Translated by Kira Josefsson Review by Susan Osborne While enduring a light fever, the unnamed narrator of Ia Genberg’s The Details is seized with the urge to read the novel…
Translated by Michael Hofmann Review by Susan Osborne Jenny Erpenbeck’s novels offer much food for thought on the events that have shaped modern Germany. Opening in 1986, Kairos charts an…
Review by Susan Osborne Beginning in 2010, Caleb Azumah Nelson’s Small Worlds is a beautiful, eloquent exploration of love, loss and finding a place of safety for a person of…
Review by Susan Osborne Opening with a beginning and an end, The Queen of Dirt Island follows four generations of women in one unconventional household, all devoted to each other…
Review by Susan Osborne Yiyun Li’s The Book of Goose is the story of an obsessive friendship between two young girls in 1950s rural France, one of whom will briefly…
Review by Susan Osborne I’ve read all Kamila Shamsie’s novels and, despite enjoying each of them, Burnt Shadows remained my favourite, but with its exploration of ‘80s Pakistan and contemporary…
Review by Susan Osborne Miriam Toews’ Fight Night takes the form of a letter written by nine-year-old Swiv to her father who her grandmother has told her is off fighting…
Paperback review by Susan Osborne Set in Carol Anshaw’s home town of Chicago in the months before and after the 2016 election, Right After the Weather explores both the state…
Reviewed by Susan Osborne, 2 April 2020 I’m a fan of Jill Dawson’s writing. Her last novel, The Crime Writer, was a wonderful piece of literary fan fiction, a perverse…
Translated by Elizabeth Bryer Reviewed by Susan Osborne Venezuelan writer Karina Sainz Borgo’s It Would Be Night in Caracas is one of three novels published to launch HarperVia, a new…
Review by Susan Osborne Tasmanian writer Robbie Arnott’s Flames is not an easy book to write about. It’s quite some way out of my usual literary territory, steeped as it…
Review by Susan Osborne Sofka Zinovieff’s Putney is a subtle novel which explores the fallout of sexual abuse all wrapped up in an engrossing piece of storytelling, accessible enough to…
Reviewed by Susan Osborne Louise Levene’s last novel, The Following Girls, was a pitch-perfect satire on ‘70s schoolgirl life whose period detail rang more than a few bells for me….
Reviewed by Susan Osborne Both Melissa Harrison’s previous novels are notable for their vividly evocative descriptions of the English countryside, the kind of thing readers are treated to in the…
Reviewed by Susan Osborne Jim Powell’s Things We Nearly Knew is a slice of American smalltown life seen through the eyes of an unnamed bartender. I enjoyed Powell’s second novel,…
Reviewed by Susan Osborne I’ve yet to read anything by Amy Bloom that I’ve not loved. Her writing is both deft and empathetic, pressing all my literary buttons. Spanning a…
Reviewed by Susan Osborne Emily Ruskovich’s Idaho is an impressive debut, both in its writing and its treatment of a difficult subject: the murder of a young child in the…
Paperback reviewed by Susan Osborne This novel is unlikely to appeal to everyone although we should all read it. It’s about assisted suicide, one of the great moral dilemmas of…
Paperback review by Susan Osborne Ron Rash hails from the Appalachians and it’s there that he sets his award-winning novels with their smalltown mountain backdrop similar to Kent Haruf’s Holt,…
Translated by Charlotte Collins Reviewed by Susan Osborne It’s a both a joy and a worry when a second novel appears on the horizon following one quite so spectacularly good…
Reviewed by Susan Osborne Female friendship is a frequent theme in fiction, or at least what’s often dubbed as ‘women’s fiction’. It can be more than a little idealised but…
Reviewed by Susan Osborne Fans of Jay McInerney’s series of novels which began with Brightness Falls way back in 1992, won’t need to be told who the Calloways are nor will they…
Reviewed by Susan Osborne There’s something very attractive about a state of the nation novel. It offers the chance to examine a snapshot of a country, taking in the many…
Translated by Anthea Bell Reviewed by Susan Osborne Perhaps it’s because many of us in the privileged developed world are living longer these days but there seems to be a…
