2023

November


A highly artistic study of death encapsulated in moving stories, [where] the setting seems to be a symbol of a larger (ultimately, cosmic) universe, signalled by a reality that is limited to a small number of characters. Although the seemingly independent stories contain many voices and perspectives, and several parallel time spaces, White Nights is a coherent narrative in which the imagined and dreamlike are intertwined with reality, and the present mixes with the past…White Nights is an extraordinary story about death, which is an inseparable part of life…Honek reveals the bright side of something that is usually only known and seen through darkness.’ - Paulina Subocz-Białek


'Honek with complete cruelty, but also mastery, symbolically kills her influences. She stands firmly on her own two feet, moving readers with her own voice - immediately clear, set and full.' - Paulina Małochleb, Empik Critics' Choice



Resigned to her fate, Skalde fills her days reading, writing and trying to live under her reclusive mother’s rules, until one day, from seemingly nowhere, a girl named Meisis arrives and Skalde decides to go against Edith’s wishes by bringing her in. Meisis’s arrival doesn’t simply mean that Skalde has someone to care for or a friend: it means that there has been a serious breach in security for the area and this proves to be too much for the community, a community that has decided to separate itself from the rest of the world and to do whatever it takes to survive, to handle.


Beautifully written in immersive, spare prose, Helene Bukowski’s debut novel is about what it means to be a mother at the end of the world, about living with the impacts of climate change and the way we view ‘outsiders’. Jen Calleja’s impressive translation is a moving rendition of this modern fairy-tale, where each moment witnessed, and every word uttered, is weighted with importance in the quiet, dying world of these characters living on the brink.


Milk Teeth is a novel with a lingering taste, one that weighs on the soul. It asks introspection of us, drawing attention to the cataclysms that daunt our own world even through the imagined, fictive realm. It advocates for responsibility instead of blindness, knowledge instead of ignorance, and in the realisation of the fact that there may no longer be easy answers for our problems, it holds up a mirror so that we may confront our worst instincts.’ - Anna Rumsby, Asymptote Journal


In Milk Teeth, Helene Bukowski has created a world as eerie, unsettling and immersive as that of Samanta Schweblin's Fever Dream. Her prose is as spare as the climate-change dystopia she depicts: harsh, unforgiving, and rife with social tension--but dotted with pockets of care. Come for the propulsive mystery, stay for the tenderness pulsing underneath it.’ - Jessica Gross, author of Hysteria

Like Sophie Macintosh in The Water Cure or Diane Cook in The New Wilderness, Helene Bukowski imagines a pocket landscape where the concerns of our world can be contained and considered, a defamiliarised place that skews increasingly uncanny without ever becoming unrecognisable. Written with precision and poise, Milk Teeth is a moving depiction of survival and perseverance, and of how we might choose new families and communities in the face of an increasingly hostile world.’ - Matt Bell, author of Appleseed


'Against the backdrop of a slowly dying world, Helene Bukowski writes a beautiful and brutal story about living with trauma, the strain of motherhood and the danger of fearing the unknown.' - Daria Husni, Glassworks

2024

February

- 'Jazmina Barrera has written an astonishing book, one that illuminates the mysterious, intricate, and eternal nature of female friendship. Through prose that never fails to find the profound in the particular, Barrera’s Cross-Stitch takes readers on a journey through the little private universes people make through relation to one another.” —Chloé Cooper Jones, author of Easy Beauty 

March

April

'All Dogs Die' is narrated in nine episodes by different characters who all live in the same apartment building in Turkey. All the characters have had violence and torture inflicted on them by the secret police or the army, have often been driven from their homes in acts of terror. Each episode tells of a harrowing past and an indeterminate present as the characters struggle to describe acts of torture and displacement. Characters often appear in multiple episodes as one another’s neighbours, and frequently destabilise the narrative of a previous episode by presenting events from a different angle or providing information to show that a narrator has failed to grasp an aspect of their doomed situation. As a multimedia visual artist, Cemile is interested in the interplay between image and text, and the novel is interspersed with images which form their own commentary.

'All Dogs Die' seeks to embody the challenges of expressing the horror of state-sponsored terror and war in words and stories, while Cemile Sahin’s direct, unadorned style prevents the novel from relishing the violence it depicts. This is an important novel for its unflinching representation of both actual geopolitical situations, and the enduring human suffering wrought by state-sponsored terror that extends far beyond this one place and time.

- 'An artist and writer everyone will soon be talking about.' - Die Zeit

- 'The determination, clarity and rigour in Cemile Sahin's tone is a force to be reckoned with.' - Julia Encke

May

- 'Although [this novel is described] as a hybrid text somewhere between an essay and a memoir, the way it explodes in front of readers’ eyes makes it so that it doesn’t only surpass that ubiquity (...) but also exceeds those constraints and becomes a novel that paints a portrait of the growth and conflicts between generations, as well as the encounters and disagreements between fathers and their children, and, above all, about illusions and disillusions, hopes failures, love and grief.' - Emiliano Monge, El País


- 'Writer Aura García-Junco presents many fascinating questions in this book that is like no other. An autobiographical, political, and radical book in which she talks about her relationship with her father, the 10,000-volume library she inherited after his death, Italo Calvino, and the bridge between generations that extended between her re-reading of two different editions of Cosmicomics. And at the centre of the plot is a narrator with a critical, astute, and reflexive perspective....In the pages of [this novel,] there is an abundance of glimmers of truth and intelligence that allow us to know an intimate side of this young Mexican writer.' - Publishers Weekly