Montpellier, France. Éditions Chèvre-feuille étoilée. 2013. ISBN 9782367950037Évelyne Trouillot’s new novel is ostensibly about border laws separating father and daughter. Gérard, having lived in Broo…
FICTION
Charleston, South Carolina. CreateSpace. 2012. ISBN 9781475126327To the growing list of East African literature focusing on the heritage of that region’s Asian population we may now add the title …
Enska textasmidjan. 2013. ISBN 9789979723110Unraveled is an absorbing read. It mixes the life story of the principal character, Frida, and the mechanisms she uses to survive abandonment by he…
Kay Heikkinen, tr. Northampton, Massachusetts. Interlink. 2013. ISBN 9781566569262Best known as the author of Saddam City (2003), a harrowing, partly autobiographical account of life in Sadda…
Mara Faye Lethem, tr. New York. Knopf. 2013. ISBN 9780307700681To its great credit, this extremely competent novel has prompted uncritical vacuity and petty comments in some American book reviews. The…
Ljouwert, Netherlands. Frysk en Frij. 2013. ISBN 9789085660279Leo Popma has written an intriguing story with an intriguing title, As gong dêr in oar (As if another went there), a story that s…
New Delhi. Prakash Books India. 2012. ISBN 9788172344474It’s not very often a book locates itself in the 1990s of both India and England. This period is a particularly interesting one for India,…
New York. Ecco / HarperCollins. 2013. ISBN 9780062120397Chronologically, Philipp Meyer’s The Son starts in 1849 with Eli McCullough—one of the three perspectives presented in the book—be…
Silvester Mazzarella, tr. New York. MacLehose (Random House, distr.). 2013. ISBN 9781623650346In this dystopian novel, Davide Longo explores the true human nature that comes out during times of d…
New York. Knopf. 2013. ISBN 9780307265746In this exquisite novel, Jhumpa Lahiri revisits some of her major themes—dislocation, assimilation, family connection, and the difficulties of love—but in this…
Gale A. Kirking, tr. Brno, Czech Republic. Real World Press. 2012. ISBN 9788090535718Jiří Hájíček is a Czech author, born in České Budějovice, southern Bohemia, where he spent his formative years in t…
Paris. P.O.L. 2013. ISBN 9782818017555The hero of Iegor Gran’s latest novel, his tenth for Editions P.O.L, is a twenty-something Parisian man named José. When his girlfriend leaves him, citing his lac…
Frank Wynne, tr. London. Heinemann. 2012. ISBN 9780434019410The Spanish edition of Alonso Cueto’s The Blue Hour was awarded the coveted Premio Herralde de Novela when it was first published i…
New York. Reagan Arthur Books / Little, Brown. 2013. ISBN 9780316230810Written with kinetic energy that crackles with life, NoViolet Bulawayo’s debut novel should be read by anyone interested in emerg…
New York. Little, Brown. 2013. ISBN 978-0316217385 This powerful first novel explores the history of Croatia and its diaspora from World War II to the present through the Moric family on a fictio…- Ljouwert, Netherlands. Afûk. 2012. ISBN 9789062738854Daniel Mûnema, the main character of Rekkenskip (Calling to account), is very much in search of the self he has been and should have been.…
- Paris. Buchet/Chastel. 2013. ISBN 9782283026274Sylvie Weil has recently written a couple of fine books about family life, but in neither case are the families she describes conventional ones. In C…
- Arch Tait, tr. Moscow. Glas (Consortium, distr.) 2013. ISBN 9785717200967Alexander Snegirev’s Petroleum Venus stands out against the backdrop of Russia’s contemporary literary scene, where co…
- New York. Knopf. 2013. ISBN 9780307596901Claire Messud is a confident and stylish writer, as she has proven in previous novels such as The Emperor’s Children. Those adjectives set her ap…
- James Coon et al., ed. Warsaw. New Europe Writers. 2012. ISBN 9780956859815It is difficult to get a coherent sense of Ljubljana from the sixty-six items in Ljubljana Tales, but a few things a…
- Madrid. Caballo de Troya. 2013. ISBN 9788415451204Working women are the protagonists of Diario de campo, the first novel by Rosario Izquierdo Chaparro (b. 1963). The author is a sociologist a…
- Højbjerg, Denmark. Hovedland. 2013. ISBN 9788770703581Ole Hyltoft’s Copenhagen trilogy (see WLT July 2006 and January 2008) spans an entire century. In the first volume the milieu i…
- Minneapolis, Minnesota. Graywolf. 2013. ISBN 9781555976422On Sal Mal Lane belongs to that subgenre of postcolonial literature that treats ethnonational violence resulting from decolonization.…
Brendan Riley, tr. Champaign, Illinois. Dalkey Archive. 2013. ISBN 9781564788733 The first of Mexican author Álvaro Enrigue’s six books to be published in English, Hypothermia compr…- Patty Paine et al., ed. Highclere, Berkshire. Berkshire Academic Press (ISBS, distr.). 2013. ISBN 9781907784125This is a beautifully produced book with large-size pages and glossy paper. It contains s…