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Mauritius meant white beaches, turquoise water, palm trees, sugar cane. Tourist crap. This Mauritian novel smashed those exotic fantasies and showed me something real. Not paradise—just people living actual lives on an island with its own mess and beauty.
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Empire Falls was rich once. The Whiting family ran everything. Then the economy tanked, factories closed, people left. Now it's just crumbling houses and people stuck in place. A small-town decline story that feels uncomfortably real.
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Three novellas here. Harrison owns this format. The title story brings back Brown Dog, a character from another book—half-Native American detective navigating his own strange path. Harrison knows how to write long-form short fiction that actually lands.
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Moscow, 1876. A young guy commits a very public suicide in a city park. Same day, more suicide attempts get reported. Young detective Eraste Fandorine takes the case. It's a tight little mystery novel with period Russian atmosphere baked in.
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Victor Zolotarev is a failed writer in Kyiv. He lives with a penguin named Misha. To feed the penguin, he writes obituaries for famous people who aren't dead yet. Then things get weird. Dark comedy from Ukraine that shouldn't work but totally does.
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God isn't dead. He's watching. Humans got too smart and stole all his secrets with Lucifer's help. So God's pissed off and starts manipulating things on a cosmic timescale. Big ambitious Dutch novel about theology, humanity, and divine revenge.
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Found this because of the cover from Serpent à Plumes's Motifs collection—gorgeous pocket editions of foreign authors. The cover caught my eye. Serbian fiction with a structure as unusual as its title suggests. Worth hunting down.
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Japanese authors keep surprising me. Their novels have this specific atmosphere—hard to describe. And they invent genuinely original stories. This one's no exception. Unusual premise, executed perfectly. That particular Japanese sensibility is all over it.
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Auster at slightly-less-than-peak is still better than most writers. This latest isn't his most brilliant work, but I still love the atmosphere he creates. Even when he's coasting, he's a master. That's what great writers do—maintain quality even in minor keys.
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Started years ago when my book-loving mom taught me to read with a primer I'll never forget: Rémi et Colette. My first book and the beginning of everything. Now I'm here writing about books because that's what readers do eventually.
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