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…
FICTION
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…
, 
God Dies by the Nile and Other Novels. London. Zed Books. 2016. 494 pages. The Hidden Face of Eve. London. Zed Books. 2015. 368 pages. In a 2012 interview, now eighty-four-…
Minneapolis. Graywolf Press. 2016 (©2015). 256 pages. In this third novel, Anuradha Roy explores the lingering trauma of childhood sexual abuse in the psyche of a young Nomita. Nomi, a child victim of…
New York. Europa Editions. 2016. 370 pages. Given that Francesca Melandri’s novel Eva Sleeps has received such critical acclaim in Italy, it is no surprise that a narrative with such far-reac…
New York. Hogarth. 2016. 320 pages. Eimear McBride’s first novel, 2014’s A Girl Is a Half-Formed Thing, immediately established the Irish writer as one of the most ambitious and unique voices…
Rochester, NY. Open Letter. 2016. 260 pages. If one of us is sleeping, is the other one awake? Might Danish author Josefine Klougart’s English-language debut be a luminous waking dream? The cryptic…
London. OneWorld (distr. Publishers Group West/Canada). 2016. 288 pages. The English translation of Umami, by Laia Jufresa, is a thoughtful, eccentric, and heart-wrenching interwoven story to…
Chicago. University of Chicago Press. 2016. 145 pages. In “Ain’t No Sunshine” by Bill Withers, the performer sings “I know” a remarkable one hundred-plus times. Surprisingly, the repetition of these l…
Madrid. Hispabooks. 2016. 200 pages. Landing is a multifaceted book, written under two simple chapter headings, “Her” and “Him,” alternately throughout the book. These chapters develop the in…
San Francisco. Two Lines Press. 2016. 532 pages. Zlata, a Siamese twin conjoined at the head to her sister, Srebra, is the unlikely protagonist of Macedonian writer Lidija Dimkovska’s remarkable novel…
Dallas, Texas. Deep Vellum. 2016. 160 pages. When tourists visit the island of Mauritius, located off the east coast of Africa, they see gorgeous beaches and luxury hotels and not the hopelessness and…
New York. The Feminist Press. 2016. 248 pages. An aging punk named Gloria comes face to face with her own past in Virginie Despentes’s latest novel, Bye Bye Blondie, but her destructive roman…
New York. Archipelago Books. 2016. 494 pages. In The First Wife, Paulina Chiziane, the first Mozambican woman to publish a novel, writes from the perspective of Rami, who is Tony’s only wife—…
New York. Anchor Books. 2016. 379 pages. Eileen Chang is undoubtedly one of the most influential writers in modern Chinese literature. Born in Shanghai in 1920, she later moved to America and passed a…