New York. Tor. 2018. 384 pages.
Multiple-award-winning Chinese science-fiction author Cixin Liu is having a moment in the anglophone world. Because of the 2014 English translation of his novel The Thr…
FICTION
Madrid. Alfaguara. 2018. 504 pages. Mexican novelist Jorge Volpi has won the 2018 Alfaguara Novel Prize with Una novela criminal, a documentary novel examining the use of illegal tactics by M…
Paris. Lattès. 2017. 365 pages. Ivan and Ivana, whose intertwined destinies structure this novel, are twins born in Guadeloupe. The brother and sister grow up in difficult circumstances: their mother…
Paris. Flammarion. 2018. 868 pages. A scant two months after winning the prestigious, quirky Prix Décembre for the first volume, Grégoire Bouillier brought out the second half of his Le Dossier M…
Paris. Éditions Grasset & Fasquelle. 2016. 218 pages. The translations of Petit pays into thirty languages and its five French literary prizes attest to the universal appeal of this first…
Hamburg, Germany. Argument Verlag mit Ariadne. 2017. 352 pages. Alles so hell da vorn (It’s all so bright over there) is Monika Geier’s seventh outing for the likable and slightly chaotic Det…
New York. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 2018. 288 pages. Set in western Australia, Tim Winton’s newest novel features a teenager who wants to escape an abusive home but can’t do so until his parents pass…
Seattle. AmazonCrossing. 2018. 161 pages. Kazuki Kaneshiro’s (b. 1968) Naoki Prize–winning Go begins with a famous epigraph from Romeo and Juliet and sets, thereby, both the scene an…
Oakland, California. Transit Books. 2018. 160 pages. Despite being slim, Blue Self-Portrait is at once dizzying and—at times—exhausting. Lefebvre’s first novel to be translated into English i…
New Haven, Connecticut. Yale University Press. 2018. 328 pages. First published in 2014 at the start of Russia’s war in Ukraine’s east, Serhiy Zhadan’s Mesopotamia tells the story of Kharkiv,…
Montreal. Drawn & Quarterly. 2018. 68 pages. Anna Haifisch’s absurdist graphic novel Von Spatz is brilliant, weird, and darkly funny. Von Spatz is a tribute to artists, by an art…
Windsor, Ontario. Biblioasis. 2018. 400 pages. Despite Transparent City’s focus on a community slipping down a precipice and toward urban demise, Ondjaki’s prose pulses with life. In the hour…
New York. Penguin Random House. 2018. 320 pages. You-Jeong Jeong’s The Good Son is a precise, meticulously plotted thriller that is occasionally too precise and meticulous for its own good. T…
New York. New Directions. 2018 (©2016). 304 pages. Marcia Douglas, born in the UK and raised in Jamaica, is a novelist and poet who currently teaches creative writing and Caribbean literature at the U…
Brooklyn, New York. Restless Books. 2018. 208 pages. Two things happen in Cuban science-fiction writer Yoss’s third novel in English. First, Josué Valdés—once an orphan living in the radioactive waste…
Rochester, New York. Open Letter. 2018. 266 pages. This intricate novel is packed with ruminations on scientific research, mortality, and the military-industrial complex, but at its core The Botto…
New York. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 2018. 256 pages. One January morning, three young women in different Scandinavian cities wake up, and Gunnhild Øyehaug starts examining their inner lives. A 2008 N…
New York. New Directions. 2018. 160 pages. I Didn’t Talk, Beatriz Bracher’s first novel to be published in English, revisits the Brazilian military dictatorship that lasted from 1964 to 1985,…
Brooklyn. Restless Books. 2018. 452 pages. It would be an understatement to call Moon Brow, the latest novel by Shahriar Mandanipour (translated from Persian by Sara Khalili), anything but “w…
New York. Riverhead Books. 2018 (©2017). 416 pages. One of Europe’s most important and original voices finally, after many years, has a new book on the English-language market. Olga Tokarczuk (pronoun…
Mumbai. Almost Island. 2017. 155 pages. Works of fiction are sometimes excerpted in literary magazines ahead of their publication. Baroni: A Journey, Sergio Chejfec’s eighth book and his four…
New York. Europa Editions. 2018. 253 pages. In his novel Athenian Women, newly translated from the Italian, Alessandro Barbero attempts to give us a view of daily life in ancient Athens durin…
Manchester, UK. Comma Press. 2018. 70 pages. In 2017 President Trump made the contentious decision to institute a travel ban that effectively barred individuals from seven different countries from ent…
Arles, France. Actes Sud. 2017. 328 pages. “Writing is the only effective ruse against death. People have tried prayer, drugs, magic, endelessly repeated verses, or immobility, but I believe I am the…
Madrid. Alfaguara. 2017. 552 pages. In his latest novel, Berta Isla, Spanish writer Javier Marías delivers an intense, emotionally charged story based on what, at first sight, could be labele…