September 2026 #RivetingReviews – Introduction by West Camel

Welcome to September’s #RivetingReviews. The exceptional heat of the summer, which in Europe is extending into the autumn, doesn’t seem to have burned away our reviewers’ critical skills, as we have a bumper crop of reviews for you this quarter. Not only that, but we have some bumper, feature-length pieces for you too: 

Our director, Rosie Goldsmith, who has covered the first two novels in Andrey Kurkov’s Kyiv Mysteries, is effusive about the latest instalment, The Lost Soldiers. Caroline Wyatt is back, and is spellbound by The Princes of Pauper’s Pond, the first novel from one of Norway’s best-regarded visual artists, Lars Elling. I wax positive too – about an outstanding ‘future classic’ novel from the Bulgarian Iana Boukova, Traveling in the Direction of the Shadow. And Jonathan Levi takes on a major piece of nonfiction in Kazimierz Moczarski’s Conversations with an Executioner – an extraordinary account of the exchanges between a Nazi war criminal and one of his victims while they share a prison cell, which is finally published in unexpurgated translation in English. 

The #RivetingReviews wouldn’t be so riveting without strong representation from crime fiction, and this set doesn’t disappoint, with Max Easterman covering Olivier Norek’s latest, Surface; Barry Forshaw on the doyenne of Icelandic crime, Yrsa Sigurðardóttir; Paul Burke on an early Henning Mankell novel, only recently published in English, and on the funniest Finn, Antti Tuomainen’s latest, The Fresh Cut. And I decide that Anna Albinus’s prize-winning Revolver Christi uses the crime novel’s tropes for altogether different purposes. 

Ukraine, already represented by Kurkov in our reviews, features again with a hard-hitting contemporary account of the war from Arthur Dron’ in Hemingway Knows Nothing, reviewed by Steve Komarnyckyj, as well as a review from Ewa Sherman of Steve’s translation of a hard-hitting 1920s Ukrainian novel, The Girl with the Teddy Bear.

Mandy Wight returns, this time with reviews of the third part of Lëila Slimani’s Country of Others trilogy and a set of interlinked short stories from Luis Lopez Carrasco. 

We have family secrets and lies in Valerie Perrin’s Tata, reviewed by Dymphna Flynn, and  Andrea Bajani’s The Anniversary, reviewed by Sonja van der Westhuizen, and one man’s search for his family’s history in Stefan Çapaliku’s Sarajevo Saga, reviewed by Morelle Smith. 

John Munch is rapt by Claudia Petrucci’s tale of a mysterious house; Tom Taylor is impressed by the always impressive Olga Tokarczuk, and her study of a Polish village, in Primeval and Other Times; and Cory Anderson is duly disturbed by Mathias Enard’s first-hand account of a sniper’s life in Perfecting the Shot. 

We have no poetry this time, but we do have ‘proems’ – prose pieces about the history of the land that is now Türkiye, by Leylâ Erbil. We also have a poetic exploration of the birdlife of Northumbria and Scotland from the German writer Bernhard Malkmus, and I take on the recent, and perhaps strangest-so-far novel from Christian Kracht. 

Finally, September has been World Kid Lit month, so we have a small selection of the best kid and YA literature available, from our friends at World Kid Lit. 

You’ll have to agree that we present you with a literary feast this time. Read, enjoy, and if you’re moved to buy any of these books, please do so through our dedicated Bookshop.org page. It does earn us a few pennies, helping us to continue these reviews and other activities. 

If you have a title you’d like to review for us, or would like to join our list of reviewers, please get in touch via contact@eurolitnetwork.com. Our next set of reviews will be released in December.

Until then…

—West Camel