Fiction – paperback; Faber & Faber; 44 pages; 2019. Translated from the Czech by Suzanne Rappaport. French-Czech writer Milan Kundera (1929-2023) penned the short story Let the Old Dead Make Room for the Young Dead in 1969. It appeared in English for the first time in 1974 — in Kundera’s short story collection Laughable Loves — and was reissued by Faber as part of its Faber Stories series to mark the publisher’s 90th birthday in 2019. It tells the story of a man who bumps into his former lover, a woman much older than him whom he has not seen in 15 years. “I wouldn’t have recognised you ..read more

Fiction – paperback; Penguin; 112 pages; 2018. Translated from the Italian by W.J. Strachan. The Beautiful Summer by Cesare Pavese (1908-1950) won Italy’s most prestigious literary award, the Strega Prize for fiction, in 1950. (The author sadly died by suicide a couple of months later.) It’s the story of a teenage girl whose friendship with an older woman draws her into a bohemian artistic community in 1930s Turin, showing her an alternative way of life. It has been reissued as part of Penguin’s European Writers series. A girl’s life Sixteen-year-old Ginia works at a dressmakers and lives wit ..read more

Fiction – paperback; Europa Editions; 300 pages; 2023. Translated from the French by Alison Anderson. Children’s right to privacy in the Internet age is at the heart of Kids Run the Show, a provocative novel — part crime thriller, part social commentary — by French writer Delphine de Vigan. The story focuses on Mélanie Claux, a young mother of two, who exploits her children online for financial gain. It is set against a backdrop of calls to regulate the commercial exploitation of children by their parents and to classify the activity as work. In fact, in 2021, France introduced a law to prote ..read more

Fiction – Kindle edition; Text Publishing; 208 pages; 2024. Translated from the Swedish by Saskia Vogel. Review copy courtesy of the publisher via Netgalley. The Singularity is a hypnotically powerful novel about the strength of a mother’s love for her missing teenage daughter. But it’s also a compelling story about what it is like to be displaced and to lose your language, country and identity. The author, Balsam Karam, is of Kurdish ancestry and has lived in Sweden since she was a child. Unnamed country The story is set in an unnamed country, somewhere hot, framed between the mountains, “ha ..read more

Fiction – paperback; Giramondo; 144 pages; 2020. Translated from the Spanish by Ellen Jones. It’s widely acknowledged that the letter X holds a special place in Elon Musk’s heart (assuming he has one). There’s SpaceX, Tesla’s Model X and the social media channel X (formerly known as Twitter). He even has a child named X AE A-XII, known as “X” for short. The letter X is also popular with Chilean author Bruno Lloret if his debut novel, Nancy, is anything to go by. First published in Chile in 2015 and translated into English by Ellen Jones in 2020, this striking novella uses X as literary “decor ..read more

Fiction – paperback; Daunt Books; 80 pages; 2023. Translated from the Italian by Avril Bardoni. What is it to be a “man of consequence”? And what happens if you don’t live up to that descriptor? This is the focus of Natalia Ginzburg’s Valentino, the tale of a much-doted-upon son who fails to live up to his parents’ expectations. The titular Valentino, the only son of a retired school teacher, is lazy, vain and selfish. But there’s more to his story than meets the eye, and what is left unsaid in this carefully crafted novella, first published in 1957, is almost more important than what is ..read more

Fiction – hardcover; Europa Editions; 224 pages; 2022. Translated from the Japanese by Sam Bett and David Boyd. Review copy courtesy of the publisher via NetGalley. Set in contemporary Tokyo, Mieko Kawakami’s All the Lovers in the Night tells the story of a 30-something woman who isolates herself from the real world because she has difficulty making friends and forming meaningful relationships — both at work and at play. My name is Fuyuko Irie, a freelance proofreader, thirty-four years old. I’ll be turning thirty-five in the winter. I live alone. I’ve been living in the same apartment forev ..read more

Fiction – paperback; Bloomsbury; 208 pages; 2023. Translated from the French by Emma Ramadan and Olivia Baes. It took almost 80 years, but it’s wonderful that Marguerite Duras‘ second novel, The Easy Life, has finally been translated into English for the first time. Originally published in her native France in 1944, this extraordinary novel is about a young woman dealing with the aftermath of two family tragedies in close succession. It’s essentially a coming-of-age tale (told in the first person) and is divided into three parts. The first charts 25-year-old Francine Veyrenatte’s life on the ..read more

Fiction – paperback; Penguin Modern Classics; 240 pages; 2017. Translated from the Italian by Jamie McKendrick. The Garden of the Finzi-Continis, first published in 1962, is the third book in Giorgio Bassani’s “Novel of Ferrara” six-part series but can be read as a standalone. At its most basic level, it is a story of unrequited love between two Italian college students, but it’s so much more than that. It touches on issues related to Italian Fascism, racial discrimination (all the characters are Jewish) and class, and explores memory, loyalty, friendship and family. The story is told by an u ..read more

Fiction – Kindle edition; Fitzcarraldo Editions; 144 pages; 2020. Translated from the Arabic by Elisabeth Jaquette. It’s not very often that I am ahead of the curve, but when I extracted Adania Shibli’s Minor Detail from my digital TBR last weekend, little did I know the author would be the focus of worldwide attention in the days to come. Shibli is a Palestinian author who was due to be awarded the 2023 LiBeraturpreis yesterday (20 October) at an award ceremony at the Frankfurt Book Fair. In the wake of the recent outbreak of war between Israel and Hamas, the Fair’s organisers cancelled the ..read more