Book news, reviews and recommendations
Set in seventeenth-century Denmark, Olga Ravn’s The Wax Child grew out of HEX, her play which premiered at the Royal Danish Theatre in 2023. It’s narrated by the titular wax child moulded by Christenze Kruckow, an impoverished noblewoman charged with witchcraft. Is that what harmful magic is? The thing everyone did to stop the hiccups? […]
Andrev Walden’s Bloody Awful in Different Ways was a huge bestseller in Sweden, winning the country’s prestigious August Prize in 2023. It’s pitched at readers who loved Frederik Bachman’s A Man Called Ove which didn’t appeal to me but I liked the sound of this slice of autofiction which begins with young Andrev, aged seven
I’ve often mentioned the power of novellas on this blog, how in the right hands a few pages can convey much more than several hundred. Mai Ishizawa’s prize-winning debut, The Place of Shells, is a fine example of that for me. Set during the pandemic, it’s narrated by an unnamed academic from Tōhoku, whose coastline
The Place of Shells by Mai Ishizawa (Transl. Polly Barton): Trauma, grief and memory Read More »
I’ve read all six of Austrian writer Daniel Kehlmann’s novels and reviewed four on here, each of them very different from the others. The Director tells the story of film director G. W. Pabst who found himself trapped after the annexation of Austria, apparently with no choice but to produce films for Goebbels’s Ministry of
The Director by Daniel Kehlmann (transl. Ross Benjamin): In a bind Read More »
Oliver Lovrenski’s Back in the Day topped the bestseller lists in Norway for months, winning the country’s prestigious Bookseller Prize when Lovrenski was just nineteen. Set in Oslo, his episodic, fragmented novel follows four boys through their school days onto the streets into a life that will likely lead to an early death. argan was
Recently shortlisted for this year’s International Booker Prize, the first book in Solvej Balle’s septology comes garlanded with praise from a wide range of writers including Jon McGregor whose endorsement swung it for me; that and its intriguing premise. On the Calculation of Volume 1 follows Tara Selter who wakes up every morning to find
This is the fourth novel by Robert Seethaler I’ve reviewed on here. The first was A Whole Life which sees a man lead a simple yet rich life, leaving his alpine valley just once. After that I snapped up both The Tobacconist and The Field as soon as they appeared. All offer a slice of
I’ve read so little Korean fiction that when Gu Byeong-Mo’s Your Neighbour’s Table popped up on NetGalley I decided to give it a try. It’s set in an apartment building for which there is a long waiting list and strict rules to obey: tenants must have at least one child and produce two more. You’d
This is the latest in a series of occasional posts featuring books I read years ago about which I was wildly enthusiastic at the time, wanting to press a copy in as many hands as I could. I’m ashamed to say that I read far less fiction in translation back in 2000 when I first
Nanae Aoyama’s A Perfect Day to Be Alone is already a bestseller in several European countries, translated into German, French and Italian before Jesse Kirkwood’s English version. Spanning a year in which twenty-year-old Chizu lives with an elderly distant relative, it’s a quiet coming-of-age story. It turned out that when you put three people with
The blurb for Alex Schulman’s Malma Station was so impenetrable I’d have passed it by had I not been so impressed by The Survivors back in 2021. Schulman’s new novel explores similar themes following three journeys to the eponymous station deep in the Swedish countryside, separated by several decades. Often, when her parents fought, she
Malma Station by Alex Schulman (transl. Rachel Willson-Broyles) ‘You are never alone’ Read More »