Re-tellings of Greek mythology are all the rage at the moment. Some recent forays back into this world include Madeline Miller’s Circe, Colm Tobin’s House of Names, Mark Haddon’s The Porpoise and Pat Barker’s The Silence of the Girls. The Miller and Barker books, in particular, seek to put a more feminist, female-centric spin on…
German author Dirk Kurbjuweit’s first novel to be translated into English was Fear, based on his own experience of being stalked. His most recent book in translation (translated by Imogen Taylor) is a very different beast. Based on the shocking true story of Fritz Haarmann, the Butcher of Hannover, The Missing is more a thinly…
The music world of the 60s and 70s seems to be having a literary renaissance at the moment. Recently we have had David Mitchell’s Utopia Avenue and Taylor Jenkins Read’s Daisy Jones and the Six. Much like those books, Dawnie Walton’s The Final Revival of Opal & Nev, is about a band that burned brightly…
After having done giant robot on robot action in his Themis Files trilogy, Sylvain Neuvel embarks on something a little different in his new book A History of What Comes Next. Set between the dying days of the Second World War and the launch of the first man into space, this is not so much…
Inga Vesper’s debut crime novel The Long, Long Afternoon takes readers into the Stepford world of 1950s Los Angeles and then blows it up from the inside. When the book opens, seemingly devoted housewife Joyce Hayney has disappeared. The investigation into that disappearance will reveal cracks in the façade of her marriage and the community…
Jack Beaumont is not the real name of the author of The Frenchman, a book that itself is full of pseudonyms, nicknames and operational code names. Beaumont was, apparently, a member of the French secret service after a career as a pilot and has, since retiring, moved to Australia. Following in the footsteps of authors…
Cassandra Austin’s debut All Fall Down was a sometimes dreamlike Australian gothic tale set in a rural country town. While it is at times a little more grounded, her latest book Like Mother, finds Austin in similar territory. An Australian country town in the late 1960s in the middle of a heatwave and a set…
Polish author Kaja Malanowska wrote her third novel Fog (translated by Bill Johnson) as an experiment in attracting a broader readership through the crime genre. Her previous two novels, the autobiographical Drobne szaleństwa dnia codziennego (Small Madnesses of Everyday Life) in 2010, and Patrz na mnie, Klaro! (Look at Me, Klara!) in 2012 were literary…
Klara and the Sun is the first novel from Kazuo Ishiguro since winning the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2017 and his 2015 novel, the Arthurian-inspired The Buried Giant. While delivery a very different main character and sketching in the outlines of a unique future world, Klara and the Sun is thematically consistent with much…
Lara Thomson’s debut One Night, New York, opens at the top of the Empire State Building in the height of the depression. Two women, Frances and Agnes wait up there, planning to push someone over the edge. In returning to this setup, Thompson will range across the highs and lows of New York City in…
