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In an epigraph, referring to Jules Verne’s posthumous novel, The Lighthouse at the End of the World (1905), González Macías tells how Verne never set foot in Argentina, where the novel was set, but captured that world imaginatively. Macías a self-confessed “landlubber” therefore likens himself...

Scenes From a Childhood (tr: Damion Searls, 2018) is a selection of Jon Fosse’s short fiction that spans 1987 through 2013. It contains five pieces that showcase the Nobel laureate’s work, and each is distinct in its way, although they are all unmistakably the work of this very singular writer...

Kathryn Scanlan’s Kick the Latch (2022) is an engaging compression of one woman’s life in the Midwest horse racing circuit. Based on transcribed interviews with the subject, Sonia, Scanlan has taken this material and crafted a series of vignettes that take in the obvious elements of horses and...

Natalia Ginzburg’s first novel, The Road to the City (1942, tr: Francis Frenaye, 1952) is a coming-of-age of story, cool in its delivery, and hard in its truth. The opening line appears to riff on the opening line in Anna Karenina, setting us up to realise that the narrator is from the long line...

The war in Éric Vuillard’s The War of the Poor (2019, tr: Mark Polizzotti , 2021) is not a single point in time but an ongoing campaign fought throughout history. Although it focuses on Thomas Müntzer, a 16th century German preacher and reformer, its narrative drops in on a handful of social...

The thirteen stories that comprise Petina Gappah’s debut collection, An Elegy for Easterly (2009), examine Zimbabwe under the regime of Robert Mugabe. While that experience may not be comparable to our own, the wide cast and their everyday concerns make it a recognisable world. The opening...

Life is what happens in the moments between birth and death, and there’s much mystery found in this fleeting gap in Jon Fosse’s Morning and Evening (2000, tr: Damion Searls, 2015). Here life and death are not just the chronological start and end points for our time on Earth, but literally the...

Jon Fosse’s Aliss at the Fire (2003, tr: Damion Searls, 2010) is as much a showcase of his talent as dramatist as well as writer of prose. His characters converse with each other in only the most basic of utterances, and yet in this minimalism the unsaid is given powerful expression. In an...

Women are at the heart of Jennifer Clement’s 2001 fiction debut, A True Story Based on Lies, which looks at the upstairs downstairs dynamics in wealthy Mexico City. Our gateway to this world is Leonora, a young villager sent for a convent education so that she may exceed her mother’s career of...

Boxes, clothes, and the dead form a common thread in the stories of Samanta Schweblin’s Seven Empty Houses (2015, tr: Megan McDowell, 2022) which invite us into moments of the domestic uncanny where exteriors are just masks and inside lurks worries, arguments, and unresolved traumas. In the...

I was reading a book. It was good. It felt good to be reading. I didn’t know where the story was going. I was just reading. Curiosity had taken hold of me. So I just read. I was reading Jon Fosse’s A Shining from 2023. It was translated by Damian Searls In the same year I think, yes, in the same...

Since his appearance over a hundred years ago, Hercule Poirot has become part of the cultural landscape. Agatha Christie wrote thirty-three novels featuring him, as well as several plays and short stories over a period of fifty-five years. The little Belgian is her most famous and recurring...

In an unnamed country, after an ambiguous event, there’s an anonymous narrator living in a nondescript house in an undisclosed neighbourhood. After whatever happened in the past houses no longer have basements. What they do have is a room for the unknowable president on the longshot expectation...

The narrator of Edogawa Rampo’s Beast in the Shadows (1928, tr: Ian Hughes, 2006) suggests there are two categories of detective novelist. While he views himself as the type interested in the intellectual challenge of detection, it’s the other - excited by the crime itself - that leads the...

On its first publication, The Castle of Otranto (1764) was attributed to a translation by William Marshall from the Italian of Onuphrio Muralto. Supposedly found “in the library of an ancient catholic family in the north of England” and dated to 1529, with its story reaching further back, it was...

Viktoria Lloyd-Barlow’s All the Little Bird-Hearts (2023) follows an account of one memorable summer that irreparably changed its narrator’s life, Sunday, is an autistic woman with notable quirks: she enjoys white food; is advised by a 1950s handbook on social etiquette; and finds comfort in a...

To see the meeting in print of Micheline Aharonian Marcom and Fowzia Karimi feels like destiny fulfilling itself. True, Karimi has previously illustrated Marcom’s The Brick House (2017), but in Small Pieces (2023) they have engaged in a dialogue over twenty-five short texts and an equal number...

Andy Hamilton is a well-kent name from British TV and radio, having given us, among other things, shows like Drop the Dead Donkey (1990-1998) and Outnumbered (2007-2016). Longhand (2020) is his second novel and, unusually, it’s actually written in longhand, with almost 350 pages of Hamilton’s...

The Wasp Factory (1984) by Iain Banks centres on the narration of Frank Cauldhame, a teen living in an isolated house on a remote island in Scotland. Frank’s a psychopath with three murders chalked up, having dispatched some relatives at an early age in somewhat darkly comic circumstances...

In 1859 Jules Verne left France for the first time and visited Scotland. He looked over Edinburgh from Arthur’s Seat (his first ‘mountain’), visited Glasgow, and took the train to Loch Lomond and on, via coach, to the scenic Trossachs, which he was anxious to see. Along the way he learnt of...