An outcast among outcasts: Katerina, by Aharon Appelfeld, reviewed
A peasant girl flees her abusive home, to find happiness working for Jewish families in the lush Carpathian countryside – until anti-Semitic pogroms change everything irrevocably
Nordic dream or nightmare?: The Mark, by Frida Isberg, reviewed
A test has been developed in Iceland to assess a citizen’s sensitivity and potential for anti-social behaviour. Will the looming referendum make it compulsory?
Portrait of an artistic provocateur: Blue Ruin, by Hari Kunzru, reviewed
A once fashionable YBA now scraping a living in America meets old friends by chance, prompting a deep dive into memory
Mediterranean Gothic: The Sleepwalkers, by Scarlett Thomas, reviewed
Thomas tells her tale of a hellish honeymoon on a Greek island with the cunning of an Aegean sorceress, keeping her readers pleasurably unsettled and alert
The truth one year, heresy the next: The Book of Days, by Francesca Kay, reviewed
A richly imagined novel unfolds in an Oxfordshire village as the accession of the child king Edward VI brings another round of ‘newfanglery’ in religion
Must we live in perpetual fear of being named and shamed?
Current wars, Brexit and Trumpism have sucked us into a vortex of outrage and disgrace, says David Keen – while advertisers make us feel guilty for being too fat or just poor
Public lies and secret truths
Smith’s sweeping historical novel spans slavery in Jamaica in the 1770s and the marathon trials of the Tichborne Claimant in London a century later
The devil comes calling
The sinister Sergeant Bertrand arrives in a ‘provincial, mediocre’ Russian town to wreak havoc in the lives of a couple mourning the loss of their son
Find the lady: Tomás Nevinson, by Javier Marías, reviewed
A merciless ETA terrorist is in hiding in Spain – but which of three seemingly innocent women is she?
Luminous fables: Night Train to the Stars, by Kenji Miyazawa, reviewed
A downcast cellist discovers that his music cures sick mice and rabbits in one of many tales featuring talking animals in eerie, folkloric landscapes
An empire crumbles: Nights of Plague, by Orhan Pamuk, reviewed
Welcome to Mingheria, ‘pearl of the Levant’. On a spring day, as the 20th century dawns, you disembark at this…
When did cheerfulness get so miserable?
We’ve all met the sort of facetious oaf who orders any non-giggling woman to ‘Cheer up, love, it might never…
Snafu at Slough House: Bad Actors, by Mick Herron, reviewed
Reviewers who make fancy claims for genre novels tend to sound like needy show-offs or hard-of-thinking dolts. So be it:…
Timely tales of pestilence
Professor David Damrosch, the director of Harvard’s Institute for World Literature, fell in love with ‘a fictional realm that I’d…
A broken nation: Chronicles from the Land of the Happiest People on Earth, by Wole Soyinka, reviewed
One of the best episodes in Wole Soyinka’s third novel (his first since 1973) takes place not in Nigeria but…
The power of the translator to break nations
No one ever raised a statue to a translator, disgruntled adepts of that art sometimes complain. I beg to differ,…
A Danubian Narnia: Nostalgia, by Mircea Cartarescu, reviewed
Mircea Cartarescu likens his native Romania to a Latin American country stranded in eastern Europe. Certainly, his writing delivers not…
The dictator of the dorm: Our Lady of the Nile, by Scholastique Mukasonga, reviewed
In the cloud-capped highlands of Rwanda, even the rain-makers sound like crashing snobs. When two teenage pupils from Our Lady…
Algeria’s War of Independence still leaves festering wounds, two new novels reveal
In France, even the car horns yelled about Algeria. A five-beat klaxon blast — three short, two long — signalled…
In search of Noëlle: Invisible Ink, by Patrick Modiano, reviewed
At some point in his twilit, enigmatic novels of vanished lives and buried memories, Patrick Modiano likes to jolt his…
Full of desperate longing: Unquiet, by Linn Ullmann, reviewed
The scrawny little girl with ‘pipe-cleaner legs’ wants to feel at home with her parents. But father and mother live…
Stockholm syndrome: The Family Clause, by Jonas Hassen Khemiri, reviewed
Some faint hearts may sink at the idea of a torrid Swedish family drama peopled with nameless figures identified only…
Foreign fields: Boyd Tonkin chooses his favourite shorter classics in translation
If I had a rouble or a euro for every reader who fulfilled their lockdown promise to devour Dostoevsky, Tolstoy…
Sinister toy story: Little Eyes, by Samanta Schweblin, reviewed
We often hear that science fiction — or ‘speculative’ fiction, as the buffs prefer — can draw premonitory outlines of…
Albanian literary icon Ismail Kadare revisits ‘home’
Ismail Kadare is a kind of lapidary artist who carves meaning and pattern into the rocky mysteries of his native…
