I try my best to avoid using clichés in these sales pitches, but what can I say except this book is a truly heartwarming novel with friendship, love and loneliness at its heart. In her late thirties, Tsukiko is living a solitary existence in Tokyo, until one evening...
"I didn't like my own secrets. I liked other people's even less." Writen in 1987, this novel charting the relationship between a successful writer and her housekeeper, Emerence, perhaps draws many parallels with Szabó's own life, after her rehabilitation by the...
After her husband's death, Effie finds herself uprooted from her home and her previous existence, with barely any say in the matter, in order to live with her daughter Iza in Iza's modern apartment in Budapest. Overwhelmed by grief and bewildered by the move to a...
Perhaps, like me, at the start of the pandemic in 2020, you found yourself wondering if this was it? Might civil society as we know it be about to disintegrate? How would communities cope, would selfishness or cooperation prevail? These themes and much more are...
Trick is a stylish drama about ambition, family and old age that goes beyond the ordinary and predictable. Daniele Mallarico is a successful ilustrator who, in the twilight of his years, feels that his reputation and his artistic prowess are fading. Mario is Daniele's...
"The novel begins in a railway station, a locomotive huffs, steam from a piston covers the opening of the chapter, a cloud of smoke hides part of the first paragraph." Playful, offbeat and fun this post-modernist puzzle of a book has always been one of my favourite...
Paolo Cognetti won the Strega Prize in 2017 with this semi-autobiographical novel set in the mountains of the Val d'Aosta in Northern Italy. Telling the story of Pietro and his parents, who come to live in the mountains every summer, and Pietro's enduring friendship...
Giordano, a physicist and mathematician before he became a writer of fiction, writes of love, death and family in simple, stripped-back prose in this poignant novel based on events from his own life. An intense exploration of what happens when you lose someone who is...
Italian seaside resorts are perhaps not so different from towns like Blackpool or Skegness, except for more reliable sunshine. Set in his home town of Forte dei Marmi on the Tuscan coast, Fabio Genovesi's Strega Prize-winning novel strips away the veneer and follows...
Mahir Guven’s prizewinning first novel is a blistering account of two French-Syrian brothers, growing into adulthood in a hostile Paris that offers them little in the way of opportunity. The story draws on the War in Syria as well as the repercussions from the Charlie...