Grandpa Slavko dies. ‘And how do you photog
The Boarding House (published as ‘Pensjonat’in Poland in 2009) is the debut novel by Piotr Paziński – editor-in-chief of Midrasz, a monthly magazine devoted to Jewish cultur
This is the fifth volume in the Periscope series of translated poetry by the New York-based publisher A Midsummer Night’s Press, following One is None by Kätlin Kaldmaa, Anythin
For the alert follower of crime novelists writing in languages other than English, the name Guillaume Musso has been on the radar for some time now, for both his prodigious sales (
As someone who has written several books on the subject, one of the questions I am most frequently asked is: Has the Nordic Noir boom finally run out of steam? And I always have th
The title may be cheekily borrowed from Strindberg, but The Dance of Death is (as usual with Bottini) a wholly original piece of work. The author’s celebrated series of Black For
‘She went from being irritated, to exhausted, excited, worried, tired, annoyed, moved, disillusioned, impatient, distracted, tormented, concerned, offended, demoralised, and wear
