A mix of memoir and fiction, Mircea Cărtărescu’s three-part epic – seamlessly translated by Sean Cotter – is the first volume in a trilogy. To call it a challenging read is
Germany’s authoritarian past haunts Birgit Vanderbeke’s explorations of patriarchal tyranny, The Mussel Feast and You Would Have Missed Me. These two novellas, superbly transla
Ivana Dobrakovová has been labelled an ‘expat writer’ because her stories often explore the experience of living abroad. She resides in Turin and is a talented translator of F
Danish author, Maria Gerhardt, died of breast cancer on 16 March 2017. She was thirty-nine years old and left behind a wife and son. Soon after, Transfer Window, a haunting account
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
I first came across Moroccan writer Abdellah Taïa in 2006 at a PEN talk on sedition. He had recently caused something of a stir by coming out in a country where homosexuality is i
Stylistically, Jacek Dehnel’s family saga is a hybrid. It reads like a memoir, includes real people and their portraits, covers historical events, and features a family tree and
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
Children of the Cave, which opens in 1819, some thirty years before Darwin published The Origin of Species, questions what it means to be human. Jean Moltique is an esteemed a
Hundreds of anonymous corpses are found every year along the Spanish motorways. They belong to those who have sought and failed to find a better life in Europe. In his heartrending
