“The Orphanage is an extremely interesting book. Serhiy Zhadan comes from Eastern Ukraine and during Maidan was taking part in the clashes in the second-largest Ukrainian city, Kharkiv, which is now under the threat of possible attack.” Read more...

The best books on Ukraine and Russia

Serhii Plokhy, Historian

“Elena Knows is a day in the life of a woman with advanced Parkinson’s disease. Technically it’s a crime novel, a thriller—of sorts. It’s about a woman whose daughter has died recently, and wrapped up by the police who have said that it’s a straightforward suicide. But Elena knows that it’s not, because she knows that her daughter would never have gone near the church when it was raining, because she was terrified of lightening, and there was a lightning rod on the church, and so on, and so on. But actually, Elena Knows is an extraordinarily beautiful and harrowing description of aging and disability. Everything that happens in it happens to the rhythm of the pills she needs to take, every time she needs to stop and sit down, to pause on her way to get to the metro or the church. So, in fact, as a book, it is much closer to something like Elizabeth is Missing or Olive Kitteridge than a crime novel.” Read more...

The Best of World Literature: The 2022 International Booker Prize Shortlist

Frank Wynne, Translator

“Heaven is a very short, deeply claustrophobic novel of two children in what Americans would call middle school—what we’d call early secondary school—who, for different reasons, are bullied by their peers. Eventually they get to know each other. The girl sends the boy a note and they meet up where nobody can see them and they talk about how they can or should deal with what they are experiencing. These 230 pages act as a a tiny capsule, taking you back to the time you felt at your most vulnerable, and felt that no one was going to come and save you.” Read more...

The Best of World Literature: The 2022 International Booker Prize Shortlist

Frank Wynne, Translator

“The Septology as a whole, and A New Name in particular, is an extraordinary meditation on art and love, and the possibility of eternity. Each of the individual sections in the book is a single sentence. Those sentences have an incantatory feel to them. There is a lot of repetition, a lot of repeated images, repeated sections. It has an extraordinary hypnotic quality. Frequently, the reader will shift from being inside the mind of character A to character B and it will take a moment before you realise it, but that’s entirely deliberate. The prose is luminous. It’s like swimming in an open sea. You can’t see land in any direction. You aren’t trying to. You have no frame of reference as to where you are. You are simply here, and must deal with the waves as they come. It’s a reading experience unlike anything else I’ve come across in the last several years, and an extraordinary meditation on human mortality and human endeavour, what we do with our lives, what we don’t do, what we may regret, what we may invest ourselves in—in terms of our art or whatever it is.” Read more...

The Best of World Literature: The 2022 International Booker Prize Shortlist

Frank Wynne, Translator

“What’s extraordinary about Bora Chung’s stories is that, on the surface, they are horror stories that brush the boundaries of science fiction—they all have fantastical elements—but they are very much rooted in human emotion, in fear and need and love and want. So they speak as directly to the human experience as anything else, in the same way as do David Cronenberg’s stories, or Iain M Banks. What’s amazing about them is not simply the extraordinary imagination that gives rise to them as works of fantasy, but the humanity in which they are grounded, and which makes them stick in your mind long after you read them. The experience of reading them is profoundly and viscerally affecting and moving.” Read more...

The Best of World Literature: The 2022 International Booker Prize Shortlist

Frank Wynne, Translator

“This is an extraordinary piece of fiction, but also an extraordinary piece of metafiction. It’s a novel of Partition, which is obviously a genre within from the Indian subcontinent. And at the same time, it is also none of these things, it is sui generis. It’s an extraordinarily joyful and playful and funny book, despite the fact that it begins with an 80-year-old woman who has lost her husband retiring to bed for months on end, turning to the wall and refusing to engage with life.” Read more...

The Best of World Literature: The 2022 International Booker Prize Shortlist

Frank Wynne, Translator

“This book is attempting to embrace an entire world and culture, a particular period in Poland and Eastern Europe, and fold it into everything that can be known. It is a maximalist novel in that sense. There’s the theology of it, but also how market garden towns worked, how peasants lived, what beliefs people had and how those were challenged or changed.Both The Books of Jacob and A New Name are dealing with the numinous, a sense of God. But Jacob Frank is an apostate, he’s someone who is prepared to overturn centuries of his own religion in an attempt to create something new. Thanks to Olga—through Jenny—we get to witness this vast pageant of what it means to have lived through that time in Poland. It’s like a very, very large Bayeux Tapestry. But also, what it is to look back on that, given what we know now, because there are outside observers.” Read more...

The Best of World Literature: The 2022 International Booker Prize Shortlist

Frank Wynne, Translator

“Well, this book just roars into action. From the first moment, you’re being swept away by the energy with which Vuillard writes. And his translator keeps up with him every step of the way. It’s about Thomas Müntzer, who’s a little-remembered hero of the European religious reformation in the 16^th century. Vuillard conjures all his persuasive brilliance, but also his selfless and self-destructive rage. This is a kind of fictionalised biography, charged with electrical imaginative power. It’s thrillingly energetic and vivid.” Read more...

The Best of World Literature: The 2021 International Booker Prize Shortlist

Lucy Hughes-Hallett, Biographer

“This capacious, thoughtful, generous book is a kind of meditation on mortality. It’s a book full of sorrow and regret. But it’s also very funny. Stepanova has a wonderfully humorous way of looking at the pathos of the passing of life. It’s a very unusual approach, and it’s delightful to spend so much time—it’s a long book—in the company of an author who has such a wise spirit and such a well-furnished mind. She never says an obvious thing. Her opinions are carefully thought out, and often startling.” Read more...

The Best of World Literature: The 2021 International Booker Prize Shortlist

Lucy Hughes-Hallett, Biographer

“Its structure is extraordinary. I’ve never read anything like it. It’s as though we’ve raided the filing cabinet of the human resources department on a spaceship where half the workers are humans, and the other half are… I suppose robots, or artificial intelligences contained in humanoid bodies. Each of these people, these spaceship dwellers, have been asked to report on their state of mind to the personnel department, and there’s this wonderful conjunction of fantasy with the most tedious aspects of office life and bureaucracy. It’s so funny.” Read more...

The Best of World Literature: The 2021 International Booker Prize Shortlist

Lucy Hughes-Hallett, Biographer

“It has a very innovative form. It’s a series of linked pieces, each one part-essay, part-story, part-biographical account of great minds, geniuses, who—according to this account—seem always on the verge of collapsing into madness as they unlock the secrets of the universe. What I took away from this book, is a new understanding that mathematics and physics, like language, are symbolic systems. And none of those systems are really capable of containing the strangeness of the actual substance, the matter, of the universe. All that a scientist can do, and all that a creative writer can do, when grappling with what Labatut calls “the dark heart” of the physical world, is create a kind of poetry. It’s a dazzlingly clever book.” Read more...

The Best of World Literature: The 2021 International Booker Prize Shortlist

Lucy Hughes-Hallett, Biographer

“This is a collection of ghost stories. Enríquez uses the conventions of gothic horror and the macabre to write these brilliantly strange parables about the modern world. Her settings are detailed and concrete and realistic, mainly in Buenos Aires—she’s an Argentinian writer. The stories are very unsettling. But they’re also colourful and flamboyant, and sometimes disconcertingly funny, and always icily intelligent. They have the energy of ghosts that just won’t agree to be exorcised.” Read more...

The Best of World Literature: The 2021 International Booker Prize Shortlist

Lucy Hughes-Hallett, Biographer

“This book is frightening. Reading it, you feel you’re being hypnotised. Your emotions are set all a-jangle, and your mind is being opened up to new thoughts. It’s an extraordinary piece of writing—very powerful, very compelling. It’s a story about war, yes. But also a story about love. The author David Diop creates incantatory word music, and the translator Anna Moschovakis absolutely has managed to recreate it.” Read more...

The Best of World Literature: The 2021 International Booker Prize Shortlist

Lucy Hughes-Hallett, Biographer