On Earth As It Is Beneath

March 12, 2026

Ana Paula Maia can already count herself a prize-winner having won the Republic of Consciousness Prize in 2024 for Of Cattle and Men, translated by Zoe Perry. While that novel, her first from Charco Press, did not go on to be selected for the International Booker, her follow-up, On Earth As It Is Beneath (translated, on this occasion, by Padma Vishwanathan) has been. It is a brutal novel, though it would be unfair to say it is entirely without hope despite giving that impression throughout most of its pages. The novel is set in a remote prison known as the Colony:

“Little is left, men or animals.”

The man in charge, Melquiades (a name which means ‘righteous king’), has ordered the horses shot, and, as we will discover, has developed a habit of hunting the prisoners so that there are only a few of them left. They dare not escape as a tag has been placed on their ankle which, so they have been told, will explode should they go outside the wall. Death is everywhere in the opening chapter, from the dog (“It died sick, with a sore on its belly that gradually expanded, rotting it”) to the boar that one of the prisoners, Bronco Gil, has killed, the head of which Melquiades wants for his wall. The ground itself is filled with corpses, suggesting that the title has more than religious connotations:

“The worst part is that, whenever we dig a hole in the ground, we find others buried. All that’s left are bones with ropes tied around their wrists and ankles. There are more men underneath than up here, that’s for sure.”

Melquiades’ mental instability is suggested with economy when he quizzes a prisoner, Valdenio, about his own orders, and then repeats his opening question about lunch which has just been answered. All are aware that the camp’s time is almost over as an official is on his way, but the prisoners fear that Melquiades will kill them all before he arrives. For this reason, the remaining prisoners still dream of escape. Bronco Gil even plans to cut off his foot to remove the bomb strapped to his ankle. He has already escaped death having lost an eye to a vulture which ate it after he was run over. Valdenio also believes Melquiades is going to kill everyone: “We’re not going to make it past today.” The guard, Taborda, is aware of Melquiades’ madness but unable to abandon his role:

“He doesn’t agree with any of his superior’s actions and it makes him miserable when the prisoners look at him with fellow feeling. What can he do, he’s not trained to have compassion or disobey. The feeling of hierarchy eats away at him like a worm.”

Despite the barren landscape and the empty prison, the novel has a claustrophobic feel with each of the characters trapped, both prisoners and guards. We learn a little of Bronco Gil’s back story, how he first killed a man for money, but nothing of Melquiades, who begins hunting the men the same day he has the horses shot, further narrowing the possibility of escape. The novel’s final scenes play out cinematically as the official, unlike Godot (of whom we might have been reminded), does appear, but it is perhaps a little too cinematic when the ironic justice served on Melquiades is replaced by a gun battle.

The novel deals with a legacy beyond the prison and Melquiades’ madness. The bones date long before the prison as the Colony “was always shrouded in some mystery involving mass disappearance and murder…

“More than a hundred years ago, when the enslaved people living here were mostly tortured and killed, it was known as the Black Calvary.”

This is highlighted by a box the prisoners uncover, the contents of which are not revealed until the end. It is also significant that Bronco Gil, the most sympathetic character, is an ‘Indian’, ‘bronco’ suggesting that he cannot be tamed. He provides the novel with what little hope there is, being “good at staying alive and keeping predators at bay.” On Earth As It Is Beneath is the kind of novel which leaves its images in the mind long after it is read, whether we might want them there or not. Whether the judges have the stomach to progress it to the International Booker shortlist remains to be seen.

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The Deserters

March 8, 2026

Mathias Enard’s The Deserters, beautifully translated as usual by Charlotte Mandell, is two novels for the price of one. The first takes place in a war-torn landscape where a deserter returns to his hometown and encounters a woman who is terrified of what he might do to her. The second is set in the more sedate surroundings of an academic conference in celebration of the German mathematician, Paul Heudeber, aboard a small cruise ship on the river Havel, yet it, too, will be interrupted by violence on September 11th, 2001. Both narratives are interesting in their different ways, though whether they succeed in creating a whole is largely in the hands of the reader.

In the first narrative, the nameless soldier is returning to home not because he expects help but as a retreat to the past:

“the cabin will protect you with its childhood

“you’ll be caressed with its memories”

Despite a clearly delineated, if unspecified, landscape, the style is internal, with paragraphs running on like lines of poetry. The use of the second person to convey the soldier’s thoughts projects the distance he aims to keep between himself and others. When he first encounters the woman his instinct is to shoot her, an idea he returns to more than once. She recognises him, but that recognition only makes her more afraid:

“suddenly she recognises him and her terror grows, he is the son of the ironmonger – and the thought is stifled in her brain, reaching neither language nor image,”

The suggestion is perhaps of some civil conflict where people of the same town are set against each other. At the same time, Enard makes clear the soldier is not a man unsuited to war, but one who initially embraced it. He will chart their relationship across the course of the novel, one in which she will always expect violence, and he will continue to question himself as he lets her live.

While this narrative lasts a matter of hours, with little reference forward or back, its two characters existing in a present which taxes all their strength, the second encompasses a man’s life.  Heudeber is a mathematician whose greatest discoveries occurred while he was imprisoned in Buchenwald as a Communist. After the war he remains in East Germany even when offered the chance to move to the West. Meanwhile, the woman he loves, Maja, and has a child, Irina, with (who narrates much of this section) lives in West Germany. Letters to Maja are interspersed with the story of the conference and his life:

“Twenty years ago, there on the Ettersberg hill, I was looking for absent stars and thinking about polynomial rings, prime numbers, all the misery around me, the pain that was increasing,  illness, torture and hunger, but mostly about you whom I had lost but whose face so often appeared to me: your face rose up to protect me.”

Here, the idea of desertion plays out in different ways. Heudeber refuses to desert the GDR – and therefore deserts Maja, who in turn deserts her daughter:

“Maja abandoned me for her political career just as she had been abandoned.”

Heudeber and Maja’s relationship is coloured by an earlier desertion when Maja allows Heudeber to be arrested as she decides it is too risky to warn him, aware she possesses more knowledge of the communist resistance than he does. Yet his faith in communism remains when Maja turns to the democratic socialism of the West:

“My father walked on two legs: algebra and communism. These two limbs allowed him to make his way through all of life.”

Both represent hope to Heudeber. When asked what he learned from one of his earliest teachers of mathematics he replies, “She taught me that mathematics was the other name for hope.” His faith in communism is shaken by post-war events – “the Soviets were more and more becoming enemies of actual socialism” – but particularly suffer with the results of the first free elections in the GDR.

In setting the conference in his memory on September the 11th, 2001, Enard seems to be highlighting that the ‘end of history’ forecast in 1992 when communism collapsed did not even last a decade, as capitalism was reset by the attack on the Twin Towers (though characters in the novel point out more than once the conflicts in the Balkens in the 1990s which seem to have been airbrushed out of European history). Its legacy, of course, continues to this day. The Deserters, like all Enard’s work, is both clever and profound. Only a sense that the two narratives do not quite unite prevent it being in the same class as Zone or Compass, but it still stands out as a potential winner of the International Booker Prize.

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She Who Remains

March 4, 2026

Though the International Booker Prize longlist contains a number of well-known names, it also features writers appearing in English for the first time. She Who Remains (translated by Izidora Angel) is Bulgarian author Rene Karabash’s debut novel, originally published in 2018. Much of the novel is set in Albania and focuses on the traditions of the Kanun which she researched prior to writing. Anyone familiar with the work of Ismail Kadare (quoted as the novel begins) will have encountered this concept before, a social structure based on honour and revenge which has outlasted various political systems. Two aspects of this influence the events of the novel: firstly, when Bekija / Matija declares she will become a ‘sworn virgin’ rather than marry, and secondly, when a member of her family must be killed as a result of the cancelled wedding.

The character’s two names represent her change from bride to sworn virgin as she must not only “preserve my virginal innocence” but also renounce her womanhood and live as a man:

“I shall take the masculine name Matija as my only given name and may the women cut off my hair and may my dresses turn to ash and may the clothes of a man become one with my back, my legs, my skin.”

The novel opens with this event, but we will also learn about Bekija’s childhood, from the moment in the womb where she hears her father’s “iskam sin” (I want a son). One of twins, the other (a boy) no longer appears on the ultrasound after her mother bleeds and her name, Bekija, means ‘she who remains’.

“my father didn’t touch me for the first year of my life, avoided me in the house, didn’t speak to me…”

However, when a son, Sale, is born, he is physically feeble and it is Bekija who becomes her father’s favourite, goes hunting with him, and is given the nickname ‘daddy’s boy’.  It is quickly clear that this is novel which questions gender stereotypes set in a society where such rigid roles go unquestioned. This is also developed through Bekija’s friendship with Dhana, a girl the same age but “taller and more beautiful” who Bekija is both attracted to but ashamed of, “like a relative I was embarrassed by”.

The cancelled wedding lies at the heart of the novel as it influences the fate of all the characters. In the novel’s first part, Bekija tells us that before her wedding she is raped by Kuka, the ‘village idiot’ – “I touch where the wet is, I see blood on my fingers.”

“whom would they believe, him or me, what do you think, there’s no point in telling anyone”

The incident is significant as, if she is not a virgin on her wedding night, her husband must kill her, so she tells her family she will become a sworn virgin rather than marrying. She must then choose between her father and her brother to pay the price for this as the other family must take revenge. At this point it seems as if she has selfishly given up another life to save her own, but, as we will discover, we have not heard the whole truth about what happened to her, or who witnessed it. She chooses her brother, but we already know Sale does not die as the narrative is interspersed with letters he has written to his sister from Sofia.

Though the novel is not told chronologically, Karabash cleverly leaves much to be revealed in the shorter second part. It is written in short chapters with a disregard for sentences; often in Bekija’s voice – or voices (Karabash uses the conceit that she is telling the story to a journalist at points, but at others it reads like stream of consciousness). Not only do Sale’s letters provide an alternative voice, but the direct speech of characters sits side by side with her thoughts as if their voices are echoing in her head. There is a fluidity to it that reflects the gender fluid nature of her life.

Despite this elegant construction, She Who Remains relies on a coincidence that Dickens would be proud of to tie up its various plot threads and provide the emotional impact of its second part. This allows it to present a more hopeful denouement than we might have expected. It is a novel that well deserves its place on the long list, though it seems an unlikely winner. Though the Kanun may be an archaic echo of patriarchal violence, the novel’s exploration of society’s need to excise difference, particularly when it comes to gender, is more relevant than ever.

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The Wax Child

March 1, 2026

Olga Ravn’s first novel to be translated into English, The Employees, is set in the 22nd century and features such science fiction staples as androids and spaceships; her second, My Work, is a more autobiographical work drawing on her own experience of motherhood. Now comes The Wax Child, a historical novel (translated like The Employees by Martin Aitken) based on witch trials which took place in Jutland in the early seventeenth century. Ravn is clearly comfortable across a number of genres and here draws on a range of historical documents including spells. The novel originated in a play Ravn wrote, Hex, which premiered in 2023, but its existence as a piece of prose fiction began with the voice, the wax child of the title, a wax doll made by Christenze Kruckow, one of the accused:

“I am a child shaped in beeswax. I am made like a doll the size of a human forearm. They have given me hair and fingernail parings from the person who is to suffer.”

Though Christenze has aristocratic blood, she is poor. Her ancestry confers on her a certain entitlement but in her own mind she considers herself untouchable:

“She fully believed they would never seize her. That she was as invincible as a star… but to me my mistress was harmless, as invincible as the foam that tops the wave as it crests into its final peak.”

She is first accused of witchcraft when the woman in whose house she lives has a succession of stillbirths but she escapes to Aalberg where she meets Maren, who will also be accused. Maren introduces Christenze to other women who meet regularly to spin wool and share their stories. Do they believe they are witches? There is certainly superstition in their remedies but Ravn leaves their actions and motivations deliberately vague. In part at least there is an attempt to help other women, such as Elisabeth, the preacher’s wife, though her description when they ask about her marital problems foreshadows her later betrayal:

“A feral look darted in Elisabeth’s eyes, like an animal crossing her way, her jaw tightened and she nodded her head.”

The novel’s second part is ‘A Witch Trial’, a process that lasts many months, though as Ravn points out in an afterword, she has actually condensed events. As well as the expected horrors of torture, Ravn includes moments such a conversation between members of the town council on the cost of execution should they proceed with the accusations. Throughout Christenze believes her arrest is an error, not because she is innocent but because she is noble:

“Soon they will realise their mistake in keeping me here. Soon a letter will come from the king and explain it to them.”

In a scene one hopes also features in the play, Christenze will eventually meet the king who appears, still blindfolded, having been indulging in a game of blind man’s bluff. While the symbolism may be overt, the scene is so beautifully written, both comic and tragic, that it works perfectly. But while that may owe something to the novel’s dramatic origins, it is the novel’s voice that marks it out as something special. Though the wax child refers to Christenze as ‘mistress’, the narrative voice is more powerful than any of the human characters, ranging omnisciently through place and time:

“And I was in the king’s ear, and I was in the king’s mouth, he would go on to live for many more years and try out many eiderdowns…”

Similarly, the choice to scatter spells throughout effortlessly enhances both the historical and supernatural elements of the novel. Moreover such spells are often placed to highlight events, for example when Christenze and Maren meet:

“If you are enchanted by forbidden love of a woman, you must put on a pair of shoes and walk about until the feet heat… Remove then the right shoe and drink from it some wine or ale, and at once all love for her will be lost.”

Whether we see the wax child as an endorsement of a darker power, a plea for a wider perspective, or simply a technical response to a writing problem, it provides the novel with both its depth and propulsion and further enhances Ravn’s reputation as a master (mistress?) of all genres. It has very chance of reaching the Internationale Booker shortlist.

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Something Leather

February 25, 2026

While I have regularly re-read Alasdair Gray’s novels over the years, I suspect this is the first time I have opened Something Leather since it was first published in 1990 (or more likely 1991 having bought the paperback). Something Leather was Gray’s fourth novel after Lanark, 1982 Janine, and the slighter The Fall of Kelvin Walker. As Gray says in his ‘Critic-fuel: An Epilogue’ he had begun to feel that he “had no more ideas for stories and did not expect them” until Kathy Acker suggested a story about a woman. He initially dismissed this as “impossible” as he “could not imagine how a woman feels when she is alone” until the sight of a woman in a leather suit walking through Queen Street station leads him to write the first chapter as a short story, which he later expands into a novel by – not for the first or last time – using material from the plays he wrote in the sixties and seventies. Of course, we must always be careful with Gray’s interventions in his fiction as they are also part of the fiction – in this case, including scenes from June’s life that do not appear elsewhere. (Gray goes one step further by including a final chapter on the inside flap of the dust jacket). However, his explanation provides an excuse for the piecemeal nature of the novel which seemed a weakness at the time, but, on re-reading, is more of a strength.

The reason I say this is that the story which provides Something Leather’s origin – that of a woman who orders a leather suit which involves her (against her will) in sado-masochistic sexual practises which she finally finds freeing is neither as risqué nor revolutionary as it might have seemed thirty years ago (but probably didn’t). However, this is only a fraction of the overall, narrative, which takes the characters involved (June, the maker of the leather suit, Senga, and her friend, Donalda) and provides them with a back story, alongside the artist, Harry, who is used to develop a satire on class which culminates in Glasgow being named the European City of Culture for 1990.

Harry’s journey to becoming a sculptor begins in the all-girls boarding school she is sent to as a young child by a mother who has no affection for her at all. Gray uses a phonetic version of RP to highlight the accent of the wealthy (for example ‘eva’ for ever ‘befoa’ for before) to undermine the idea that they in any way represent the ‘norm’. At school, Harry is a loner, “happiest when modelling clay”. One day she models a dome with a cleft in it which the school bully immediately describes a ‘bum’ before asking Harry to produce a series of larger ones which become know as the Bum Garden. Years later, Harry is a famous sculptor, and another classmate asks her to exhibit in Glasgow when it is selected as European City of Culture:

“…a lot of us have come hia to make the thing possible and take the curse of the place.”

It is well recorded that Gray and other Glasgow writers such as James Kelman objected to the ‘year of culture’ for ignoring Glasgow culture in favour of imported ideas, and Gray clearly relishes pointing this out while involving Harry in the novel’s sadomasochistic climax for good measure (a preference rooted in an abusive nanny).

While this is fun, the more notable chapters reveal the other side of the class divide. We first meet Senga as a schoolgirl of fifteen with “a reckless gaiety which many find attractive” being pressed into marriage by Tom, who, in her world, is only one of the boys she is happy to flirt with (it is 1965 and with no contraceptive pill she is reluctant to get ‘serious’):

“Instinctive caution usually inclines her to Tom who is not very amusing or good-looking.”

Donalda we meet via an old man (her lodger) who asks a student to change a light bulb for him. The student ends up sorting various electrical problems while he is there:

“The room strikes him as messier than it need be. The bed is unmade. Dirty plates, crumpled clothes lie on and partly under a dusty sideboard and two sagging armchairs.”

The Irishman she is living with tells the student they are not working class but “casualty class” as the area is scheduled for redevelopment and nothing is getting repaired:

“And now the entire area – the part not knocked down – is full of the unemployed and the elderly, and moral casualties like me, and sentimental casualties like her.”

Again, Gray is able to touch on the issues that affect Glasgow in the course of the narrative while making wider points which still apply today. He also overcomes the problem of writing female characters by placing them on the periphery many of the chapters, seen by male characters. This is less true of June, however, who features as a secretary in a business who is quite able to stand up for herself, while at the same time allowing Gray to reveal some shadier business practises (such as bugging the workforce). All together this gives the novel a much wider range than we might expect, as well as highlighting the origin of the women’s sexual desires in way they have been treated by men and society. Class differences occur even when Harry, Senga and Donalda appear at June’s door to initiate her into their sadomasochistic lifestyle.

Something Leather is not Gray’s strongest work but nor does it deserve to be forgotten, and some of the chapters and characters (for example ‘Quiet People’ where a couple take in lodgers) stand out as amongst his most memorable.

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International Booker Prize Longlist 2026

February 24, 2026

My International Booker Prize predictions were among the most accurate of recent years, correctly guessing three of the thirteen titles (The Director, The Wax Child and The Deserters), mentioning a fourth (We Are Green and Trembling), and coming close with possible entries for Charco and Peirene Presses while not quite landing on the right title. This means I greet the long list without much disappointment, unless it is for new publisher Akoya whose time will surely come (Fitzcarraldo, hard as it is to believe, was for a time ignored).

The long list is:

The Nights Are Quiet in Tehran by Shida Bazyar, translated from German by Ruth Martin, published by Scribe UK

We Are Green and Trembling by Gabriela Cabezón Cámara, translated from Spanish by Robin Myers, published by Harvill 

The Remembered Soldier by Anjet Daanje, translated from Dutch by David McKay, published by Scribe UK

The Deserters by Mathias Énard, translated from French by Charlotte Mandell, published by Fitzcarraldo Editions

Small Comfort by Ia Genberg, translated from Swedish by Kira Josefsson, published by Wildfire

She Who Remains by Rene Karabash, translated from Bulgarian by Izidora Angel, published by Peirene Press

The Director by Daniel Kehlmann, translated from German by Ross Benjamin, published by riverrun

On Earth As It Is Beneath by Ana Paula Maia, translated from Portuguese by Padma Viswanathan, published by Charco Press

The Duke by Matteo Melchiorre, translated from Italian by Antonella Lettieri, published by Foundry Editions

The Witch by Marie NDiaye, translated from French by Jordan Stump, published by MacLehose Press

Women Without Men by Shahrnush Parsipur, translated from Persian by Faridoun Farrokh, published by Penguin International Writers

The Wax Child by Olga Ravn, translated from Danish by Martin Aitken, published by Viking

Taiwan Travelogue by Yáng Shuāng-zǐ, translated from Mandarin Chinese by Lin King, published by And Other Stories

As is often the case, the list heavily favours European authors, much more so than last year, with nine of the thirteen coming from that continent: two each from France and Germany, and the others from Italy, Sweden, Bulgaria, Denmark and the Netherlands. Of the remaining authors, two are from Latin American – Argentina (Gabriela Cabezón Cámara) and Brazil (Ana Paula Maia) – one from Taiwan (Yáng Shuāng-zǐ) and one from Iran (Shahrnush Parsipur). The latter doesn’t quite break the record for the length of time between original publication and translation set last year by Astrid Roemer’s 1982 novel On a Woman’s Madness but comes close having first appeared in 1990 (it does, however, fulfil my prediction that Penguin Modern Classics will be represented). Unusually, six of the writers have been listed before (Cámara, Énard, Genberg, Kehlmann, Ndiaye and Ravn) – almost fifty percent.

The Director probably begins as favourite as Kehlmann is a writer who is entertaining without sacrificing intelligence, and the combination of its real-life protagonist, the art of filmmaking and Nazis is a winning one. Watch out for The Remembered Soldier, however, set in the aftermath of the First World War and the longest novel on the long list. Anjet Daanje may be relatively unknown in the UK, but the novel has already picked up numerous awards, and the author is actually ten years older than Kehlmann. It would not surprise me if these two novels of war fight it out for the prize.

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Katalin Street

February 22, 2026

Magda Szabo is a Hungarian writer whose fame has grown in recent years, largely thanks to the work of translator Len Rix who has brought novels such as Abigail into English and retranslated work, including her best-known novel The Door, and Katalin Street. These three novels he describes as having been written “to explore the effects of the Second World War on the private lives of those who survived”, of which Katalin Street, originally published in 1969, is the first. The novel centres on three families, and their children in particular, who were all neighbours to each other in the years leading up to the war: the sisters, Irén and Blanka, Henriette, whose father, a dentist and is of Jewish descent, and  Bálint, the son of Major Bíró, with whom all three girls are at least a little bit in love. In the novel’s opening section, ‘Places’, these characters are older, they are living in a flat  which “depressed them profoundly”, Blanka is living in Greece, and Irén is married to Bálint, (though he is not her first husband) in a marriage which showed him “that she yearned and pined for Katalin Street just as much as he did.” Henriette is the only one who “visited her old home regularly…

“Not everyone was able to do this, and it made them angry to see others free to come and go at will.”

The novel then takes us back to Henriette’s arrival in Katalin Street in 1934. She is the youngest of the children and Bálint is the oldest. The two sisters are quite different: dark-haired Irén is clever and disciplined; fair-haired Blanka is untidy and careless (in Bálint’s words, “daft”). The children act out a play at school which has significance for their fates later in the novel. Irén plays ‘Hungaria’ with Henriette at her feet (pressing the national coat of arms rather too firmly against her knees). Bálint is dressed as a hussar, and Blanka plays Hungary’s Enemy. Irén hopes:

“…he had noticed how very pretty she had looked that day, how very grown up in that full length dress.”

During the play Blanka refuses to surrender as scripted and Henriette faints with stage fright. Here we see the first signs of romantic feelings between Irén and Bálint, but also Blanka’s stubbornness and anger – an anger that will later lead her to betray Bálint. Henriette’s faint foreshadows her death as we are told when it is revealed that the play will trouble Bálint later in his life:

“The first occasion when it came back to him was ten years after it had taken place, on the day Henriette died.”

The Henriette we met in the opening section is, in fact, a ghost, and will haunt the novel throughout, her visitation interspersed with Irén’s narration. From 1934 the narrative moves on to 1944, and from there to particular years after the war – 1952, 1956 and 1961. As the first section has already indicated, however, Szabo’s approach is not chronological as she will reveal future events when she sees fit – in the same moment we are told about Henriette’s death, we also learn that Bálint will be interrogated by a Party official in 1952. This gives the events of the novel an inevitability which makes the characters seem less culpable of their choices. Szabo also foregrounds the impact of the war and what follows on ordinary life, particularly for women. The internment of Henriette’s parents, for example, is juxtaposed with Irén and Bálint’s engagement as when Major Bíró turns up for the engagement lunch it is to tell them:

“I have to leave you, Henriette must go with me. Her parents are waiting for her.”

In fact, rather than taking her to her parents, he will hide Henriette in his house with strict instructions never to go outside. Her presence there will make Irén doubt her engagement, thinking that Henriette had managed to awaken something in Bálint that went “beyond both love and desire.” Her death will change Bálint completely.

Katalin Street is a wonderful novel weaving an intricate, shifting web of relationships between its four main protagonists. Szabo’s confidence in revealing future events from the opening chapter, but also in the narrative itself, enhances the story she is telling, and the use of Henriette as a ghost (not just hinted at but fully embraced as she roams among the living and the dead) is a masterstroke, particularly as it provides the novel with its memorable, moving ending.

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International Booker Prize Predictions 2026

February 18, 2026

The 24th of February sees the announcement of this year’s International Booker Prize long list, an exciting moment for those of us interested in literature in translation. Every year there seems to be an increase in eligible titles making predictions more challenging but no less fun. Let us first consider some of the favourites (if any such category really exists). My personal choice of a novel that has to be on the list is Daniel Kehlmann’s The Director (translated by Ross Benjamin). Kehlmann made the shortlist of the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize back in 2008 for his first novel, Measuring the World, and was shortlisted for the International Booker with his previous novel, Tyll, in 2020. Given that Tyll is about an obscure 16th century jester, The Director’s focus on the art of film during the Nazi occupation of Europe should make it a much surer bet. Another historical novel which might feature is Olga Ravn’s The Wax Child (translated by Martin Aitken). Like Kehlmann, Ravn has previously been shortlisted (for The Employees in 2021) and witches are the new Nazis if we are to judge a book by the cover of lots of other books, so this may have some popular appeal given its rather experimental narration.

Other previous short listees who may feature again include Gabriela Gabzon Camara for We Are Green and Trembling (translated by Robin Myers), Bora Chung for either The Red Sword or The Midnight Timetable (translated by Anton Hur), Jon Fosse for Vaim (translated by Damion Searles), and Mathias Enard for The Deserters (translated by Charlotte Mandell – though Enard has never been particularly well-treated by the prize with Compass the only one of his novels to have been noticed). One should never bet against Samanta Schweblin, whose success rate is currently 75%, for Good and Evil and Other Stories (translated by Megan McDowell) though short stories are always less likely to make the cut. Recent winners Georgi Gospodinov and Geetanjali Shree also have eligible books (Death and the Gardener, translated by Angela Rodel, and The Roof Beneath their Feet, translated by Rahul Soni, respectively).

In terms of less well-known writers, I am excited to see how new press Akoya fares with a number of eligible titles. It would be wonderful to see a writer such as Bolivia’s Liliana Colzani (You Glow in the Dark, translated by Chris Andrews) or Spain’s Marta Sanz (My Clavicle and Other Massive Misalignments, translated by Katie King) gain recognition on their first UK publication. The same would apply to Finnish author Pirkko Saisio whose Helinski trilogy (translated by Mia Spangenberg, is being published by the rather more established Penguin Classics. (Jean-Noel Orengo’s You Are the Fuhrer’s Unrequited Love, translated by David Watson, would also be eligible). Speaking of series, it’s not impossible that On the Calculation of Volume III (translated by Jennifer Russell and Sophia Hersi Smith) will appear (well, it’s more possible than being stuck in a single day forever) but this feels unlikely as we are now thoroughly immersed in the story. More likely, perhaps, to see the second volume of Asta Olivia Nordenhof’s Scandinavian Star series, The Devil Book (translated by Caroline Waight), which can be more easily read alone.

Looking at possible titles from various small publishers, I would love to see Sara Mesa’s Four by Four (translated by Katie Whittemore) included (Peirene Press), though Eva Meijer Sea Now (translated by Anne Thompson Melo) would make a striking addition with its climate emergency theme. Antonio Xersenesky’s An Infinite Sadness (translated by Daniel Hahn, Charco Press) taps into the ever-popular world of physics. Lee Yuri’s Broccoli Punch (translated by Amber Hyun Jung Kim, Heloise Press) remains my favourite title of the year, though Park Seolyeon’s Capitalists Must Starve (another Anton Hur translation, Tilted Axis Press) runs it a close second. And the inclusion of Balsam Karam’s Event Horizon (translated by Saskia Vogel, Fitzcarraldo Editions) would compensate for the failure to list her previous novel, The Singularity. Whatever happens (and I’m sure the judges will look more widely than I have) it is to be hoped the long list is vibrant and varied (and that none of the books are too long!)

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Posted in International Booker Prize 2026 | 14 Comments »

Queen

February 12, 2026

Brigitta Trotzig is a Swedish writer who published novels in her homeland for almost fifty years – the first in 1951, the last in 2000. Now, fifteen years after her death, we can finally read her work in English. Queen, translated by Saskia Vogel, and appearing in the UK in the excellent Faber Editions series (and from Archipelago Press in the US), was originally published in 1964 as part of Life and Death: Three Stories, though at 140 pages it probably exceeds a novella. Life and death certainly feature equally in Queen, set in an earlier, unforgiving landscape beginning in 1930 but largely looking backwards from there. The novel opens with the arrival of “a widow from America” at Judit’s (Queen’s) farm in Sweden:

“…something had happened to her there. And now she could remember but little – items, stains, fragments.”

The character’s inarticulacy highlights Trotzig’s challenge in writing a novel about people who do not think in narrative or reflect. As Sarah Moss outlines in her introduction:

“There is no privileged access to inner monologues or internally articulated but unspoken need and desire because Judit and her family live in instinct and repression…”

Indeed, we are told on the opening page “Children here learn that silence is golden and it is indeed so, nothing can ever be said anyway.” Trotzig overcomes this problem with a rich, descriptive omniscient narration which slows the pace of the novel to the rhythms of the land. Judit greets the widow’s arrival with suspicion, but this event is nearer the end of the story than the beginning. The novel then retreats to the previous century, a time of famine, when the farm’s gates are bolted against the “faltering shadow-and-rag creatures” in search of food. Judit’s father, Joahnn, then a child, sees a woman with a child:

“Her face was white. Her hunger was dark. Death was dark. The snow was white.”

There is something slightly supernatural in her appearance, admittedly seen through the eyes of a child, and when her plea for help is ignored, we are invited to think the farm’s troubles begin. Johann as an adult will allow all-comers to enter and eat, even when there is little for the family, and he is portrayed as a simple man, much like his son, Albert. It is the daughter, Judit, who must take on the responsibility of the farm, and of raising her younger brother, Viktor, especially after her mother’s death:

“The boy Viktor had been placed in her arms. And with the he was hers. And she was his.”

As Viktor grows, however, he is even less help than Albert (as with much else, this is revealed early in the novel) – “he’d been named as father of several children in the area” – and eventually he runs away. Judit, however, refuses to criticise him (“not a word of censure against the runaway brother ever passed their lips”) and Trotzig uses the sight of one of his bastard children in a shop to demonstrate that Judit still longs for him.

It is Viktor who goes to New York in what is, perhaps surprisingly, one of the best written sections of the book:

“A mighty sea of people, of faces, welled forth, welled forth, they welled up out of howling caves, out of ash-black buildings, going up and down the roaring, rattling stairs.”

The fierce, natural landscape of Viktor’s youth imprints itself on the city. Trotzig, having detailed the rural poverty of Sweden, now delineates the urban poor – it is the 1920s and the height of the Great Depression. In one particularly fine passage, Viktor hears rumours of work and finds himself in an immense crowd:

“In a few moments the place was aboil, faces appeared and vanished as if on the crests and troughs if waves; in the distance the row of whirling batons was like a surf brake – the first blood-washed faces rocked out into the sea of people like debris from a shipwreck.”

The entire section is terrifying, and Viktor only survives thanks to a Polish woman, who takes him back to her room and nurses him back to health. If this decision seems unlikely, it stems from the instinctive rather than the rational in ruthless world where solitary survival is unlikely.

Queen is a remarkable novel: the reader is may not relate to the characters, but they are so powerfully drawn that they linger long after the final page is turned. Trotzig’s ability to articulate the experience of a different time and place (this was a historical novel for her as well) is astonishing. Hopefully more of her work will follow.

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The Case Worker

February 6, 2026

When Hungarian writer George Konrád, his sister and his parents returned to their hometown of Berettyóújfalu in 1945 they were the only Jewish family to have survived the war intact. Their troubles were not over, however, as his father’s business was soon appropriated by the new Communist government. Despite this, Konrád chose to remain in Hungary in 1956 and eventually, after various short-term jobs, worked for seven years as a social worker focusing on children’s welfare from 1959. Ten years later his first novel, The Case Worker, was published, drawing heavily on these experiences. It was translated into English in 1974 by Paul Aston as part of Philip Roth’s Writers from the Other Europe series, and, though this is not the only edition, it has been out of print for decades.

This might be partly explained by the fact that it is one of the most depressing novels you are likely to encounter. Narrated by a case (or social) worker who is tasked with aiding the dregs of society, and who himself undergoes a crisis in the course of the novel, it observes the very worst of humanity and offers little, if anything, in the way of hope or redemption. As Irving Howe explains in his introduction, where other writers have included characters from this underclass:

“Konrád was perhaps the first to place them in a distinctive contemporary setting as the ‘clients’ of a social welfare system that is overwhelmed by their needs and clamour, and proceeds to slot them into categories, hospitals, files and clinics, attempting through society’s benevolence or callousness to cope with the gratuitous cruelties of nature.”

In such circumstances a case worker cannot help but harden their heart as Konrád makes clear in the opening paragraph:

“He thinks his situation is desperate; seems perfectly normal to me. He swears his cross is too heavy; seems quite bearable to me. He hints at suicide; I let it pass. He thinks I can save him; I can’t tell him how wrong he is.”

The narrator describes his job as being like “swallowing fistful of mud; I can neither digest it or vomit it up.” The novel opens with a series of ‘cases’, the overwhelming nature of his task emphasised by the frequent use of lists. In one example, he imagines what sounds might originate from a filing cabinet containing all his cases:

“Children’s cries, woman’s moans, resounding blows, quarrels, obscenities, recriminations, interrogations, hasty decisions, false testimony, administrative platitudes, jovial police slang, judges’ verdicts, the vapid chatter of female supervisors, the incantations of psychologists, my colleagues’ embittered humour, my own solitary invective, and so on and so on.”

We are soon introduced to the particular case at the heart of the novel, the Bandulas, who have committed suicide by poison. The narrator already knows the couple, and we learn that they lost their daughter during the war, and that afterwards their house was nationalised (as happened to Konrád’s family) and tenants moved into some of the rooms. Bandula is denounced by one of the tenants for hording jewellery and imprisoned, eventually returning home with “his mind unhinged” and taking to drink. They have another child, a boy, Feri, but he is born both physically and mentally disabled. The narrator first sees him while his parents are still alive:

“Feri was stamping about in his crib on an excrement-stained nylon sheet strewn with apple cores, cabbage stalks, carrot ends, a bare rib of mutton, and various unidentifiable scraps of meat. It was the same carpet of miscellaneous garbage as in the monkey house at the zoo.”

The narrator is tasked with taking the child to an institution where he will “disappear through the trap door leading to the repository for infantile rubbish…” He describes in detail the journey and the institution itself up to the point he waves a “token farewell” but we find him waking the next morning in the Bandula’s room with Feri “asleep in his ramshackle bed.” His decision is instinctive rather than rational; “it is not duty that keeps me here,” he says but, even though he knows he can walk away at any moment, “this chid has undeniably become my lot.”

Konrád frequently uses war imagery to describe the situation the narrator finds himself in. The room is “a house abandoned the previous night by drunken soldiers”; the cases he deals with are people who “live in a state of perpetual siege”; the case worker is a “neutral but armed observer.” Now it seems, he wants to experience the life of the observed, however artificial he knows this is. This highlights that, beneath the cynicism, the novel retains, if not hope, at least some faint belief in humanity. Ultimately, The Case Worker is a cry of rage rather than despair at the suffering that surrounds us and the state’s ineffectual attempts to relive it, a lesson that goes beyond any particular time or place.

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