I have to confess that I was a little unsure at first how my meeting with Leonardo Padura might go. The writer, neatly bearded and casually dressed, initially seemed a little ill a
Filiberto Garcia is a worried man. He has successfully maintained his reputation as a ruthless assassin for many years, but age is beginning to take its toll. He begins to doubt th
Selja Ahava’s compelling novel explores random acts of chance and how ordinary people cope with extraordinary events. In the first part, entitled ‘A Walled-In Girl’, eight-ye
A Devil Comes to Town is an eerie tale of literary ambition and an exploration of the perils of narcissism and vanity. When an author receives an anonymous manuscript, he finds ins
Ummulbanu Asadullayeva (1905–1992), writing in French under the penname of Banine, was the granddaughter of Azerbaijani oil barons – former peasants enriched by the discovery o
Roy Jacobsen’s The Unseen must be the best novel not to have won the Man Booker International Prize. I was therefore delighted to hear there was to be a follow-up (number two of
1954 was indeed an eventful, vintage year in France – especially in politics. It began with the Berlin Conference discussing the war in Indo-China and ended with Vietnam partitio
Crime in translation may be achieving massive breakthroughs in the twenty-first century, but long before this trend, one writer was a standard bearer for the field. George Joseph C
Codex 1962, beautifully translated here by Victoria Cribb, at first might seem a rambling, confusing, picaresque tale – hugely enjoyable, but not particularly coherent. I contend
Faruk Šehić is a poet and a war veteran. If that sounds romantic it’s not meant to – it’s true. During the Balkans war of the early 1990s, the poet – aged twenty-two at t
