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 an…
FICTION
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 w…
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 analogous to…
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 overc…
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 humil…
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 If Yo…
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 doesn’t even include the coll…
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 short…
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. T…
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 Farah ar…
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 they…
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 youn…
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 work…
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 Europ…
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. In…
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 erup…
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 sa…
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 l…
Manchester, UK. Comma Press. 2019. 222 pages. The twelve stories in Palestine +100 present radically different visions of Palestine in 2048. Technology dominates, particularly virtual realit…
New York. Liveright. 2019. 417 pages. We meet The Capital’s main characters in a central Brussels plaza where they are trying to get out of the way of a runaway pig creating havoc. Pigs are a…
New Haven, Connecticut. Yale University Press. 2019. 359 pages. War is not pleasant to read about. If, by some chance, you should ever forget that, it may be time to pick up Until Stones Become Li…
New York. Columbia University Press. 2019. 282 pages. Wang Anyi has already been recognized as one of the most influential contemporary Chinese authors and has recently received increased scholarly at…