The Day of the Owl

April 12, 2026

Leonardo Sciascia was one of Italy’s most famous writers during the second half of the twentieth century. The Day of the Owl was the first in a series of novels to use the crime genre to reveal the political corruption in Sicily which protected the Mafia  – indeed, when it was translated into English by Archibald Colquhoun and Arthur Oliver in 1963 it was titled Mafia Vendetta only adopting the original  Italian title, The Day of the Owl, later. The novel opens as a man is murdered boarding a bus:

“Two ear-splitting shots rang out. For a second the man in the dark suit, who was just about to jump on the running board, was suspended in mid-air as if some invisible hand were hauling him up by the hair. Then his brief case dropped from his hand and very slowly he slumped down on top of it.”

The murdered man, Colasberna, runs a construction company with his brothers, and the police captain, Bellodi, immediately suspects a Mafia killing, but the lack of cooperation from the local population is quickly established. The bus driver claims he cannot remember any of the passengers on his bus, the fritter seller who witnessed the incident asks, “has there been shooting?” and even the victim’s brothers, when it is suggested that the crime might be a consequence of refusing Mafia protection, reply, “This is all new to us.” Bellodi, not being Sicilian, is an outsider. According to the brothers, “Mainlanders are decent enough but just don’t understand things.” Others are less forgiving, as one ‘businessman’ complains to a politician:

“The presence of a man like that in our part of the world ought to upset you more than it does me. He was a partisan; with all the hot-bed of communists we have down here, they had to send us an ex-partisan as well. No wonder our interests are going to pieces…”

Sciascia scatters these anonymous conversations throughout the novel as the rich and powerful comment on the case emphasising the connections between the criminals and corrupt politicians. Bellodi’s status as an outsider allows him to investigate the murder properly rather covering it up by declaring it an act of passion as is normal practice:

“Captain Bellodi… was by family tradition and personal conviction a republican, a soldier who followed what used to be called ‘the career of arms’ in a police force, with the dedication of a man who has played his part in a revolution and has seen law created by it.”

He is a calm but cunning investigator, using intelligence rather than force. For example, he asks the brothers to write down their names so he can compare the writing to anonymous letters he has received; in identifying a match he knows “the clue provided by the anonymous letter was a sure one.” When another man, Nicolosi, goes missing, Bellodi is certain there is a connection, but when Nicolosi’s wife tells him that her husband mentioned a name she cannot remember when she last saw him, his sergeant-major is surprised by his tactics:

“That, according to him, had been the moment to put on the screw, to frighten her enough to force it out of her, that name or nickname… The captain, on the other hand, was being kinder than ever.”

The kindness works and the name is recalled, leading the captain to the first link in a chain of guilt.

Much of the novel involves Bellodi confronting those guilty of the murder(s). These interrogations are, as you might expect, tense and dramatic, made more so by the general acceptance that no one will talk. Bellodi has to use both rhetorical and procedural tricks in an attempt to obtain admissions of any kind in what becomes a battle between truth and lies. Even the most senior of those he questions, Don Mariano, who divides men into five categories, “men, half-men, pygmies, arse-crawlers… and quackers” acknowledges that his opponent is a ‘man’.

The Day of the Owl works extremely well as a crime novel with the focus not so much on who did it or why, but on the process of bringing them to justice. Behind this Sciascia’s anger at the silence and corruption can be clearly felt, the same rage Bellodi shares, “a wave of resentment at the narrow limits in which the law compelled him to act” while at the same time rejecting the repression that took place under fascism. Politically astute without ever losing sight of the story, Sciascia delivers a bracing engagement of good versus evil in a much larger battle.

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The Witch

April 8, 2026

It is a pleasure to see Marie Ndiaye on the shortlist for the International Booker Prize, particularly as it is only a couple of years since she missed out on being selected at all for Vengeance is Mine, also translated by Jordan Stump, which was certainly superior to a number of the chosen books. Vengeance is Mine was a recent novel (2022) whereas The Witch dates from as long ago as 1996, but both share the intention of making the reader increasingly uneasy while at the same time offering no resolution. The Witch is not a metaphorical title, and the novel opens with Lucie initiating her twin daughters, Maud and Lise, in the “mysterious powers” they possess which have barely manifested in their mother but will prove much more potent in their hands:

“My abilities were in all honesty laughable, they allowed me to see trivialities, nothing more.”

The plot, if indeed it is fair to describe the events in Ndiaye’s novel as a plot, kicks in when Lucie’s husband, Pierrot, brings home a visitor, a Monsieur Matin: “he’ll be having dinner with us and possibly spending the night.” Monsieur Matin, it transpires, has left his wife:

“I’m only there to drive the car and bring home money, how long is a man supposed to live like that nowadays?”

Monsieur Matin soon exits the novel (through a window when his wife appears to pick him up), but it is not long after that Pierrot leaves for his mother’s and does not return. More worryingly, he takes with him a large sum of money given to Lucie by her father which her father now needs returned as it was not strictly his to give away. Lucie, however, is more concerned with getting her mother and father to agree to see each other again as they have recently separated, making both promise to do so even though neither is particularly keen. Superficially this might seem like the start of a relationship comedy but that is not how it feels as Ndiaye tends to keep character motives oblique and their behaviour can therefore seem strange and unsettling (why Pierrot leaves, for example, is never entirely clear).

Much of the novel focuses on relationships between parents and children. Monsieur Matin complains that his son only cares about his mother describing him as “the little beast who hates me”; Pierrot describes his daughters as “filthy little witches”; and Isabelle, a neighbour, is indifferent to her son, Steve, trailing him round Paris looking for a boarding school, “the child still clinging to her leg seemed to weigh no more than a little pile of clothes.” On the other hand, Lucie’s mother-in-law cannot wait for her daughter to have a child:

“How I hope it will be a girl… Oh, I’d make dresses for her. And all Lili’s outfits, you know, all the clothes she wore as a child, I’ve kept them all, I never gave a single one away, because I knew this day would come.”

When Lucie catches glimpses of the future she cries tears of blood, but blood isn’t thicker than water in this novel, as family relationships prove brittle, often breaking when one individual feels contempt for another.

The supernatural undercurrent runs throughout the novel, with Maud and Lise apparently able to transform themselves into birds and Lucie’s mother also able to transmute others. Alongside this are other more natural but equally strange transformations when Lucie encounters Pierrot and Isabelle again, positions reversed – Pierrot is now stuck in the domestic sphere, living with another woman and two young children, whereas Isabelle, now unencumbered with Steve, has started her own business, a Woman’s University for Spiritual Health, in which she asks Lucie to take classes. Lucie is a still point among numerous characters who not only change but accept that change, her determination that her mother and father get back together (which will have unintended consequences) only one sign of this. It also indicates her inability to change the world around her – Pierrot leaving, her daughters finding their own path – which could be seen as a echo of her feeble ‘witch’ powers.

As is common with NDiaye’s work, The Witch entices the reader into its strange world but feels little need to explain itself. Its combination of domesticity and witchcraft is appealing but some readers may find its conclusion unsatisfying as there is no attempt at a resolution. The work itself, however, is delightfully unsettling.

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The Feast of Lupercal

April 3, 2026

Brian Moore’s second novel, The Feast of Lupercal, mines similar territory to his first, The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne. Here, too, an inexperienced, unloved protagonist, Diarmuid Devine, believes he may have found a candidate for marriage; in this case, the niece, Una, of a colleague at the boys’ school where he teaches. His thoughts of marriage originate in an overheard conversation in the toilets where Devine finds himself described as “that old woman” by a younger teacher:

“How can you expect the likes of Dev to understand what a fellow feels about a girl?”

This moment of self-doubt coincides with his friend and colleague, Tim Heron’s, daughter’s engagement party, and the arrival of his niece, Una, from Dublin. When they meet at the party he might, at any other time, have thought little of it but “he had promised himself he’d get out of the rut and now he’d met a girl.” The next day Devine, stage manager at the local amateur dramatic society, is asked by Father McSwiney about a performance of Mulligan’s Will to raise funds. Though Devine is reluctant, he realises that Una’s claim, “I’ve always been keen on the stage,” opens up an opportunity for him as the actress who had previously played the lead female part is unavailable and he offers to rehearse with Una in preparation for an audition. Moore is excellent in describing the change in his character as their relationship develops:

“…he was filled with an outrageous joy. He smiled into the shocked faces of strangers, walked across Donegall Street against a red light and stopped to kick an apple core into the formal flowerbeds of City Hall.”

The novel also cleverly balances the possibility that Una likes Devine, despite being much younger, with the more cynical suspicion that she is using him. Alongside the fact she is Protestant, Devine has also been told that she is in Belfast as she “was mixed up with a married man”. On the one hand, this adds a suggestion she is sexually available, but on the other it could prove scandalous for a Catholic schoolteacher. The religious dimension is important not only because Devine is expected to be morally exemplary in his life or risk losing his job, but because his own religious principles prevent him from taking advantage of Una. When they are rehearsing and an opportunity arises for him to kiss her as scripted:

“Dammit, he couldn’t. It might not be acting any more, it might be something else entirely.”

Una, too, must guard her own reputation, which has already been tarnished, and her uncle is duty bound to ensure there is no hint of further scandal. This explains Heron’s anger when he hears that Devine has taken Una out for a meal. When Heron confronts Devine, however, Devine plays down any relationship with Una:

“She’d rehearsed so hard all week, I thought she needed a little treat.”

This will be the first, but not the last, occasion, when Devine will ‘deny’ Una to save himself: “he felt as though he had committed sacrilege. How could he face Una, after letting her down?” As the novel progresses it becomes less about their relationship and more about whether Devine can find the courage to be himself whatever the cost – not only his job but his lodgings (as with Judith Hearne) being under threat.

Both The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne and The Feast of Lupercal are about characters who find themselves lost and lonely in middle-age. Both aspire to be good Catholics but find their religion is not enough to sustain them. Both are seen by others as rather dull, leading routine, unexciting lives. Moore reveals the passions that lie untapped beneath the surface, suppressed by both Catholicism and hopelessness, giving the reader glimpses of neglected possibilities, while never forgetting we are bound by the societies we live in. Moore’s vision is both hopeful in recognising that his characters can still be stirred to action, but pessimistic in suggesting that society will reject any attempt at change, a pessimism reflected in the novel’s final image:

“The horse, harnessed, dumb, lowered its head once more.”

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Taiwan Travelogue

March 29, 2026

Taiwan Travelogue is an outlier on the International booker Prize longlist – not only is it the only Asian book, but its tone is much lighter, belying the seriousness of its intentions. It is, first of all, unashamedly post-modern, presenting itself as the work of another writer which Yang Shuang-zi has translated (this, in itself, is fitting as languages lie at the heart of the novel – Japanese, Chinese Mandarin and Taiwanese Hokkien, which the Japanese narrator signifies using Xs). As well as an introduction, the novel comes equipped with five afterwords (including one by translator Lin King), not to mention a plethora of footnotes.

The (fictional) history of the novel begins when the Japanese writer Aoyama Chizuko is invited by the (Japanese) government of Taiwan to undertake a lecture tour on the island in 1938. At the time she produces a series of articles describing her travels, but later (in 1954) she uses the experience to write a novel. Japan ruled Taiwan from 1895 to the end of the Second World War, having taken the island by force. The Japanese and Taiwanese people lived largely separate lives in ways that are common in colonies, and even when schooling was integrated entry to the best schools was decided by fluency in Japanese. (A visit to a school will result in one of the novel’s most important scenes). Aoyame has little understanding of this history, an innocence that is progressively less forgivable. She has one overriding longing and that is to taste the local food (the novel opens with her attempting to communicate at a food stall on arrival) but she is initially disappointed:

“Everything was perfectly delicious and, also perfectly catered to a Mainlander’s palate; I had no doubt the recipes had been tailored or even invented to suit Mainlander tastes.”

Only when her original interpreter is replaced by a young Taiwanese woman whom she takes to calling Chi-chan, does she gain access to the food she craves. This does mean that a generous proportion of the narrative is taken up with descriptions of the narrator long for food, eating food, and asking about food, an obsession that will please some readers more than others. Of course, the author has other intentions here: Aoyame’s embrace of the local cuisine is a statement that she sees herself as more than a tourist and is generously accepting of the island and its people, a belief that the novel will go on to question. It is also possible to see her eating as synonymous with Japan’s exploitation of its colonies, a devouring of resources.

More interesting than her diet is her relationship with Chi-chan who soon proves to be invaluable to Aoyame in her knowledge of Taiwan and her desire to please her. Aoyame soon begins to see Chi-chan as a friend but, of course (as Chi-chan understands) that is problematic for numerous reasons:

“No matter Aoyame-san’s stance on the matter, as an Islander interpreter, I am expected to act as your personal assistant. In this sense, I am subordinate staff, and it would not be appropriate for me to dine at the same table as a Mainlander writer.”

Yan Shunag-zi uses Aoyame and Chi-chan’s relationship to examine the workings of colonialism in an intimate setting. As already mentioned, a visit to a girls’ school provides an important clue to Chi-chan’s misgivings as they witness the friendship between a Mainlander (Ozawa-san) and an Islander (Tan-san). Aoyame only sees the positive in this, but as Chi-chan later points out:

“In a girls’ school where Mainlanders are the majority, it is likely that such special treatment only makes Tan-san’s situation more difficult, yet Ozawa-san may not have realised this at all.”

While Ch-chan is generally treated respectfully in Aoyame’s presence, there are occasions where the truth is revealed, such as when she is told to leave a luxury hotel because the concierge does not realise she is with a Mainlander. It is perhaps, Aoyame’s initial interpreter who best sums up the writer’s shallow commitment to equality, noticing Aoyame’s “tendency to judge things as you please according to your subjective and arbitrary criteria.” In terms of Japan’s southern expansion:

“Whether you choose to criticize or support these policies has little to do with whether the empire had caused harm or done good – it has more to do with your personal preferences.”

This criticism does not only feel very apt for Aoyame but also remains true today whenever wealthy people come into contact with the poor – describing a servant, for example, as being like a ‘member of the family’. It is not the first time a novel has highlighted the hypocrisy of those who see themselves as ‘good’ people, rejecting their privilege while simultaneously retaining it, but it does so patiently and subtly. Having said that, the novel was, for me, too long, and the endless discussion of food became rather tedious. That Aoyame is a rather vacuous character is the point but we are stuck to her even more firmly than Chi-chan making this a novel whose intention and cleverness I admired while finding its execution at times laborious. 

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The Duke

March 27, 2026

The real reward of reading prize lists is the unexpected find, the title or author previously unregistered which immediately elicits a positive response. For me, Matteo Melchiorre’s The Duke is such a book. Originally published in 2022, and translated by Antonella Lettieri last year, it exudes a certain timelessness which begins with its title and extends through the rural landscape and village life it describes. Though set in Italy, it most reminded me of Jean Giono’s early novels, written almost one hundred years before.

The novel opens as the narrator, the ‘Duke’ of the title, witnesses a buzzard attacking a crow. The last of the Cimamonte family, he is a count rather than a duke but:

“…by calling me The Duke, the villagers were either implying that I was as eccentric as my grandfather, though inevitably of a quite different sort of eccentricity, or they were mocking the decline of my lineage.”

Rather than an eccentricity of the author, that lineage will prove vital to the plot, but it is also central to Cimamonte’s character and the reason he has decided to live in the village of Vallorgana “in my ancestor’s house which had been uninhabited for over thirty years.” Cimamonte sees the buzzard’s attack as a “premonition…a spectacular act of rebellion” and the same day he is informed that woods have been cut down in what will become a border dispute at the heart of the novel. The man behind this, Mario Fastredo, is the most powerful man in the village and, Cimamonte is informed, the dispute is not about wood but land, land Fastreda needs to gain a grant that will allow him to build a road along which he can take his cattle to graze. Once his initial anger has passed, Cimamonte is of a mind to let Fastredo have the land, though possibly as much to humiliate him as anything else, but the man who looks after Cimamonte’s woods, Nelso, changes his mind:

“What a gentleman! What a Lord! …What about your ancestors? They would never come up with such nonsense. With all due respect, they were the kind of people who’d not let a hen slip past them when it was time to settle the accounts with the tenants.”

The reference to ‘ancestors’ hits home as Cimamonte is particularly interested in the history of his family which he has thoroughly researched through papers which were once lost but are now back in his hands. This uncovering of his family’s past can be likened to his attempts to uncover a mural of a rural scene which has been plastered over. Later Nelso will advise him to do nothing and let his “blood cool down” over the winter but it is too late and Cimamonte himself recognises his need to act originates in his family’s ancient role:

“Deep in your heart the venom from your archive has woven an ethical system which is dormant but alive and easily provoked; in fact, it has built a pyre there ready to be torched.”

Cimamonte and Fastredo are both arrogant in their different ways and in the pages that follow attempt to outwit each other to gain the upper hand. However intriguing this sounds, it is intensely involving in practice. It is not a fast-paced novel and all the better for it, Melchiorre creating a slow burn tension that stretches to breaking point without ever quite breaking. He cleverly uses the Duke as narrator, enticing the no doubt educated reader to assume his side, but as the novel progresses, we may find ourselves questioning his short temper and arrogant assumption of title. Enthralled as he is by the idea of nobility, he questions Fastredo’s influence in the village which he seems likely to have earned rather than been gifted at birth (this, it turns out, is not the whole story but the principle stands).

Melchiorre also introduces a young woman, Maria, into Cimamonte’s largely lonely life, though it clear that both fear closeness, Maria suggesting that “we must not utter the kind of words which give body to things and make them real.” She finally restores the mural and, similarly, will later allow secrets of the Cimamonte family to be revealed. She makes Cimamonte both more and less sympathetic as his affection for her is hindered by her lower status.

The Duke is the type of novel where the reader comes to inhabit the story. Resolutely old fashioned, it captures many of the strengths of the nineteenth century without the need for ironic distance, its very topic being the persistence of wealth and attitudes inherited from that time. It would be wonderful if it were to make the International Booker Prize shortlist.

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Women Without Men

March 23, 2026

Shahrnush Parsipur’s Women Without Men is a very different book from The Nights are Quiet in Tehran. Whereas the latter is very much a European novel, the former hints at a wider range of influence as it veers from realism to surrealism, despite a title that inverts Hemingway’s Men Without Women. Translated from the Persian by Faridoun Farrokh in 2011 and now appearing in Penguin’s International writers series, it is, as the title suggests, a collection of stories about women, each one bearing the name of its female protagonist apart from ‘Two Women on the Road.’ It also foregrounds the idea of ‘without men’ as on most occasions the women must fend for themselves, though it may also be a nod to Iranian society’s preoccupation with virginity, a concern we are introduced to in the opening story ‘Mahdokht’:

“Suddenly and unaccountable a thought came to Mahdokht’s mind: my virginity is like a tree.”

Mahdokht’s fear of sex has already been witnessed in the story as she resigns her job as school secretary when the headmaster asks her to the cinema, and when she catches the maid with the gardener she longs for the fifteen-year-old girl to be punished:

“It would have been convenient if the girl had gotten pregnant. The brothers would have ganged up on her and beaten her to death. That would have been nice.”

As is evident here, Parsipur’s female characters are not always presented to us in a positive light. We see this again in the second story when the title character, Fa’iza, travels to visit her ‘friend’, Munis, despite civil unrest in the streets, to complain about her sister-in-law. At twenty-eight she is also concerned that she is still unmarried and has her eyes on Munis’ husband, Amir Khan – when he offers to see her home she is “secretly delighted to have time alone with him.” Two days later, Munis falls to her death, however she doesn’t realise this as she rises to her feet and offers to help a man who has fallen into a ditch only for him to insist that he is dead and beyond help. It is a month before she returns home to face Amir Kahn’s fury only for him to kill her (again) at which point Fa’iza sees an opportunity:

“You killed her? you did the right thing. Why not? She’d been gadding about for a whole month. No decent girl behaves like that.”

Muni’s resurrection reveals Parsipur’s playfulness however serious the topic, a playfulness which become more obvious as the collection progresses.

In the next story a fourth character is introduced, Farrokhlaqa, a fifty-one-year-old married woman who is suffering from her husband’s decision to retire:

“With him on the house she felt restricted and claustrophobic – a need to confine herself to a corner to avoid contact. In the thirty-two years of their marriage she had learned to be inactive when her husband was home.”

The final character is Zarrinkolah, a twenty-six-year-old prostitute who is suddenly faced with an inexplicable problem:

“The customer came into the room. It was a man with no head. She was so frightened she couldn’t scream. She submitted to him frozen with fear.”

In the final story, ‘Farrokhlaqa’s Garden’, the women all meet at the new property Farrokhlaqa has bought after her husband’s death. Here Parsipur’s surrealism is most prominent as Mahdokht is to be found in the garden where she has planted herself as a tree, but it also married to an element of satire as Farrokhlaqa is determined to get into politics. In fact, one of the most attractive features of the collection is the sense that Parsipur does not distinguish between these different genres but goes wherever the story takes her. Just as she unites a variety of women, so she blends a variety of tones, from the serious (Munis and Fa’iza are raped in ‘Two Women ion the Road’) to the humorous (‘dead’ Munis’ appearance at her husband’s wedding), the down to earth (Munis’ eventual fate) to the transcendental (Zarrinkolah’s eventual fate). All in all, it is a superb collection, deserving of its place on the International Booker Prize long list and beyond.

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The Nights Are Quiet in Tehran

March 18, 2026

The Nights Are Quiet in Tehran is Sheda Bazyar’s debut novel, originally published in German in 2016, and translated by Ruth Martin. The novel is elegantly constructed of four sections each set ten years apart (1979, 1989, 1999, 2009) and with a different narrator representing the different perspectives / generations of the same family. The story begins in Iran but by the second section the family have left for Germany, a path undertaken by the author’s own family in 1987 – Bazyar herself was born a year later. In 1979 the Shah of Iran (an absolute ruler who had been imposed on the country by the Americans to protect their oil interests) was exiled and later deposed. We know now that the country would quickly become an Islamic republic under Khomeini, but the novel opens shortly after the revolution and is narrated by Behzad, a teacher and communist:

“The Revolution is getting older every week, but it hasn’t even begun yet. The Shah has gone, and we’re at the beginning of a new age, a new system, a new freedom for which we are now preparing ourselves.”

Behzad and his childhood friends, Sohrab and Peyman (the latter a late arrival to politics) delight in the revolution, one that has been accomplished by a variety of opposition groups:

“In the struggle and on the streets, they were our brothers and sisters, united against the monarchy, against oppression and American imperialism… Even if some believe in a divine power and armed struggle and others The Communist Party Manifesto and pacifism.”

Of course, now these differing beliefs do matter, and, as with so many revolutions before, one group triumphs and immediately represses the others. By the end of the first section, Sohrab has drifted away from the movement and is getting married, and Behzad, too, has met his future wife.

The second part is narrated by Behzad’s wife, Nahid. They are now in Germany and have two children, “calling out to one another, German sentences that come quite naturally from Laleh’s lips and that Morad tries or copy.” While they have escaped, Peyman, the least interested in politics (and, reading between the lines, the poorest) is in prison. “It’s madness,” a German friend says:

“…madness to stay in a country that locks you up and drives out your friends.”

Her lack of understanding is highlighted by her insistence that Nahid read a book “like a tabloid newspaper… The poor American woman and the wicked Iranian husband.” This section subtly conveys Nahid’s disconnect from both her old country and her new country. We see something similar in the opening of the third section, narrated by Laleh, when she must speak ‘as Iran’ in a school discussion. Most of this section describes a visit to Iran by Nahid and her children:

“…they suddenly start showing you childhood photos of yourself that are completely new to you, hanging on the wall like a commemorative plaque for you, for your father. It’s funny, suddenly seeing him there, and for the first time you realise that he looked really different before.”

Amid the friendliness, however, there is still horror. “A friend of mine painted her fingernails,” one of her cousins tells her, “and they pulled them out.” When they are asked if they prefer living in Germany, Laleh politely answers, “I don’t know,” but her younger sister Tara is honest:

“That’s a silly question, of course it’s better in Germany, everything is better in Germany, in Germany people don’t die, and they don’t put kids in jail.”

The final section is narrated by Morad, now a student, and then there is a brief epilogue from Tara. These are the weakest sections of the novel, simply less interesting than the rest. In fact, the first section is probably the strongest, both in terms of character and tension. It offers us a unique perspective whereas much of what follows – the immigrant experience in Europe – is well worn ground. There is also an issue with the changing narrators in that we rather lose sight of the previous one and therefore character development is minimal. Overall the novel is rather conventional in style and, while it has much to recommend it, seems unlikely to reach the International Booker Prize shortlist.

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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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Posted in Ana Paula Maia, International Booker Prize 2026 | 5 Comments »

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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Posted in International Booker Prize 2026, Mathias Enard | 8 Comments »

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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Posted in International Booker Prize 2026, Peirene Press | 6 Comments »

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