Japanese novelist Kotaro Isaka hit on a great formula with his last book, Bullet Train. That was a fast paced, violent and weird battle between a group of idiosyncratic assassins on a train. Bullet Train was influenced by more than a little manga, plenty of early Tarantino and a whole lot of swagger. And while…
Israeli author Ayelet Gundar-Goshen’s latest novel The Wolf Hunt (translated by Sondra Silverston) was first published in Hebrew with the name Relocation. And while the new title has some resonance with the plot, the original name cuts deeper to the concerns that Gundar-Goshen is trying to explore. That is, the split and tension in the…
At 80 pages, Weasels in the Attic by Hiroko Oyamada (translated by David Boyd) is more a novella than a novel. But Oyamada manages to pack a punch into this brevity. The three connected stories that make up the novel explore issues of parenthood and responsibility from a Japanese perspective. In the first part of…
Mieko Kawakami is probably best known for her second novel in translation – Breasts and Eggs. Her third novel to be translated in to English All the Lovers in the Night (also translated by Sam Bett and David Boyd) is a deep character piece. The book focusses on a woman who has difficulty forming relationships,…
Natsuko Imamura’s novel The Woman in the Purple Skirt (translated from the Japanese by Lucy North), is a short, disquieting novel of obsession and loneliness. While the story is ostensibly about the eponymous woman, who never otherwise has a name, it is narrated by another woman who calls herself “the woman in the yellow cardigan”….
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…
