By Margarita Khemlin (tr Melanie Moore) - Ukraine Set in the Ukrainian SSR, The Investigator is rooted in a specific time and place. Lilia Vorobeichik’s death is given as 18 May 1952, barely 10 months before the death of Stalin, whose rule brought untold suffering to the region. The forced collectivization of the late 1920s […]
By Arundhati Roy – India. In a graveyard outside the walls of Old Delhi, a resident unrolls a threadbare Persian carpet. On a concrete sidewalk, a baby suddenly appears, just after midnight. In a snowy valley, a bereaved father writes a letter to his five-year-old daughter about the people who came to her funeral. In […]
By Ahlam Bsharat (tr Nancy Roberts) – Palestine. A young adult book. With irony and poignant teenage idealism, Butterfly draws us into her world of adult hypocrisy, sibling rivalries, girlfriends' power plays, unrequited love...not to mention the political tension of life under occupation. As she observes her fragile environment with all its conflicts, Butterfly is […]
By Olga Tokarczuk – Poland. Flights interweaves travel narratives and reflections on travel with an in-depth exploration of the human body, broaching life, death, motion, and migration. From the seventeenth century, we have the story of the Dutch anatomist Philip Verheyen, who dissected and drew pictures of his own amputated leg. From the eighteenth century, […]
By Reni Eddo-Lodge – UK. Writing on black life in Britain has long been the poor relation of its African American equivalent, not least because, in the hierarchy of suffering, the daily slights endured by black Britons do not bear comparison to the existential threat to African American lives. She’s strong on the pervasive racial […]
By Orhan Pamuk - Turkey. The Museum of Innocence - set in Istanbul between 1975 and today - tells the story of Kemal, the son of one of Istanbul's richest families, and of his obsessive love for a poor and distant relation, the beautiful Fusun, who is a shop-girl in a small boutique. In his […]
By Ayesha Haruna Attah – Ghana. Aminah lives an idyllic life until she is brutally separated from her home and forced on a journey that turns her from a daydreamer into a resilient woman. Wurche, the willful daughter of a chief, is desperate to play an important role in her father's court. These two women's […]
By Kamal Abdullayev - Azerbaijan. Translated from Azerbaijani by Anne Thompson, this is a novel narrating the imaginary life of medieval icons. When a young researcher accidentally comes across a manuscript in the Manuscripts Institute, he discovers the unexpected but well-known epic Kitabi Dada Korkud, combined with the history of Azerbaijani shah and poet Shah […]
By Joanne Hillhouse – Antigua/Barbados. Zahara is a loner. She's brilliant on the guitar but in everyday life she doesn't really fit in. Then she meets Shaka, himself a musical genius and the first boy who really gets her. They discover that they share a special bond, their passion for music, and Zahara finds herself […]
By Sulaiman Addonia – Eritrea/Sudan Saba arrives in an East African refugee camp as a young girl, devastated to have had to abandon her books as her family fled. In this crowded and often hostile place, she must carve out her new existence, always protecting her mute brother Hagos. A moving portrait of a woman […]
By Min Jin Lee – Korea/Japan Yeongdo, Korea 1911. In a small fishing village on the banks of the East Sea, a club-footed, cleft-lipped man marries a fifteen-year-old girl. The couple have one child, their beloved daughter Sunja. When Sunja falls pregnant by a married yakuza, the family face ruin. But then Isak, a Christian […]
by Khaled Khalifa (tr by Leri Price) – Syria Khalifa portrays his native city under the grip of the Assad regimes though the lives of one family over three generations. In the once beautiful city of Aleppo, the family descends into tragedy and ruin. Irrepressible Sawsan flirts with militias, the ruling party, and finally religion, […]
