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Erasure by Percival Everett (2001)

I read this after Percival Everett’s excellent So Much Blue (my review) so my reading was influenced by having read that earlier novel, which I enjoyed more.

I did really enjoy this, however I enjoyed So Much Blue more on account of the type of reader I am, because it takes you outside of America to Paris and El Salvador – that novel was about the growth of the protagonist as a result of those experiences, whereas Erasure is more of a commentary on American culture and racial bias.

Revenge Can Backfire

American Fiction film classic satire Cord Jefferson book cover young smiling black boy child holds a toy pistol to his head wearing checked shirt and jeans with braces photo in black and white the word Erasure in yellow text

In Erasure, a deeply satirical novel of the publishing industry and its biases; we have a Black American writer ‘Monk’ as protagonist, whose current work isn’t gaining traction.

I called my agent to check on the status of my novel and he had no good news for me. Three more editors had turned it down. ‘Too dense,’ one had said. ‘Not for us,’ a simple reply from another. And, ‘The market won’t support this kind of thing,’ from the third.

‘So, what now?’ I asked.

‘I don’t know what to tell you,’ Yul said. ‘If you could just write something like The Second Failure again.’ The ice clinked in his glass.

‘What are you telling me?’ I asked.

‘I’m not telling you anything.’

He feels resentful of some of what he is seeing gain popularity (fiction about the Black community using performative and pejorative racial themes and language); and he has had enough of his work being criticised for being too white.

He is middle aged and his mother is showing signs of needing additional care as her dementia begins to endanger her life. His sister and brother are both Doctors as was his late father. He visits his mother and sister, to learn his sister is being harassed by pro-life protestors every day and his mother has been lighting fires inside – a box of papers his father asked her to burn.

The Novel With A Novel

In his angst about work he writes a revenge novella using the pseudonym Stagg R. Leigh, one that uses every terrible trope about his race and sends it to his agent. The agent thinks it is a joke, he is instructed to send it out to prospective publishers anyway.

I remembered passages of Native Son and The Color Purple and Amos and Andy and my hands began to shake, the world opening around me, tree roots trembling on the ground outside, people in the street shouting dint, ax, fo, screet, and fahvre! and I was screaming inside, complaining that I didn’t sound like that, that my mother didn’t sound like that, that my father didn’t sound like that and I imagined myself sitting on a park bench counting the knives in my switchblade collection and a man came up to me and he asked me what I was doing and my mouth opened and I couldn’t help what came out, ‘Why fo you be axin?

I put a page in my father’s old manual typewriter. I wrote this novel,, a book on which I knewI could never put my name:

That 80 page novella, initially entitled My Pafology is contained within the novel Erasure. When I started reading, I skipped ahead to see how long it was. It is a unique experience to read a novel within a novel and one that is…well, I don’t really know how to describe it, because it is so deliberately offensive – and so then we witness the author watch his act of protest backfire as he is made to kind of account for what he has done.

Dealing With A Parent With Dementia

In the meantime he takes his mother and her maid on a short holiday, which results in hastening things forward there, dealing with a tragedy and coming to terms with aspects of the family that had been hidden.

Photo furkanfdemir Pexels.com

As in So Much Blue, where we learned that Percival Everett has a bit of a fascination for secrets, so too are they present here. He explores their impact on those whom they have been withheld from.

It is a thought provoking novel and there are many references to other writers and artists and thinkers within, like clues to the things that the author might have been thinking about while writing, that can take the reader down various rabbit holes. Like this one:

* * *
D.W. Griffith: I like your book very much.
Richard Wright: Thank you.
* * *

Going Down A Rabbit Hole

I learned that film director D.W.Griffith, in 1915, directed a controversial, silent film, Birth of a Nation, that depicted previously enslaved African Americans as uncivilised, and that order was restored to the chaotic South by the noble KKK.

African American author Richard Wright wrote Native Son, a book with a similar premise to My Pafology, one that may or may not undermine the humanity of the African American. James Baldwin objected to it, believing it confirmed the damning judgment on African-Americans delivered by their longstanding tormentors.

All that to say there are complex references and issues contained within Erasure that might require more close reading.

It also satirises the book prize industry, when our protagonist finds himself in a dilemma having been asked to judge a prize.

The Movie American Fiction

The book has recently been made into a film which I have not seen, entitled American Fiction. It was written and directed by Cord Jefferson and won an Academy Award (Oscar) for Best Adapted Screenplay in 2024. Jefferey Wright plays the role of the author ‘Monk’, he received a nomination for Best Actor in the Academy Awards 2024.

I was aware of this, although I did not look at any reviews or trailers, but did wonder how much of the depth of reflection could ever be portrayed in a film.

Highly Recommended. Read the book before seeing the film.

Have you read Erasure or seen the film American Fiction? What did you think?

Further Reading

New York Times: The Book Behind ‘American Fiction’ Came Out 23 Years Ago. It’s Still Current.

NPR: Advice from a critic: Read ‘Erasure’ before seeing ‘American Fiction’ by Carole V. Bell

Percival Everett, Author

Percival Everett is the author of over thirty books, including So Much Blue, Telephone, Dr No and The Trees, which was shortlisted for the 2022 Booker Prize and won the 2022 Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize.

He has received the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award and the PEN Center USA Award for Fiction, has been a Pulitzer Prize finalist, and is Distinguished Professor of English at the University of Southern California. His novel Erasure has now been adapted into the major film American Fiction.

His latest novel James (a reimagining of Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, told from the perspective of the enslaved Jim) was published on 11 April 2024. He lives in Los Angeles.

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Women’s Prize for Fiction Shortlist 2024

The Women’s Prize for Fiction have announced their shortlist of six novels. You can view the entire longlist here.

Identity, Resilience, Migrant Experiences, Family Relationships

Many of the books depict characters who are navigating seismic changes in their identity, undergoing a process of self-reckoning and self-acceptance, with several dealing with the inheritance of trauma and the resilience of women overcoming the weight of the past.

Half of the books in this year’s shortlist explore the migrant experience through different lenses, offering moving, distinct, explorations of race, identity and family, of the West’s false promise and the magnetism of home.

The shortlist encompasses stories that both focus on intimate family relationships, as well as those that convey a sweep of history, always with an eye on the particularity of women’s experience, whether in the home or in the context of war and political upheaval.

The Shortlist

Below are descriptions of the individual titles, along with a quote from a judge, to help you discern if they might be of interest:

The Wren, The Wren by Anne Enright (Ireland) published by Jonathan Cape, 283 pgs

A psychologically astute examination of family dynamics and the nature of memory. Enright’s prose is gorgeous and evocative and scalpel sharp.

Nell – funny, brave and much loved – is a young woman with adventure on her mind. As she sets out into the world, she finds her family history hard to escape. For her mother, Carmel, Nell’s leaving home opens a space in her heart, where the turmoil of a lifetime begins to churn. Across the generations falls the long shadow of Carmel’s famous father, an Irish poet of beautiful words and brutal actions.

A consideration of love: spiritual, romantic, darkly sexual or genetic. A generational saga tracing the inheritance of trauma and wonder, it is a testament to the resilience of women in the face of promises, false and true. An exploration of the love between a mother and daughter – sometimes fierce, often painful, always transcendent.

Brotherless Night by V. V. Ganeshananthan (Sri Lanka), published by Viking, 348 pgs

Visceral, historical, emotional. It is 300 pages of must-read prose. A powerful book that has the intimacy of memoir, the range and ambition of an epic, and tells a truly unforgettable story about the Sri Lankan civil war.

Sixteen-year-old Sashi wants to become a doctor. But over the next decade, as a vicious civil war subsumes Sri Lanka, her dream takes her on a different path as she watches those around her, including her four beloved brothers and their best friend, get swept up in violent political ideologies and their consequences. She must ask herself: is it possible for anyone to move through life without doing harm?

Restless Dolly Maunder by Kate Grenville (Australia), published by Canongate Books, 256 pgs

[It] follows the life of Dolly, who really is restless. It begins in the 1880s in rural Australia, and it follows Dolly’s ambitions to live a bigger life than the one she’s been given.

Dolly Maunder is born at the end of the 19th century, when society’s long-locked doors are just starting to creak ajar for determined women. Growing up in a poor farming family in rural New South Wales, Dolly spends her life doggedly pushing at those doors. A husband and two children do not deter her from searching for love and independence.

Restless Dolly Maunder is a subversive, triumphant tale of a pioneering woman working her way through a world of limits and obstacles, who is able – despite the cost – to make a life she could call her own.

Enter Ghost by Isabella Hammad (Britain/Palestine), published by Jonathan Cape, 336 pgs

How can a production of Hamlet in the West Bank resonate with the residents’ existential issues? Enter Ghost is a beautiful, profound meditation on the role of art in our society and our lives.

After years away from her family’s homeland, and reeling from a disastrous love affair, actress Sonia Nasir returns to Haifa to visit her sister Haneen. While Haneen made a life here commuting to Tel Aviv to teach at the university, Sonia remained in London to focus on her acting career and now dissolute marriage. On her return, she finds her relationship to Palestine is fragile, both bone-deep and new.

When Sonia meets the charismatic, candid Mariam, a local director, she joins a production of Hamlet in the West Bank. Soon, Sonia is rehearsing Gertrude’s lines in classical Arabic with a dedicated group of men who, in spite of competing egos and priorities, all want to bring Shakespeare to that side of the wall. As opening night draws closer and the warring intensifies, it becomes clear just how many obstacles stand before the troupe. Amidst it all, the life Sonia once knew starts to give way to the daunting, exhilarating possibility of finding a new self in her ancestral home.

Timely, thoughtful, and passionate, Isabella Hammad’s highly anticipated second novel is an exquisite story of the connection to be found in family and shared resistance.

Soldier Sailor by Claire Kilroy (Ireland), published by Faber & Faber, 233 pgs (my review)

A full-bodied, remorseless, visceral deep dive into the maternal mind. It is ultimately a love story between Soldier, the mother, and Sailor, the son.

In her acclaimed new novel, Claire Kilroy creates an unforgettable heroine, whose fierce love for her young son clashes with the seismic change to her own identity.
As her marriage strains, and she struggles with questions of autonomy, creativity and the passing of time, an old friend makes a welcome return – but can he really offer her a lifeline to the woman she used to be?

River East, River West by Aube Rey Lescure (France/China), published by Duckworth, 352 pgs

Set in Shanghai in the 2000s, it’s a novel about reinvention. It’s original, it’s funny, and it’s sometimes heartbreaking as well.

A mesmerising reversal of the east–west immigrant narrative set against China’s economic boom, River East, River West is an exploration of race, identity and family, of capitalism’s false promise and private dreams.

Shanghai, 2007: feeling betrayed by her American mother’s engagement to their rich landlord Lu Fang, fourteen-year-old Alva begins plotting her escape. But the exclusive American School – a potential ticket out – is not what she imagined.

Qingdao, 1985: newlywed Lu Fang works as a lowly shipping clerk. Though he aspires to a bright future, he is one of many casualties of harsh political reforms. Then China opens up to foreigners and capital, and Lu Fang meets a woman who makes him question what he should settle for.

The 2024 Winners

The winner of both the Women’s Prize for Fiction and the inaugural Women’s Prize for Non Fiction will be announced on June 14th, 2024.

I have only read one from the list, Claire Kilroy’s excellent Soldier, Sailor. I’m most interested in reading V.V. Ganeshananthan’s Brotherless Night and Isabella Hammad’s Enter Ghost and am reminded that a friend recommended her debut The Parisian back in 2019 (but you know, 700+ pages).

Have you read any of these from the shortlist? Let us know what you thought in the comments below.

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Yellowface by R. F. Kuang

Yellowface is a satirical novel about the publishing industry and cultural appropriation, by the New York Times bestselling author R.F. Kuang who wrote the equally popular, ambitious novel about the British Empire Babel.

Being so popular, I had seen it pop up in many bookish places, but what made me get a copy and find out for myself was listening to writer and journalist Afua Hirsch’s one minute description of it here. Her commentary is so interesting, I share part of it below.

Afua Hirsch created the podcast We Need to Talk About the British Empire where she talked to six different people about their family history and education, in the context of the British Empire and colonisation.

Literary Opportunity or Cultural Theft

Yellowface is a fascinating look into the game of being a published writer, the universe of social media, the dangers of cultural appropriation, cancel culture, revenge and who can get away with things and who can not.

Two women, June Hayward and Athena Liu, who knew each other while at university, who may or may not have been close, are now launched into their adult lives as newly published writers, one a rising star, the other fast becoming a nobody.

It is a kind of psychological thriller, as June capitalises on the death of her friend, rebranding herself to take advantage of what she is planning to do. To steal her friend’s unpublished work. But can someone who has none of the life experience of their protagonist or witness to the testimony of people interviewed, get away with convincing readers of the authenticity of their work?

“Quirky, aloof and erudite” is Athena’s brand. “Commercial, and compulsively readable yet still exquisitely literary,” I’ve decided, will be mine.

Authorial Projection or Authentic Voice

Ironically, the one thing that doesn’t ring true is the main protagonist, a white girl appropriating her Asian friend’s work and passing it off as her own. Kuang writes from this perspective, a role she is required to step into, and perhaps because we can see she is not that, it felt a little like acting. Therein lies the point, that the only way to be authentic is to be authentic.

Of course, I have my detractors. The more popular a book becomes, the more popular it becomes to hate on said book, which is why revulsion for Rupi Kaur’s poetry has become a millennial personality trait. The majority of my reviews on Goodreads are five stars, but the one-star reviews are vitriolic. Uninspired colonizer trash, one reads. Another iteration of the white woman exploitation sob story formula: copy, paste, change the names, and voila, bestseller, reads another.

A riveting read, if you’re prepared to follow the paranoid delusions of a writer playing a risky game, but along the way we learn all about the world that certain writers aspire to, that of traditional publishing and the very capitalist desire to overcome all obstacles in pursuit of profit, with little regard for the exploitation of other cultures, the dead and vulnerable.

Have you read Babel or Yellowface?

Further Reading

The Guardian: Yellowface by Rebecca F Kuang – a wickedly funny publishing thriller

New York Times: Yellowface review: Her Novel Became a Bestseller. The Trouble: She Didn’t Write It.

Author, R. F. Kuang

Rebecca F. Kuang is the #1 New York Times and #1 Sunday Times bestselling author of the Poppy War trilogy, Babel: An Arcane History, Yellowface, and Katabasis (forthcoming). Her work has won the Nebula, Locus, Crawford, and British Book Awards.

A Marshall Scholar, she has an MPhil in Chinese Studies from Cambridge and an MSc in Contemporary Chinese Studies from Oxford. She is now pursuing a PhD in East Asian Languages and Literatures at Yale, where she studies Sinophone literature and Asian American literature.

Afua Hirsch on Reading Yellowface

It is the story of two young women, one of Chinese heritage, the other white, who become intertwined in a complicated way, and it’s really about, in my opinion, the reality of what happens when someone who does not have the lived experience of a character they are writing about, attempts to tell a story in that person’s world, but lacks the complexity, the perspective and the humility to know that there is an integrity to that experience that they don’t share and the result is something problematic, no matter how much research that person has done. 

I relate to that and I think that my position on cultural appropriation is that we shouldn’t police the stories we can tell, but if you are going to tell the story of somebody whose life and perspective and truth is very different to yours, you better be prepared to acknowledge what you don’t know and ask yourself hard questions about whether you can do justice to that story. 

The character in this book doesn’t and it is a great morality tale of what happens when somebody who doesn’t have that credibility insists on taking up space.

I also think this book is a metaphor for something deeper about western cultures and how they have been predatory for centuries, not just the land and the resources of other people, which we talk about a lot in the history of colonisation, but the intellectual property, the ideas, the art, the genius, the innovation of other cultures. Afua Hirsch

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The House on Via Gemito by Domenico Starnone (Italy) tr. Oonagh Stransky

That was quite an experience.

Starnone writes a work of fiction about the man his father was (we can assume it is autobiographical since his father’s name was Federico and he painted an artwork titled ‘The Drinkers’ which is in part featured on the cover). It is an attempt to tell the story of a man he spent his childhood in fear of and his adulthood trying not to be like.

Reconstructing a Life, Walking the Streets

In the novel, the narrator is the eldest son Mimi, who lives in Rome but has returned to Naples some time after the death of his father and is reconstructing memories, by walking the streets where they lived, visiting certain places to evoke other memories, like the hospital where his mother was when her husband could no longer deny her illness; the church where he made his first communion; the council offices, where he hopes to find some of his father’s paintings, including ‘The Drinkers’. Every location existed in service to his father’s existence and memories.

He was certain that both great and small events had a common thread: the mystery of his destiny. And he constantly tried to prove it to himself, his relatives, his friends, and to us children by weaving a vibrant pattern in which the only events that were true were the ones vitally connected to him. Consequently, all the names of cities and buildings and roads, all of geography, served merely to create a map of his needs, and this was how they were to be remembered.

Though the novel is about the man, the title refers to a street where they lived for a while and the use of street names rather than diary entries or even artworks, inscribes the neighbourhood into history, creating a different kind of legacy, one that will last longer than any man or work of art. A diary would be too intimate, a street map a kind of canvas.

Portrait of a Narcissist Father Via His Eldest Son

It is also about his own boyhood, however the character of the father overshadows the son, his wife, his wife’s family, in fact anyone in proximity to him. This is because he considers himself superior. According to himself. He makes it one of his main purposes in life to remind everyone around him of that fact. He can not be taken down or made to think he is anything less than how he perceives himself.

It’s true, he was lazy. He was arrogant. He was blowhard. He was all those things, and the first to admit it. He felt he had the right to be lazy, arrogant, and a blowhard – to anyone who busted his balls. He was born to be a painter, not a railroader.

The son walks familiar streets of Naples, streets he never strolled with his father – but knew intimately from his adolescence – as a way to navigate anecdotes about the way his father lived his life, the things he said (mostly insults about everyone else), the things he did (working for the railroad as a clerk, beating his wife, painting artworks) and his opinions about various matters. He walks and remembers. He walks and imagines anew.

A Determined Artist Perseveres

historical fiction Paris 1939 Domenico Starnone House on via gemito
Photo by Pixabay on Pexels.com

Federi is passionate about art and believes he possesses great artistic talent, but the art world is full of shit people who nominate their friends for prizes, then their friends create prizes and nominate those friends, therefore keeping him out of these circles. He blames everyone for his lack of success that he continues to strive for. Beginning with his own father who refused to educate him, in fact his parents abandoned him at a young age and sent him to live with his grandmother.

He becomes a working class man, who sees the most beautiful woman who he takes for a wife, raises four sons and a daughter and spends his free time at home painting or pursuing opportunities to advance his art.

A Literary Triptych

The book is in three sections. The first section ‘The Peacock’ introduces the character and is the part of the book where you might abandon, because it isn’t yet clear why it might benefit any reader to be subject to this psychological demonstration of one of the most extreme versions of the societal system of domination at work. The patriarchy thrives under this system, as Riane Eisler showed in her work The Chalice and the Blade: Our History, Our Future and Nurturing Our Humanity: How Domination and Partnership Shape Our Brains, Lives, and Future and the portrait this novel creates shows how someone who lives according to this conditioning impacts those in his proximity. Cycles of trauma, neglect and narcissism eroding relationships in pursuit of validation, not love.

A Masterpiece Created at All Cost

Much of the source material is inspired by journals his father kept, which trigger memories and dates of events he participated in. The artworks themselves are a kind of journal, a record of themes in his life. Part Two ‘The Boy Pouring Water’ is the most compelling and significant section, it documents the process of creating the largest, most significant art work he would do. ‘The Drinkers’ required the son to pose as the boy pouring water, other members of the family sat for him and the local fruit and vegetable seller.

The anxiety the young son would feel when he realises that there is a problem in the image, between the character holding out the glass and where he is pouring from will cause contortions of magnitude in him, to try and avoid the disaster he sees coming. His father never sees it and we think for a moment that the drama has been averted, alas no – disaster arrives at the height of his short-lived pleasure.

So why do we want to read a novel about an egomaniac? And one that was originally published just over 20 years ago.

It is both a psychological example of the effect a man with no empathy and worse, a need to belittle, insult and induce fear in people, can have on a family. It is set against a backdrop of 1960’s Naples, post WWII, a place where allegiances often changed, both in the halls of power and on the street, depending on how ‘enemies or allies’ treated the people.

It is the historical context and the journey of a working class man trying to break into the establishment of artists, who despite his unruly personality, perseveres and participates as much as is possible for someone who won’t allow himself to be intimidated. Everything is a struggle, he will fight to the end. Art ‘wasn’t fun, it was war’.

Fortunately as the years passed, I developed a strategy for blocking out his words. Using this technique, which I perfected as a teenager, the angrier he grew when telling the stories of his life and the reasons for his actions, the thicker the fog grew in my head, allowing me to think about other things. It helped establish a distance between us. It curbed the desire to kill him.

Fatherhood in Another Era, Produce, Punish, Protect

In the final part ‘The Dancer’ the humiliation of the son comes full circle as he enters adolescence and tries to impress a girl Nunzia and his father gives him terrible advice about what to do with women. As if things couldn’t get any worse, we learn that young girl has been abused by an Uncle and the son lies waiting for his fathers verdict.

The book ends with a scene that makes the reader pause to reflect on how reliable the narrator is, like the father, he too has the ability to exaggerate, to curate anecdotes and perspective.

Once I got into this, which didn’t take very long, I found it both shocking and compelling to read, the dedication by a son to honoring the passage of a man who made his boyhood hell. Thus he provides a kind of validation beyond the grave, but doesn’t hold back from focusing on the many flaws alongside the talent. It is the many layers that make it something of a classic, the psychological profile and repeat patterns of the man, the making of an artist and the impact on family and the social history of a city.

Highly Recommended.

‘The House on Via Gemito is a marvellous novel of Naples and its environs during and after the Second World War. The prism for this exploration is the relationship between the narrator and his railway worker / artist father – an impossible man, filled with cowardice and boastfulness. His son’s attempt to understand and forgive him is compelling; we are held through the minutiae of each argument and explosion, each hope and almost-success.’ International Booker Judges

Further Reading

New York Times Review June 2023: My Father The Frustrated Artist

A Reading Guide – The House on Via Gemito, International Booker Prize 2024

Read An Extract from the Opening Chapter here

To see the artwork of Federico Starnone visit https://starnone.it/gallery2/

Author, Domenico Starnone

About the author

Domenico Starnone is an Italian writer, screenwriter and journalist. He was born in Naples and lives in Rome

He is the author of 13 works of fiction, including First Execution, Ties, a New York Times Editors Pick and Notable Book of the Year, and a Sunday Times and Kirkus Reviews Best Book of the Year, Trick, a Finalist for the 2018 National Book Award and the 2019 PEN Translation Prize, and Trust. 

The House on Via Gemito won Italy’s most prestigious literary prize, the Strega in 2001 and was longlisted for the International Booker Prize 2024.

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Not a River by Selva Almada (Argentina) tr. Annie McDermott

Not a River has just been shortlisted for the International Booker Prize 2024.

Opening Lines and Book Covers

International Booker Prize longlist 2024 Argentinian literature Spanish translation

I read the opening line and let it tell me as much as possible about the story I am about to read.

“Enero Ray, standing firm on the boat, stocky and beardless, swollen-bellied, legs astride, stares hard at the surface of the river and waits, revolver in hand.”

It’s a Charco Press title, so there is always a thought provoking abstract image on the cover, that never fails to contribute to the understanding of what the book has to say. This one shows twin rivers, fed by tributaries, running red.

It is clear that will be blood, death, perhaps menace and/or violence – and more than one episode. Just as the water of the smaller channels has no choice but to flow into the main river, so too the intent of a man standing firm, awaiting his prey. But who/what else will the river claim?

To Understand Any Story We Circle Back

Not a River tells a story, not in a linear way, but in a circular fashion, beginning with two men El Negro and Enero and a boy Tilo, on a fishing trip; circling back to a previous trip when Eusubio was with them, slowly revealing the memory that is acting on both men and what happened to their friend. The fishing trip is further disturbed by a visit from ‘a local’ whose questions unsettle the trio.

The second tributary/narrative follows Siomara and her two daughters Lucy and Mariela. The girls are entering womanhood, the mother is becoming more protective.

Photo V. Bagacian Pexels.com

Siomara was in one of those phases she sometimes went through, when she was grouchier than usual. Saying no to everything and dealing out punishments and bans for no reason. All because she could see how the two girls were growing, how little by little they were slipping away, how sooner or later they were going to leave her as well.

She lights fires as a way to deal with her emotions, she has done so since she was a girl. She seems to be lighting them a lot recently.

Sometimes she thinks the fire talks to her. Not like a person does, not with words. But there’s something in the crackle, the soft sound of the flames, as if she could almost hear the air burning away, yes, something, right there, that speaks to her alone…
Come on, you know you want to.
It says.

Again the story turns on itself, something has happened here too, sometimes the mother is living in the past, the present too much for her. The girls hear about a dance and plan to go.

Lucy wants to be a hairdresser. She wants to give other woman those moments of peace her mother seems to feel when she is doing her hair.

The narrative moves back and forth like the tide, people in the community are connected and affected by events that occur at the river. Paths cross, fates intertwine. It is necessary to let go of needing to know whether we are in the past or the present. If certain events happened before or after others. We accept each part of the story’s mosaic, see how they fit together, until all the pieces have been laid.

A summer like this one. Twenty years back, a summer like this one. The same island or the next one along or the one after that. In the memory it’s all just the island, with no name or exact coordinates.

The longer the men stay in the forest, the more uneasy they feel about what they have done, what has happened in the past and how unwelcome and out of place they feel. Invited to a dance, they leave their campsite for the evening.

Dreams and a Queue for the Healer

Photo by Pixabay on Pexels.com

Enero has a disturbing dream, twice.

Eusubio looked at him and thought for a moment.
We need to go see my godfather. He knows about this stuff.
He said.

Mariela also has a dream, she tells her sister Lucy about it.

And what happened in the dream?
I don’t know, like I say I just had a kind of flashback. It was weird, there were lights and sirens.

There is a sense of the repetitive cycles of the generations, girls hide from their families, they grow up to become a mother who can’t help but try and prevent their child from repeating the same mistakes. To keep them safe.

She pretends not to hear. Still just about strong enough to resist. But for how much longer.
One day, she knows she will answer the fires’s call.

In less than 100 pages, Not a River depicts disparate elements of a broken community, marginalised families, their efforts to bond, heal, escape, punish, revel and cope with the aftermath of it all.

Selva Almada’s paragraphs are like brushstrokes on a canvas, each one contributes to the story and is necessary in order to see beyond it.

The characters in my novel, men and women who live on what the river can provide, are a reflection of what the neo-liberalism of the 1990s has done to Argentina: impoverishing it, condemning a significant part of its citizens to poverty and marginalization.

Selva Almada

Highly Recommended for fans of thought provoking literary fiction.

Further Reading

Tony’s Reading list – review of Not a River

Booker Prize Website: Q & A with Author & Translator

My review of The Wind that Lays Waste

Selva Almada, Author

Selva Almada is considered one of the most powerful voices of contemporary Argentinian and Latin American literature and one of the most influential feminist intellectuals of the region.

Compared to Carson McCullers, William Faulkner, Flannery O’Connor, Sara Gallardo and Juan Carlos Onetti, Almada has published several novels, a book of short stories and a book of journalistic fiction. She has also published a film diary, written on the set of Lucrecia Martel’s film Zama, based on Antonio di Benedetto’s novel.

She has been a finalist for the Medifé Prize, the Rodolfo Walsh Award and of the Tigre Juan Award. Her work has been translated into French, Italian, Portuguese, German, Dutch, Swedish and Turkish. 

Not a River (shortlisted for the Vargas Llosa Prize for Novels) is her fourth book to appear in English after The Wind that Lays Waste (Winner of the EIBF First Book Award 2019), Dead Girls (2020), and Brickmakers (2021).

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International Booker Prize shortlist 2024

The shortlist for the International Booker Prize 2024 has been decided. It features novels from six countries, (Argentina, Brazil, Germany, Netherlands, South Korea and Sweden), translated from Dutch, German, Korean, Portuguese, Spanish and Swedish.

Chair of judges Eleanor Wachtel said:

‘Our shortlist, while implicitly optimistic, engages with current realities of racism and oppression, global violence and ecological disaster’

Prize Administrator Fiammetta Rocco added:

‘The books cast a forensic eye on divided families and divided societies, revisiting pasts both recent and distant to help make sense of the present’ 

Read Around the World, Other Perspectives

The International Booker Prize introduces readers to the best novels and short story collections from around the globe that have been translated into English and published in the UK and/or Ireland. Recognising the vital work of translators, the £50,000 prize money is divided equally: £25,000 for the author and £25,000 for the translator(s).

The shortlist was chosen from a longlist of 13 titles announced in March, which was selected from 149 books published in the UK and/or Ireland between May 1, 2023 and April 30, 2024, submitted to the prize by publishers. 

I have read one from the shortlist and it was excellent; Selva Almada’s Not a River (link to my review), the second of her novella’s I have read. Not having read any others on this list, I can’t really comment, but I would love to know what you thought if you have read any of these, or intend to. Brief summaries below.

The Shortlist

Not a River by Selva Almada (Argentina) tr. by Annie McDermott

International Booker Prize longlist 2024 Argentinian literature Spanish translation

Selva Almada’s novel is the finest expression yet of her compelling style and singular vision of rural Argentina.

Three men go out fishing, returning to a favourite spot on the river despite their memories of a terrible accident there years earlier. As a long, sultry day passes, they drink and cook and talk and dance, and try to overcome the ghosts of their past. But they are outsiders, and this intimate, peculiar moment also puts them at odds with the inhabitants of this watery universe, both human and otherwise. The forest presses close, and violence seems inevitable, but can another tragedy be avoided?

Mater 2-10 by Hwang Sok-yong (Korea) tr. Sora Kim-Russell, Youngjae Josephine Bae

An epic, multi-generational tale that threads together a century of Korean history. 

Centred on three generations of a family of rail workers and a laid-off factory worker staging a high-altitude sit-in, Mater 2-10 vividly depicts the lives of ordinary working Koreans, starting from the Japanese colonial era, continuing through Liberation, and right up to the twenty-first century. 

What I’d Rather Not Think About by Jente Posthum (Netherlands) tr. Sarah Timmer Harvey

A deeply moving exploration of grief, told in brief, precise vignettes and full of gentle melancholy and surprising humour.

What if one half of a pair of twins no longer wants to live? What if the other can’t live without them? This question lies at the heart of Jente Posthuma’s deceptively simple What I’d Rather Not Think About. The narrator is a twin whose brother has recently taken his own life. She looks back on their childhood, and tells of their adult lives: how her brother tried to find happiness, but lost himself in various men and the Bhagwan movement, though never completely. 

Crooked Plow by Itamar Vieira Junior (Brazil) tr. Johnny Lorenz

A fascinating and gripping story about the lives of subsistence farmers in Brazil’s poorest region.

Deep in Brazil’s neglected Bahia hinterland, two sisters find an ancient knife beneath their grandmother’s bed and, momentarily mystified by its power, decide to taste its metal. The shuddering violence that follows marks their lives and binds them together forever.

Kairos by Jenny Erpenbeck (Germany) tr. Michael Hofmann

An intimate and devastating story of the path of two lovers through the ruins of a relationship, set against the backdrop of a seismic period in European history.

Berlin. 11 July 1986. They meet by chance on a bus. She is a young student, he is older and married. Theirs is an intense and sudden attraction, fuelled by a shared passion for music and art, and heightened by the secrecy they must maintain. But when she strays for a single night he cannot forgive her and a dangerous crack forms between them, opening up a space for cruelty, punishment and the exertion of power. And the world around them is changing too: as the GDR begins to crumble, so too do all the old certainties and the old loyalties, ushering in a new era whose great gains also involve profound loss. 

The Details by Ia Genberg (Sweden) tr. Kira Josefsson

In exhilarating, provocative prose, Ia Genberg reveals an intimate and powerful celebration of what it means to be human.

A famous broadcaster writes a forgotten love letter; a friend abruptly disappears; a lover leaves something unexpected behind; a traumatised woman is consumed by her own anxiety. In the throes of a high fever, a woman lies bedridden. Suddenly, she is struck with an urge to revisit a particular novel from her past. Inside the book is an inscription: a message from an ex-girlfriend. Pages from her past begin to flip, full of things she cannot forget and people who cannot be forgotten. Johanna, that same ex-girlfriend, now a famous TV host. Niki, the friend who disappeared all those years ago. Alejandro, who appears like a storm in precisely the right moment. And Birgitte, whose elusive qualities shield a painful secret. Who is the real subject of a portrait, the person being painted or the one holding the brush?

The Winner

The International Booker Prize 2024 ceremony will take place from 7pm BST on Tuesday, 21 May. It is being held for the first time in the Turbine Hall at London’s Tate Modern.

Highlights from the event, including the announcement of the winning book for 2024, will be livestreamed on the Booker Prizes’ channels, presented by Jack Edwards. 

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International Booker Prize Longlist 2024

On 11 March the longlist for the International Booker Prize 2024 was announced. It was a notable celebration for Latin American fiction, with authors representing Brazil, Argentina, Peru and Venezuela on the list. 

The 13 novels cover 10 different languages, Spanish, Italian, Swedish, German, Albanian, Portuguese, Dutch, Korean, Polish and Russian. They span multiple genres and generations, as well as personal and national histories, oppressive regimes and the shadow of colonialism. Though they may seem unfamiliar, many have been bestsellers in their home countries.

Take the Quiz!

If you are not sure which of these books might be your style, you can do what I did, and take their quiz!

-> Quiz: which book from the International Booker Prize 2024 longlist should you read?

I’ll let you know which book they have recommended I read at the end of this post. If you take the quiz, let me know in the comments below which book came up for you.

The 13 Novels on the Longlist

The 13 books chosen by this year’s judges represent the best in translated fiction, published in the English language in the UK and Ireland selected from 149 books published between 1 May 2023 and 30 April 2024.

I have two on my shelf already, but not the one the quiz recommended I should read!

The titles are listed below with a description and the judges’ comment: 

Not a River by Selva Almada (Argentina), tr. Annie McDermott (Spanish) (#1 on my shelf)

– Selva Almada’s novel is the finest expression yet of her compelling style and singular vision of rural Argentina. 

Three men go out fishing, returning to a favourite spot on the river despite their memories of a terrible accident there years earlier. As a long, sultry day passes, they drink and cook and talk and dance, and try to overcome the ghosts of their past. But they are outsiders, and this intimate, peculiar moment also puts them at odds with the inhabitants of this watery universe, both human and otherwise. The forest presses close, and violence seems inevitable, but can another tragedy be avoided?

‘Not A River moves like water, in currents of dream and overlaps of time which shape the stories and memories of its protagonists. Enero and El Negro have brought their young friend and protégé Tilo on a fishing trip along the Paraná River in Argentina. The island where they set up camp pulses with its own desires and angers, tensions equal to those of the men who have come together on its shores. Alongside the story of these grief-marred characters, the author offers those of the women of the town – and what luck to root for or mourn them: the mother whose ever-growing fires engulf us, her two flirtatious, youth-glowed daughters, and the almost-mythical manta ray who becomes one of the guardians and ghosts of this throbbing, feverish novel.’ 

Simpatía by Rodrigo Blanco Calderon (Venezuela), tr. Noel Hernández González & Daniel Hahn (Spanish)

– A suspenseful novel with unexpected twists and turns about the agony of Venezuela and the collapse of Chavismo. 

Set in the Venezuela of Nicolas Maduro amid a mass exodus of the intellectual class who have been leaving their pets behind. Ulises Kan, the protagonist and a movie buff, receives a text message from his wife, Paulina, saying she is leaving the country (and him). Ulises is not heartbroken, but liberated by Paulina’s departure. As two other events end up disrupting his life even further, Ulises discovers that he has been entrusted with a mission – to transform Los Argonautas, the great family home, into a shelter for abandoned dogs. If he manages to do it in time, he will inherit the luxurious apartment that he had shared with Paulina.

‘In this realistic allegory set in Caracas during Nicolás Maduro’s dictatorship, we meet Ulises, a former orphan who is desperate for a sense of purpose and belonging. His wife has just announced by text message that she is leaving him and his father-in-law has willed him Los Argonautas, a house of accumulating secrets and mythologies. Much like that of Jason of the Argonauts, Ulises’ inheritance is contingent on the completion of a task: to transform the house into a veterinary clinic and kennel for the stray dogs left behind by the elites who have fled the city. Within the madness and austerity of political corruption and historical revisioning, Ulises devotes himself to one of the saner choices left to him: complete the task by saving the dogs, with the help of his Medea-like lover, Nadine, and the leftover animal rescue and house staff. In doing so he simultaneously creates a chosen family and a practice of care that is a stronger balm for the heart than sympathy.’

Kairos by Jenny Erpenbeck (Germany), tr. Michael Hofmann

– An intimate and devastating story of the path of two lovers through the ruins of a relationship, set against the backdrop of a seismic period in European history. 

Berlin. 11 July 1986. They meet by chance on a bus. She is a young student, he is older and married. Theirs is an intense and sudden attraction, fuelled by a shared passion for music and art, and heightened by the secrecy they must maintain. But when she strays for a single night he cannot forgive her and a dangerous crack forms between them, opening up a space for cruelty, punishment and the exertion of power. And the world around them is changing too: as the GDR begins to crumble, so too do all the old certainties and the old loyalties, ushering in a new era whose great gains also involve profound loss. 

‘An expertly braided novel about the entanglement of personal and national transformations, set amid the tumult of 1980s Berlin. Kairos unfolds around a chaotic affair between Katharina, a 19-year-old woman, and Hans, a 53-year-old writer in East Berlin. Erpenbeck’s narrative prowess lies in her ability to show how momentous personal and historical turning points intersect, presented through exquisite prose that marries depth with clarity. She masterfully refracts generation-defining political developments through the lens of a devastating relationship, thus questioning the nature of destiny and agency. Kairos is a bracing philosophical inquiry into time, choice, and the forces of history.’ 

What I’d Rather Not Think About by Jente Posthuma (Netherlands), tr. Sarah Timmer Harvey (Dutch)

– A deeply moving exploration of grief, told in brief, precise vignettes and full of gentle melancholy and surprising humour. 

What if one half of a pair of twins no longer wants to live? What if the other can’t live without them? This question lies at the heart of Jente Posthuma’s deceptively simple What I’d Rather Not Think About. The narrator is a twin whose brother has recently taken his own life. She looks back on their childhood, and tells of their adult lives: how her brother tried to find happiness, but lost himself in various men and the Bhagwan movement, though never completely. 

‘A deeply moving exploration of grief and identity through the lives of twins, one of whom dies by suicide. Posthuma delves into the surviving twin’s efforts to understand and come to terms with the loss of her brother, examining the profound complexities of familial bonds. Posthuma navigates delicate themes with sensitivity and formal inventiveness, portraying the nuances of the twins’ relationship and the individual struggles they face. The author skilfully inflects tragedy with unexpected humour and provides a multifaceted look at the search for meaning in the aftermath of suicide. What I’d Rather Not Think About stands out for its empathetic portrayal of love, loss, and resilience.’  

Lost on Me by Veronica Raimo (Italy), tr. Leah Janeczko

– Narrated in a voice as wryly ironic as it is warm and affectionate, Lost on Me seductively explores the slippery relationship between deceitfulness and creativity.

Vero has grown up in Rome with her eccentric family: an omnipresent mother who is devoted to her own anxiety, a father ruled by hygienic and architectural obsessions, and a precocious genius brother at the centre of their attention. As she becomes an adult, Vero’s need to strike out on her own leads her into bizarre and comical situations. As she continues to plot escapades and her mother’s relentless tracking methods and guilt-tripping mastery thwart her at every turn, it is no wonder that Vero becomes a writer – and a liar – inventing stories in a bid for her own sanity.

‘A funny, sharp, wonderfully readable novel in which a fresh, playful voice takes us to the heart of an obsessive, unpredictable family. This engaging book tells the story of a young writer finding her special place where the “most fragile, tender, and comical parts” of herself come dazzlingly to life in wild escapades and moments of unexpected reflection.’ 

The House on Via Gemito by Domenico Starnone (Italy), tr. Oonagh Stransky (#2 on my shelf)

– Narrated against the vivid backdrop of Naples in the 1960s, The House on Via Gemito has established itself as a masterpiece of contemporary Italian literature.

The modest apartment in Via Gemito smells of paint and white spirit. The living room furniture is pushed up against the wall to create a make-shift studio, and drying canvases must be moved off the beds each night. Federí, the father, a railway clerk, is convinced of possessing great artistic talent. If he didn’t have a family to feed, he’d be a world-famous painter. Ambitious and frustrated, genuinely talented but full of arrogance and resentment, his life is marked by bitter disappointment. His long-suffering wife and their four sons bear the brunt. It’s his first-born who, years later, will sift the lies from the truth to tell the story of a man he spent his whole life trying not to resemble.

‘The House on Via Gemito is a marvellous novel of Naples and its environs during and after the Second World War. The prism for this exploration is the relationship between the narrator and his railway worker / artist father – an impossible man filled with cowardice and boastfulness. His son’s attempt to understand and forgive his father is compelling; we are held through the minutiae of each argument and explosion, each hope and almost-success.’ 

Crooked Plow by Itamar Vieira Junior (Brazil), tr. Johnny Lorenz (Portuguese)

– A fascinating and gripping story about the lives of subsistence farmers in Brazil’s poorest region.

Deep in Brazil’s neglected Bahia hinterland, two sisters find an ancient knife beneath their grandmother’s bed and, momentarily mystified by its power, decide to taste its metal. The shuddering violence that follows marks their lives and binds them together forever. 

‘Bibiana and Belonisía are two sisters whose inheritance arrives in the form of a grandmother’s mysterious knife, which they discover while playing, then unwrap from its rags and taste. The mouth of one sister is cut badly and the tongue of the other is severed, injuries that bind them together like scar tissue, though they bear the traces in different ways. Set in the Bahia region of Brazil, where approximately one third of all enslaved Africans were sent during the height of the slave trade, the novel invites us into the deep-rooted relationships of Afro-Brazilian and Indigenous peoples to their lands and waters – including the ways these communities demand love, gods, song, and dream – despite brutal colonial disruptions. An aching yet tender story of our origins of violence, of how we spend our lives trying to bloom love and care from them, and of the language and silence we need to fuel our tending.’  

The Details by Ia Genberg (Sweden), tr. Kira Josefsson

– In exhilarating, provocative prose, Ia Genberg reveals an intimate and powerful celebration of what it means to be human. 

A famous broadcaster writes a forgotten love letter; a friend abruptly disappears; a lover leaves something unexpected behind; a traumatised woman is consumed by her own anxiety. In the throes of a high fever, a woman lies bedridden. Suddenly, she is struck with an urge to revisit a particular novel from her past. Inside the book is an inscription: a message from an ex-girlfriend. Pages from her past begin to flip, full of things she cannot forget and people who cannot be forgotten. Johanna, that same ex-girlfriend, now a famous TV host. Niki, the friend who disappeared all those years ago. Alejandro, who appears like a storm in precisely the right moment. And Birgitte, whose elusive qualities shield a painful secret. Who is the real subject of a portrait, the person being painted or the one holding the brush?

‘Ia Genberg writes with a remarkably sharp eye about a series of messy relationships between friends, family and lovers. Using, as she says, “details, rather than information”, she gives us not simply the “residue of life presented in a combination of letters” but an evocation of contemporary Stockholm and a moving portrait of her narrator. She has at times a melancholic eye, but her wit and liveliness constantly break through.’  

White Nights by Urszula Honek (Poland), tr. Kate Webster

– A highly artistic study of death encapsulated in moving stories set in Poland’s Beskid Mountains region.

White Nights is a series of thirteen interconnected stories concerning the various tragedies and misfortunes that befall a group of people who all grew up and live(d) in the same village in the Beskid Niski region, in southern Poland. Each story centres itself around a different character and how it is that they manage to cope, survive or merely exist, despite, and often in ignorance of, the poverty, disappointment, tragedy, despair, brutality and general sense of futility that surrounds them.

‘A haunting series of interconnected stories set in a small town in the Beskid Mountains of Poland, a place enveloped by the continuous daylight of the summer months. Through a cast of characters each facing their own existential crises, Honek crafts a narrative mosaic that explores themes of isolation, identity, death, and the longing for connection. The book’s strength lies in its ability to capture the intense, dreamlike quality of its setting, where the natural phenomenon of “white nights” serves as a backdrop for the characters’ introspective journeys. White Nights is a dark, lyrical exploration of the ways in which people seek meaning and belonging in a transient world.’ 

Mater 2-10 by Hwang Sok-yong (Korea), tr. Sora Kim-Russell & Youngjae Josephine Bae

– An epic, multi-generational tale that threads together a century of Korean history. 

Centred on three generations of a family of rail workers and a laid-off factory worker staging a high-altitude sit-in, Mater 2-10 vividly depicts the lives of ordinary working Koreans, starting from the Japanese colonial era, continuing through Liberation, and right up to the twenty-first century. 

‘A sweeping and comprehensive book about a Korea we rarely see in the West, blending the historical narrative of a nation with an individual’s quest for justice. Hwang highlights the political struggles of the working class with the story of a complicated national history of occupation and freedom, all seen through the lens of Jino, from his perch on top of a factory chimney, where he is staging a protest against being unfairly laid off.’ 

A Dictator Calls by Ismail Kadare (Albania), tr. John Hodgson

– A fascinating meditation on Soviet Russia, authoritarianism, power structures and a period of great writers. 

In June 1934, Joseph Stalin allegedly telephoned the famous novelist and poet Boris Pasternak to discuss the arrest of fellow Soviet poet Osip Mandelstam. In a fascinating combination of dreams and dossier facts, Ismail Kadare, winner of the inaugural International Booker Prize, reconstructs the three minutes they spoke and the aftershocks of this tense, mysterious moment in modern history. Weaving together the accounts of witnesses, reporters and writers such as Isaiah Berlin and Anna Akhmatova, Kadare tells a gripping story of power and political structures, of the relationship between writers and tyranny. 

‘The core of this brilliant exploration of power is an analysis of 13 versions of a three-minute telephone conversation between the Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin and the novelist Boris Pasternak in 1934. Each of these is an attempt to understand or justify Pasternak’s troubling, ambiguous response from a slightly different point of view. The book begins with what seem like autobiographical memories of Kadare’s time as a student in Moscow, setting a tone which hovers continually between fiction and non-fiction, between what is real and what is invented. Kadare explores the tension between authoritarian politicians and creative artists – it is a quest for definitive truth where none is to be found.’

The Silver Bone by Andrey Kurkov (Ukraine), tr. Boris Dralyuk (Russian)

– Inflected with Kurkov’s signature humour and magical realism, The Silver Bone crafts a propulsive narrative that bursts to life with rich historical detail. 

Kyiv, 1919. The Soviets control the city, but White armies menace them from the West. No man trusts his neighbour and any spark of resistance may ignite into open rebellion. When Samson Kolechko’s father is murdered, his last act is to save his son from a falling Cossack sabre. Deprived of his right ear instead of his head, Samson is left an orphan, with only his father’s collection of abacuses for company. Until, that is, his flat is requisitioned by two Red Army soldiers, whose secret plans Samson is somehow able to overhear with uncanny clarity. Eager to thwart them, he stumbles into a world of murder and intrigue that will either be the making of him – or finish what the Cossack started.

‘A surprising book from Ukrainian novelist and journalist Andrey Kurkov, The Silver Bone is a crime mystery set in 1919 Kyiv during a time of chaos, shifts of power and random violence in the aftermath of war. But amidst the brutality is Kurkov’s sense of irony and absurdism. A young engineering student sees his father cut down by Cossacks and, moments later, a sabre cuts off his own right ear. He manages to catch it and keep it in a box, where it can still hear for him, wherever he is. Inspired by real-life, post-First World War Bolshevik secret police files, Kurkov’s novel creates an atmosphere that ranges from 19th century Russian literature to the immediacy of the current war in Ukraine, though it was initially published before Putin’s invasion.’ 

Undiscovered by Gabriela Wiener (Peru), tr. Julia Sanches (Spanish)

– A provocative, irreverent autobiographical novel that reckons with the legacy of colonialism through one Peruvian woman’s family ties to both colonised and coloniser. 

Alone in an ethnographic museum in Paris, Gabriela Wiener is confronted with her unusual inheritance. She is visiting an exhibition of pre-Columbian artefacts, the spoils of European colonial plunder, many of them from her home country of Peru. Peering through the glass, she sees sculptures of Indigenous faces that resemble her own – but the man responsible for pillaging them was her own great-great-grandfather, Austrian colonial explorer Charles Wiener. In the wake of her father’s death, Gabriela begins delving into all she has inherited from her paternal line. From the brutal trail of racism and theft Charles was responsible for, to revelations of her father’s infidelity, she traces a legacy of abandonment, jealousy and colonial violence, and questions its impact on her own struggles with desire, love and race in a polyamorous relationship. 

‘A compelling search for identity that explores the complicated relationship between the person you want to be and the stories of the past that might have made you. This is an exploration of colonialism’s surprising effects on a writer investigating her antecedents and ancestors starting from a display case of Peruvian artefacts in Paris and ending in a story of family, love and desire.’ 

The Shortlist

The shortlist of six books will be announced on 9 April 2024.

The winning title will be livestream announced at a ceremony on Tuesday 21 May 2024.

My Quiz Result

Photo by cottonbro studio on Pexels.com

When I did the quiz for the first time, it came up with the result Undiscovered by Peruvian author Gabriela Wiener.

I did it a second time and I must have changed one of my answers and it came up with Not a River by Selva Almada. I have previously read and enjoyed one of her earlier novels The Wind That Lays Waste (my review here).

The good news is that I do have Not a River on my shelf because it is part of my Charco Press 2024 bundle, so I’ll be reading it next.

Many of these authors are new to me, though I have read Jenny Erpenbeck’s Visitation and Domenico Starnone’s Ties.

I will be looking out for Undiscovered to see if that quiz really does have any insight into my reading preferences! What book did it tell you to read? Let me know in the comments below.

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Women’s Prize Nonfiction Shortlist 2024

In 2024 The Women’s Prize created a new prize to raise the profile and awareness of women authors writing nonfiction.

They began with a list of 16 titles, from gripping memoirs and polemic narratives, to groundbreaking investigative journalism and revisionist history. It featured seven debut writers, two international bestsellers, two poets and five journalists. You can see the longlist here.

From Sixteen to Six Titles

The longlist has now been whittled down to six books covering a broad range of subjects – from life writing, religion, art and history, to AI, social media and online politics. What links them is an originality of voice and an ability to turn complex ideas and personal trauma into inventive, compelling and immersive prose.

“Our magnificent shortlist is made up of six powerful, impressive books that are characterised by the brilliance and beauty of their writing and which each offer a unique, original perspective. The readers of these books will never see the world – be it through art, history, landscape, politics, religion or technology – the same again.” Suzannah Lipscomb, Chair of Judges

The six titles shortlisted are:

Thunderclap: A Memoir of Art and Life and Sudden Death by Laura Cumming (UK) (Art History & Grief)

‘We see with everything that we are’

On the morning of 12 October 1654, a gunpowder explosion devastated the Dutch city of Delft. The thunderclap was heard over seventy miles away. Among the fatalities was the painter Carel Fabritius, dead at thirty-two, leaving only his haunting masterpiece The Goldfinch and barely a dozen known paintings. The explosion that killed him also buried his reputation, along with answers to the mysteries of his life and career.

What happened to Fabritius before and after this disaster is just one of the discoveries in a book that explores the relationship between art and life, interweaving the lives of Laura Cumming, her Scottish painter father, who also died too young, and the great artists of the Dutch Golden Age.

This is a book about what a picture may come to mean: how it can enter your life and change your thinking in a thunderclap.

Doppelganger: A Trip Into the Mirror World by Naomi Klein (Canada) (Mistaken Identity)

– When Naomi Klein discovered that a woman who shared her first name, but had radically different, harmful views, was getting chronically mistaken for her, it seemed too ridiculous to take seriously. Then suddenly it wasn’t. She started to find herself grappling with a distorted sense of reality, becoming obsessed with reading the threats on social media, the endlessly scrolling insults from the followers of her doppelganger. Why had her shadowy other gone down such an extreme path? Why was identity – all we have to meet the world – so unstable?

To find out, Klein decided to follow her double into a bizarre, uncanny mirror world: one of conspiracy theories, anti-vaxxers and demagogue hucksters, where soft-focus wellness influencers make common cause with fire-breathing far right propagandists (all in the name of protecting ‘the children’). In doing so, she lifts the lid on our own culture during this surreal moment in history, as we turn ourselves into polished virtual brands, publicly shame our enemies, watch as deep fakes proliferate and whole nations flip from democracy to something far more sinister.

This is a book for our age and for all of us; a deadly serious dark comedy which invites us to view our reflections in the looking glass. It’s for anyone who has lost hours down an internet rabbit hole, who wonders why our politics has become so fatally warped, and who wants a way out of our collective vertigo and back to fighting for what really matters.

A Flat Place by Noreen Masud (Pakistan/UK) (Nature Writing Memoir)

– Noreen Masud has always loved flat landscapes – their stark beauty, their formidable calm, their refusal to cooperate with the human gaze. They reflect her inner world: the ‘flat place’ she carries inside herself, emotional numbness and memory loss as symptoms of childhood trauma. But as much as Britain’s landscapes provide solace for suffering, they are also uneasy places for a Scottish-Pakistani woman, representing both an inheritance and a dispossession.

Pursuing this paradox across the wide open plains that she loves, Noreen weaves her impressions of the natural world with the poetry, folklore and history of the land, and with recollections of her own early life, rendering a startlingly strange, vivid and intimate account of a post-traumatic, post-colonial landscape – a seemingly flat and motionless place which is nevertheless defiantly alive.

All That She Carried: The Journey of Ashley’s Sack, a Black Family Keepsake by Tiya Miles (US) (History)

– In 1850s South Carolina, Rose, an enslaved woman, faced a crisis: the imminent sale of her daughter Ashley. Thinking quickly, she packed a cotton bag with a few items. Soon after, the nine-year-old girl was separated from her mother and sold. Decades later, Ashley’s granddaughter Ruth embroidered this family history on the sack in spare, haunting language.

That, in itself, is a story. But it’s not the whole story. How does one uncover the lives of people who, in their day, were considered property? Harvard historian Tiya Miles carefully traces these women’s faint presence in archival records, and, where archives fall short, she turns to objects, art, and the environment to write a singular history of the experience of slavery, and the uncertain freedom afterward. All That She Carried gives us history as it was lived, a poignant story of resilience and love passed down against steep odds.

Code Dependent: Living in the Shadow of AI by Madhumita Murgia (India/UK) (Technology)

– What does it mean to be human in a world that is rapidly changing thanks to the development of artificial intelligence, of automated decision-making that both draws on and influences our behaviour?

Through the voices of ordinary people in places far removed from Silicon Valley, Code Dependent explores the impact of a set of powerful, flawed, and often exploitative technologies on individuals, communities, and our wider society. Madhumita Murgia, AI Editor at the FT, exposes how AI can strip away our collective and individual sense of agency – and shatter our illusion of free will.

AI is already changing what it means to be human, in ways large and small. In this compelling work, Murgia reveals what could happen if we fail to reclaim our humanity.

How to Say Babylon: A Jamaican Memoir by Safiya Sinclair (Jamaica) (Memoir)

– There was more than one way to be lost, more than one way to be saved.

Born in Montego Bay, Jamaica, where luxury hotels line pristine white sand beaches, Safiya Sinclair grew up guarding herself against an ever-present threat. Her father, a volatile reggae musician and strict believer in a militant sect of Rastafari, railed against Babylon, the corrupting influence of the immoral Western world just beyond their gate. To protect the purity of the women in their family he forbade almost everything: nowhere but home and school, no friends but this family and no future but this path.

Her mother did what she could to bring joy to her children with books and poetry. But as Safiya’s imagination reached beyond its restrictive borders, her burgeoning independence brought with it ever greater clashes with her father. Soon she realised that if she was to live at all, she had to find some way to leave home. But how?

In seeking to understand the past of her family, Safiya Sinclair takes readers inside a world that is little understood by those outside it and offers an astonishing personal reckoning. How to Say Babylon is an unforgettable story of a young woman’s determination to live life on her own terms.

The Winner

The winner will be announced on the 13th of June 2024.

Have you read any of these titles? Anything here interest you? Leave a comment below letting us know if you have read or intend to read any of these titles.

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Dublin Literary Award Longlist Announced

The Dublin Literary Award has announced a longlist of 70 books nominated by 80 libraries from 35 countries around the world.

Celebrating excellence in world literature and now in its 29th year, this award is the world’s most valuable annual prize for a single work of fiction published in English, worth €100,000 to the winner.

The list features 16 debut novelists and 31 novels in translation representing 14 languages including Finnish, Hungarian, Romanian, Serbian and Turkish. New  Zealand author Catherine Chidgey has been nominated for two novels. 

The shortlist will be revealed on 26th March 2024 and the winner will be announced on 23rd May 2024.

The nominated novels will be available for readers to borrow from Dublin City Libraries and from public libraries around Ireland, and some can be borrowed as eBooks and eAudiobooks on the free Borrowbox app, available to all public library users.

I have read Pet, Birnam Wood, Soldier Sailor, Old God’s Time and Demon Copperhead.

Irish Book Awards 2023 motherhood literary fiction
literary fiction Irish
Demon Copperhead Barbara Kingsolver
eco thriller tech billionaire New Zealand

The Longlist

1000 coils of fear by Olivia Wenzel (Germany) tr. Priscilla Layne – A multilayered and rhythmic debut novel about her life as a Black German woman living in Berlin and New York during the chaos of the 2016 U.S. presidential election from playwright Olivia Wenzel.

A History of the Island by Eugene Vodolazkin (Russia) tr. Lisa C. Hayden – Internationally acclaimed novelist and scholar of medieval literature, Eugene Vodolazkin returns with a satirical parable about European and Russian history, the myth of progress, and the futility of war.

A Minor Chorus by Billy-Ray Belcourt (Canada) – An urgent first novel about breaching the prisons we live inside from one of Canada’s most daring literary talents. An unnamed narrator abandons grad school and returns to northern Alberta in search of answers to existential questions about family, love, and happiness. What ensues is a series of conversations amounting to an autobiography of his hometown. 

Ada’s Realm by Sharon Dodua Otoo (Germany) tr. Jon Cho-Polizzi – In a small village in what will become Ghana, Ada gives birth to a baby who does not live. As she grieves for her child, Portuguese traders arrive in the village, an event that will bear terrible repercussions for Ada and her kin. Centuries later, Ada will become the mathematician Ada Lovelace; Ada, a prisoner forced into prostitution in a concentration camp; and Ada, a pregnant Ghanaian woman who arrives in Berlin in 2019 for a fresh start. Ada is not one woman, but many, and she is all women. This debut from Sharon Dodua Otoo paints an astonishing picture of femininity and resilience with deep empathy and infinite imagination.

An Astronomer in Love by Antoine Laurain (France) tr. by Louise Rogers Lalaurie & Megan Jones – Part swashbuckling adventure on the high seas and part modern-day love story set in the heart of Paris, An Astronomer in Love is an enchanting tale of adventure, destiny and the power of love. 

Birnam Wood by Eleanor Catton (New Zealand) – A landslide has closed the Korowai Pass cutting off the town of Thorndike, leaving a farm abandoned. The disaster presents an opportunity for Birnam Wood, a guerrilla gardening collective that plants crops where no one will notice. An enigmatic billionaire also has an interest in the place. Can they trust him? Can they trust each other? A propulsive literary thriller from the Booker Prize-winning author of The Luminaries, Birnam Wood is a brilliantly constructed tale of intentions, actions, consequences and survival.

Breakwater by Marijke Schermer (Netherlands) tr.(Dutch) Liz Waters – A woman who seems to have it all is unable to tell her husband of her violent secret past, which threatens to tear their family apart. “A secret between a husband and a wife threatens their existence in Marijke Schermer’s novel Breakwater. Breakwater is a concise, cutting story about trauma, post-traumatic stress, and misdirected love.”

Canción by Eduardo Halfon (Guatemala) tr. (Spanish) Lisa Dillman & Daniel Hahn – In Canción, Eduardo Halfon’s eponymous wanderer is invited to a Lebanese writers’ conference in Japan, where he reflects on his Jewish grandfather’s multifaceted identity. To understand more about the day in January 1967 when his grandfather was abducted by Guatemalan guerillas, Halfon searches his childhood memories. Soon, chance encounters around the world lead to more clues about his grandfather’s captors, including a butcher nicknamed “Canción” (or song). As a brutal and complex history emerges against the backdrop of the Guatemalan Civil War, Halfon finds echoes in the stories of a woman he meets in Japan whose grandfather survived the atomic bombing of Hiroshima.

Chain-Gang All-Stars by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah (US) – Two top women gladiators fight for their freedom within a depraved private prison system not so far-removed from America’s own. In packed arenas, live-streamed by millions, prisoners compete as gladiators for the ultimate prize: their freedom. Fan favourites Loretta Thurwar & Hamara ‘Hurricane Staxxx’ Stacker are teammates and lovers. Thurwar is nearing the end of her time on the circuit, free in just a few matches, a fact she carries as heavily as her lethal hammer. As she prepares for her final encounters, as protestors gather at the gates, and as the programme’s corporate owners stack the odds against her – will the price be simply too high?

Crimson Spring by Navtej Sarna (India) – On 13 April 1919, around 25,000 unarmed Indians had gathered in Jallianwala Bagh in Amritsar. Many were listening to speakers denouncing the Rowlatt Act, while others were there to relax. In the evening, a detachment of soldiers led by Brigadier General R. E. H. Dyer entered the Bagh and open fired without warning. Several hundred perished and several hundred more were injured. Navtej Sarna brings the horror of the atrocity to life through the eyes of nine characters -Indians and Britons, ordinary people and powerful officials, the innocent and the guilty. Set against India’s epic freedom struggle, the book is a powerful, unsettling meditation on the costs of colonialism.

Crooked Plow by Itamar Vieira Junior (Brazil) tr.(Brazilian Portuguese) Johnny Lorenz – Deep in Brazil’s neglected Bahia hinterland, two sisters find an ancient knife beneath their grandmother’s bed and, momentarily mystified by its power, decide to taste its metal. The shuddering violence that follows marks their lives and binds them together forever.

Heralded as a new masterpiece and the most important Brazilian novel of this century, this fascinating and gripping story about the lives of subsistence farmers in the Brazil’s poorest region, three generations after the abolition of slavery in that country is at once fantastic and realist, covering themes of family, spirituality, slavery and its aftermath and political struggle.

Dandelion Daughter by Gabrielle Boulianne-Tremblay (Canada) tr. Eli Tareq El Bechelany-Lynch (French) – An intimate portrait of growing up having been assigned the wrong sex at birth. Set against the windswept countryside of the remote Charlevoix region north of Montreal, an autobiographical novel immortalizes her early years as an alienated boy trapped in a world of small-town values. In the midst of her parents’ dissolving marriage, Boulianne-Tremblay traverses complex adolescent years of self-discovery and first loves, to harrowing episodes that fuel the growing realization that she must transition and give birth to her new self if she is to continue living at all. One of the first novels of its kind to appear in Quebec.

Day’s End by Garry Disher (Australia) – Hirsch’s rural beat is wide. Daybreak to day’s end, dirt roads and dust. Every problem that besets small towns and isolated properties, from unlicensed driving to arson. Today he’s driving an international visitor around: Janne Van Sant, whose backpacker son went missing while the borders were closed. They’re checking out his last photo site, his last employer. A feeling that the stories don’t quite add up. A call comes in: a roadside fire. Nothing much—a suitcase soaked in diesel and set alight. Two noteworthy facts emerge. Janne knows more than Hirsch about forensic evidence. And the body in the suitcase is not her son’s.

Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver (US) – Demon’s story begins with his traumatic birth to a single mother in a single-wide trailer. For the life ahead of him he would need all of that fighting spirit, a quick wit, and some unexpected talents. In the southern Appalachian Mountains of Virginia, poverty and addiction are as natural as the grass grows. For Demon, born on the wrong side of luck, the affection and safety he craves is as remote as the ocean he dreams of seeing one day.

Falling Hour by Geoffrey Morrison (Canada) – It’s a hot summer day, and Hugh Dalgarno, a 31-year-old clerical worker, thinks his brain is broken. Over the course of several hours in an uncannily depopulated public park, he will traverse the baroque landscape of his own thoughts: the theology of nosiness, the beauty of the arbutus tree, the theory of quantum immortality, Louis Riel’s letter to an Irish newspaper, the baleful influence of Calvinism on the Scottish working class, the sea, and, ultimately, thinking itself and how it may be represented in writing. A meandering sojourn, as if the history-haunted landscapes of Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn were shrunk down to a mere 85 acres.

Feast by Emily O’Grady (Australia) – Alison is an actress who no longer acts, Patrick a musician past his prime. The eccentric couple live an isolated existence in Scotland until Patrick’s teenage daughter Neve, flees Australia to spend a year abroad with her father, and the stepmother she barely knows.

On the weekend of Neve’s eighteenth birthday, her father insists on a special feast to mark her coming of age. Despite Neve’s objections, her mother Shannon arrives in Scotland to join the celebrations. What none of them know is that Shannon has arrived with a hidden agenda that has the potential to shatter the delicate façade of the loving, if dysfunctional, family.

Hades by Aisha Zaidal (Malaysia) – In 2012, sixteen-year-old troublemaker Kei and his mother move into a decaying low-cost flat from the slums at the edge of town, right next to Maryam, a young mother, and her three-year-old son Ishak. Shunned by society, Kei and Maryam develop an unspoken bond, which starts to fray as the ghosts of their pasts circle in. Both wonder if they can free themselves of the men who made them the abominations everyone considers them to be, and of the despair creeping in around them.

Haven by Emma Donoghue (Ireland) – In 7th-century Ireland, a scholar/priest called Artt has a dream telling him to leave the sinful world behind. Taking two monks – young Trian & old Cormac – he rows down the river Shannon in search of an isolated spot on which to found a monastery. With only faith to guide them and drifting out into the Atlantic, the three men find a steep, bare island, inhabited by tens of thousands of birds, and claim it for God. In such a place, what will survival mean? What they find is the extraordinary island now known as Skellig Michael.

Hello Beautiful by Ann Napolitano (US) –

The four Padavano girls bring loving chaos to their neighbourhood. William Waters grew up in a house silenced by tragedy. When he meets Julia Padavano, it’s as if the world has lit up around him. With Julia comes her family: Sylvie, the dreamer; Cecelia, the artist; and Emeline patiently taking care of them all. But when darkness from William’s past begins to block the light of his future, a catastrophic rift leaves the family inhabiting two sides of a fault line. Can they find their way back to each other? Can love make a broken family whole?

Hollow Bamboo: A Novel by William Ping (Canada) – The hilarious and heart-breaking story of two William Pings in Newfoundland—the lost millennial and the grandfather he knows nothing about. Based on a true story, Hollow Bamboo recounts with humour and sympathy the often-brutal struggles, and occasional successes, faced by some of the first Chinese immigrants in Newfoundland. Drawing on elements of magical realism, auto fiction and satire, as well as deep historical research, Hollow Bamboo is a fresh and original portrayal of our past and our present, and the debut of an extraordinary new author.

Human Nature by Serge Joncour (France) tr. Louise Rogers Lalaurie – When his three sisters escape to the city Alexander is left to run the family farm. Though reluctant, he commits himself to honouring the traditional methods that prioritise the welfare of his cattle, and produce the highest quality meat. But the world around him is changing. The insatiable appetites of supermarkets and fast food chains demand that standards must be sacrificed for speed. As Alexandre struggles to balance his principles and his livelihood, he is drawn to the beautiful Constanze, part of a group of environmental activists keen to draw him into their cause. Farmers uses ammonium nitrate and so do eco-terrorists…

Identitti by Mithu Sanyal (Germany) tr. Alta L. Price – Nivedita (a.k.a. Identitti), a doctoral student who blogs about race with the help of Hindu goddess Kali, is in awe of Saraswati, her superstar postcolonial and race studies professor. But Nivedita’s life and sense of self are upturned when it emerges that Saraswati is actually white. Hours before she learns the truth Nivedita praises her tutor in a radio interview, which calls into question her own reputation and ignites an angry backlash among her peers and online community. A darkly comedic tour de force, Identitti showcases the outsized power of social media in the current debates around identity politics and the power of claiming your own voice.

If I Survive You by Jonathan Escoffery (US) – In the 1970s, Topper and Sanya flee to Miami as political violence consumes their native Kingston. But America, as the couple and their two children learn, is far from the promised land. Excluded from society as Black immigrants, the family pushes on first through Hurricane Andrew and later the 2008 recession. But even as things fall apart, the family remains motivated by what their younger son calls “the exquisite, racking compulsion to survive.” Pulsing with vibrant lyricism and sly commentary, Escoffery’s debut unravels what it means to be in between homes and cultures in a world at the mercy of capitalism and white supremacy.

Limberlost by Robbie Arnott (Australia) – In the heat of a long summer Ned hunts rabbits in a river valley, hoping the pelts will earn him enough money to buy a small boat. His two brothers are away at war, their whereabouts unknown. His father and older sister struggle to hold things together on the family orchard, Limberlost. Desperate to ignore it all—to avoid the future rushing towards him—Ned dreams of open water. As his story unfolds over the following decades, we see how Ned’s choices that summer come to shape the course of his life, the fate of his family and the future of the valley, with its seasons of death and rebirth.

Lone Women by Victor LaValle (US) – Adelaide Henry carries an enormous locked steamer trunk with her wherever she goes. It’s locked because when the trunk opens, people around Adelaide disappear. It’s 1915 and Adelaide is in trouble. Her secret has killed her parents, forcing her to flee California for a new life in Montana. Dragging the trunk with her, she becomes one of the “lone women,” accepting the government’s offer of free land for those who can tame it—except Adelaide isn’t alone. And the secret she’s kept locked away might be the key to her survival.

Memorial, 29 June by Tine Høeg (Denmark) tr. Misha Hoekstra – Celebrated for her signature insight and precision, Tine Høeg returns with a wry, haunting, and riotously funny novel about how loss is bound up with the urge to create. Asta is invited to a memorial. It’s been ten years since her university friend August died. The invitation disrupts everything – the novel she is working on, her friendship with Mai and her two-year-old son – reanimating longings, doubts, and the ghosts of parties past. Moving between Asta’s past and present, Memorial, 29 June is a novel about who we really are, and who we thought we would become.

Monsters Like Us by Ulrike Almut Sandig (Germany) tr. Karen Leeder – the story of old friends Ruth and Viktor in the last days of Communist East Germany. Inseparable since kindergarten, forced to go their different ways to escape their difficult childhood: Ruth into music and the life of a professional musician; Viktor into violence and a neo-Nazi gang. A story of families, a story of abuse, a story about the search for redemption and the ways it takes shape over generations. More than anything, it is about the stories we tell ourselves about who we are, and who we want to be.

My Father’s House by Joseph O’Connor (Ireland) – September 1943: German forces occupy Rome. SS officer Paul Hauptmann rules with terror. An Irish priest, Hugh O’Flaherty, dedicates himself to helping those escaping from the Nazis. His home is Vatican City, the world’s smallest state, a neutral country within Rome where the occupiers hold no sway. Here Hugh brings together an unlikely band of friends to hide the vulnerable under the noses of the enemy. But Hauptmann’s net begins closing in on the Escape Line and the need for a terrifyingly audacious mission grows critical. Based on an extraordinary true story, My Father’s House is a powerful literary thriller from a master of historical fiction.

My Men by Victoria Kielland (Norway) tr. Damion Searls – Based on the true story of Norwegian maid turned Midwestern farmwife Belle Gunness, the first female serial killer in American history, My Men is the radically empathetic and disquieting portrait of a woman capable of ecstatic love and gruesome cruelty. Among thousands of other Norwegian immigrants seeking freedom, Brynhild Størset emigrated to the American Upper Midwest in the late nineteenth century, changing her name and her life. As Bella, later Belle Gunness, she came in search of fortune and faith but, most of all, love. In pursuit of her American Dream, Kielland’s Belle grows increasingly alienated, ruthless, and perversely compelling.

Now I Am Here by Chidi Ibere (UK) – About to make his last stand, a soldier facing certain death at enemy hands, writes home to his love to explain how he ended up there. The Officer in the story has no name nor is his nation specified. While out walking, he stumbles upon officers enjoying a military barbecue and is persuaded to join them. He enjoys the comradeship of the event, is quickly seduced by the smart, tailored military uniform he is fitted with, by the power bestowed upon it and the respect commanded by it. From there, this gentle man is gradually transformed into a war criminal, committing acts he wouldn’t have thought himself capable.

Old God’s Time by Sebastian Barry (Ireland) – Retired policeman Tom Kettle is enjoying the quiet of his new home in Dalkey, overlooking the sea. His peace is interrupted when two former colleagues turn up at his door to ask about a traumatic, decades-old case. A case that Tom never came to terms with. His peace is further disturbed by a young mother who asks for his help. And what of Tom’s wife, June, and their two children? A beautiful, haunting novel about what we live through, what we live with, and what will survive of us.

Open Heart by Elvira Lindo(Spain) tr. Adrian Nathan West – This intimate family novel that follows the rise and fall of a great love is also a moving tribute to the generation that struggled to survive in Spain after the Civil War. In Open Heart, Elvira Lindo tells the story of her parents—the story of an excessive love, passionate and unstable, forged through countless fights and reconciliations, which had a profound effect on their entire family.

Orgy by Gábor Zoltán (Hungary) tr. Thomas Sneddon – A nightmarish recounting of events from the final phase of the Holocaust in Hungary. In late 1944 and early 1945 Budapest was consigned to the rule of the fascist organization known as the Arrow Cross. They sought out individuals not only of Jewish descent but anyone they viewed as liberals, “English sympathizers” or “humanists.” One such man is the novel’s main character, the thirty-year-old factory owner, Renner. He is a successful, fearless man: the Arrow Cross have plenty of reasons to kill him. But instead of a swift execution, they torture and humiliate him even longer than usual, subsequently forcing him to assist them.

Our Missing Hearts by Celeste Ng (US) – Bird Gardner lives a quiet existence with his father, a former linguist who now shelves books in a library. His mother Margaret, a Chinese American poet, left without a trace. He doesn’t know what happened to her—only that her books have been banned. Bird receives a letter containing a cryptic drawing, and he’s entered a quest to find her. His journey will take him to the folktales she poured into his head as a child, through the ranks of an underground network of heroic librarians, and finally to NYC, where he will finally learn the truth about what happened to his mother, and what the future holds for them both.

Our Share of Night by Mariana Enriquez (Argentina) tr. Megan McDowell (Spanish) – Moving back and forth in time, from London in the swinging 1960s to the brutal years of Argentina’s military dictatorship and its turbulent aftermath, Our Share of Night is a novel like no other: a family story, a ghost story, a story of the occult and the supernatural, a book about the complexities of love and longing with queer subplots and themes. This is the masterwork of one of Latin America’s most original novelists, “a mesmerizing writer,” says Dave Eggers, “who demands to be read.”

Pet by Catherine Chidgey (New Zealand) – Like every other girl in her class, twelve-year-old Justine is drawn to her glamorous, charismatic new teacher, and longs to be her pet. However, when a thief begins to target the school, Justine’s sense that something isn’t quite right grows ever stronger. With each twist of the plot, this gripping story of deception and the corrosive power of guilt takes a yet darker turn. Young as she is, Justine must decide where her loyalties lie.

Praiseworthy by Alexis Wright (Australia) – In a small town in northern Australia dominated by a haze cloud, a crazed visionary sees donkeys as the solution to the global climate crisis and the economic dependency of the Aboriginal people. His wife seeks solace from his madness in the dance of moths and butterflies. One of their sons, called Aboriginal Sovereignty, is determined to commit suicide. The other, Tommyhawk, wishes his brother dead so that he can pursue his dream of becoming white and powerful. Praiseworthy is a novel which pushes allegory and language to its limits, a cry of outrage against oppression and disadvantage, and a fable for the end of days.

Properties of thirst : a novel by Marianne Wiggins (US) – “Rocky” Rhodes has spent years fiercely protecting his California ranch from the LA Water Corporation. It is where he and his wife Lou raised their twins, Sunny and Stryker, and it where Rocky has mourned Lou since her death. When the government decides to build an internment camp next to the ranch, Rocky realizes that the land faces even bigger threats than the LA watermen. Complicating matters is the fact that the Department of the Interior man assigned to build the camp, who only begins to understand the horror of his task after it may be too late, becomes infatuated with Sunny and entangled with the Rhodes family.

Querelle of Roberval: A Syndical Fiction by Kevin Lambert (Canada) tr. Donald Winkler (French) – As a millworkers’ strike in the northern lumber town of Roberval drags on, tensions escalate between the workers—but when a lockout renews their solidarity, they rally around the mysterious and magnetic influence of Querelle, a dashing newcomer from Montreal. As the dispute hardens and both sides refuse to yield, the tinderbox of class struggle and entitlement ignites in a firestorm of passions carnal and violent. A tribute to Jean Genet’s antihero, and a brilliant reimagining of the ancient form of tragedy, Querelle of Roberval is a wildly imaginative story of justice, passion, and murderous revenge.

River Sing Me Home by Eleanor Shearer (UK) – Rachel is searching for her children. For Mary Grace, Micah, Thomas Augustus, Cherry Jane and Mercy. These are the five who were sold to other plantations; the faces she cannot forget. It is 1834, and the law says her people are now free. But for Rachel freedom means finding her children. With fear snapping at her heels, Rachel keeps moving. From sunrise to sunset, through the cane fields of Barbados to the forests of British Guiana, then on to Trinidad, up the dangerous river and to the open sea. Only once she knows their stories can she rest. Only then can she finally find home…

Rombo by Esther Kinsky (Germany) tr. Caroline Schmidt – In May and September 1976, two earthquakes ripped through north-eastern Italy, causing severe damage to the landscape and its population. About a thousand people died under the rubble, tens of thousands were left without shelter, and many ended up leaving their homes in Friuli forever. In Rombo, Esther Kinsky’s sublime new novel, seven inhabitants of a remote mountain village talk about their lives, which have been deeply impacted by the earthquake that has left marks they are slowly learning to name. From the shared experience of fear and loss, the threads of individual memory soon unravel and become haunting and moving narratives of a deep trauma.

Schmutz by Felicia Berliner (US) – In this witty, provocative, and “compulsively readable coming-of-age story” (Cosmopolitan), a young Hasidic woman on a quest to get married fears she will never find a groom because of her secret addiction to porn. Like the other women in her ultra-Orthodox community, Raizl expects to find a husband through arranged marriage. But Raizl has a secret. With a hidden computer to help her complete her college degree, she falls down the slippery slope of online pornography. As Raizl dives deeper into the world of porn at night, her daytime life begins to unravel. Raizl must balance her growing understanding of her sexuality with the expectations of the family she loves.

Small Mercies by Denis Lehane (US) – In the summer of 1974 a heatwave blankets Boston and Mary Pat Fennessey is trying to stay one step ahead of the bill collectors. One night Mary Pat’s teenage daughter Jules stays out late and doesn’t come home. That same evening, a young Black man is found dead, struck by a subway train under mysterious circumstances. The two events seem unconnected. But Mary Pat, propelled by a desperate search for her missing daughter, begins turning over stones best left untouched – asking questions that bother Marty Butler, chieftain of the Irish mob, and the men who work for him, men who don’t take kindly to any threat to their business.

Solider Sailor by Claire Kilroy (Ireland) – In her wildly acclaimed novel, her first in over a decade, Claire Kilroy creates an unforgettable heroine whose fierce love for her young son clashes with the seismic change to her own identity. As her marriage strains, and she struggles with questions of autonomy, creativity and the passing of time, an old friend makes a welcome return ­– but can he really offer a lifeline to the woman she used to be?

Solenoid by Mircea Cărtărescu (Romania) tr. Sean Cotter – Based on Cărtărescu’s own role as a high school teacher, Solenoid begins with the mundane details of a diarist’s life and spirals into a philosophical account of life, history, philosophy, and mathematics. On a broad scale, the novel’s investigations of other universes, dimensions, and timelines reconcile the realms of life and art. Grounded in the reality of late 1970s/early 1980s Communist Romania, including long lines for groceries, the absurdities of the education system, and the misery of family life. Combining fiction, autobiography and history, Solenoid ruminates on the exchanges possible between the alternate dimensions of life and art within the Communist present.

Stolen by Ann-Helén Laestadius (Sweden) tr. Rachel Willson-Broyles – Nine-year-old Elsa lives just north of the Arctic Circle. She and her family are Sámi, Scandinavia’s indigenous people, and make their living herding reindeer. One morning, Elsa witnesses a man brutally killing her reindeer calf. She recognises the man but refuses to tell anyone – least of all the Swedish police force – about what she saw. A decade later, Elsa finds herself the target of the man she first encountered all those years ago, and something inside of her finally breaks. The guilt, fear and anger she’s been carrying since childhood come crashing over her like an avalanche, and will lead Elsa to a final catastrophic confrontation.

Stone and Shadow by Burhan Sönmez (Turkey) tr. Alexander Dawe – In the city of Mardin, the orphaned Avdo finds purpose when an old mason takes him on as an apprentice. From Master Josef, he learns the importance of their art, which looks after the dead and bears witness to their lives. Avdo travels the country and meets a woman he loves wholeheartedly, only to lose her through a tragic crime. Resigned to a lonely existence, he retreats from the world into his cemetery workshop, but even there, life, with all its sorrows, joys, injustices, and gifts, draws him in unexpected directions.

Take What You Need by Idra Novey (US) – Take What You Need traces the parallel lives of Jean and her beloved but estranged stepdaughter, Leah, who’s sought a clean break from her rural childhood. In Leah’s urban life with her young family, she’s revealed little about Jean, how much she misses her stepmother’s hard-won insights and joyful lack of inhibition. But with Jean’s death, Leah must return to sort through what’s been left behind. Set in the Allegheny Mountains of Appalachia, the novel explores the continuing mystery of the people we love most, zeroing in on the joys and difficulties of family with great verve.

The Ascent by Stefan Hertmans (Netherlands) tr. David McKay (Dutch) – In 1979, Stefan Hertmans fell in love with a beautiful old house in Ghent in Belgium, which he lovingly rescued from decay. Now, years later, he learns that a bust of Hitler once sat on the mantelpiece, and a war criminal relaxed in its rooms with his family. This shocking discovery sends Hertmans off to the archives and to interview next of kin, to uncover the secrets of the house and expose the atrocities this man committed. A story of war, family, and fate, Hertmans masterfully brings history to life, as he appears in the novel as a trusted guide, and imagines individual lives to tell the greater European story.

The Axeman’s Carnival by Catherine Chidgey (New Zealand) – Everywhere, the birds: sparrows and skylarks and thrushes, starlings and bellbirds, fantails and pipits – but above them all and louder, the magpies. We are here and this is our tree and we’re staying and it is ours and you need to leave and now.

The Birthday Party by Laurent Mauvignier (France) tr. Daniel Levin Becker – Buried deep in rural France, little remains of the isolated hamlet of the Three Lone Girls, save a few houses and a curiously assembled quartet. While Patrice plans a surprise for his wife’s 40th birthday, inexplicable events start to disrupt the hamlet’s quiet existence. Told in rhythmic, propulsive prose that weaves seamlessly from one consciousness to the next, a deft unravelling of the stories we hide from others and from ourselves, a gripping tale of the violent irruptions of the past into the present, written by a major contemporary French writer.

The Chinese Groove by Kathryn Ma (US) – Eighteen-year-old Shelley, born into a much-despised branch of the Zheng family in Yunnan Province, heads to San Francisco to claim his destiny, confident that any hurdles will be easily overcome. Shelley is dismayed to find that his “rich uncle” is his unemployed second cousin and that the guest room he’d envisioned is but a scratchy sofa. Even worse, the loving family he hoped would embrace him is in shambles, shattered by a senseless tragedy that has cleaved the family in two. Ever the optimist, Shelley concocts a plan to resuscitate his American dream by insinuating himself into the family.

The Crane Husband by Kelly Barnhill (US) – In this stunning contemporary retelling of “The Crane Wife” by the Newbery Medal-winning author of The Girl Who Drank the Moon, one fiercely pragmatic teen forced to grow up faster than was fair will do whatever it takes to protect her family—and change the story.

The Drinker of Horizons by Mia Couto (Mozambique) tr. David Brookshaw (Portuguese) – the epic love story between a young Mozambican woman named Imani and the Portuguese sergeant Germano de Melo to its moving close. We resume where The Sword and the Spear concluded: While Germano is left behind in Africa, serving with the Portuguese military, Imani has been enlisted to act as the interpreter to the imprisoned emperor of Gaza, Ngungunyane, on the long voyage to Lisbon. For the emperor and his seven wives, it will be a journey of no return. Imani’s own return will come only after a decade-long odyssey through the Portuguese empire at the beginning of the twentieth century.

The Exhibition by Miodrag Kajtez (Serbia) tr. Nikola M. Kajtez – Izlozba (original title of The Exhibition published in 2015 and awarded the National Award Laza Kostić for the book of the year) is an explicit story about the morphology of death. The characters seem to be as if from the other side of life. On the other hand, the very text of the novel is addictively fun, especially for literary connoisseurs, the humor, although unobtrusive, is often hilarious.

The Eye of the Beholder by Margie Orford (South Africa) – Cora carries secrets her daughter can’t know. Freya is frightened by what her mother leaves unsaid. Angel will only bury the past if it means putting her abusers into the ground.
One act of violence sets the three women on a collision course, each desperate to find the truth. In a nail-biting thriller set between the scorched red soil of South Africa, the pitiless snowfields of Canada and the chilly lochsides of western Scotland, each woman must contend with the spectres of male violence, sexual abuse and the choices we each make to keep our souls.

The Fire by Daniela Krien (Germany) tr. Jamie Bulloch – With plans adrift after a fire burns down their rented holiday cabin, Rahel and Peter find themselves on an isolated farm where Rahel spent many a happy childhood summer. Suddenly, after years of navigating careers, demanding children and the monotony of the daily routine, they find themselves unable to escape each other’s company. With three weeks stretching ahead, they must come to an understanding on whether they have a future together. What happens when love grows older and passion has faded? When what divides us is greater than what brought us together? And how easy is it to ask the fundamental questions about our relationships?

The Ghetto Within by Santiago H. Amigorena (Argentina/France) tr. Frank Wynne – The Ghetto Within re-imagines the life of its author’s Jewish grandfather whose guilt provokes an enduring silence to span generations. 1928. Vicente Rosenberg is a European émigré starting a new life in Buenos Aires. Despite success, Vicente still misses his mother, who stayed behind in Poland. For years, she writes him. Yet, as unnerving rumors mount from abroad, her letters become increasingly sporadic, and Vicente begins to construct the reality of a tragedy that already occurred. Then, one day, the letters cease. Racked with guilt, Vicente lapses into a longstanding silence. With his new novel, Amigorena finds the language to retrieve his voice from the oblivion of familial trauma.

The Great Reclamation by Rachel Heng (Singapore) – On a quiet moonlit night, Ah Boon, young and terrified, takes his first trip out to sea in his father’s fishing boat – a rite of passage for the boys of the kampong. As the air hums and the wind howls, a mysterious, impossible island materialises in the darkness; an island that Ah Boon soon learns only he has the ability to find. But this is only the beginning of the story, and as Ah Boon grows up, alongside Siok Mei, the spirited girl he has fallen in love with, he finds himself caught in the tragic sweep of Singapore’s history.

The House of Fortune by Jessie Burton (UK) – In the golden city of Amsterdam, in 1705, Thea Brandt is turning eighteen, and she is ready to welcome adulthood with open arms. At the city’s theatre, Walter, the love of her life, awaits her, but at home in the house on the Herengracht, all is not well – her father Otto and Aunt Nella argue endlessly, and the Brandt family are selling their furniture in order to eat. On Thea’s birthday, also the day that her mother Marin died, the secrets from the past begin to overwhelm the present.

The Moonday Letters by Emmi Itäranta (Finland) tr.Emmi Itäranta – Sol has disappeared. Their Earth-born wife Lumi sets out to find them but it is no simple feat: each clue uncovers another enigma. Their disappearance leads back to underground environmental groups and a web of mystery that spans the space between the planets themselves. Told through letters and extracts, the course of Lumi’s journey takes her not only from the affluent colonies of Mars to the devastated remnants of Earth, but into the hidden depths of Sol’s past and the long-forgotten secrets of her own. Part space-age epistolary, part eco-thriller, and a love story between two individuals from very different worlds.

The Orphans of Amsterdam by Elle Van Rijn (Netherlands) tr. Jai van Essen – Amsterdam, 1941. My hands are so shaky I’m fumbling. Where to hide? I pull open the dresser, throw aside the blankets, put the baby in and push the drawer shut, just as the nursery door swings open. The German officer marches into the room, yelling over the crying downstairs: ‘You! Grab all the children – now!’ Based on the heart-wrenching true story of an ordinary young woman who risked everything to save countless children from the Nazis, this gripping read is perfect for fans of The Tattooist of Auschwitz, We Were the Lucky Ones and The Nightingale.

The Sleeping Car Porter by Suzette Mayr (Canada) – It’s 1929, and Baxter is considered lucky, as a Black man, to have a job as a porter on a train that crisscrosses the continent. He has to smile and nod for the white passengers when they call him ‘George.’ He’s obsessed with teeth, and saving up tips for dentistry school.

On this trip, the passengers are unruly, especially when the train is stranded for days – their secrets leak out, blurring with Baxter’s sleep-deprivation hallucinations. When he finds an illicit postcard of two men, Baxter’s longings are reawakened; keeping it puts his job in peril, but he can’t part with it or his memories of a certain Porter Instructor.

The Words that Remain by Stênio Gardel (Brazil) tr. Bruna Dantas Lobata (Portuguese) – A letter has beckoned to Raimundo since he received it over 50 years ago from his youthful passion, handsome Cícero. But having grown up in an impoverished area of Brazil where demands of manual labor thwarted his becoming literate, Raimundo has been unable to read. Exploring Brazil’s little-known hinterland as well its urban haunts, this is a sweeping novel of repression, violence, and shame, along with survival, endurance, and the ultimate triumph of an unforgettable figure on society’s margins. The Words That Remain explores the universal power of the written word and language, and how they affect all our relationships.

The World and All That It Holds by Aleksandar Hemon (Bosnia/US) – “The World and All That It Holds would be an audacious title for a book by anybody except God–or Aleksandar Hemon. . . From start to finish, no matter what else he’s up to, Hemon is telling a tale about the resilience of true love.” —RON CHARLES, The Washington Post. The World and All That It Holds—in all its hilarious, heartbreaking, erotic, philosophical glory—showcases Aleksandar Hemon’s celebrated talent at its pinnacle. It is a grand, tender, sweeping story that spans decades and continents. It cements Hemon as one of the boldest voices in fiction.

This Other Eden by Paul Harding (US) – inspired by the true story of Malaga Island, an isolated island off the coast of Maine that became one of the first racially integrated towns in the Northeast. In 1792, formerly enslaved Benjamin Honey and his Irish wife, Patience, discover an island where they can make a life together. Over a century later, the Honeys’ descendants and a diverse group of neighbors are desperately poor but nevertheless protected from the hostility on the mainland. During the summer of 1912, Matthew Diamond, a retired, idealistic but prejudiced schoolteacher-turned-missionary, disrupts the community’s fragile balance. (Bibliotheca Alexandrina) This Other Eden is an exceptional novel. It is lyrically expressed historical fiction which is “a tribute to community and human dignity.” (Rachel Seiffert, The Guardian)

Thistlefoot by Genna Rose Nethercott (US) – The Yaga siblings have been estranged since childhood. Then they learn that they are to receive an inheritance: a sentient house on chicken legs. Thistlefoot, as the house is called, has arrived from the Yagas’ ancestral home outside Kyiv—but the sinister Longshadow Man has tracked it to American shores, bearing with him violent secrets from the past. As the Yagas embark with Thistlefoot on a final cross-country tour of their family’s traveling theater show, the Longshadow Man follows, seeding destruction in his wake. Ultimately, time, magic, and legacy must collide—erupting in a powerful conflagration to determine who gets to remember the past and craft a new future.

Ti Amo by Hanne Ørstavik (Norway) tr. Martin Aitken – A woman is in a deep and real, but relatively new relationship with a man from Milan. She has moved there, they have married, and they are close in every way. Then he is diagnosed with cancer. It’s serious, but they try to go about their lives as best they can. But when the doctor tells the woman that her husband has less than a year to live – without telling the husband – death comes between them. She knows it’s coming, but he doesn’t – and he doesn’t seem to want to know. An incredibly beautiful and harrowing novel, filled with tenderness and grief, love and loneliness.

Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin (US) – This is the story of Sam and Sadie. It’s not a romance, but it is about love. When Sam catches sight of Sadie at a crowded train station one morning he is catapulted straight back to childhood, and the hours they spent immersed in video games. Their spark reignited, together they get to work: making their own games to delight and challenge players. It’s the 90s, and anything is possible. Their collaborations make them superstars.What comes next is a tale of friendship and rivalry, fame and creativity, betrayal and tragedy, perfect worlds and imperfect ones. And, above all, of our need to connect: to be loved and to love.

When We Were Fireflies by Abubakar Adam Ibrahim (Nigeria) – When brooding artist, Yarima Lalo, encounters a moving train for the first time, two serendipitous events occur. First, it triggers memories of past lives in which he was twice murdered—once on a train. He also meets Aziza, a woman with a complicated past of her own, who becomes key to helping him understand what he is experiencing. With a third death in his current life imminent, together they go hunting for remnants of his past lives. Will they find evidence that he is losing his mind or the people who once loved or loathed him?

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Shame (1997) by Annie Ernaux, tr. Tanya Leslie

In her 2022 nobel prize lecture, I Will Write to Avenge My People, Annie Ernaux shares her motivation for writing in the particular way that is unique to her, telling us how it is at odds with the way she taught.

I had to break with ‘writing well’ and beautiful sentences – the very kind I taught my students to write – to root out, display and understand the rift running through me.

So it with this understanding, that I picked up Simple Passion (my review here) and now Shame, works of non-fiction that explore how certain pivotal events in her life affected her, by noticing her actions and reactions, how her own behaviour or perception changed.

The Origin of Shame

The book opens with a quote from Paul Auster‘s The Invention of Solitude:

Language is not truth.

It is the way we exist in the world.

The opening line begins with the pivotal event, shortly before her 12th birthday:

My father tried to kill my mother one Sunday in June, in the early afternoon.

and then describes everything she remembers about that day in a page of detail.

It was 15 June 1952. The first date I remember with unerring accuracy from my childhood. Before that, the days and dates inscribed on the blackboard and in my workbooks seemed just to drift by.

These words were written 45 years later, around 1997, when this book was first published in French, words that she tells the reader were impossible to write about, even in a personal diary, before then.

Silence Esteemed, The Seed of Unworthiness

I considered writing about it to be a forbidden act that would call for punishment. Not being able to write anything else afterwards for instance. (I felt a kind of relief just now when I saw that I could go on writing, that nothing terrible had happened). In fact, now that I have finally committed it to paper, I feel that it is an ordinary incident, far more common among families than I had originally thought. It may be that narrative, any kind of narrative, lends normality to people’s deeds, including the most dramatic ones.

Ernaux looks back at the origin of her experience of shame, awakened to it by certain moments, exploring the change(s) as she is made to feel them, in the many areas of her life within which it dwelt, sometimes just hidden behind a door, always at risk of being discovered by others.

From then on, that Sunday was like a veil that came between me and everything I did. I would play, I would read, I would behave normally but somehow I wasn’t there.

Beginning with that traumatic event, she observes the lingering effect it had on her, the strong presence it maintained, despite the fact that no one ever talked (to her) about it.

She revisits photos and news archives from that day, that time, trying to find something.

Writing an Ethnological Study of Self

While she rejects the idea of traditional therapy, it could be said that she has created her own form of it, by bringing her deepest shame to the page, as if in doing so, she is somehow sending it away, banishing it to readers.

I expect nothing from psychoanalysis or therapy, whose rudimentary conclusions became clear to me a long time ago – a domineering mother, a father whose submissiveness is shattered with a murderous gesture. To state it’s ‘childhood trauma’ or ‘that day the idols of childhood were knocked off their pedestal’ does nothing to explain a scene which could only be conveyed by the expression that came to me at the time: ‘gagner malheur‘, to breathe disaster. Here abstract speech fails to reach me.

Photo Pavel Danilyuk @ Pexels.com

This text she describes as carrying out an ethnological study of herself.

Like Simple Passion, written in short fragments, it is an engaging read that centres around the year 1952, living by the rules and codes of her world, which usually required unquestioning obedience, without any knowledge that there may be others.

The more I retrace this world of the past, the more terrified I am by its coherence and its strength. Yet I am sure I was perfectly happy there and could aspire to nothing better. For its laws were lost in the sweet, pervasive smells of food and wax polish floating upstairs, the distant shouts coming from the playground and the morning silence shattered by the tinkling of a piano – a girl practicing scales with her music teacher.

A brilliant depiction of a shattering of illusion and the origins of one girls perception of unworthiness.

As the book closes, and the year 1952 ends, her attention is caught by a film/book release.

In his novel, Fires on the Plain, published in 1952, the Japanese author Shōhei Ōoka writes: ‘All this may just be an illusion but all the same I cannot question the things I have experienced. Memories too belong in that category’.

Highly Recommended.

Author, Annie Ernaux

Born in 1940, Annie Ernaux (née Duchesne) was born in Lillebonne and grew up in Yvetot, Normandy, where her parents ran a café-grocery store in the spinning mill district.

She was educated at a private Catholic secondary school, encountering girls from more middle-class backgrounds, and experiencing shame of her working-class parents and milieu for the first time.

After a brief stint in Finchley, London, cleaning houses all morning and reading from the library all afternoon, she returned to France to study at the University of Rouen. Obtaining a degree in modern literature, she became a school teacher. From 1977 to 2000 she was a professor at the Centre National d’Enseignement par Correspondance.

Her books, in particular A Man’s Place (La Place) and A Woman’s Story (Une femme) have become contemporary classics in France. These books marked a break from the definitive novelistic form, she would continue teaching in order to never depend on commercial success.

One of France’s most respected authors, she has won multiple awards for her books, including the Prix Renaudot (2008) for The Years (Les Années) and the Marguerite Yourcenar prize (2017) for her entire body of work. The English translation of The Years (2019) was shortlisted for the Man Booker prize International and won the Warwick Prize for Women in Translation (2019).

The main themes threaded through her work over more than four decades are: the body and sexuality; intimate relationships; social inequality and the experience of changing class through education; time and memory; and the overarching question of how to write these life experiences.