Toronto. Knopf Canada. 2025. 256 pages.Roza Nozari’s All the Parts We Exile is a powerful testament to the dualities an individual possesses. The youngest of three daughters,…
FICTION
Lubbock. Texas Tech University Press. 2024. 288 pages.Longings is the first collection of contemporary fiction aimed at increasing global readers’ recognition of women’s cont…
New York. Catapult. 2025. 238 pages.The Dance and the Fire’s protagonists can’t quite trust their eyes. This is in part a product of their environment: Cuern…
Tianjin. Baihua Literature and Art Publishing House. 2025. 191 pages.A Chinese writer living in the United States, Gu Yan has written much about the immigrant experience. In her lates…
Reading, UK. Dar Arab 2025. 186 pages.Written by Jan Dost, a Syrian Kurdish poet, writer, and translator, Safe Corridor is his first novel to appear in English, and it comes…
Leeds, UK. HopeRoad. 2025. 122 pages.In Small Boat, Vincent Delecroix uses a first-person narrator as a vehicle to examine the issue of migration. Based on t…
New York. Harper Voyager. 2025. 560 pages.When Alice Law snaps a piece of chalk in two and files her admission form to hell, you know R. F. Kuang is at it again. Katabasis…
New York. New Press. 2025. 225 pages.Since 2005’s Broken Glass, Alain Mabanckou has emerged as the Congo’s definitive literary voice (see WLT, Sept.…
New York. New Directions. 2025. 224 pages.Yoko Tawada’s fiction is packed with bracing ideas about language and community, but she has the lightest of touches, even when she’s grappli…
New York. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. 2025. 320 pages.The often-fraught search for self is sometimes just a masquerade written under the fragile narrative arc of making a journey bac…
San Francisco. Two Lines Press. 2025. 178 pages.The reach and rustle of voice is inescapable, as it should be. The question is, How many voices temper personal and worldviews as the m…
Hong Kong. Earnshaw. 2025. 212 pages.Drawing inspiration from the same bustling coffee shop in Soho, Hong Kong, that fueled her 2016 short-story collection Halfway up a Hill,…
Paris. Albin Michel. 2024. 416 pages.Philippe Collin is known for his biographical essays, including Léon Blum, une vie héroïque (2023), as well as for his work as a scriptwr…
Madrid. Alfaguara. 2025. 288 pages.Juan Gabriel Vásquez’s latest novel, Los nombres de Feliza, tells the story in fictionalized form of real-life Colombian sculptress Feliza…
Charlottesville. University of Virginia Press. 2025. 148 pages.In A Waltz, Lynda Chouiten crafts an elegant and incisive narrative that follows Chahira, a se…
Tunis. Editions Elyzad. 2025. 160 pages.Picture an almond tree—prunus triloba—fanning its pink blossoms. It is the perfect illustration of a detective novel. Starting from the trunk (the crim…
New York. Archipelago. 2025. 240 pages.Angolan José Eduardo Agualusa is one of the foremost authors of the Portuguese-speaking world and arguably one of the most fascinating contempor…
New York. Ecco. 2025. 176 pages.What would happen if you made one decision instead of another?That’s what the imagined alter-ego narrator of Brigitte Giraud’s searingly perso…
Cairo. Hoopoe. 2025. 292 pages.For the reader who knows little about Oman, Zahran Alqasmi’s third novel, aptly titled Honey Hunger—an unusual tale about hunters of wild honey…
Paris. Grasset & Fasquelle. 2024. 282 pages.Winner of the Prix Renaudot 2024, Jacaranda may be the novel that is intimated in the epilogue to Petit Pays (2016; s…
Trans. Anne O. Fisher. New York. Abrams. 2025. 448 pages.Without doubt, Pioneer Summer is the most controversial and intriguing piece of Russian fiction to a…
New York. W. W. Norton. 2025. 368 pages.The Book of Records is Madeleine Thien’s fourth novel. Many readers came to Thien’s work for the first time when …
Rochester, New York. Open Letter. 2024. 200 pages.In this inspired novel, the world’s most famous soccer tournament becomes the setting for a bizarre series of events set in motion by…
New York. Penguin Press. 2025. 402 pages.Ocean Vuong deserves the highest respect as poet and memoirist, but his new novel suffers from a shocking aesthetic imbalance. Though The…
Calcutta. Seagull Books. 2024. 312 pages.Some years ago, one of his compatriots approvingly described Gamal Abdel Nasser to me as “the first Egyptian to rule Egypt since Cleopatra.” L…