Heart Lamp
by
Winner of the 2025 International Booker Prize Winner of a PEN Translates Award A monumental first collection in English from Banu Mushtaq: lawyer, activist, champion of Muslim women, and winner of India's highest literary honors. In the twelve stories of Heart Lamp, Banu Mushtaq exquisitely captures the everyday lives of women and girls in Muslim communities in southern India. Published originally in the Kannada language between 1990 and 2023, praised for their dry and gentle humor, these portraits of family and community tensions testify to Mushtaq's years as a journalist and lawyer, in which she tirelessly championed women's rights and protested all forms of caste and religious oppression. Written in a style at once witty, vivid, colloquial, moving and excoriating, it's in her characters--the sparky children, the audacious grandmothers, the buffoonish maulvis and thug brothers, the oft-hapless husbands, and the mothers above all, surviving their feelings at great cost--that Mushtaq emerges as an astonishing writer and observer of human nature, building disconcerting emotional heights out of a rich spoken style. Her opus has garnered both censure from conservative quarters as well India's most prestigious literary awards; this is a collection sure to be read for years to come.
A Leopard-Skin Hat
by
SHORTLISTED FOR THE INTERNATIONAL BOOKER PRIZE A Leopard-Skin Hat may be the French writer Anne Serre's most moving novel yet. Hailed in Le Point as a "masterpiece of simplicity, emotion and elegance," it is the story of an intense friendship between "the Narrator" and his close childhood friend, Fanny, who suffers from profound psychological disorders. A series of short scenes paints the portrait of a strong-willed and tormented young woman battling many demons, and of the narrator's loving and anguished attachment to her. Anne Serre poignantly depicts the bewildering back and forth between hope and despair involved in such a relationship, while playfully calling into question the very form of the novel. Written in the aftermath of the death of the author's little sister, A Leopard-Skin Hat is both the celebration of a tragically foreshortened life and a valedictory farewell, written in Anne Serre's signature style.
Perfection
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A 2025 International Booker Prize Shortlist Nominee A scathing, provocative novel about contemporary existence by a rising star in Italian literature. Anna and Tom, an expat couple, have fashioned a dream life for themselves in Berlin. They are young digital "creatives" exploring the excitements of the city, freelancers without too many constraints, who spend their free time cultivating house plants and their images online. At first, they reasonably deduce that they've turned their passion for aesthetics into a viable, even enviable career, but the years go by, and Anna and Tom grow bored. As their friends move back home or move on, so their own work and sex life--and the life of Berlin itself--begin to lose their luster. An attempt to put their politics into action fizzles in embarrassed self-doubt. Edging closer to forty, they try living as digital nomads only to discover that, wherever they go, "the brand of oat milk in their flat whites was the same." Perfection--Vincenzo Latronico's first book to be translated into English--is a scathing novel about contemporary existence, a tale of two people gradually waking up to find themselves in various traps, wondering how it all came to be. Was it a lack of foresight, or were they just born too late?
Under the Eye of the Big Bird
by
SHORTLISTED FOR THE INTERNATIONAL BOOKER PRIZE From one of Japan's most brilliant and sensitive contemporary novelists, this speculative fiction masterpiece envisions an Earth where humans are nearing extinction, and rewrites our understanding of reproduction, ecology, evolution, artificial intelligence, communal life, creation, love, and the future of humanity In the distant future, humans are on the verge of extinction and have settled in small tribes across the planet under the observation and care of "Mothers." Some children are made in factories, from cells of rabbits and dolphins; some live by getting nutrients from water and light, like plants. The survival of the race depends on the interbreeding of these and other alien beings--but it is far from certain that connection, love, reproduction, and evolution will persist among the inhabitants of this faltering new world. Unfolding over fourteen interconnected episodes spanning geological eons, at once technical and pastoral, mournful and utopic, Under the Eye of the Big Bird presents an astonishing vision of the end of our species as we know it.
Small Boat
by
Shortlisted for the International Booker Prize "This book challenged me profoundly. It moved me, and stayed with me. It's not an easy read - but as our politics descend into hate-mongering and point-scoring, it's an essential story that needs to be told."-- Dua Lipa A singular, gut-punching parable for our times about complicity in the face of tragedy, based on the true story of a French navy officer who ignored distress calls from migrants drowning in the English Channel. In November 2021, an inflatable dinghy carrying migrants from France to the UK capsized in the English Channel, causing the deaths of 27 people on board. Despite receiving numerous calls for help, the French authorities wrongly told the migrants they were in British waters and had to call the British authorities for help. By the time rescue vessels arrived on the scene, nearly three hours later, all but two of the migrants had died, the worst single loss of life ever to occur in the Channel. Vincent Delecroix's acclaimed Small Boat is a fictional first-person account of the French navy officer who took the migrants' calls--and her attempts to justify the indefensible. Accused of failing in her duty, she refuses to be held more responsible than others for this disaster, than the crises behind these tragedies. What unfolds is a gripping, thought-provoking examination of the darkest threat to our humanity. Powerful, forceful, and haunting, Small Boat confronts the most difficult but important moral questions of our time: to what extent are we all complicit?
On the Calculation of Volume I
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A NEW YORKER BEST BOOK OF 2024 A WASHINGTON POST NOTABLE BOOK OF 2024 SHORTLISTED FOR THE INTERNATIONAL BOOKER PRIZE LONGLISTED FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FOR TRANSLATED LITERATURE Tara Selter, the heroine of On the Calculation of Volume, has involuntarily stepped off the train of time: in her world, November eighteenth repeats itself endlessly. We meet Tara on her 122nd November 18th: she no longer experiences the changes of days, weeks, months, or seasons. She finds herself in a lonely new reality without being able to explain why: how is it that she wakes every morning into the same day, knowing to the exact second when the blackbird will burst into song and when the rain will begin? Will she ever be able to share her new life with her beloved and now chronically befuddled husband? And on top of her profound isolation and confusion, Tara takes in with pain how slight a difference she makes in the world. (As she puts it: "That's how little the activities of one person matter on the eighteenth of November.") Balle is hypnotic and masterful in her remixing of the endless recursive day, creating curious little folds of time and foreshadowings: her flashbacks light up inside the text like old flash bulbs. The first volume's gravitational pull--a force inverse to its constriction--has the effect of a strong tranquilizer, but a drug under which your powers of observation only grow sharper and more acute. Give in to the book's logic (its minute movements, its thrilling shifts, its slant wit, its slowing of time) and its spell is utterly intoxicating. Solvej Balle's seven-volume novel wrings enthralling and magical new dimensions from time and its hapless, mortal subjects. As one Danish reviewer beautifully put it, Balle's fiction consists of writing that listens. "Reading her is like being caressed by language itself."
On a Woman's Madness
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A FINALIST FOR THE 2023 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FOR TRANSLATED LITERATURE On a Woman's Madness tells the story of Noenka, a courageous Black woman trying to live a life of her own choosing. When her abusive husband of just nine days refuses her request for divorce, Noenka flees her hometown in Suriname, on South America's tropical northeastern coast, for the capital city of Paramaribo. Unsettled and unsupported, her life in this new place is illuminated by romance and new freedoms, but also forever haunted by her past and society's expectations. Strikingly translated by Lucy Scott, Astrid Roemer's classic queer novel is a tentpole of European and post-colonial literature. And amid tales of plantation-dwelling snakes, rare orchids, and star-crossed lovers, it is also a blistering meditation on the cruelties we inflict on those who disobey. Roemer, the first Surinamese winner of the prestigious Dutch Literature Prize, carves out postcolonial Suriname in barbed, resonant fragments. Who is Noenka? Roemer asks us. "I'm Noenka," she responds resolutely, "which means Never Again."
Eurotrash
by
From "the great German-language writer of his generation" (Joshua Cohen) comes the second novel of Christian Kracht's career narrated by an eponymous "Christian" (the first was his bestselling debut, Faserland). Eurotrash begins in Zurich, where Christian has returned to care for his eighty-year-old mother after her discharge from a psychiatric institution. Confronting the dark shadows of his family's past--particularly his grandfather's strong ties with the Nazi regime--and struggling to navigate the emotionally wrenching terrain of his relationship with his mother, he sets off on a road trip with her. As they traverse Switzerland together in a hired cab, mother and son attempt to give away her vast fortune, stuffed in a large plastic bag, to random strangers. By turns disturbing, disorienting, hilarious, and poignant, and brilliantly rendered in English by prize-winning translator Daniel Bowles, Eurotrash tells an intensely personal and unsparingly critical story of contemporary culture; a story that shows us a writer at the pinnacle of his powers of insight and observation.
Hunchback
by
LONGLISTED FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD, THE INTERNATIONAL BOOKER PRIZE, THE PRIX MÉDICIS ÉTRANGER AND THE ANDREW CARNEGIE MEDAL * A bombshell bestseller in Japan, a defiant, darkly funny debut novel about a young woman in a care home seeking autonomy and the full possibilities of her life--"not only a major achievement in disability literature but great literature period" (Johanna Hedva) "A literary phenomenon in Japan, Hunchback is an extraordinary and thrilling debut novel about sex, disability, and power."--International Booker Prize Judges "Unforgettable . . . a thriller of the body . . . [a] miracle."--The New York Times Book Review Born with a congenital muscle disorder, Shaka spends her days in her room in a care home outside Tokyo, relying on an electric wheelchair to get around and a ventilator to breathe. But if Shaka's physical life is limited, her quick, mischievous mind has no boundaries: She takes e-learning courses on her iPad, publishes explicit fantasies on websites, and anonymously troll-tweets to see if anyone is paying attention ("In another life, I'd like to work as a high-class prostitute"). One day, she tweets into the void an offer of an enormous sum of money for a sperm donor. To Shaka's surprise, her new nurse accepts the dare, unleashing a series of events that will forever change Shaka's sense of herself as a woman in the world. Hunchback has shaken Japanese literary culture with its skillful depiction of the physical body and its unrepentant humor. Winner of the prestigious Akutagawa Prize, it's a feminist story about the dignity of an individual who insists on her right to make choices for herself, no matter the consequences. Formally creative and refreshingly unsentimental, Hunchback depicts the joy, anger, and desires of a woman demanding autonomy in a world that doesn't always grant it to people like her. Full of wit, bite, and heart, this unforgettable novel reminds us all of the full potential of our lives, regardless of the limitations we experience.
Reservoir Bitches
by
LONGLISTED for the 2025 International Booker Prize A debut collection of gritty, streetwise, and wickedly funny stories about Mexican women who fight, skirt, cheat, cry, kill, and lie their way to survival. "Life's a bitch. That's why you gotta rattle her cage, even if she's foaming at the mouth." In the linked stories of Reservoir Bitches, thirteen Mexican women prod the bitch that is Life and become her. From the all-powerful daughter of a cartel boss to the victim of transfemicide, from a houseful of spinster seamstresses to a socialite who supports her politician husband by faking Indigenous roots, these women spit on their own reduction and invent new ways to endure, telling their own stories in bold, unapologetic voices. At once a work of black humor and social critique, Reservoir Bitches is a raucous debut from one of Mexico's most thrilling new writers.
Solenoid
by
WINNER of the Dublin Literary Award 2024 and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize 2022 LONGLISTED for the International Booker Prize 2025 NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF 2022 by the New Yorker, Publishers Weekly, Financial Times, Words Without Borders A highly-acclaimed master work of fiction from Mircea Cărtărescu, author of Blinding, Solenoid is an existence (and eventually a cosmos) created by forking paths. Based on Cărtărescu's own experience as a high school teacher, Solenoid begins with the mundane details of a diarist's life and quickly spirals into a philosophical account of life, history, philosophy, and mathematics. The novel is grounded in the reality of Romania in the late 1970s and early 1980s, including frightening health care, the absurdities of the education system, and the misery of family life, while on a broad scale Solenoid's investigations of other universes, dimensions, and timelines attempt to reconcile the realms of life and art. The text includes sequences in a tuberculosis preventorium, encounters with an anti-death protest movement, a society of dream investigators, and an extended visit to the miniscule world of dust mites living on a microscope slide. One character asks another: When you rush into the burning building, will you save the newborn or the artwork? Combining fiction with autobiography and history--Nikola Tesla and Charles Hinton, for example, appear alongside the Voynich manuscript--Solenoid searches for escape routes through the alternate dimensions of life and art, as various monstrous realities erupt within the present.
There's a Monster Behind the Door
by
"In 1980s' Reunion, monsters lurk beneath the surface of vibrant island life, ready to pounce at the slightest disturbance. Here, the naive Dessaintes couple make a failing bid for happiness, soon growing jaded and bitter as the orange tree in their front yard. Even so, sprouting defiantly through the cracks of this postcolonial legacy of violence, poverty and intergenerational trauma, the Dessaintes' daughter shows an irrepressible zest for life. Amidst the chaos raging behind and beyond the door of her childhood home, our young narrator stubbornly resists her parents' refrain, Finding refuge in reading and determined to write her own story, she falls in love with words..."
The Book of Disappearance
by
What if all the Palestinians in Israel simply disappeared one day? What would happen next? How would Israelis react? These unsettling questions are posed in Azem's powerfully imaginative novel. Set in contemporary Tel Aviv forty eight hours after Israelis discover all their Palestinian neighbors have vanished, the story unfolds through alternating narrators, Alaa, a young Palestinian man who converses with his dead grandmother in the journal he left behind when he disappeared, and his Jewish neighbor, Ariel, a journalist struggling to understand the traumatic event. Through these perspectives, the novel stages a confrontation between two memories. Ariel is a liberal Zionist who is critical of the military occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, but nevertheless believes in Israel's project and its national myth. Alaa is haunted by his grandmother's memories of being displaced from Jaffa and becoming a refugee in her homeland. Ariel's search for clues to the secret of the collective disappearance and his reaction to it intimately reveal the fissures at the heart of the Palestinian question. The Book of Disappearance grapples with both the memory of loss and the loss of memory for the Palestinians. Presenting a narrative that is often marginalized, Antoon's translation of the critically acclaimed Arabic novel invites English readers into the complex lives of Palestinians living in Israel.
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