There are some big, important books published this May – big and important for a variety of reasons. It is…
May 2019
I have to confess that I was a little unsure at first how my meeting with Leonardo Padura might go.…
Filiberto Garcia is a worried man. He has successfully maintained his reputation as a ruthless assassin for many years, but…
Selja Ahava’s compelling novel explores random acts of chance and how ordinary people cope with extraordinary events. In the first…
A Devil Comes to Town is an eerie tale of literary ambition and an exploration of the perils of narcissism…
Ummulbanu Asadullayeva (1905–1992), writing in French under the penname of Banine, was the granddaughter of Azerbaijani oil barons – former…
Roy Jacobsen’s The Unseen must be the best novel not to have won the Man Booker International Prize. I was…
1954 was indeed an eventful, vintage year in France – especially in politics. It began with the Berlin Conference discussing…
Crime in translation may be achieving massive breakthroughs in the twenty-first century, but long before this trend, one writer was…
Codex 1962, beautifully translated here by Victoria Cribb, at first might seem a rambling, confusing, picaresque tale – hugely enjoyable,…
Faruk Šehić is a poet and a war veteran. If that sounds romantic it’s not meant to – it’s true.…
At the end of the Second World War, a Polish army doctor, Zbigniew Kozłowski, known as Zbyszek, docks at Southampton,…
