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…

At the start of Jenny Erpenbeck’s Kairos, a woman is asked by a man whether she will attend his funeral. She consents, but when he passes away months later, she does not make it to the event. She knows, though, exactly which songs will be played—which Mozart concerto, Goldberg Variation, and Chopin piece. Ads interrupt…

Laura MacDonald, librarian and genealogist, is in the hospital undergoing treatment for breast cancer when she becomes absorbed in a cold case centered on the discovery, made by hikers in New Mexico’s remote Gila National Forest some thirty years before, of barrels containing the bodies of an unidentified woman and two girls. Solving this decades-old…

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…

Tackling the large and small issues of the day through a series of notebook entries and letters, Hope for the Worst, Kate Brandt’s lyrical debut novel, offers many finely cut gems while showing how a young woman develops from a passive observer to a full participant in her own life. An idealistic and naïve young…

A novel about memory and its loss, Dislocations by Sylvia Molloy is written in short chapters that feel as though they were taken from a daily journal. It is possible they were. According to the jacket copy, Dislocations is a work of fiction. But the narrator’s friend and central concern, a woman named M.L. who…

“What would it be like to step into the waters of somewhere beyond the stars?” asks one character from Chloe N. Clark’s Patterns of Orbit. Meshing genre elements from speculative, horror, and science fiction, the twenty-five stories in the collection repeatedly pose this question, exploring what it means to be uncertain, what it means to…