THAT MAD ACHE
Françoise Sagan
Translated from the French by Douglas Hofstadter
That Mad Ache takes us to glamorous 1960s Paris, a world of money, parties and passions. Lucile, a restless young woman, lives with her older, rich lover Charles. They enjoy a tranquil relationship, he responding to her frequent whims as one might indulge a child. . .
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Reviewed by Charlotte Simpson
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NEWS FROM HOME: SHORT STORIES
Sefi Atta
The Nigerian author Sefi Atta will be familiar to close readers of Belletrista, as her first novel, Everything Good Will Come, the winner of the 2006 Wole Soyinka Prize for Literature in Africa, was reviewed in issue 3. Her second book, News From Home, is a collection of 10 short stories and a novella that was awarded the 2009 Noma Award for Publishing in Africa.
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Reviewed by Darryl Morris
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THE CHINA GARDEN
Kristina Olsson
The China Garden's opening chapter marks the bookends of life—birth and death. A newborn baby is discovered, abandoned, and aging artist Angela dies. Also, Angela's daughter, Laura, finds that she has a brother who was adopted out, and so we wait…
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Reviewed by Amanda Meale
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ALL THE LIVING
C. E. Morgan
This debut novel introduces a young author with an extraordinary command of the pen. C. E. Morgan's finely crafted prose draws one into present-day Kentucky with its sweltering, breezeless days, where twenty-year-old Aloma has come to live with her lover, Orren.
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Reviewed by Akeela Gaibie-Dawood
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INFINITY IN THE PALM OF HER HAND
Gioconda Belli
Translated from the Spanish by Sayers Peden
I love retellings of popular stories (fairy tales, the King Arthur legend, fables), love venturing into familiar territory in an unfamiliar way, seeing how an author can give a voice to characters previously on the sidelines. In Infinity in the Palm of Her Hand, Gioconda Belli tackles the story of Adam and Eve…
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Reviewing by Caitlin Fehir
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THE LINE
Olga Gruskin
Once there was a line. It was a line leading to a kiosk. What was being sold in the kiosk, nobody knew. But those who stood in line lived in hope that the reward for their waiting would be something interesting or useful. The kiosk was almost always shut with signs saying, "Gone to the parade" or "Closed for accounting. Be back on Monday" or "Out with the flu. Will reopen in January."
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Reviewed by Jane Anderson Jones
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ANITYA: HALFWAY TO NOWHERE
Mridula Garg
Translated from the Hindi by Seema Segal
If you have ever had the the niggling feeling that there is something swimming under your feet in a lake, only to look underwater to see an enormous fish keeping its eye on you, you'll understand the feeling I kept having while reading Anitya, Halfway to Nowhere. I couldn't shake the sense that. . .
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Reviewed by Tui Menzies
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THE BORDER OF TRUTH
Victoria Redel
Sara Leader is a lonely, middle aged professor whose knowledge of her father's past is very limited. Between working on a hefty translation of German thinker Walter Benjamin's papers, undergoing a rigorous adoption process, and keeping an eye on her aging father, delving into family history does not seem …
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Reviewed by Julia Mignone
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THE WOMEN MY FATHER KNEW
Savyon Liebrecht
Trasnslated from the Hebrew by Sondra Silverston
At the age of seven, Meir left his father in Tel Aviv to join his mother in the United States. Straightaway he was told that his father had died. At that moment, all memories of his first seven years died, too.
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Reviewed by Kathleen Ambrogi
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THE HEART SPECIALIST
Claire Holden Rothman
I raced through this novel at one sitting (it's a missing-your-bus-stop kind of a read) and then went back to re-read more slowly. Claire Holden Rothman, inspired by the life of Dr Maud Abbott (1869-1940), one of Montreal's first female doctors, loosely based this engrossing story on Abbott's experiences.
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Reviewed by Chris Mills
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WHO FEARS DEATH
Nnedi Okorafor
Nnedi Okarafor's fanciful and furious novel Who Fears Death is a truly strange hybrid, combining "ripped from the headlines" details of genocide, rape, and female genital mutilation with lyrical descriptions of African deserts and fantastical elements like dueling sorcerers and shape-shifting. It shouldn't work—but it does, and I was drawn in…
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Reviewed by F. P. Crawford
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MAP OF HOME
Randa Jarrar
Jarrar's bold debut is seemingly effortless. She is a born storyteller who transports you with ease from Boston to Kuwait, then to Egypt when the Iraq invasion occurs, and then on to Texas, with Nidali, the young, intrepid protagonist, who should have been a boy.
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Reviewed by Akeela Gaibie-Dawood
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NO PLACE FOR HEROES
/ DEMASIADOES HÉROES
Laura Restrepo
Mateo Iribarren addresses his mother, Lorenza, about what happened during the dark period; the period when his father kidnapped him, leaving his mother behind. And thus she begins:You were two and a half years old. It was a Thursday afternoon, and you, your Father and I, were in Independence Park in Bogotá.
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Reviewed by C. Lariviere
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THE CONFESSIONS OF NOA WEBER
Gail Hareven
Translated from the Hebrew by Dalya Bilu
If you expect fiction to have plot, then this award-winning novel by Israeli author Gail Hareven is probably not the book for you! However, if you wish to experience living in someone else's head, reading The Confessions of Noa Weber will offer you very rare insights into …
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Reviewed by Dorothy Dudek Vinicombe
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DON'T CRY
Mary Gaitskill
A recurrent comment about Mary Gaitskill's work is that she writes like a man. Powerful, relentless, and at times brutal, her stories take readers to an edge over which female writers apparently are not supposed to step.
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Reviewed by Deborah Montuori
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ZIG ZAG THROUGH THE BITTER ORANGE TREES
Ersi Sotiropoulos
Translated from the Greek by Peter Green
To pick up Zigzag is to be plunged into an initially unsettling world of changing narrators and fragmented narrative—yet I immediately wanted to know more about this world and its characters. Greek literature it may be, but this is post-modern Greek literature; no heroes here. . .
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Reviewed by Rachel Hayes
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THURSDAY NIGHT WIDOWS
Claudia Piñeiro
Translated from the Portuguese by Miranda France
Claudia Piñeiro's Thursday Night Widows presents itself as a thriller. Yet even though in the opening we have three dead bodies in a pool and are promised an investigation of how they came to be there, this novel has more in common with Camus, or with DeLillo, than with a standard thriller. The bodies remain decaying…
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Reviewed by Andrew Stancek
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THE EIGHTH DAY
Mitsuyo Kakuta
Translated from the Japanese by Margaret Mitsutani
On February 3, 1985, Kiwako makes her way into the home of her married ex-lover, and leaves with his newborn child tucked underneath her coat. With Kaoru in her arms, she flees Tokyo to start a journey with the child she should have had, had she not been persuaded …
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Reviewed by C. Lariviere
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PALIMPSEST
Catherynne M. Valente
Think of a novel as an amalgam of its story, its ideas, its people, and its language. Does a particular story demand a particular sort of language? Palimpsest is a fantastical city, sprawling over a vast territory, functioning on magic, eclectic in architecture, infested with clockwork insects, populated by …
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Reviewed by Michael Matthew
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