In a dark alley in Oxford, Yohan finds his mentor Doha Kim stabbed. With moments left to live, Doha tells Yohan that he must go to the Soju Club and meet with Dr Ryu. These are the North Korean spymaster’s final instructions, which Yohan knows he must obey.
Category Archive: Fiction
When Clarissa FitzRoy arrives on South Australia’s Kangaroo Island in October 1836, the heiress is met with the salty spray of the ocean.
Although Razia Sajjad Zaheer’s collection Darkness and Other Stories was written following India’s partition in 1947, it simmers with relevance today. Women still confront misogyny and sexism. They continue to be judged for their choices—sometimes by their own kind—and must often accept a lower social status.
Our Madhopur Home is a multigenerational family saga narrated through an unusual and carefully balanced set of perspectives, most strikingly that of Laura, the family’s Labrador who observes: “this is not just my tale but also a narrative of bonds and relationships on a broad canvas,” and that the story of the Madhopur home is “not just the tale of a single house but a reflection of all of society.”
In Tokyo’s Himonya district lives Kaede’s grandfather, a former school principal with a love of mystery novels that he has passed down to his granddaughter.
Elisa Shua Dusapin’s debut novel, Winter in Sokcho, won a National Book Award, among others. It was set in South Korea, while her next two novels were respectively set in Japan and Russia. Of Franco-Swiss and Korean heritage, Dusapin has crafted her fourth and most recent novel, The Old Fire, as a homecoming of sorts: she’s turned to her birthplace in the Dordogne. Aneesa Abbas Higgins, who had worked with Dusapin on her previous three books, has communicated Dusapin’s latest with this tender, melancholic and evocative translation.
Genpei Akasegawa (whose given name was Katsuhiko Akasegawa) was already famous as Neo-Dadaist artist when he began writing under the name of Katsuhiko Otsuji, and he soon proved himself able to work fruitfully in both domains, earning numerous awards. I Guess All We Have Is Freedom, beautifully translated by Matt Fargo, brings together five of Akasegawa’s short stories, some of them award winners, and all of which follow a narrator (presumably modeled on the author himself) through seemingly banal adventures as a father, professor, and denizen of Tokyo.
“The story here,” Indian Dalit author Kalyani Thakur Charal writes in the introduction to Andhar Bil, “centres round my village, my childhood, my beloved Andhar Bil which has a close, intimate relationship not only with me but also with numerous boys and girls of my village.” Drawing on her lived experience of loss, uprooting, and resettlement in the aftermath of the Bangladesh Liberation War of 1971, the novella emerges from Charal’s intimate attachment to place and memory.
With A Guardian and a Thief, Megha Majumdar seems to avoid the dreaded “sophomore slump”. Her well-received debut, A Burning, published during the first year of the pandemic, was nominated for a National Book Award. Her second had done even better: a finalist (among other acclaim) in the National Book Awards this year. The novel is short, yet packed with mystery, intrigue, and a warning or two about global warming, income disparity and xenophobia.
Rika Hourachi has an unusual talent. She’s fluent in conversational Latin. It makes her the perfect hire for an odd position at a nearby museum. The staff needs someone to keep one of their marble statues company. The first century Roman copy of a Greek statue of Aphrodite is lonely. After all, all the other art in the room speaks Greek. A deeply lonely human being, Rika quickly falls in love with the marble goddess.
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