Journey by Moonlight
Tr. Len Rix
A Hungarian man on his honeymoon in Italy becomes separated from his wife and starts following his past instead. Melanch…
Staff Picks
Eighteen books. Three booksellers. Every one of them read cover to cover.
Nora
The Driver's Seat
Spark tells you on page one that the protagonist will be murdered. Then she makes you read 100 pages to find out how. Ge…
The Mouse in the Mountain
Davis wrote three Doan and Carstairs novels before dying at 39, and this is the best of them. A drunk detective and a Gr…
Flights
Tr. Jennifer Croft
Not a novel in any conventional sense — more a cabinet of curiosities about travel, the body, and time. Tokarczuk won th…
The Gate of Angels
Fitzgerald wrote her best novels after 60, which is either encouraging or alarming depending on your age. This one — Cam…
The True Deceiver
Tr. Thomas Teal
Everyone knows Jansson for the Moomins. Fewer people know she wrote some of the coldest, most precise adult fiction of t…
Alasdair
Life: A User's Manual
Tr. David Bellos
A Parisian apartment building at a single moment in time. Every room, every resident, every object catalogued with obses…
The Passion According to G.H.
Tr. Idra Novey
A woman kills a cockroach and has a philosophical crisis that lasts 180 pages. This sounds absurd. It is not absurd. Lis…
Stoner
A man becomes an English professor, has a difficult marriage, and dies. That is the plot. Williams makes it one of the m…
The Savage Detectives
Tr. Natasha Wimmer
Two young poets in Mexico City in 1975 go looking for a vanished avant-garde movement. Then the novel skips forward and…
Woodcutters
Tr. David McLintock
A man sits in a wingchair at a Viennese dinner party and thinks, at length and with increasing fury, about everyone in t…
The Rings of Saturn
Tr. Michael Hulse
A walk along the Suffolk coast becomes a meditation on empire, memory, silk, Thomas Browne, and the nature of catastroph…
Marta
Fathers and Sons
Tr. Richard Freeborn
The novel that invented the word 'nihilist' — or at least gave it currency. Bazarov is one of the great characters in Ru…
Housekeeping
Robinson's first novel, written before Gilead, and in some ways more radical. Two sisters in a small Idaho town are rais…
The Time of the Doves
Tr. David Rosenthal
A Catalan woman narrates her life from the Spanish Civil War through the Franco years. Rodoreda wrote this in exile in G…
Family Lexicon
Tr. Jenny McPhee
Ginzburg reconstructs her family's life in Turin from the 1930s through the war using only the phrases, jokes, and verba…
Fever Dream
Tr. Megan McDowell
A woman is dying. A boy who may not be entirely himself is asking her questions. The novel is 180 pages and reads like a…
The Memory Police
Tr. Stephen Snyder
On an unnamed island, things disappear — roses, birds, calendars — and the inhabitants forget they ever existed. A novel…