New York. Henry Holt. 2017. 866 pages.
Is it an indulgence to resist the arbitrariness of having only one life to live? Rather than lodge one’s alternative paths in a variety of characters in differen…
FICTION
New York. Riverhead Books. 2017. 231 pages. Mohsin Hamid’s latest novel explores the tender and tenuous relationship between Nadia and Saeed, young adults coming of age during a time of strife in the…
Rochester, New York. Open Letter. 2017. 470 pages. Frontier, first published in China in 2008, is Can Xue’s follow-up to her novel The Last Lover, winner of the 2015 Best Translated…
Dallas, Texas. Deep Vellum. 2017. 312 pages. It is difficult to find the right genre to capture Klougart’s sixth publication, Of Darkness (WLT, Jan. 2017, 53–55). Perhaps people have…
Anadarko, Oklahoma. Hosstyle. 2016. 387 pages. In The Last Pow-Wow, by That Native Thomas and Steven Paul Judd, a Native American baby is born with powwow regalia growing out of his skin. Fe…
Barcelona. Acantilado. 2016. 373 pages. La última hermana, the latest novel by Chilean Jorge Edwards, is a compelling story about the cruelty of war but also of a courage born of human compas…
Santiago de Chile. Plaza Janés. 2015. 131 pages. Those who know about literature know that what is easy to read is almost always difficult to write. That is the case of the work of the Chilean author…
Madrid. Alfaguara. 2016. 223 pages. The continuing polemic about this novel’s publication confirms that it hardly matters whether it disappoints professors fretful about pre/ur-texts, or faithful Robe…
Seattle. Chin Music Press. 2016. 220 pages. Set in the 1960s, White Elephant follows the lives of sisters Hiroko and Sakiko, two of the four daughters of Japanese business magnate Morimasa Mo…
Madrid. Siruela. 2016. 182 pages. Rosa Montero says in La loca de la casa that novelists can be classified into two types: the hedgehogs (erizos), the ones who always come back almos…
New York. Riverhead Books. 2016. 195 pages. Claire-Louise Bennett’s debut novel, Pond, follows an unnamed young woman who takes up residence in a village on Ireland’s west coast. Initially re…
Manchester. Comma Press. 2016. 164 pages. To call The Book of Dhaka overdue is an understatement, given the dearth of translations of contemporary writers working in the Bangla language, whic…
Astoria, New York. The Mantle. 2016. 221 pages. The Sound of Things to Come, a novel in eight apparently unlinked stories, portrays educated urban Nigerians. Its context external realities du…
New York. Overlook Press. 2016. 300 pages. Despite being ever-evolving, the culture of beauty is one that looks similar across the ages. The details change from century to century, yet throughout time…
London. Peter Owen / Istros Books. 2016. 200 pages. This deeply engaging work traces the intersection of the narrator—a stand-in for the Slovenian author—with other wandering souls encountered across…
New York. Europa Editions. 2016. 259 pages. Parisa Reza’s novel The Gardens of Consolation takes us into the lives of an Iranian couple, Sardar and Talla, from their youth to their middle ag…
New York. W.W. Norton. 2016. 473 pages. Shortlisted for the 2016 Man Booker Prize, Do Not Say We Have Nothing is Madeleine Thien’s third novel. The story follows a family in China during the…
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The Doomed City. Chicago Review Press. 2016. 462 pages. The Dead Mountaineer’s Inn. Melville House. 2015. 238 pages. A Soviet astronomer from the 1950s. A Nazi. An American profes…
New York. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 2016. 148 pages. We need a new word to describe a book like Normal. “Novel” doesn’t quite cut it, because as a novel (or any of its length-centric denomin…
Comma Press. 2016. 182 pages. Iraq + 100 envisions the political and psychological consequences of the occupation a century into Iraq’s future. Written by authors of diverse ages and backgrou…
Rochester, New York. Open Letter Books. 2017. 500 pages. Life or death? Dream or reality? Antoine Volodine destroys these binaries with the force of a nuclear meltdown, much like those that (in the no…
Sacramento, California. Snuggly Books. 2017. 110 pages. Vessel and Solsvart is a collection of five short stories, all dark fantasies dealing with the fine line between life and death. Norweg…
New York. Other Press. 2017. 432 pages. Truth be told, Malin Persson Giolito’s fourth novel, Quicksand, is an indictment of the zeitgeist. Victor Hugo called quicksand “a pit of mire in a cav…
Brooklyn. Restless Books. 2017. 240 pages. Deepak Unnikrishnan’s Temporary People is a riveting debut collection of twenty-eight short stories written in a mélange of stylistic registers. Fic…
Budapest. Kossuth. 2016. 203 pages. Tamás Vekerdy, one of Hungary’s top educationalists and founder of the Waldorf Schools in his native country, is also an impressive writer. His early literary work…