Crime fans know and love Simenon’s Maigret stories, and British readers are increasingly becoming familiar with his romans durs, his ‘hard novels’. These are not necessarily
Former government minister Júlíusdóttir’s 2020 debut novel, Dead Sweet, was published in English in 2023, introducing detective-in-training Sigurdís. The investigation took t
There is a lot to admire in this panoramic novel, with its decades-long sweep from the Holocaust to the post-World War Two geopolitical landscape. It is both a wide-screen view of
#RivetingReviews: Paul Burke reviews THE WINTER WARRIOR by Olivier Norek, translated by Nick Caistor
Euro-crime fans may know the gritty contemporary police procedurals of former cop, Norek. His Captain Coste novels, informed by his own experiences, are set in the toughest banlieu
1944, the cruelest winter bites as the war arrives on Bologna’s doorstep. The rabid fascist Black Brigades, untethered since the collapse of Mussolini’s government, unl
The war is finally encroaching on the village of Le Case in Tuscany in early winter, 1943. It is now occupied by German and Italian troops, as the allied advance into Italy gets ev
Reading Le Corre is emotionally draining: the gritty realism of the narrative is infused with fatalism, even cynicism, and tells us the world is an unforgiving place. Even when no
I am wary of epistolary novels based around social-media interactions, as in my view their form makes momentum and character depth hard to realise. Despentes, however, proves it ca
Ginster reflects on German lives on the home front during World War I. Naturally, the off-page conflagration dominates daily life and thought, and this is a lament for a society at
Often with fiction in translation the first rendering into English isn’t the first of the series. For Buchholz it was Blue Night (2018), the fifth of her novels to feature Hambur
