Now more than ever, it’s good to be reminded that the U.S. is part of an international community, and there’s no better reminder than reading a novel or story collection from another country. Some of these recent books are explicitly political, while others delve into neighborhoods or private lives; all will transport you far away.
The World With Its Mouth Open by Zahid Rafiq (Tin House, 2024): Rafiq is a writer and journalist from Kashmir; his debut collection of stories explores life for ordinary people in the long-contested region. A man loses his job at a luggage shop but doesn’t want to tell his parents, who are grieving his brother’s death at a protest. A clothing-shop owner thinks a mannequin’s face has an expression of terrible sadness. The construction of a couple’s new house is disrupted by the discovery of part of a skeleton on the site. Our review says, “Rafiq writes crisply and tenderly, with occasional flashes of humor and exquisite attention to the trials of day-to-day life.”
Oromay by Baalu Girma; trans. by David DeGusta and Mesfin Felleke Yirgu (Soho, Feb. 4): Originally published in 1983, Ethiopian author Girma’s novel illuminates the way the country’s military dictatorship set out to conquer neighboring Eritrea. It’s “part spy thriller, part melodrama, roman à clef through and through…an exemplary anti-war novel,” according to our starred review. The book was not well received by the regime it criticized: Girma disappeared in 1984 and is presumed to have been assassinated.
Live Fast by Brigitte Giraud; trans. by Cory Stockwell (Ecco/HarperCollins, Feb. 11): This autobiographical novel is French author Giraud’s 14th book but the first to be translated into English; it won the 2022 Prix Goncourt. Looking back from a distance of 20 years, she chronicles the events leading to her husband’s death in a motorcycle accident—the errands he was running, the detour he made on the borrowed bike. What if he’d made different choices; what if she’d done something differently that day? “Written with forensic precision and journalistic detail, Giraud’s elegiac novel is about the questions that haunt us no matter how much we may try to rid ourselves of them,” according to our starred review.
The Café With No Name by Robert Seethaler; trans. by Katy Derbyshire (Europa, Feb. 25): In 1966, a Viennese man named Robert Simon, orphaned in the war, decides to take over the lease on a market cafe, turning it into a gathering place for the local butcher, cheesemonger, bill collector, and others. Our starred review calls it “a gem of a novel, whimsical and bittersweet but never sentimental, with indelible characters and a powerful sense of place.”
Wildcat Dome by Yuko Tsushima, trans. by Lisa Hofmann-Kuroda (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, March 18): Set in the aftermath of the Fukushima nuclear disaster, Tsushima’s novel revolves around two friends who are the mixed-race children of American GIs who abandoned them and mothers who put them up for adoption. “Part ghost story and part noir thriller, Tsushima’s narrative unfolds carefully, small details building even as Tsushima draws broad connections,” says our starred review. “A superb literary mystery.”
Laurie Muchnick is the fiction editor.
