‘Zero transport. Zero meat. Zero hope.’ [book review]

A review of Havana Year Zero by Karla Suárez, translated from the Spanish by Christina MacSweeney Only once in Havana Year Zero is the city ever explicitly given human characteristics. On a balcony in the rain, towards the end of the novel, as her life seems to be falling apart around her, our narrator, Julia,

The Monthly Booking: June 2021

Summer is almost upon us, and my birthday is this month – two excellent reasons to finally pick up a rather large book I’ve been looking at but not reading for roughly a year. In all its almost-1000-page glory, The Eighth Life has become something of a legend: longlisted for last year’s International Booker Prize

‘Another sort of beauty altogether’ [book review]

A review of A Perfect Cemetery by Federico Falco, translated from the Spanish by Jennifer Croft Strange things happen in small towns. This seems to be the premise of Federico Falco’s A Perfect Cemetery, a collection of substantial short stories that gleam in Jennifer Croft’s English translation. At the tipping point between realism and its

‘Absurdity, gratuitousness, and imminent disaster’ [book review]

A review of Ramifications by Daniel Saldaña París, translated from the Spanish by Christina MacSweeney It was always going to be difficult to read fiction after Hurricane Season. Fortunately for me, there was Ramifications, another cracker from Latin American specialists Charco Press. Daniel Saldaña París’s second novel, vividly translated by Christina MacSweeney, offered me a

‘A chronology of scars’ [book review]

A review of Theatre of War by Andrea Jeftanovic, translated from the Spanish by Frances Riddle It’s been a downright brilliant year for Charco Press titles, a feeling that can only be compounded by the Edinburgh-based press’s final publication of 2020. Andrea Jeftanovic’s Theatre of War is a firecracker of a novel, structurally ambitious and

‘Oscillating endlessly between history and story’ [book review]

A review of Resistance by Julián Fuks, translated from the Portuguese by Daniel Hahn It can be difficult to know where to start with a book like Resistance. The list of quotes I have noted down seems unfathomably long, and even a couple of days after finishing I keep thinking of new things it was

The Monthly Booking: October 2020

The autumn of intense publication continues, added to by the recent appearance of shortlists for the Booker Prize and the Deutscher Buchpreis, but as is so often the case my core reading list for October is composed of books already sitting on my shelves. A couple are relatively recent releases, while the others are stalwarts

‘The loneliest whale in the world’ [book review]

A review of A Musical Offering by Luis Sagasti, translated from the Spanish by Fionn Petch Of all the mesmerising books I have had the pleasure of reading recently, Luis Sagasti’s A Musical Offering is right up there with the best of them. A complex and extremely heartfelt ode to another art form, music, this

The Monthly Booking: September 2020

Women in Translation Month might be over, but I’m not done with women in translation yet. Not having a theme this month gives me the chance to catch up on some of the most hotly anticipated titles sitting on my shelves, including Alta L. Price’s translation of Anna Goldenberg’s I Belong to Vienna. This book

‘Lost when she woke up to die’ [book review]

A review of Dead Girls by Selva Almada, translated from the Spanish by Annie McDermott Some books are hard to write about. Selva Almada’s Dead Girls is one of them. Hard to write about, and in many ways hard to read as well – though this is purely in terms of the content with which