New York. Simon & Schuster. 2015. 359 pages.
“Oh, plenty of hope, an infinite amount of hope—but not for us.”
This quote from Franz Kafka kicks off Australian Steve Toltz’s Quicksand—hi…
FICTION
London. Darf. 2015. 378 pages. Few non-Western cities have penetrated our consciousness like Benghazi, Libya, following the 2012 attack on the American mission there, yet most of us know little about…
Paris. Alma. 2015. 263 pages. Pierre Raufast’s latest novel begins rather grippingly with a getaway scene in which a middle-aged teacher confides in the reader that he is hiding one of his teenage pu…
New York. Minotaur Books. 2015. 320 pages. Those unfamiliar with Qiu Xiaolong’s Inspector Chen series may want to read all or some of the earlier novels prior to reading this newest one, if only to be…
New Romney, UK. Jantar (Dufour Editions, distr.). 2014. 344 pages. Three Faces of an Angel is a captivating three-generational Czech saga spanning the time of the Austro-Hungarian Empire to…
Athens, Ohio. Ohio University Press. 2015. 235 pages. Mrs. Shaw takes place in two vastly different settings: the Kwatee Republic, a fictitious, pan-African name for Kenya, and Madison, Wisc…
Rochester, NY. Open Letter. 2015. 190 pages. Some books demand a slow reading, requiring a period of acclimation. We pick them up in intervals, glimpse their interiors with trepidation. Such is the ca…
New York. Tor. 2015. 512 pages. Suppose you know with certainty that in four hundred years a cosmic event will obliterate the human race. Suppose, for example, you are a brilliant strategist and forme…
Copenhagen. Gyldendal. 2015. 594 pages. Kim Leine’s new novel is not about Greenland; the Danish ex-colony is the setting of Kalak (2007), Leine’s much-praised debut; Tunu…
New York. Harper. 2015. 115 pages. It has been thirteen years since Milan Kundera last published a novel. The Festival of Insignificance is Kundera’s tenth novel and the fourth to be written…
Paris. Gallimard. 2015. 331 pages. Isabelle Jarry, who has written science fiction and novels for young adults, invents a story taking place in 2051, Magique aujourd’hui (Magic today), where…
San Francisco. Two Lines Press. 2015. 163 pages. It is gratifying to see Wolfgang Hilbig’s work appear in translation, if posthumously, because of the unique perspective on the former East and the new…
New York. Seagull Books. 2015. 293 pages. Decades after the Battle of Berlin and the fall of Nazi Germany, sociologists and laymen alike still puzzle over one of the most vexing questions to come out…
Patrick Hemingway, foreword. Seán Hemingway, intro. New York. Scribner. 2015. 281 pages. In this new edition of Green Hills of Africa, the introduction and, by implication, the apparatus—Pau…
Bedford, New York. Fig Tree Books. 2015. 389 pages. From the beginning, Jonathan Papernick thrusts the reader into the middle of a very disorganized life. Matthew Stone, suicidal, somewhat dependent…
San Francisco. Two Lines Press. 2015. 286 pages. Is there some inherent quality within the Czech lands that favors an inclination toward the absurd in their literature? Fans and adherents of Czech abs…
New York. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. 2015. 592 pages. Ludmila Ulitskaya’s new novel offers an almost ethnographic portrait of Russia’s 1960s generation, who came of age during Khrushchev’s Thaw. The…
Ann Vandermeer & Jeff Vandermeer, ed. Oakland, California. PM Press. (IPG, distr.). 2015. 341 pages. This collection brings together stories from the 1970s onward from new and established writers…
New York. Atavist Books. 2014. 336 pages. To put this book in any specific genre would be an injustice. A God in Every Stone is firstly a historical fiction, outlining lands long forgotten bu…
Paris. Gallimard. 2015. 275 pages. Boualem Sansal often writes about the power of religion in north Africa (see WLT, Sept. 2012, 16–19). In 2084, his seventh novel, which won the Gra…
Minneapolis, Minnesota. Graywolf. 2015. 88 pages. One Out of Two, by Daniel Sada, describes the lives of the Gamal twins, Constitución and Gloria. They live together, work together in their s…
New York. Random House. 2015. 210 pages. In his captivating new novel, the title of which adds up to the magical storytelling formula of 1,001 nights, Salman Rushdie tells a story in which jinn and ji…
New York. Seven Stories Press. 2015. 208 pages. "We perpetuate unto the newest generation the neuroses of our forbearers, wounds we keep inflicting on ourselves like a second layer of genetic inscrip…
New York. Hogarth. 2015. 332 pages. After the signal achievement of Anthony Marra’s first novel, A Constellation of Vital Phenomena (2013), one returns with pleasure to Chechnya and Russia fo…
New York. Dr. Cicero Books (SPD Books, distr.). 2015. 400 pages. Ashley Mayne’s second novel, Tiger, is a wonderfully empathetic look into the hearts and minds of profoundly damaged people. T…