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.
A handful of stories about five women whose recent experiences of difficult or painful events are leavened by life-enhancing - even life-altering - moments.
A couple lost their intimacy somewhere along the road of their marriage. Set over a three-week period, away from home, this is a skillful unpicking of connubial and familial dynamics. Krien'... read more
Smuggled out of the Soviet Union in 1982, this novel first appeared in English in 1987 and soon disappeared, to be resurrected thanks to Susan Sontag's enthusiasm for a 'scruffy-looking' cop... read more
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.
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.
A slim, charming and witty riff on Proustian themes - the shallowness of society, the impossibility of love, the enduring power of art... Life-affirming!
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
An exuberant romp of a thriller: career-driven journalist Rika finds that the best way to secure an interview with a maybe-serial-killer is through her stomach, trying out the rich recipes t... read more
Two men go walking in the Dolomites, but not together; one falls to his death, the other reports the body. Is it coincidence that they knew each other in earlier years, and that one had betr... read more
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