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Careless

Hiroko Oyamada

‘As I lay on the mattress, the white toe pads of the gecko floated up before me, against the vastness of the blue-black night. Rather than a presence, it seemed to me more like a trace, a barely discernible odour that flooded in on the air.’

The Fallen

Carlos Manuel Álvarez

Read an excerpt from The Fallen by Carlos Manuel Álvarez, translated from the Spanish by Frank Wynne and available now from Fitzcarraldo Books.

The Water Tower and the Turtle

Kikuko Tsumura

‘It was safe to say I didn’t really know anybody in this town at all.’ New fiction translated from the Japanese by Polly Barton.

Sirens

Jorge Consiglio

‘A knock-off Conrad. He’d drive us to school in his car.’

The Biggest House on Earth

Choi In-Ho

‘What is happiness? Nothing other than pausing at the bottom of the stairs to admire the portrait of a beautiful queen from some distant, foreign land.’

Death Customs

Constantia Soteriou

Constantia Soteriou’s ‘Death Customs’, translated from the Greek by Lina Protopapa, is the winner of the 2019 Commonwealth Short Story Prize.

How I Write My Books

Anne Serre

Anne Serre on how she writes. Translated from the French by Mark Hutchinson.

To Zinder

Sven Lindqvist

Obsessed with a single line from Conrad’s The Heart of Darkness – Kurtz’s injunction to ‘Exterminate All the Brutes’ – Sven Lindqvist set out across Central Africa, and wrote a book that revealed precisely what Europe’s imperial powers had exacted on Africa’s people over the course of the preceding two centuries.

Pajtim Statovci | Notes on Craft

Pajtim Statovci

‘My childhood was pierced not only by the violence in Kosovo but also by the violence my immigrant family was confronted with in Finland.’

A Man’s Life

Pajtim Statovci

‘I wished my family would die, my friends too, everybody I knew, because only that way could they never follow me wherever I went.’

My Enemy’s Cherry Tree

Wang Ting-Kuo

‘And the truth is, my heart was tied in knots, and pain bored into the marrow of my bones when I heard about his illness.’

The Pine Islands

Marion Poschmann

‘Gilbert Silvester woke up distraught. Mathilda’s black hair lay spread out on the pillow next to him, tentacles of a malevolent pitch-black jellyfish.’

Animalia

Jean-Baptiste Del Amo

An excerpt from Animalia by Jean-Baptiste Del Amo, translated from the French by Frank Wynne.

Vintage 1954

Antoine Laurain

An extract from Vintage 1954 by Antoine Laurain, translated from the French by Emily Boyce and Jane Aitken.