Tiina Nunnally, tr. London. Serpent’s Tail. 2015. ISBN 9781781254882
I’m seldom sad to have finished a book. The Winter War is one of those rare novels that leave you wishing there could have…
FICTION
Mayra Santos-Febres, ed. Mexico City. Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México. 2014. ISBN 9786070252914 Since 2009, the National Autonomous University in Mexico has been publishing the series Sólo cue…
Istanbul. Yapı Kredi Yayınları. 2014. ISBN 9789750830884 Turkish Nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk’s ninth novel, Kafamda Bir Tuhaflık (A Strangeness in My Mind, forthcoming in English tra…
Tess Lewis, tr. London. Seagull Books / University of Chicago Press. 2015. ISBN 9780857422125 As this autobiographical bildungsroman, winner of the Swiss and German Book Awards in 2010, traces the jou…
Anne Mathai & Marie-Louise Naville, tr. New York. Europa Editions. 2014. ISBN 9781609452278 A multinational corporation controls much of Asia, Muslim insurgents are battling occupiers from the We…
New York. Random House. 2014. ISBN 981400065677 The Bone Clocks initially seems more conventional than Cloud Atlas—in short, a real novel. It begins in the mid-1980s and moves forwa…
Stephen Snyder, tr. New York. Mulholland Books / Little, Brown. 2014. ISBN 9780316200929 Confessions, the debut novel from Minato Kanae (b. 1973), is a sobering indictment of current Japanese…
Zoltán Hafner, ed. Budapest. Magvető. 2014. ISBN 9789631427738 The Nobel Prize–winning writer Imre Kertész always focused his writing on two broad themes: the Holocaust and his own experience of post-…
London. Oneworld. 2014. ISBN 9781780744940 Like many publishers, Oneworld sends out its review copies accompanied by publicity materials. From these we learn that Claire Hajaj inherits a shared Pales…
New York. Europa Editions. 2014. ISBN 9781609452346 Arctic Summer is the title of an unfinished novel by E. M. Forster about the tension between marriage and friendship that results when a ma…
Dick Cluster, tr. San Francisco. City Lights Books. 2014. ISBN 9780872866225 A Corner of the World is a love story with a sad ending. The ending is predictable from the beginning, expected as…
Paris. Gallimard. 2014. ISBN 9782070146314 Eugène Ébodé, of Cameroonian origin but having lived and worked in France for many years, was one of ten African writers invited by Fest’Africa to go to Rwa…
Belgrade. Laguna. 2014. ISBN 9788652117499 Over the past decade, several excellent post-Yugoslavia novels have been published on genocide and the Holocaust. This indicates a strong writers’ need for r…
David Kurnick, tr. Los Angeles. Semiotext(e)/MIT Press. 2014. ISBN 9781584351344 In 1975 Argentine writer Julio Cortázar returned home to Paris from Brussels, where he had been participating in a meet…
Angela Rodel, tr. New York. Black Balloon (Consortium, distr.). 2014. ISBN 9781936787135 Virginia Zaharieva is a Bulgarian author, journalist, and psychotherapist. She has written three books of poetr…
Salar Abdoh, ed. & tr. Brooklyn, New York. Akashic Books. 2014. ISBN 9781617753008 Tehran Noir is one of the new books in the Akashic Books noir series, which was launched in 2004. It has…
Pasadena, California. Red Hen Press. 2014. ISBN 9781597099592 With her timely first novel, The Meaning of Names, Karen Gettert Shoemaker presents us with two unique main conflicts: the great…
Fereshteh Nouraie-Simone, ed. Faridoun Farrokh & Sara Khalili, tr. New York. Feminist Press at CUNY. 2014. ISBN 9781558618688 The Shipwrecked: Contemporary Stories by Women from Iran emph…
London / New York. Viking. 2014 / 2015. ISBN 9780241004920 / 978052542971 The best historical novels impose familiar tensions upon unfamiliar locales and eras, making place and time come alive with ac…
Chris Andrews, tr. New Haven, Connecticut. Yale University Press. 2014. ISBN 9780300196092 Severina is a multifaceted novel that exposes the complicated maneuvers which make up the dénouement…
Andrew Bromfield, tr. London. And Other Stories. 2014. ISBN 9781908276360 In his novel The Matiushin Case, author Oleg Pavlov delves deep into the psyche of a troubled young man during the la…
Melanie Mauthner, tr. Brooklyn. Archipelago Books. 2014. ISBN 9780914671039 Our Lady of the Nile (Notre-Dame du Nil, 2012) won the Prix Renaudot, the French Voices Award, as well as…
Eric Selland, tr. New York. New Directions. 2014. ISBN 9780811221504 The Guest Cat is, at its heart, a novel of loss, told in sparse, precise prose unencumbered by sweeping rhetorical flouris…
New York. Hogarth / Random House. 2014. ISBN 9780553418842 In a 2008 interview occasioned by publication of his novel The Fire Gospel, Michel Faber said, “I think there is that very basic yea…
Ros Schwartz, tr. London. Seagull Books (University of Chicago Press, distr.). 2014. ISBN 9780857421647 The only fully functioning police state I have had personal experience with is Syria, which I vi…