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 Yorkshire childhood, remembered in lockdown, collides with immense global forces. Hunters in the Snow, Hildyard's previous novel - her first - was excellent.
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
Pieces together three generations of a family, moving between Italy and England, in an attempt to understand what roots and home might mean. Subtle, charming memoir.
The fragmented recollections of a handful of survivors of the earthquake that struck the northern Friuli in 1976. Their tiny village high in the Julian Alps, beneath the immense karstic mass... read more
A strange and darkly comic novel about a young tennis coach, his pupil, a crumbling castle where towels behave in a sinister manner... This is the first time this modernist-gothic masterpiec... read more
In 1942, aged 24, the great and defiant Canetti began to write notes, aphorisms and meditations about death - he was dead against it - and, by extension, about and for life; he only stopped... read more
Her memoir of running a small cinema in rural Hungary, the transformative magic of communal yet private experience in a place stale with resignation and nostalgia.
The literary fl?neur wanders amongst places and objects, images, film and ideas: a series of short, discursive essays that are the more brilliant for being unassuming.
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 long novel in which an artist watches versions of himself slip away into alcohol and loneliness. (Previously published as three separate paperbacks).
The season's most arresting title? Ambitious and witty, this novel about a student researching rural life in the marshlands of western France is another fruit of Enard's wildly leaping imag... 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