Revenge, they say, is a dish best served cold. But is it revenge if the act stays forever secret? Can the avenger ever find satisfaction knowing she must spend the rest of her life married to her wrongdoer? For Jhumur, the highly educated, once independent woman of Taslima Nasrin's Revenge, silent vengeance is the only option.
READ MORE

Wow! Ludmilla Petrushevskaya is big news in Russia, but was little known in the English-speaking world before the publication of this collection by Penguin in 2009. I hope much more of her work is published in English, because, on the evidence of this collection, she is a stunningly good writer.
READ MORE

Ana María Shua's Death as a Side Effect is a perfectly pitched, darkly comic satire, set in a dystopian near-future Argentina. Politicians perform comedy routines on television, the streets are no-go areas, infested with gangs of marauding vandals, and neighbours are strangers, drowning out evidence of each others' presences with blaring music.
READ MORE

Although Amélie Nothomb has been a prolific and acclaimed author for nearly twenty years now, it is only comparatively recently that English translations of her books have started to appear. Now, at last, Hygiene and the Assassin, her 1992 debut novel, is available to English speakers for the first time. I had never read Nothomb before and, given her reputation as a difficult, challenging and even dangerous writer, I started reading with some trepidation.
READ MORE

The Saga of Gösta Berling moves freely from lyrical celebrations of nature to harshly realistic descriptions of industry, and on into the realms of folklore and fairytale. Were the book published today, we might …
READ MORE