#RivetingReviews December 2024 – Introduction by Max Easterman

Welcome to what I hope you will agree is a Christmas feast of #RivetingReviews!

This is the time of year when reading something new and original is the icing on the festive cake … a chance to sit down and enjoy a few exciting secular tales to complement the religious one. My personal fancy always turns to a good whodunnit – what better way to add to the pleasure of an excellent glass of wine – and we have plenty of the former to recommend to you while drinking the latter …

For starters, there’s a pair of fine Scandi-noir offerings reviewed by Ewa Sherman: a first translation from Ørjan Karlsson, set in the snows of Norway north of the Arctic circle, where nasty things happen to local women; and from Finland, a gripping tale of corporate hostilities in the heat of the sauna industry, full of black humour! Meanwhile, Paul Burke is back to give his thoughts on a new thriller from Hervé le Corre, which explores the dysfunctionality of a criminal family and its shocking outcome; we welcome a new reviewer in Michael Eaude, who has some interesting thoughts about Catalan writer Teresa Solana’s latest crime novel and her determination to expose the real-life crimes of the Spanish Civil War; and I have been reading the second translation into English of the Italian duo Fruttero and Lucentini, set in Siena around the famous Palio horse-race: the drama of galloping hooves in the Campo is as nothing to the seething emotions behind the scenes of the competing contrade!

We have two more fascinating and disturbing Catalan books as well this time, by Mercè Rodoreda – reviewed by West Camel – and by Eva Baltasar, reviewed by Jennifer Sarha. But our main language of origin this December quarter is German: Rosie Goldsmith takes us into the fraught world of East – West German re-unification in a masterly dissection of family relationships by Bernhard Schlink; and she then explores the locked-in mind of the protagonist in a novel written by Yoko Tawada in Berlin at the height of the Covid pandemic. Caroline Wyatt looks at Eva Menasse’s portrayal of people coming to terms with the past over a different border, that of Austria and Hungary. Our final German offering is a story also about Hungary by Esther Kinsky, a tale about a cinema in the vast flatness of the Alföld plain, reviewed by Mandy Wight.

Another ‘first’ for us here is a book in Maltese, which is part mystery, part family saga, reviewed by Darcy Hurford; from Poland, we have Olga Tokarczuk’s latest novel, a ‘health resort horror story’, expertly analysed by John Munch, and a fascinating book of poetry by Małgorzata Lebda, appraised by Anna Blasiak. Clarissa Botsford not only reviews Marosia Castaldi’s’s latest, but has provided us with an interesting interview with Jamie Richards, its translator, who won the National Translation Award for her translation from Italian.

All in all, we have 20 reviews for your delectation this month and we hope you will enjoy them all. If you’d like to buy any of the books, please do so via our dedicated Bookshop.org page, as the small commission this pays us helps to continue publishing these reviews. Our next reviews will be published in March: please get in touch at reviews@eurolitnetwork.com if you’d like to write for us. The deadline for submissions will be March 24th (for publication on the 28th).

Happy Christmas and happy reading …!!

Max Easterman