Monthly Archives: August 2025

A quietly devastating, but absolutely riveting, book. It begins with the suicide of a woman stricken with grief over her daughter’s disappearance, intertwining her story with those of her remaining children, and that of a young pregnant woman who witnesses her leap into the sea. It’s a brilliantly unsettling story. The city is never named,ContinueContinue reading “The Singularity, Balsam Karam, tr. Saskia Vogel”

This is a remarkable book about the difficulties of understanding King Lear, and also 20th-century Chinese history. It turns out that thinking about them alongside each other is both illuminating and clarifying. Not in the sense that anything is totally explained, but rather that some of the strangeness is distilled; it becomes possible to articulateContinueContinue reading “The Chinese Tragedy of King Lear, Nan Da”

This is a real slow burn of a novel. Very short (only 116 pages!) but it feels like a gradual buildup, layering different perspectives and moments in time. It was a fascinating contrast to another novel I read recently and was blown away by, Mikołaj Grynberg’s Poufne: both are stories of multiple generations, and howContinueContinue reading “Years and Years, Hwang Jungeun, tr. Janet Hong”

This is terrific — wry, bristly, surprising. It’s a story about a woman, the titular Sister Deborah (though she will prove to have many names throughout the book) who comes to Rwanda from the US and gains a reputation as a miracle worker, unsettling local power dynamics. It’s also the story of a woman whoContinueContinue reading “Sister Deborah, Scholastique Mukasonga, tr. Mark Polizotti”

August is Women in Translation month (aka #WiTMonth), which I am a big fan of, so I meant to only post about books in translation by women, or translated by women, but I also have a bit of a backlog of books I’m finished and haven’t written about so best laid plans, etc. I boughtContinueContinue reading “Home Fire, Kamila Shamsie”