Our top 5 books of the month kicking off the Autumn take in fiction, foodie explorations, memoir and literary experimentation. From Emmanuel Carrère’s unsettling excavation of history and memory in Kolkhoz, to Fuchsia Dunlop’s richly informed tour of flavour in Five Tastes: The Magic of Flavour in a Chinese Kitchen, these are books well worth investigating. Mathias Énard’s…

Adrift in the South is a first memoir by Xiao Hai, poet and essayist, and follows his decade working in factories across southern China, culminating in the flourishing arts village Picun. With neat prose and a straight-forward, speedy narrative, the repetitiveness of Xiao’s life never reads as a retread.

Marc Levy is one of the most widely-read living French authors. He has written twenty-eight novels to date. His work has been translated into fifty languages and has sold over fifty million copies worldwide. While his emotionally resonant, very engaging stories can have something of a Marmite effect on certain readers, his mass appeal remains undisputed. A self-made storyteller, Levy worked for the French Red Cross and ran a computer graphics company before turning to writing in his thirties to entertain his son.

Jackie Thomae’s award-winning novel, Brothers, is a versatile and engaging examination of how two half-brothers raised in separate households navigate life completely isolated from each other. Following a broad, classic, realist structure, this engrossing novel illuminates how, in Western society today, cohabitation and remarriage impact half-siblings growing up separately in dispersed families. Thomae moves fluidly between different cultural and socio-economic viewpoints as she tackles abandonment, infidelity, ageing, racism and class bias with a light touch, avoiding preachy moralising.

BookBlast review of Marie Darrieussecq’s How to Make a Woman and Our Life in the Forest by Emily Unwin. How do humans mirror and shape each other?

Hanna Nordenhök’s Wonderland reviewed by Clem Clement for BookBlast. A dark, atmospheric literary novel it explores deception, identity, and survival through three interconnecting lives in a post-trut...

BookBlast review of Surface by Olivier Norek, awarded the Prix Maison de la presse; Prix Relay; Prix Babelio-Polar; Prix de l'Embouchure; Prix Sang d'Encre des lycéens. Disfigured police captain Noémi...

This month’s top 5 books range across history, art and human survival; moving across continents, eras and genres. From minute-by-minute reckonings with a political crisis and a chilling first-hand account of the extremes of tyranny, to quiet acts of wartime preservation and Japanese Noir, these five books offer radically different takes on how individuals navigate moments of extreme pressure. In a world overshadowed by systemic collapse and environmental genocide, they also provide a strangely comforting form of literary…

When a reader strolls into a bookshop, they enter a rich universe of literary imagination, yet historically, great swathes of stories from around the world have been missing from the shelves. While translated literature as a whole has long fought for the attention of Anglophone booksellers, female authors writing in different languages have faced a double invisibility. Enter the Warwick Prize for Women in Translation.

A coming-of-age saga, Red River centres around the fate of three boys whose childhood friendship is strained by political upheaval and violence. Set against the turbulent shifts in power in Assam in the late twentieth century — a region overshadowed by the partition of British India in 1947 and the 1971 Bangladesh Liberation War — it is an unusual exploration of survival, betrayal and shattered male bonds.

BookBlast interview with Maureen Freely, the American novelist, journalist, professor and co-founder of the Warwick Prize for Women in Translation. Georgia de Chamberet (GDC): Your early life bridged distinct worlds, moving from New Jersey to Istanbul as an eight-year-old, when your father took a job teaching physics at Robert College. What are your earliest memories of family life in the city, and which neighbourhood did you live in?

‘A series of photographs titled, The Aquatics, featured terrified faces emerging from wastewater and flooding, ID cards floating, women hoisting babies, lamps or suitcases overhead, the swollen face of a drowned man. The images weren’t new. Every year during the rainy season, the same ones, more of less, appeared on television screens and newspaper pages, but Samy’s frame – rusted corrugate sheet metal, scrap metal, papier-mâché – and his juxtaposition of these cataclysmic images with pictures of carefree couples lying in a field of ripening corn with their children, amplified the radical despair that was bursting from every scene…

I read the entirety of The Bureau of Unknown Fates with the assumption that the International Tracing Service (ITS) is as fictional as Gaëlle Nohant’s protagonist, Irène. With this lack of knowledge, I followed Irène, a senior agent at the ITS, whose main job is detective-like: take items confiscated from concentration camp prisoners and return them to the owner’s family.

Reading around the world this month features new releases and updated classics, taking in folklore, international fantasy, dark comedy and biography. An interior designer stumbles into a medieval parallel world; David Bowie finds reinvention in Cold War Berlin; pre-modern Icelandic legends come to life; a homecoming turns into a chaotic murder mystery; and a timely biography unveils Cold War machinations behind the Congolese struggle for independence.

My Dreadful Body is an award-winning debut autofictional novella by Egana Djabbarova. Originally published in Russian and translated into English by Lisa C. Hayden, it is an unsettling, disturbing, strangely absorbing read. I was unsure at first, but I became engrossed. Beautifully written in a strong poetic voice, you can't help but feel great empathy and admiration for the narrator.

In her striking debut novel Ever Land, Amy Abdelnoor steps into the polarized landscape of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, exploring its fractures through a supernatural interweaving of the lives of two teenage girls separated by three decades. In this way, Abdelnoor cleverly bypasses political rhetoric and high melodrama to create a raw, balanced narrative about the overarching human cost of displacement and denial, memory and inherited trauma.

Ben Faccini has written an unusual and clever novel which reflects the shifting reality of family life today and how unresolved emotional wounds of the past impact the present. As stepfamilies have increasingly become a part of everyday life, more adults find themselves navigating the messy, fragile territory of raising children who aren't biologically theirs. Other People’s Children is, in turn, touching, amusing, frustrating and profound.

This month's Top 5 Books from around the world takes in five distinct voices embracing sun-baked Mediterranean islands, surreal, tech-fused futures and witchy woods among other spaces, as they go behind the masks we wear to explore the fine line between connection and isolation. You Know The Sun Bothers Me by Ryan Falzon (translated by Joe Gatt) is a contemporary ‘millennial dread’ novel set over the course of one hot, intense Maltese summer.

Book prizes are the ultimate tastemakers of the literary world, providing welcome cash to authors; boosting sales for publishers and booksellers; helping readers choose high-quality fiction and nonfiction out of the thousands of books being published annually. A book published by an independent can become an overnight bestseller when awarded a major prize, bringing the author into the spotlight (Anna Burns’ novel…

If the title of this book by Maria Judite de Carvalho calls for an answer, it has to be, ‘As a woman, I’ve been frustrated, puzzled by the way life passes me by, with no-one, especially my husband, able to understand or love me’. Time and again in these short stories (some 450 pages of them!) selected from the author’s later works, the female protagonists find life a puzzle that disappoints them in ways that are not so much cataclysmic as simply impenetrable. Carvalho was one of the most prominent female authors in Portugal during the middle and late twentieth century.

Kate Briggs, translator of Twenty Minutes of Silence and of Hélène Bessette’s first novel Lili is Crying, wrote in an essay for The Yale Review in September 2025: How, why, and under what material circumstances a writer, translator, or publisher feels compelled to respond to the call of a past work — all of this is often wholly incidental. While there can be deep interest as well as contingency and opportunity at play, there is rarely a clear logic to it.

A novel about second chances, which blends romance and melodrama, Dark Heart is strangely compulsive reading. Silvia Avallone’s heroine is both a deeply sensitive soul and fiercely independent. A paradoxical figure, she provokes both irritation and compassion. Her actions and reactions possess a mysterious, unfathomable quality that create an ambiguous atmosphere. Lovers Are Never Losers The peace of a remote, largely uninhabited hamlet in the Italian Alps is disrupted by the arrival of thirty-one-year-old redhead, Emilia. “The cowsheds were dilapidated and the Black Madonna in the roadside shrine had been disfigured by bad weather [.

The White Desert is an unusual debut novel by Luis López Carrasco, expertly translated by Rosalind Harvey. Odd, unsettling and dystopian, the novel starts with nine people fleeing bombs in a hot air balloon which is “deflating a little more with every second that passes”. A young man asks “What sort of bombs were they? Was it a nuclear attack? Biological?” while a young woman asserts that they must decide which one of them will jump into the sea so that the others can reach a desert island safely where a new civilisation can be established.

Review of Éric Cantona’s 82 Goals by Valentin Deudon. It is a precise record of every one of the 82 goals scored by Cantona during his time at Manchester United, written with artistic flair.

Exit 8 by Genki Kawamura, translated by Sameeha Anwar, is a disturbing, short Japanese psychological mystery based on a hugely successful game that has sold three million copies, created by Kotake Create. The global craze for Japanese fiction designed explicitly as a game between author and reader, based around interactive escape-room logic and surreal loops, is a hugely successful publishing trend. Yukito Ayatsuji’s Mansion Series, beginning with The Decagon House Murders, is the market leader and pioneer of this genre which has been a massive success for Pushkin Vertigo, who also publish Uketsu’s…

BookBlast Review of The Roof Beneath Their Feet by Geetanjali Shree out with And Other Stories. A lyrical meditation on memory, grief and unconventional female love. Beautifully translated into Englis...

Our monthly top 5 books roundup brings together five strong voices in translation, each tracking the art of survival across vastly different landscapes. Whether navigating the external terrors of a regime or the internal wilderness of obsession and 'otherness', these books map the geography of our deepest, private battles. Mayfly Season by Matthias Jugler Tr. Jo Heinrich  An exploration of a dark chapter of East German history: state-sanctioned forced adoptions.

In early 2024, Samar Yazbek found herself in Doha, where more than 2,500 Palestinian survivors of the genocide in Gaza were living alongside their families and receiving desperately needed medical care. Yazbek is a Syrian writer and journalist. Forced into exile after joining the uprising against the Assad regime in 2011, she wrote several books collecting the testimonies of those who resisted the regime or who were forced to live through the civil war, including A Woman in the Crossfire and The Crossing. In 2024, seeing the survivors in Doha, Yazbek was immediately transported back to her experiences in Syria: ‘

Nick Caistor, author of Mexico Inside Out, explores how Cristina Rivera Garza weaves a personal and political tapestry of Northern Mexico in Autobiography of Cotton just published by And Other Stories...

Nick Caistor reviews for BookBlast The Night Train by Xu Zechen, a campus novel with a difference in that it is set in small town China in the present day.

My dispatch from the intern's desk begins with a struggle for a foothold in a competitive industry, but it ends on a happy note: do not lose hope! Truth be told, I emerged from my Publishing MA at UCL deflated. I believed I should immediately have a job lined up within the publishing industry, preparing to draft my dissertation in stolen time during summer evenings and weekends. But I quickly learned life was not that simple. I had vastly overestimated the job market, not heeding the warnings of friends and family, too hopeful and desperate to move on from the global pandemic that haunted us all even four years on.

The BookBlast® Translation Book Club meets in person at 6pm on the second Monday of each month at Hatchards, Piccadilly, to discuss engaging, well-written fiction in translation from the past decade, offering thought-provoking reads that illuminate global cultures. Surprise guests include translators, publishers, editors or authors who sometimes join in, offering insights into their work and experiences. Who better to introduce readers to cultures from around the world than leading writers translated into English? On Monday 11 May at 6pm we are discussing My Women Yuliia Iliukha trs. Hannah Leliv …

Continental, classy and chic, Paradiso by Michele Masneri is an entertaining read. Federico Desideri, a young, underpaid, disillusioned journalist from Milan, is sent to Rome by his editor-in-chief at Comic Sans — “a niche magazine desperately seeking to survive the mass extinction of print publishing” — during a “Saharan heatwave”. He is instructed to track down and interview an elusive Oscar-winning film director who has become a national sensation. In Rome, Federico finds himself at a party hosted by the omnipresent politician, Willy Vanetti. He fails to meet the director but instead encounters fast-talking, seductive Barry Valpolicelli, the alleged inspiration for the protagonist in the Oscar-winning film, …

This month, our top five books of the month take in Brooklyn, Iraq, the West Bank, the Congo, Argentina, and a dystopian otherworld. Together, these stories explore a central question: What happens to a person when their home is no longer a safe place? Notes From a Lost Country by Sinan Antoon Translated by the author The work of Iraqi poet, novelist and scholar, Sinan Antoon, navigates the intersections of memory, war and realities of exile. Notes From a Lost Country captures the visceral experience of a homeland that has been physically and metaphorically destroyed.

The Paper House by Carlos María Domínguez, elegantly translated by Nick Caistor, is very short but packed with ideas. A book about books for lovers of great literature, it is a compelling blend of storytelling and philosophical reflection, written in a meditative way. It begins with a shocking event. Bluma Lennon, a Cambridge professor working in the Hispanic Studies department, buys a secondhand copy of Emily Dikinson’s poems. As she reads on the street corner, she is knocked over by a car and killed. The summing up of the eulogy at her funeral causes an uproar, “

My Women by Yuliia Iliukha, translated by Hanna Leliv, is a powerful and critically acclaimed collection of short fiction that shines a spotlight on the experiences of women during the Russian invasion of Ukraine. The world is experiencing the highest number of active conflicts since 1946, with women and girls being disproportionately impacted by war, and excluded from peace decision-making, according to UN Women. My Women was selected as BBC Book of the Year 2024 in Ukraine and shortlisted for the EBRD Literature Prize 2025. It has been published in the US, France, Italy, Sweden and several other European countries.

An unusual and engrossing intergenerational saga, Nelio Biedermann’s debut novel, Lázár, follows the fate of an aristocratic family living on an estate in Southern Hungary, from the beginning of the twentieth century and the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, to the 1956 uprising. Biedermann was only twenty two years old when he wrote it and is being heralded as a…

Our Reading Around the World Top 5 Books of the Month come from France and the Congo, Iran, Suriname and the Netherlands, India, Spain. Ève Guerra, Shahnrush Parsipur, Astrid Roemer, Vivek Shanbhag and Sara Torres all write from the edges of dominant culture and challenge power structures as they explore identity through innovative storytelling from outside the literary mainstream. Repatriation…

Hélène Cixous is best known in the Anglophone world for her 1976 essay The Laugh of the Medusa (Le Rire de la Méduse), in which she laid out a roadmap for a new kind of women’s writing (écriture feminine): a writing that springs from the female body and sexuality, unbound by the ‘phallocentric’ worldview which has shaped the Western canon.

BookBlast review of Lovers of Franz K by Burhan Sönmez. It's a literary crime novel; a creative resurrection; a metafictional kaleidoscope where Poe meets Kafka whose bureaucracy is refracted through ...

5 books, 5 countries: Russia, Spain, Algeria, Norway and Iraq (via the UK) set the scene. What links these works is a shared desire for clarity. Stepanova dismantles memory; García Llovet stalks the edges of crime; Khatibi writes with hindsight of the sociological and political; Hjorth worries at family trauma like a dog with a bone; Haddad traces power where death, identity and money collide.