Ed. Raph Cormack. Manchester, UK. Comma Press. 2019. 144 pages.
It is not often that Western audiences have the opportunity to delve into an anthology of contemporary Egyptian fiction; a book that tr…
FICTION
New York. Europa Editions. 2020. 245 pages. Shokoofeh Azar’s The Enlightenment of the Greengage Tree is an astoundingly imaginative work of fiction with deep roots in Persian culture.…
Raleigh, North Carolina. Regal House. 2019. 206 pages. In this masterful collection of short stories, characters from urban Nairobi and rural villages burst into life in bold, expressionistic strokes…
Paris. Grasset. 2019. 377 pages. Laurent Binet’s last novel, La septième fonction du langage (2015), was an elaborate, cleverly constructed satire of the postmodernist period and many of its…
New York. Harper Voyager. 2020. 304 pages. “No good deed goes unpunished”: rarely has an aphorism been so vividly rendered in fiction. But Daughter from the Dark doesn’t just offer readers a…
Weston, Florida. Katakana Editores. 2020. 126 pages. Near the end of Alberto Chimal’s The Most Fragile Objects, Latour, one of the protagonists, tries, much like all enlightened tyrants, to…
New York. Bloomsbury. 2020. 512 pages. For all its strange science, clairvoyance, and electrical ghosts, The Lost Future of Pepperharrow presents a nineteenth century remarkably analog…
New York. William Morrow. 2020. 195 pages. An author who wishes to recall a history known to his parents, but outside his own experience, often has a hard time getting it right. He may brim with over…
New York. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 2020. 224 pages. In a four-decade career as a crooked Buenos Aires businessman, the protagonist of K. Ferrari’s Like Flies from Afar has harmed and…
Windsor, Ontario. Biblioasis. 2020. 342 pages. One of Pascale Quiviger’s narrators calls “love” a “hole punched in reality”; though from an earlier novel, it aptly describes the situation in…
Trans. Bill Johnston. Bloomington. Indiana University Press. 2019. 203 pages. In the Republic of Vietongo, life is a perpetual schism. The setting of Alain Mabanckou’s most recently translated novel,…
New York. Tor Books. 2019. 352 pages. Supernova Era is the fifth novel by Chinese sci-fi author Cixin Liu to come out in English translation since 2014, and this doe…
Frankfurt am Main. Schöffling. 2019. 250 pages. Berit Glanz is one of Germany’s brightest young stars. In a year where young novelists are dominating prize lists, including the German Book Award shor…
New York. Grove Press. 2019. 576 pages. Most novels about Palestine focus on the events following the Nakba (the catastrophe, in Arabic) of 1948. Isabella Hammad chooses to focus on the neglected pre…
New York. HarperVia. 2019. 387 pages. Sometimes a novel stands out less for its content and more for its very existence. Such a novel is Lost in the Spanish Quarter, by Heddi Goodrich, which…
New York. Bellevue Literary Press. 2019. 208 pages. The invisible butler did it. That’s the high-concept vision of Spanish novelist Juan José Millás’s quirky, dark comedy From the Shadows…
Dallas, Texas. Deep Vellum. 2019. 176 pages. In her second novel translated into English, Dorota Masłowska sets her sights on societal decay under capitalism and consumer culture. Joanne and Fa…
New York. Ballantine. 2019. 317 pages. Originally published in Canada in 2016, The Beekeeper of Aleppo follows a couple fleeing the destruction of the Syrian war to Turkey and Greece as…
Oakland, California. Transit Books. 2019. 150 pages. Gabriela Ybarra grew up in death’s shadow. Before she was born, her grandfather was kidnapped and executed by Basque separatists. When she was you…
Rochester, New York. Open Letter. 2019. 180 pages. A novelist once said that writers come in two types. One is the storyteller, whose art originates in folklore and the oral tradition and whose…
New York. Other Press. 2019. 192 pages. Compact, thought-provoking, and gently exquisite, Labyrinth, the fourth novel by Turkish author Burhan Sönmez, quietly establishes him as one of…
Montréal. Mémoire d’encrier. 2019. 166 pages. The age of Louis XIV conjures images of pomp and splendor, court intrigues and trickeries, loose morals and scabrous adventures, ribaldry and chivalry. I…
Toronto. Arachnide Editions. 2019. 192 pages. Quebecoise author Audrée Wilhelmy’s third novel chronicles the Borya family’s experiences in fictional Sitjaq’s rugged terrain. Unexpected intimacies eru…
Beijing. People’s Literature Publishing House. 2018. 1,039 pages. Ying Wu Xiong (Brother Yingwu), Li Er’s latest novel, won the 2019 Mao Dun Literature Prize in China. In the afterword, Li s…
New York. Scribner. 2019. 320 pages. David Livingstone was a household name to late nineteenth-century Brits. His story was one of colonialist triumph, of British imperial masculinity’s simultaneous…