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…
FICTION
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…
New York. Archipelago. 2025. 250 pages.Norwegian writer Hanne Ørstavik (b. 1969) often writes intensely immersive novels about the search for a “perfect” love, unaware of the iro…
New York. Europa Editions, 2025. 528 pages.All stories begin in ambiguity. This simple declaration is central to the beginning of The Gowkaran Tree in the Middle of Our Kitchen…
New York. Knopf. 2025. 304 pages.Best known as the author of Waterland (1983) and Last Orders (1996), for which he won the Booker Prize, Graham Swif…
New York. Grove Press. 2025. 240 pages.Vanishing World is the fourth title by Sayaka Murata (b. 1979) to appear in English. The novel’s skilled translator, Ginny Tapley…
New York. And Other Stories. 2025. 224 pages.Heart Lamp—winner of the 2025 International Booker Prize—is a resonant short-story collection that illuminates the lives of Musli…
New York. New Vessel Press. 2025. 376 pages.With immigration a timely topic, a new novel by an Israeli writer parses cross-cultural identity via a distinctive approach. Maya Arad’s pr…
New York. Riverhead Books. 2025. 256 pages.Throughout his career, Abdulrazak Gurnah has constantly examined the historical and social transformations of East Africa, particularly the…
New York. Random House. 2024. 352 pages.Crafting three narrative voices and rendering each specific and compelling is just one of the literary feats that Ayelet Tsabari (b. 1973)…
Syracuse, New York. Syracuse University Press. 2024. 222 pages.Heraclitus spoke of a constant change in both perceived and perceiver that is morally neutral, but perhaps the first of…
New York. Knopf. 2024. 291 pages.Peter Heller’s Burn follows Jess and Storey, longtime friends and outdoorsmen who emerge, like Rip Van Winkle, from an annua…
London. Hogarth. 2025. 320 pages.In Cristina Rivera Garza’s Death Takes Me, nothing is what it seems. In fact, all the formulaic aspects of detective fiction are called into…
Nanjing. Jiangsu Phoenix Literature and Art Publishing House. 2024. 251 pages.In I Am as Timid as a Mouse, Yu Hua launches a spiritual revol…
Minneapolis. Coffee House Press. 2025. 136 pages.The phrase “primal scream” feels bandied about these days. The Seers, Sulaiman Addonia’s third novel, is certainly primal, an…
New York. New Press. 2025. 160 pages.It may come as a surprise that Jews still live in Poland. At the start of World War II, Poland was a center of Jewish culture and home to 3.3 mill…
New York. W. W. Norton. 2024. 381 pages.Quite naturally, one wants to connect Powers’s title to the act of making a novel, with the emphasis on playfulness. But this is no fun house,…
New York. Pantheon. 2025. 336 pages.In Laila Lalami’s new fiction, The Dream Hotel, an ordinary journey home turns into a nightmare. Sara Hussein, a Moroccan American scienti…
New York. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 2025. 282 pages.The Malaysian London-based author Tash Aw has won consistent critical acclaim since the publication of his first novel, The Ha…