A literary and psychoanalytical first cousin to the Bombay Laughing Club: a book about laughter and the unconscious, with philosophy, poetry, memoir and the tragi-comedy of clowns thrown in ... read more
A Yorkshire childhood, remembered in lockdown, collides with immense global forces. Hunters in the Snow, Hildyard's previous novel - her first - was excellent.
The author is a US journalist who, in 2016, accompanied an Afghan driver determined to leave his country for the West. It is an extraordinary account of how this ghastly odyssey works from t... read more
A 900-page epic from the Polish Nobel laureate. Biblical in scale and content, the book follows an C18th messiah called Jacob Frank who converts from Judaism to Islam and then to Catholicism... read more
Perhaps the most high-profile political prisoner in the Arab world, Alaa has spent most of the last seven years in prison in Egypt. These essays were smuggled, compiled by friends and relati... read more
A hotchpotch of journal entries from the last seven years to do with living around Paris, surprisingly free of the angst found in much of her other writing.
The controversial address to 3,500 psychoanalysts, at which he was booed off stage for asserting that the Academy needed to change their attitudes to gender.
The author moved to Japan aged 21, immersing herself in language and culture with such success that she is now a literary translator. Her route there was by no means straightforward; this bo... read more
MS is an outstanding literary voice in contemporary Russia: here she creates a portrait of three Russian-Jewish generations sifted from the detritus in a late aunt's flat. This book is diff... read more
A clever and playful reworking of Wagner's 'Ring' that brings in the financial crisis of 2008; originally conceived as a libretto for the Berlin Opera.