Munich. Luchterhand Literaturverlag. 2016. 640 pages.Germany fell in love with Unterleuten, and Juli Zeh’s “great German novel” shot to the top of the fiction b…
FICTION
Evanston, Illinois. Northwestern University Press. 2016. 420 pages.Originally penned in 2001 by Ludmila Ulitskaya—one of Russia’s most acclaimed contemporary writers and public intellectuals—and later…
New York. New Directions. 2016. 288 pages. As acrobatic with her writing as her polar bear subjects, Yoko Tawada walks a line between fantastical yet believable. Her novel Memoirs of a Polar…
Chicago. Seagull Books (University of Chicago Press, distr.). 2016. 265 pages.Maryam: Keeper of Stories is a novel depicting women’s experiences during the Lebanese civil war across class, se…
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God Dies by the Nile and Other Novels. London. Zed Books. 2016. 494 pages.The Hidden Face of Eve. London. Zed Books. 2015. 368 pages.In a 2012 interview…
Minneapolis. Graywolf Press. 2016 (©2015). 256 pages.In this third novel, Anuradha Roy explores the lingering trauma of childhood sexual abuse in the psyche of a young Nomita. Nomi, a child victim of…
New York. Europa Editions. 2016. 370 pages.Given that Francesca Melandri’s novel Eva Sleeps has received such critical acclaim in Italy, it is no surprise that a narrative with such far-reach…
New York. Hogarth. 2016. 320 pages.Eimear McBride’s first novel, 2014’s A Girl Is a Half-Formed Thing, immediately established the Irish writer as one of the most ambitious and unique voices…
Rochester, NY. Open Letter. 2016. 260 pages. If one of us is sleeping, is the other one awake? Might Danish author Josefine Klougart’s English-language debut be a luminous waking dream? The cryp…
London. OneWorld (distr. Publishers Group West/Canada). 2016. 288 pages.The English translation of Umami, by Laia Jufresa, is a thoughtful, eccentric, and heart-wrenching interwoven story tol…
Chicago. University of Chicago Press. 2016. 145 pages.In “Ain’t No Sunshine” by Bill Withers, the performer sings “I know” a remarkable one hundred-plus times. Surprisingly, the repetition of these ly…
Madrid. Hispabooks. 2016. 200 pages.Landing is a multifaceted book, written under two simple chapter headings, “Her” and “Him,” alternately throughout the book. These chapters develop the ind…
San Francisco. Two Lines Press. 2016. 532 pages.Zlata, a Siamese twin conjoined at the head to her sister, Srebra, is the unlikely protagonist of Macedonian writer Lidija Dimkovska’s remarkable novel…
Dallas, Texas. Deep Vellum. 2016. 160 pages.When tourists visit the island of Mauritius, located off the east coast of Africa, they see gorgeous beaches and luxury hotels and not the hopelessness and…
New York. The Feminist Press. 2016. 248 pages.An aging punk named Gloria comes face to face with her own past in Virginie Despentes’s latest novel, Bye Bye Blondie, but her destructive romanc…
New York. Archipelago Books. 2016. 494 pages.In The First Wife, Paulina Chiziane, the first Mozambican woman to publish a novel, writes from the perspective of Rami, who is Tony’s only w…
New York. Anchor Books. 2016. 379 pages.Eileen Chang is undoubtedly one of the most influential writers in modern Chinese literature. Born in Shanghai in 1920, she later moved to America and passed aw…
Rochester, New York. Open Letter. 2016. 128 pages.A Greater Music is another addition to a growing body of literature that explores the idea that human sexuality is more pliable and fluid tha…
Dallas, Texas. Deep Vellum. 2016. 176 pages.One Hundred Twenty-One Days, the debut novel by mathematician and Oulipo member Michèle Audin, is truly the sum of its parts. Each of the chapters…
Victoria, Texas. Dalkey Archive Press. 2016. 248 pages.Can horrific psychic wounds from wartime ever really heal? Can one merely will oneself to forget? These are the major themes explored in this new…
Oakland, California. PM Press. 2016. 274 pages.It is said that historians provide accuracy while artists provide truth, which can be best illustrated by the novel Damnificados. According…
Norman, Oklahoma. University of Oklahoma Press. 2016. 338 pages.The Mexican Flyboy reads like a surrealist dream: it is a fairy tale for adults, a novel where clairvoyant superheroes (Mandrak…
Madrid. Alfaguara. 2016. 314 pages.Mario Vargas Llosa’s latest novel is as much a psychological thriller as it is a compelling portrait of power and corruption in Peru’s recent political history. Set…
New York. Verso Books. 2016. 164 pages.Zeno Hintermeier is named for the founder of Stoicism, a central tenet of which is that we should live in accord with nature and that we should promote moral pro…
New York. Alfred A. Knopf. 2016. 177 pages.On March 30, 1924, on what was known in England as Mothering Sunday—the day servants were given off to visit their mothers—Jane Fairchild, an orphan and hous…