Paris. Gallimard. 2016. 176 pages.
Scholastique Mukasonga, whose family was destroyed in the Rwandan genocide and who won a prestigious prize for the novel Notre-Dame du Nil (2012), now has…
FICTION
Paris. P.O.L. 2016. 272 pages. The narrator of Gérard Gavarry’s latest book, Leucate Univers, is anonymous. All that is initially made known about him is that he is eager to learn about the…
Trans. Jerry Pinto. New York. The New Press. 2016. 240 pages. The entrance of an unknown stranger who radically impacts the lives of other characters is a commonly used fictional device. Consider Paso…
Windsor, Ontario. Biblioasis. 2016. 393 pages. There is nothing more profound than the realization of what war does well beyond its official end. Peter Bush has given us a poetic translation of Emili…
New York. Viking. 2016. 462 pages. In June 1922 the charming Count Alexander Ilyich Rostov is tried in Moscow and found guilty; this verdict opens Amor Towles’s engaging new novel. Rather than being s…
Greenville, South Carolina. KBR. 2016. 217 pages. Western literature is full of accounts of vagrancy and tales of the flâneur. So why would we need yet another? Wolfgang Hermann’s Paris Berlin New…
Goa, India. Under the Peepal Tree. 2016. 192 pages. Perspectives: An Anthology of Telugu Short Stories is a collection of nineteen short stories by as many authors (sixteen men and three wome…
Brooklyn. Melville House. 2016. 582 pages. As if on an unseasonable night, reading a Calvino novel, the reader is addressed in the first chapter. He or she is pictured in a fully furnished hotel room…
Brooklyn. Archipelago Books. 2016. 153 pages. The unnamed narrator of Antonio Moresco’s Distant Light is uncommonly attuned to the natural world. Fleeing from his past for reasons that are ne…
Bloomington. Indiana University Press. 2016. 78 pages. The unnamed narrator of Wilfried N’Sondé’s novella The Heart of the Leopard Children describes his wretched and brutal experience in a F…
New York. Tor. 2016. 608 pages. Death’s End concludes Cixin Liu’s trilogy, Remembrance of Earth’s Past, which began with the multiple-award-winning The Three-Body Problem (2…
Toronto. Coach House Books. 2016. 232 pages. In his latest novel, Scotiabank Giller Prize winner André Alexis crafts a complex tale of family, addiction, and mystery that reflects a diverse vision of…
New York. Penguin Books. 2016. 101 pages. Alejandro Zambra is a comprehensive reader of Bolaño and Perec, and surely of Natalia Ginzburg and Cesare Pavese, although he says one is dumb if worried abou…
Madrid. Alfaguara. 2016. 362 pages. Eduardo Sacheri’s La noche de la Usina won the prestigious Alfaguara Novel Prize for 2016. An accomplished fiction and scriptwriter, Sacheri earned interna…
New York. Viking. 2016. 246 pages. Krys Lee’s How I Became a North Korean casts a narrative of three voices: Yongju, a North Korean exile from an affluent family; Jangmi, a trafficked North K…
New York. Atlantic Monthly Press. 2016. 294 pages. Jacob has issues. He was born a bastard in Beirut, the son of a bourgeois Lebanese teenager and a Yemeni housekeeper. He spends much of his youth in…
New York. Liveright. 2016. 1,266 pages. Alan Moore has constructed in Jerusalem a monolithic rendering of his hometown of Northampton, England, steeped in a timeless mythology and haunted by…
Minneapolis, Minnesota. Graywolf. 2016. 281 pages. What are borders? “Not something to be taken lightly,” declares Norwegian author Roy Jacobsen in his latest English translation. Over thirty…
New Haven, Connecticut. Yale University Press. 2017. 184 pages. Czesław Miłosz, the Polish poet and Nobel laureate who died in 2004, published two novels in his lifetime. The first, The Seizure of…
Dallas, Texas. Deep Vellum. 2016. 104 pages. It has taken twenty-seven years for Antes, Carmen Boullosa’s second novel, to reach an English audience. Published in 1989, the novel earned Boul…
Victoria, Texas. Dalkey Archive Press. 119 pages. Like many postmodern Yugoslav novels, Jovanka Živanović’s slim debut, Fragile Travelers,mines magical realism in its shifts between, and merg…
Munich. Luchterhand Literaturverlag. 2016. 640 pages. Germany fell in love with Unterleuten, and Juli Zeh’s “great German novel” shot to the top of the fiction best-…
Evanston, Illinois. Northwestern University Press. 2016. 420 pages. Originally penned in 2001 by Ludmila Ulitskaya—one of Russia’s most acclaimed contemporary writers and public intellectuals—and late…
New York. New Directions. 2016. 288 pages. As acrobatic with her writing as her polar bear subjects, Yoko Tawada walks a line between fantastical yet believable. Her novel Memoirs of a Polar Bear…
Chicago. Seagull Books (University of Chicago Press, distr.). 2016. 265 pages. Maryam: Keeper of Stories is a novel depicting women’s experiences during the Lebanese civil war across class, s…