Author and journalist Fatima Bhutto reflects on how caring for her pet dog shed light on her own relationships in this tender and insightful memoir of a doomed love affair.
Author: Jane Wallace
It’s been nearly 20 years since Kiran Desai won the Booker Prize with The Inheritance of Loss. Now she finally returns with an epic tale of love, race, migration, art and mysticism which thoroughly deserves its short-listing for this year’s award.
Set against a variety of conflicts from the past century, author and academic Sunny Singh pays tribute to the courage and strength of victim-survivors of war, whose voices mostly go unheard because the victors control the narrative.
Mud, blood, farts and plenty of swearing: esteemed author Jia Pingwa minutely details the brutal reality of peasant life in this magnum opus set during the Cultural Revolution.
It’s a brave step to have a coward as your protagonist but acclaimed author Vivek Shanbhag’s unlikeable creation proves to be a memorable device for exploring power, patriarchy and politics in contemporary India.
This stunning debut by Devika Rege explores contemporary Indian politics through a cast of characters at the end of their “quarterlife”: the soul-searching phase in one’s third decade between late-stage youth and genuine seniority.
Nicola Dinan presents a much-needed update on finding love in London as a 30-something in this follow-up to her brilliant 2023 debut novel, Bellies.
A trip down south turns out to be more life-changing than a family getaway in this passionate story of sexual awakening set in late 1990s Malaysia. The novel is the first in a planned quartet which follows the Lim family and their struggles with racism, gender, sexuality and, most importantly, inter-generational conflict.
A much-loved memoir about a Japanese author’s relationship with her cat is translated into English for the first time by award-winning translator, Ginny Tapley Takemori. Writer Mayumi Inaba won many prizes for her stories and poems before her untimely death from cancer in 2014. She was well-known as a cat lover, particularly her calico, Mii. This modern classic—published as Mornings with My Cat Mii in Britain and forthcoming as Mornings without Mii in the US—describes the close bond they shared over the 20 years of Mii’s life.
In her latest collection of short stories set in contemporary China, award-winning writer Yao Emei reveals that, as goes the song, “it’s hard to be a woman”, but not just sometimes: all the time. Alternately macabre, heart-rending and shocking, the four tales comprehensively skewer the aspirational notion of the happy family. No matter how hard Yao’s female characters work to get married, have children and put the rice on the table, they are continually thwarted by their menfolk generating crises which their long-suffering wives, mothers and daughters must clean up.
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