“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

“Rulfo does a lot of things in this novel, while endowing a tremendous poetic force both to language and to the events, the characters and the atmospheres he describes; he experiments with a fragmentary structure; breaks down the sense of reality through the idea of the ghost and the popular legends, the people’s sayings. Comala is a powerful mythical universe that represents abandonment and loss from many angles. The characters have an extraordinary strength and reach a very complex degree of conflict, determined above all by the fragility and harm of a very macho way of understanding masculinity.” Read more...

Five of the Best Classic Mexican Novels

Ave Barrera, Novelist

“I read it when I was 17 years old and it left a deep mark on me. It is also a young girl’s perspective, a sensitive and vulnerable subjectivity that narrates the colonialist violence in the south-east of the country, the subjugation and harassment suffered by the original peoples of the territory that we know today as Chiapas. Thanks to Rosario Castellanos I fell in love with this region; her novel lit a spark of fascination with the indigenous peoples and their languages.” Read more...

Five of the Best Classic Mexican Novels

Ave Barrera, Novelist

“There are countless novels about the Mexican Revolution, but what fascinated me about Nellie Campobello’s book is her ability to represent the reality of violent warfare not on from the viewpoint of the conflicting parties, but through the emotions; it is the perspective of a girl that reveals the paradox of violence, both in its significance and its futility. I think Cartucho should be read in schools the world over.” Read more...

Five of the Best Classic Mexican Novels

Ave Barrera, Novelist

“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

“I read Aura as a teenager and it both terrified and fascinated me, but above all it invited me to join that search among dark corners that is literature. It is a very brief and self-contained novel that maintains the tension in each line. What I most admire about it is its ability to build atmosphere and cause us to feel trapped in this shady house among the smell of moss and decaying plants.” Read more...

Five of the Best Classic Mexican Novels

Ave Barrera, Novelist