Paris. Gallimard. 2020. 365 pages.
IN 2016 LEÏLA SLIMANI won the Prix Goncourt, France’s most prestigious annual literary prize, for her novel Chanson douce (see WL…
FICTION
New York. Random House. 2020. 368 pages. YIYUN LI, ONE OF THE MOST acclaimed contemporary American writers, continually reinvents herself. Her last novel, The Kindness of So…
New York. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 2020. 288 pages. MASTER STORYTELLER MIA COUTO frames an inspired tale with actual events in The Sword and the Spear. The novel illu…
Fredericton, New Brunswick. Goose Lane Editions. 2020. 240 pages. A CHARACTER IN Deni Ellis Béchard’s previous novel, White (2018), describes people as “clusters of exp…
New York. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 2020. 309 pages. THE GILEAD CYCLE is a series of theological novels (Gilead, Home, Lila, and now Jack) that explore the nature…
New York. Verso. 2020. 432 pages. OSAMA, THE BROKEN BUT learned Marxist in Fatima Bhutto’s The Runaways, delineates a way of looking at societies that provides a much-n…
Charlottesville. University of Virginia Press. 2020. 186 pages. THE BELLE CRÉOLE, Maryse Condé’s twelfth novel, was originally published in French in 2001. The 2020 English…
New York. Grove Atlantic. 2020. 240 pages. IN HIS LATEST NOVEL, Track Changes—the final installment in a quartet that explores the liminal position occupied by Palestinian c…
New York. Little, Brown. 2020. 368 pages. HOMELAND ELEGIES is Ayad Akhtar’s second novel following American Dervish, published in 2012. In the interim, Akhtar…
New York. Other Press. 2020. 688 pages. VICTOR DEL ÁRBOL served as a Catalan police officer for two decades ending in 2012, so one would naturally expect him, as with writers li…
New York. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 2020. 320 pages. MIDWAY THROUGH Carlos Fonseca’s new novel, an actress who has exchanged the limelight for a sprawling, subversive art…
New York. Europa Editions. 2020. 318 pages. THE LYING LIFE OF ADULTS is Elena Ferrante’s first published novel following the monumental success of her Neapolitan Quarte…
New York. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 2020. 368 pages. “AN EARTHQUAKE FRACTURES the present, shatters perspective, shifts memory plates.” In Fracture, Andrés Neuman revi…
London. Jantar. 2019. 219 pages. IN BELLEVUE, Ivana Dobrakovová, winner of the European Prize for Literature, pulls no punches for her readers or her protagonist, nineteen-y…
London. Seagull Books. 2019. 303 pages. IN 2016 I CHATTED with Sonallah Ibrahim about his then-new novel, Berlin 69, published in Arabic in 2014.…
Pittsburgh. University of Pittsburgh Press. 2019. 185 pages. IN HER TOUR de force debut collection, Driving in Cars with Homeless Men, Kate Wisel weaves the stories…
Burlington, Vermont. Fomite. 2019. 236 pages. BOOKENDED BY A LYRIC from Emily Dickinson’s “We dream – it is good we are dreaming,” and from which its title is appropriately borrowed,…
Budapest. Jelenkor. 2019. 248 pages. FAMILY SAGAS HAVE recently become fashionable in Hungary. Following Péter Nádas’s excellent semi-autobiography (see WLT, March 2018, 94)…
Columbus, Ohio. Two Dollar Radio. 2020. 272 pages. FIRST PUBLISHED IN 2019 in the UK, Yelena Moskovich’s Virtuoso has been rereleased for US audiences. A novel with su…
London. Harvill Secker. 2020. 197 pages. THE DEATH OF JESUS presumably concludes J. M. Coetzee’s cycle on the messianic figure. It is not surprising that this author wo…
Paris. Éditions de l’Olivier. 2019. 256 pages. A POSSIBLE TRANSLATION for the title might be: “There are different ways to inhabit the world.” Born in 1950 in Toulouse, where he stil…
Québec. Alto. 2020. 184 pages. “LIKE A BRIDGE over troubled waters,” Hélène Dorion watches over the flow of words-thoughts-images-emotions that carries Hanna through her discovery of…
New York. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 2020. 209 pages. THE BLACK CATHEDRAL is an interesting piece of prose writing. Due to its narrative structure, a series of sh…
London. Scribner. 2020. 195 pages. IN THE 1959 Brighton summer season, Ronnie Deane, or “The Great Pablo,” and his beautiful assistant and fiancée, Evie White, have become a sensatio…
New York. Black Cat. 2020. 432 pages. CHAN HO-KEI, who lives in Taiwan, is one of the most successful rising stars of Asian crime writing. Born in Hong Kong, he began writing a…