November

• White Nights by Urszula Honek, tr. Kate Webster

  • White Nights, the debut short story collection from poet Urszula Honek, is a series of interconnected stories concerning the various tragedies and misfortunes that befall a group of people who all grew up and live(d) in the same village in the Beskid Niski region, in southern Poland. Each story centres itself around a different character and how it is that they manage to cope, survive or merely exist, despite, and often in ignorance of, the poverty, disappointment, tragedy, despair, brutality and general sense of futility that surrounds them. Urszula relates to us, with the sincerest care and honesty, a localised, yet so clearly universal, story of ruin and hope: a story where the protagonists do not ask to be understood, but merely to be seen and to be heard. Kate Webster’s brilliant translation of Urszula’s poetic, yet often earthen, prose brings us to places that, though they are seldom seen in literature, we may never forget.

‘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

• Milk Teeth by Helene Bukowski, tr. Jen Calleja

  • Skalde writes her thoughts on pieces of paper, making new discoveries and revelations and understanding the world that is, and once was, through her mother’s limited library of books. Edith, her mother, prefers the solitude of her room and has begun to interact less and less with her daughter. Their house is full of silence and secrets. Having only ever known life with her mother, Skalde rarely crosses the boundaries of their plot of earth to visit neighbours and she certainly never leaves their zone. Skalde has never even seen blue in the sky—their region has been plagued by fog for as long as she can remember. Their terrain is dry and burning and Edith and their neighbours cling to memories of what once was: snow and rain, green grass and trees ripe with fruit.

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

February

• Cross-Stitch by Jazmina Barrera, tr. Christina MacSweeney

  • The unexpected death of a friend launches this novel-tapestry where various time periods, stories, conversations, and trips are interwoven. This is a story about growth, about the imbalances of identity, and the adolescent body. Cross-Stitch narrates the path towards adulthood in a society pierced with sexist, classist, racist and environmental violence. Friendship becomes the primary tool for care, feeling, reparation, and resistance for the protagonists of this book. Friendship and embroidery, that activity where women from hundreds of different cultures and time periods have found oppression, repression, freedom, community, and art. This novel is also a travel chronicle, or a chronicle about the effect that trips have on individual and collective identity, and about friendship as travel—with all of its linguistic, emotive, sentimental, and cultural problems and discoveries.
    
    - 'A sombre book about the formative, irreplicable experiences shared between friends and the agony and bewilderment of loss.' - Kirkus Reviews

- '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

• The Sadness of Shadows by Lola Ancira, tr. Juana Adcock

  • These twelve stories give voice to those who have been marginalised and condemned to live life in the shadows of lunacy, nostalgia, loss and desperation. The protagonists, defeated by life itself, find refuge in abandonment, in forgotten promises, in dejection  and in the memory of what they once had. The psychiatric hospital 'La Castañeda', the most notorious mental health facility in Mexican history, and the prison 'The Palace of Lecumberri', the most notorious penal institution in Mexican history, are the spaces that hold these protagonist's destinies, whose end is an inevitable metamorphosis into shadows.
    
    - 'A masterful interweaving of characters, psychologies and loss.' - Alicia Maya Mares
    
    - 'This book is a literary showcase that combines narrative talent with rigorous historical documentation; a precise and monumental work that navigates the abysses of madness, crime, tragedy and the drama of humankind.' - Ariel  Alejo

April

• ALL DOGS DIE by Cemile Sahin, tr. Ayça Türkoğlu

  • How do you live with violence and trauma? How do you cope with the threat of them recurring? These are among the urgent questions posed by Cemile Sahin’s second novel – a haunting and brilliant tale of people on the edge.

'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

• May God Strike Down She Who Writes About Me by Aura García-Junco, tr. Heather Cleary

  • In this hybrid auto-fictionalised novel, the ‘protagonist’ inherits approximately 10,000 books from her father, the eccentric teacher, underground writer and cultural promoter H. Pascal, after his death, and it is through her reconnection (or first connection) with this library that she investigates her (fractured) relationship with him and, furthermore, her relationship with literature, materiality, with society and with, of course, herself.
    
    Between gothic concerts in El Zócalo and fights over MeToo, this novel is “a seance during which you literarily re-live through the things that life forced you to bury.” An inherited library serves as the detonator of a voluntary shipwreck within a familial archaeology. Generational change, feminism and the tension it creates between fathers and daughters, inheritance, personal libraries, self-publishing and that which is 'peripheral' all parade through these pages that oscillate between distance, fury, happiness, humour, and reconciliation.
    
    

- '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