Breaking free of conformity, a woman leaves her husband, flat and career for a new, queer life: first part of an autofictional trilogy; the prequel in fact to last year's Love Me Tender.
A Japanese man tries to form a relationship with his half-French child, who has grown up on the other side of the world. The other side of the story told in A Single Rose, this nevertheless ... read more
A story handed down through generations of women becomes a tale within tales, accumulating myths and family histories. Translated from the Romanian. The author has won the EU Prize for Liter... read more
Not all are hidden by luxuriant, pointy moustaches... The painter's only novel is a baroque and decadent tale set in the 1930s, first published in 1944.
A slim, charming and witty riff on Proustian themes - the shallowness of society, the impossibility of love, the enduring power of art... Life-affirming!
In the wake of the success of Baron Bagge in 2022, here's another tight novella by the Austrian mid-C20th novelist, this time about the fear of revenge after WW2.
An excellent Catalan novel from the 1970s, about flight and return, in which the Civil War still looms over the tail-end of Franco's era and modernity blooms. A marvellous evocation of Barce... read more
Drawing on the author's own experiences of WW2, the novel's protagonist rebels against the pressures of family and politics in Fascist Italy. First published in 1949. By the author of Forbid... read more
Tokyo, an astonishly good cook and multiple murders. This is not a who-dunnit but a why-dunnit - and there is much to savour, both malicious and delicious.
A compulsive political thriller that takes us deep into the Kremlin and the psychology of authoritarianism: at its heart is Putin's chief spin-doctor, the still centre of a delirious propaga... read more
Set in Siberia in the 1970s, the adult narrator looks back on his friendship with an Armenian boy. Other slim but lyrically powerful novels by this great Russian/French novelist include Test... read more
A Finnish picaresque novel, about a man who abandons his conventional life when he pursues an injured hare into the forest. First published in 1975 and now a classic.
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
A new collection of short stories by the acclaimed writer who moved to Rome in 2012 and now only writes in Italian. Her many awards include a Pulitzer prize, a Guggenheim Fellowship and a Na... read more
A young Sicilian woman delves into her family's history, their relationships, intrigues, betrayals, struggles. This is a new translation and the first unabridged version of what is widely co... read more
The author's investigation of her family's history and her own identity was sparked by the arrival of an anonymous postcard bearing four names that arrived over forty years after those four ... read more
From the author of the breathtaking At Night All Blood is Black (winner of the International Booker Prize in 2021), this novel is another marvel. Set in C18th France and Africa, its protagon... read more
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 perfect wife tests her perfect husband for the perfection of his love... A French bestseller of unnerving and claustrophobic domestic unease in the manner of Highsmith.
The mayor of Barcelona is being blackmailed with a sex tape from her student days and there are several interested parties who would gladly see her resignation. The first in a new series by ... read more
Death, divination and a succession of murders, set in the crumbling grandeur of a once great house... Another treat for those who loved The Inugami Curse and others by this master of the gen... read more
A young farm lad falls asleep in a boat and drifts down the river: a week of liberated, pastoral bliss ensues. First published in 1945, this is the first new translation since the 1950s. By ... read more
Louis XV's astronomer sails the seas to observe the transit of Venus; two and half centuries later his telescope draws a man to a woman. A new novel by the author of other, gently off-beat r... read more
First translation of his novel set in Naples in the shadow of WW2, about a railway clerk, thwarted in his artistic ambitions, and his long-suffering family. Published in Italian 20 years ago... read more
A love affair and its aftermath, set in the closing years of the GDR. The girl is young, the man significantly older; the alteration in their love finds a parallel in the oppression of the r... read more
A snakes-and-ladders novella about the misplaced confidence of a bossy widow, whose aspirations to a life of refinement and social elevation bring about her downfall. Ginzburg, as ever, is l... read more
Another of Ginzburg's lambent, ironic novellas: this time about a spoilt boy who grows into a feckless youth. Both he and his parents are blinded by unrealistic hopes, while his sister (the ... read more
The French-Lebanese writer - no stranger to complicated ethnicities or religious groups - has set this novel in a small Albanian community in the mountains of southern Italy. Often comic, so... read more