Shannon Bowring opens her debut, The Road to Dalton, by immersing readers directly in the loneliness of small town life. “Imagine this,” she writes. “You are driving along on a road in Northern Maine. Your head’s still humming from the monotonous drone of I-95 that empty highway. On the radio, nothing but static and outdated country…

In Industrial Roots, a collection of connected vignettes, author Lisa Pike explores the lives of working-class women in Ontario, writing in a style that is reminiscent of oral storytelling, of the digressive anecdotes of a great aunt. Told by different female narrators, these seventeen stories follow a family across three generations. Grandmothers, aunts, cousins, and…

Translated into English for the first time, Michele Mari’s story collection, You, Bleeding Childhood, is obsessive, neurotic, mimetic, strangely intimate, and absurdly funny. Published in Italian in the 1990s, this collection—supplemented with stories from Mari’s first collection, Euridice aveva un cane (Eurydice Had a Dog)—revisits emotional objects from Mari’s past, ruminates over troubling parental relationships,…

Our editors share their recommendations for books to enjoy over the summer break Lacey Dunham, fiction editor The narrator in Johanne Lykke Holm’s novel Strega (Riverhead, 2022), translated from the Swedish by Saskia Vogel,  is sent by her parents along with eight other girls to a remote resort hotel in the Italian alps. The girls…

Time is the anchor of our lives, but it’s also the glue of plot. Rebekah Bergman’s debut novel, The Museum of Human History, investigates the human obsession with time—specifically, with finding a cure for aging. Unspooling the potential dark consequences of that cure, the novel explores what happens when we dispense with time as a…

In 1909, as the first electric lights are installed in Boston, Artie Quick, the young heroine of Relentless Melt by Jeremy P. Bushnell, wonders: Will they leave the world open to deeper inspection, or will they simply erase the shadows she likes to disappear into? The answer is both and neither. Indeed, Bushnell’s Boston is…

A Little Luck, the latest novel by Claudia Piñeiro to be translated into English, cements her reputation as a writer of pseudo-mysteries that appear superficially conventional but open up into something deeply humanistic. As she did in her prior novel, Elena Knows—which was translated into English in 2021 and shortlisted for the 2022 International Man…

In the dystopian world of Rikki Ducornet’s The Plotinus, every human being who can afford to relocate to Mars has done so, leaving the poor to “inherit the earth (such as it is).” The oppressions formerly meted out by governmental systems—policing and incarceration—are now the domain of the Plotinus, a fierce robot whose goal is…

I was in Rome when I first encountered Natalia Ginzburg’s The Road that Goes to the City, in a bookstore on the Campo di Fiori just steps from where, in 1600, the philosopher Giordano Bruno was executed for heresy. A bronze statue of Bruno looms over the square, a reminder of what can happen when…

The plot of M.S. Coe’s novel, The Formation of Calcium, shares much with the real-life story of Lois Reiss, the white middle-aged Minnesota woman who, in March 2018, shot and killed her abusive husband and fled to Fort Meyers Beach where she befriended her lookalike, Pamela Hutchinson, before murdering her and assuming her identity. During…

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…

The fifteen stories in Shena McAuliffe’s We Are a Teeming Wilderness altogether serve as a reliquary honoring bygone things, such as manuals for salesmen hawking silk stockings door to door, and they pay tribute to daily life’s underappreciated minutiae, such as the cosmos of living organisms that compose every human body. These stories travel into…