Almost a million people fled Lebanon during the 1980s, around a quarter of the country’s population. The love of Lebanon, including a profound desire to see it restored to the sophisticated, beautiful, fertile, and pluralist country they remember, runs through the veins of every Lebanese I know. In Ghassan Zeinedine’s debut collection of tales, that…

Imagine your life like this, Sarah Layden urges her readers in this collection of stories—and we can, all too easily. The characters who inhabit this collection exhibit at once frailty and strength, wisdom and profound stupidity, cruelty and compassion. Theirs is a world that’s easy to recognise, universal and personal in the same breath. Layden’s…

In Satisfaction, Nina Bouraoui’s third novel to be translated into English, Michele, a French woman, is living in 1970s Algiers with her Algerian husband and their prepubescent son. Against a sonic backdrop of Boney M and ELO, the Eagles and 10CC, Michele secretly and obsessively records her feelings, observations, and paranoia. Weaving her story with…

In 1887, three men disappeared while attempting to reach the North Pole by hot air balloon; thirty years later their remains are found on a bleak, frozen island along with rusted canisters contain photographic film. Some is undamaged enough by its three-decade-long incarceration in ice to allow experts at the Swedish Royal Institute of Technology…

This collection of dizzying and dazzling dystopian fairytales propels the reader through a sexually intriguing, violent, shy, erudite, and disingenuous mind—think Glee Club and High School Musical meet American Psycho. In these stories, image and surface are exploited and controlled by a series of sexually obsessed narrators. “You are only whatever text I write across…

From Rosamond Lehmann to Tama Janowitz, women writers have sought to distil the modern feminine experience in tales that curl and pulse. Louise Marburg, who wrote You Have Reached Your Destination during the revelatory extremity of the Covid-19 lockdown, achieves a similar intensity as she peels away layers of so-called normality and respectability to reveal the mess…

In My Days of Dark Green Euphoria, A.E. Copenhaver reworks the age-old clash of generations, placing that story in a contemporary setting just as Western civilisation appears ready to disappear up its own fundament in a puff of carbon-neutral, gender-neutral, offense-neutral smoke. Slyly and deftly, the author skewers millennials as the risk-averse generation that invented…

Jeanne, expert crafter of artificial flowers, is on a tram in Paris in 1918. A soldier with horrific facial injuries enters her carriage, causing the crowd to “turn and flinch away … half-pitying, half-appalled … The whole structure of his face has been destroyed.” The passengers, electrified, react with horrified sympathy; children are exhorted to…

No Diving Allowed is a collection of lively, wily stories that creep up from behind to pack unexpected punches. In this glorious scrap-box of richly-patterned fragments, each story is an all-too-brief immersion in a fully-formed world. The linking theme is swimming pools, yet Louise Marburg’s writing is so deft that it takes a while for…

In Lana Bastašić’s tale of two school friends who meet after several decades to drive across Bosnia, a phone call from an old school friend jolts Sara, a Bosnian now living in Dublin, backwards in time to the Balkan wars. Lejla, who has changed almost everything about herself including her eye colour, imbues every scene…