Claudia Durastanti’s luminous novel, Strangers I Know, traverses multiple identities, migrations and languages, and considers how ‘art can free an individual from difference, and difference from solitude’, writes Vartika Rastogi.
Vigdis Hjorth’s novel, Is Mother Dead, translated by Charlotte Barslund, interrogates the cultural expectations placed on ‘woman’ and ‘mother’, and offers a stark and powerful addition to the growing body of ‘motherhood’ texts, writes Kathryn Cutler-MacKenzie.
Lieke Marsman’s brilliantly ‘cool’ novel, The Opposite of a Person (translated by Sophie Collins), is at once a novel about love and language, people and the individual, nature and the ideas we wield over the natural world, writes Kathryn Cutler-MacKenzie.
Kathryn Cutler-MacKenzie talks to Maltese author and performer Loranne Vella about her collection of short fiction, what will it take for me to leave, the influence of performance on her work, memory as a liberating and imprisoning force, European feminism and her upcoming novel, Marta Marta.
Bodies traverse histories, tap into memories and are saturated with feelings and experiences in Loranne Vella’s superb short fiction collection, WhatWill It Take For Me To Leave, translated by Kat Storace.
Rym Kechacha reviews The Books of Jacob: a wonderful, huge and complex book that asks the reader to “turn our gaze away from the simple”, and instead embrace flux, transformation, and narrative that “sprawls like a great tree’s roots”.
Maria Stepanova’s memoir, translated from the Russian by Sasha Dugdale, weaves together storytelling, culture, art, and philosophy to form a mosaic image of her family’s history.
Havana Year Zero by Karla Suárez, and Elena Knows by Claudia Piñeiro: two new translated books from Charco Press that are quirky, poignant, and very relevant for our times.
In Ida Marie Hede’s stunningly haunting and humorous novel, Adorable, B and Q’s world changes with the birth of their first child Æ. Here, in a selection of passages from the first section of the novel, the messy birth of Æ and relationship B develops with her are told in gloriously rich detail.
