International Booker Prize Longlist 2026

February 24, 2026

My International Booker Prize predictions were among the most accurate of recent years, correctly guessing three of the thirteen titles (The Director, The Wax Child and The Deserters), mentioning a fourth (We Are Green and Trembling), and coming close with possible entries for Charco and Peirene Presses while not quite landing on the right title. This means I greet the long list without much disappointment, unless it is for new publisher Akoya whose time will surely come (Fitzcarraldo, hard as it is to believe, was for a time ignored).

The long list is:

The Nights Are Quiet in Tehran by Shida Bazyar, translated from German by Ruth Martin, published by Scribe UK

We Are Green and Trembling by Gabriela Cabezón Cámara, translated from Spanish by Robin Myers, published by Harvill 

The Remembered Soldier by Anjet Daanje, translated from Dutch by David McKay, published by Scribe UK

The Deserters by Mathias Énard, translated from French by Charlotte Mandell, published by Fitzcarraldo Editions

Small Comfort by Ia Genberg, translated from Swedish by Kira Josefsson, published by Wildfire

She Who Remains by Rene Karabash, translated from Bulgarian by Izidora Angel, published by Peirene Press

The Director by Daniel Kehlmann, translated from German by Ross Benjamin, published by riverrun

On Earth As It Is Beneath by Ana Paula Maia, translated from Portuguese by Padma Viswanathan, published by Charco Press

The Duke by Matteo Melchiorre, translated from Italian by Antonella Lettieri, published by Foundry Editions

The Witch by Marie NDiaye, translated from French by Jordan Stump, published by MacLehose Press

Women Without Men by Shahrnush Parsipur, translated from Persian by Faridoun Farrokh, published by Penguin International Writers

The Wax Child by Olga Ravn, translated from Danish by Martin Aitken, published by Viking

Taiwan Travelogue by Yáng Shuāng-zǐ, translated from Mandarin Chinese by Lin King, published by And Other Stories

As is often the case, the list heavily favours European authors, much more so than last year, with nine of the thirteen coming from that continent: two each from France and Germany, and the others from Italy, Sweden, Bulgaria, Denmark and the Netherlands. Of the remaining authors, two are from Latin American – Argentina (Gabriela Cabezón Cámara) and Brazil (Ana Paula Maia) – one from Taiwan (Yáng Shuāng-zǐ) and one from Iran (Shahrnush Parsipur). The latter doesn’t quite break the record for the length of time between original publication and translation set last year by Astrid Roemer’s 1982 novel On a Woman’s Madness but comes close having first appeared in 1990 (it does, however, fulfil my prediction that Penguin Modern Classics will be represented). Unusually, six of the writers have been listed before (Cámara, Énard, Genberg, Kehlmann, Ndiaye and Ravn) – almost fifty percent.

The Director probably begins as favourite as Kehlmann is a writer who is entertaining without sacrificing intelligence, and the combination of its real-life protagonist, the art of filmmaking and Nazis is a winning one. Watch out for The Remembered Soldier, however, set in the aftermath of the First World War and the longest novel on the long list. Anjet Daanje may be relatively unknown in the UK, but the novel has already picked up numerous awards, and the author is actually ten years older than Kehlmann. It would not surprise me if these two novels of war fight it out for the prize.

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Katalin Street

February 22, 2026

Magda Szabo is a Hungarian writer whose fame has grown in recent years, largely thanks to the work of translator Len Rix who has brought novels such as Abigail into English and retranslated work, including her best-known novel The Door, and Katalin Street. These three novels he describes as having been written “to explore the effects of the Second World War on the private lives of those who survived”, of which Katalin Street, originally published in 1969, is the first. The novel centres on three families, and their children in particular, who were all neighbours to each other in the years leading up to the war: the sisters, Irén and Blanka, Henriette, whose father, a dentist and is of Jewish descent, and  Bálint, the son of Major Bíró, with whom all three girls are at least a little bit in love. In the novel’s opening section, ‘Places’, these characters are older, they are living in a flat  which “depressed them profoundly”, Blanka is living in Greece, and Irén is married to Bálint, (though he is not her first husband) in a marriage which showed him “that she yearned and pined for Katalin Street just as much as he did.” Henriette is the only one who “visited her old home regularly…

“Not everyone was able to do this, and it made them angry to see others free to come and go at will.”

The novel then takes us back to Henriette’s arrival in Katalin Street in 1934. She is the youngest of the children and Bálint is the oldest. The two sisters are quite different: dark-haired Irén is clever and disciplined; fair-haired Blanka is untidy and careless (in Bálint’s words, “daft”). The children act out a play at school which has significance for their fates later in the novel. Irén plays ‘Hungaria’ with Henriette at her feet (pressing the national coat of arms rather too firmly against her knees). Bálint is dressed as a hussar, and Blanka plays Hungary’s Enemy. Irén hopes:

“…he had noticed how very pretty she had looked that day, how very grown up in that full length dress.”

During the play Blanka refuses to surrender as scripted and Henriette faints with stage fright. Here we see the first signs of romantic feelings between Irén and Bálint, but also Blanka’s stubbornness and anger – an anger that will later lead her to betray Bálint. Henriette’s faint foreshadows her death as we are told when it is revealed that the play will trouble Bálint later in his life:

“The first occasion when it came back to him was ten years after it had taken place, on the day Henriette died.”

The Henriette we met in the opening section is, in fact, a ghost, and will haunt the novel throughout, her visitation interspersed with Irén’s narration. From 1934 the narrative moves on to 1944, and from there to particular years after the war – 1952, 1956 and 1961. As the first section has already indicated, however, Szabo’s approach is not chronological as she will reveal future events when she sees fit – in the same moment we are told about Henriette’s death, we also learn that Bálint will be interrogated by a Party official in 1952. This gives the events of the novel an inevitability which makes the characters seem less culpable of their choices. Szabo also foregrounds the impact of the war and what follows on ordinary life, particularly for women. The internment of Henriette’s parents, for example, is juxtaposed with Irén and Bálint’s engagement as when Major Bíró turns up for the engagement lunch it is to tell them:

“I have to leave you, Henriette must go with me. Her parents are waiting for her.”

In fact, rather than taking her to her parents, he will hide Henriette in his house with strict instructions never to go outside. Her presence there will make Irén doubt her engagement, thinking that Henriette had managed to awaken something in Bálint that went “beyond both love and desire.” Her death will change Bálint completely.

Katalin Street is a wonderful novel weaving an intricate, shifting web of relationships between its four main protagonists. Szabo’s confidence in revealing future events from the opening chapter, but also in the narrative itself, enhances the story she is telling, and the use of Henriette as a ghost (not just hinted at but fully embraced as she roams among the living and the dead) is a masterstroke, particularly as it provides the novel with its memorable, moving ending.

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International Booker Prize Predictions 2026

February 18, 2026

The 24th of February sees the announcement of this year’s International Booker Prize long list, an exciting moment for those of us interested in literature in translation. Every year there seems to be an increase in eligible titles making predictions more challenging but no less fun. Let us first consider some of the favourites (if any such category really exists). My personal choice of a novel that has to be on the list is Daniel Kehlmann’s The Director (translated by Ross Benjamin). Kehlmann made the shortlist of the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize back in 2008 for his first novel, Measuring the World, and was shortlisted for the International Booker with his previous novel, Tyll, in 2020. Given that Tyll is about an obscure 16th century jester, The Director’s focus on the art of film during the Nazi occupation of Europe should make it a much surer bet. Another historical novel which might feature is Olga Ravn’s The Wax Child (translated by Martin Aitken). Like Kehlmann, Ravn has previously been shortlisted (for The Employees in 2021) and witches are the new Nazis if we are to judge a book by the cover of lots of other books, so this may have some popular appeal given its rather experimental narration.

Other previous short listees who may feature again include Gabriela Gabzon Camara for We Are Green and Trembling (translated by Robin Myers), Bora Chung for either The Red Sword or The Midnight Timetable (translated by Anton Hur), Jon Fosse for Vaim (translated by Damion Searles), and Mathias Enard for The Deserters (translated by Charlotte Mandell – though Enard has never been particularly well-treated by the prize with Compass the only one of his novels to have been noticed). One should never bet against Samanta Schweblin, whose success rate is currently 75%, for Good and Evil and Other Stories (translated by Megan McDowell) though short stories are always less likely to make the cut. Recent winners Georgi Gospodinov and Geetanjali Shree also have eligible books (Death and the Gardener, translated by Angela Rodel, and The Roof Beneath their Feet, translated by Rahul Soni, respectively).

In terms of less well-known writers, I am excited to see how new press Akoya fares with a number of eligible titles. It would be wonderful to see a writer such as Bolivia’s Liliana Colzani (You Glow in the Dark, translated by Chris Andrews) or Spain’s Marta Sanz (My Clavicle and Other Massive Misalignments, translated by Katie King) gain recognition on their first UK publication. The same would apply to Finnish author Pirkko Saisio whose Helinski trilogy (translated by Mia Spangenberg, is being published by the rather more established Penguin Classics. (Jean-Noel Orengo’s You Are the Fuhrer’s Unrequited Love, translated by David Watson, would also be eligible). Speaking of series, it’s not impossible that On the Calculation of Volume III (translated by Jennifer Russell and Sophia Hersi Smith) will appear (well, it’s more possible than being stuck in a single day forever) but this feels unlikely as we are now thoroughly immersed in the story. More likely, perhaps, to see the second volume of Asta Olivia Nordenhof’s Scandinavian Star series, The Devil Book (translated by Caroline Waight), which can be more easily read alone.

Looking at possible titles from various small publishers, I would love to see Sara Mesa’s Four by Four (translated by Katie Whittemore) included (Peirene Press), though Eva Meijer Sea Now (translated by Anne Thompson Melo) would make a striking addition with its climate emergency theme. Antonio Xersenesky’s An Infinite Sadness (translated by Daniel Hahn, Charco Press) taps into the ever-popular world of physics. Lee Yuri’s Broccoli Punch (translated by Amber Hyun Jung Kim, Heloise Press) remains my favourite title of the year, though Park Seolyeon’s Capitalists Must Starve (another Anton Hur translation, Tilted Axis Press) runs it a close second. And the inclusion of Balsam Karam’s Event Horizon (translated by Saskia Vogel, Fitzcarraldo Editions) would compensate for the failure to list her previous novel, The Singularity. Whatever happens (and I’m sure the judges will look more widely than I have) it is to be hoped the long list is vibrant and varied (and that none of the books are too long!)

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Queen

February 12, 2026

Brigitta Trotzig is a Swedish writer who published novels in her homeland for almost fifty years – the first in 1951, the last in 2000. Now, fifteen years after her death, we can finally read her work in English. Queen, translated by Saskia Vogel, and appearing in the UK in the excellent Faber Editions series (and from Archipelago Press in the US), was originally published in 1964 as part of Life and Death: Three Stories, though at 140 pages it probably exceeds a novella. Life and death certainly feature equally in Queen, set in an earlier, unforgiving landscape beginning in 1930 but largely looking backwards from there. The novel opens with the arrival of “a widow from America” at Judit’s (Queen’s) farm in Sweden:

“…something had happened to her there. And now she could remember but little – items, stains, fragments.”

The character’s inarticulacy highlights Trotzig’s challenge in writing a novel about people who do not think in narrative or reflect. As Sarah Moss outlines in her introduction:

“There is no privileged access to inner monologues or internally articulated but unspoken need and desire because Judit and her family live in instinct and repression…”

Indeed, we are told on the opening page “Children here learn that silence is golden and it is indeed so, nothing can ever be said anyway.” Trotzig overcomes this problem with a rich, descriptive omniscient narration which slows the pace of the novel to the rhythms of the land. Judit greets the widow’s arrival with suspicion, but this event is nearer the end of the story than the beginning. The novel then retreats to the previous century, a time of famine, when the farm’s gates are bolted against the “faltering shadow-and-rag creatures” in search of food. Judit’s father, Joahnn, then a child, sees a woman with a child:

“Her face was white. Her hunger was dark. Death was dark. The snow was white.”

There is something slightly supernatural in her appearance, admittedly seen through the eyes of a child, and when her plea for help is ignored, we are invited to think the farm’s troubles begin. Johann as an adult will allow all-comers to enter and eat, even when there is little for the family, and he is portrayed as a simple man, much like his son, Albert. It is the daughter, Judit, who must take on the responsibility of the farm, and of raising her younger brother, Viktor, especially after her mother’s death:

“The boy Viktor had been placed in her arms. And with the he was hers. And she was his.”

As Viktor grows, however, he is even less help than Albert (as with much else, this is revealed early in the novel) – “he’d been named as father of several children in the area” – and eventually he runs away. Judit, however, refuses to criticise him (“not a word of censure against the runaway brother ever passed their lips”) and Trotzig uses the sight of one of his bastard children in a shop to demonstrate that Judit still longs for him.

It is Viktor who goes to New York in what is, perhaps surprisingly, one of the best written sections of the book:

“A mighty sea of people, of faces, welled forth, welled forth, they welled up out of howling caves, out of ash-black buildings, going up and down the roaring, rattling stairs.”

The fierce, natural landscape of Viktor’s youth imprints itself on the city. Trotzig, having detailed the rural poverty of Sweden, now delineates the urban poor – it is the 1920s and the height of the Great Depression. In one particularly fine passage, Viktor hears rumours of work and finds himself in an immense crowd:

“In a few moments the place was aboil, faces appeared and vanished as if on the crests and troughs if waves; in the distance the row of whirling batons was like a surf brake – the first blood-washed faces rocked out into the sea of people like debris from a shipwreck.”

The entire section is terrifying, and Viktor only survives thanks to a Polish woman, who takes him back to her room and nurses him back to health. If this decision seems unlikely, it stems from the instinctive rather than the rational in ruthless world where solitary survival is unlikely.

Queen is a remarkable novel: the reader is may not relate to the characters, but they are so powerfully drawn that they linger long after the final page is turned. Trotzig’s ability to articulate the experience of a different time and place (this was a historical novel for her as well) is astonishing. Hopefully more of her work will follow.

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The Case Worker

February 6, 2026

When Hungarian writer George Konrád, his sister and his parents returned to their hometown of Berettyóújfalu in 1945 they were the only Jewish family to have survived the war intact. Their troubles were not over, however, as his father’s business was soon appropriated by the new Communist government. Despite this, Konrád chose to remain in Hungary in 1956 and eventually, after various short-term jobs, worked for seven years as a social worker focusing on children’s welfare from 1959. Ten years later his first novel, The Case Worker, was published, drawing heavily on these experiences. It was translated into English in 1974 by Paul Aston as part of Philip Roth’s Writers from the Other Europe series, and, though this is not the only edition, it has been out of print for decades.

This might be partly explained by the fact that it is one of the most depressing novels you are likely to encounter. Narrated by a case (or social) worker who is tasked with aiding the dregs of society, and who himself undergoes a crisis in the course of the novel, it observes the very worst of humanity and offers little, if anything, in the way of hope or redemption. As Irving Howe explains in his introduction, where other writers have included characters from this underclass:

“Konrád was perhaps the first to place them in a distinctive contemporary setting as the ‘clients’ of a social welfare system that is overwhelmed by their needs and clamour, and proceeds to slot them into categories, hospitals, files and clinics, attempting through society’s benevolence or callousness to cope with the gratuitous cruelties of nature.”

In such circumstances a case worker cannot help but harden their heart as Konrád makes clear in the opening paragraph:

“He thinks his situation is desperate; seems perfectly normal to me. He swears his cross is too heavy; seems quite bearable to me. He hints at suicide; I let it pass. He thinks I can save him; I can’t tell him how wrong he is.”

The narrator describes his job as being like “swallowing fistful of mud; I can neither digest it or vomit it up.” The novel opens with a series of ‘cases’, the overwhelming nature of his task emphasised by the frequent use of lists. In one example, he imagines what sounds might originate from a filing cabinet containing all his cases:

“Children’s cries, woman’s moans, resounding blows, quarrels, obscenities, recriminations, interrogations, hasty decisions, false testimony, administrative platitudes, jovial police slang, judges’ verdicts, the vapid chatter of female supervisors, the incantations of psychologists, my colleagues’ embittered humour, my own solitary invective, and so on and so on.”

We are soon introduced to the particular case at the heart of the novel, the Bandulas, who have committed suicide by poison. The narrator already knows the couple, and we learn that they lost their daughter during the war, and that afterwards their house was nationalised (as happened to Konrád’s family) and tenants moved into some of the rooms. Bandula is denounced by one of the tenants for hording jewellery and imprisoned, eventually returning home with “his mind unhinged” and taking to drink. They have another child, a boy, Feri, but he is born both physically and mentally disabled. The narrator first sees him while his parents are still alive:

“Feri was stamping about in his crib on an excrement-stained nylon sheet strewn with apple cores, cabbage stalks, carrot ends, a bare rib of mutton, and various unidentifiable scraps of meat. It was the same carpet of miscellaneous garbage as in the monkey house at the zoo.”

The narrator is tasked with taking the child to an institution where he will “disappear through the trap door leading to the repository for infantile rubbish…” He describes in detail the journey and the institution itself up to the point he waves a “token farewell” but we find him waking the next morning in the Bandula’s room with Feri “asleep in his ramshackle bed.” His decision is instinctive rather than rational; “it is not duty that keeps me here,” he says but, even though he knows he can walk away at any moment, “this chid has undeniably become my lot.”

Konrád frequently uses war imagery to describe the situation the narrator finds himself in. The room is “a house abandoned the previous night by drunken soldiers”; the cases he deals with are people who “live in a state of perpetual siege”; the case worker is a “neutral but armed observer.” Now it seems, he wants to experience the life of the observed, however artificial he knows this is. This highlights that, beneath the cynicism, the novel retains, if not hope, at least some faint belief in humanity. Ultimately, The Case Worker is a cry of rage rather than despair at the suffering that surrounds us and the state’s ineffectual attempts to relive it, a lesson that goes beyond any particular time or place.

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The Midnight Timetable

February 1, 2026

The Midnight Timetable is the latest collection of short stories / novel from Bora Chung translated by Anton Hur. Connected by a mysterious Institute and a narrator who is employed there, the stories are also linked via certain reported elements, yet, at the same time, each one stands alone quite comfortably. In an afterword, Chung recounts how enjoyable she finds writing ghost stories, remarking that they are a “good method of overcoming” writer’s block:

“Midnight Timetable was not a deadline or a chore for me, but a really fun amusement park of a book to work on.”

Despite the eerie atmosphere which pervades this volume, that pleasure is communicated in the flow of both the prose and the ideas, which are less demanding than Chung’s other work. The Institute houses a collection of supernatural objects, each with a story attached. These are revealed to us via a narrator which has recently joined to work the nightshift, who hears them for a ‘sunbae’ or senior member of staff (it’s not entirely clear why this word remains untranslated unless simply to add to the mystery) assigned with “showing [him] the ropes.” The physical unreliability of the Institute is introduced via a cleaning lady who meets a mysterious figure (“utterly nondescript”) who prevents her from entering underground car park, only to discover that going back up the stairs takes her down to the parking lot. Both the stairs and the figure will appear in a later story.

Rather than horrifying, the stories seek to unsettle the reader. In the first chapter another employee of the Institute, Chan, finds himself driving through a tunnel that gets longer the further he drives. A phone rings and, when he answers it, asks him, “Aren’t you about to be deceased?” In this case, however, the haunting prompts him to rethink his life as at…

“…the desperate moment he wanted to reach out to someone for help, how his desperation and will to live had focused on a single person.”

Moral lessons are never far from the supernatural occurrences Chung recounts. In ‘Handkerchief’ the titular object takes on significance when the second daughter insists that her mother’s last wish was to be buried with it. Her siblings agree, apart from the younger son who has relied on his mother throughout his life:

“He insisted the handkerchief was his. Wasn’t he the one who had talked to his mother the most, the one to whom she had given every object of value that ever passed through her hands?”

On this occasion he is overruled and the obsession he develops with possessing the handkerchief will prove his undoing. Things also do not turn out well for DSP, introduced in ‘Cursed Sheep’ as running a “streaming channel that specialized in ghostly spectra and other paranormal phenomena” who has sought a job at the Institute in search of content. He makes the mistake of removing an object from the Institute, a tennis shoe with a picture of a sheep on it, and he, too, receives calls foretelling his death:

“What time will you board the hearse?”

A sheep also features in ‘Silence of the Sheep’ (therefore fully justifying the cover design which echoes that of Cursed Bunny). Here its ghostly presence enables the deputy director (in her past life) to tell the future. Again, there is a moral dimension as the sheep is one of a group which has been experimented on, first spotted in a field near the veterinary school:

“The sheep were covered in wounds. Their wool was shorn bald in different places, and there were surgical looking wounds in those spots.”

Both ‘Bluebird’ and ‘Why Does the Cat’ might be considered revenge stories. The first is a historical tale which features the handkerchief from earlier; the second is a more modern story about a man who murders his wife and gets away with it:

“As with many murders where the reason is stated to be ‘She refused to see me,’ the incident was considered compulsive and unpremeditated in a court of law or by law enforcement.”

Chung uses the ironic haunting of the dead wife to highlight a misogynistic application of law. There is a hint to Chung’s wider intention in the book’s final story, ‘Sunning Day’, when the objects are taken outside for one day, when the narrator states:

“We return to the work of protecting the undead from the terrors of our daylight world.”

Generally, it is the actions of the living that are to feared rather than their supernatural consequences. This is delightful selection of ghost stories which are playful and imaginative enough to always entertain without being too gruesome for gentler minds.

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Iron Lung

January 29, 2026

Kirstine Reffstrup is a Danish author whose debut novel, I, Unica (about the German artist and writer Unica Zürn), was nominated for number of prizes. Now her 2023 novel, Iron Lung, has been translated into English by Hunter Simpson and published by Peirene Press. The novel is divided into two distinct stories, one set in a hospital in Copenhagen in 1952 and the other in an orphanage in Hungary in 1913. The first tells the story of a teenage girl, Agnes, in an iron lung, a mechanical respirator she has been placed inside as a consequence of catching polio. Being inside the device leaves her almost entirely helpless:

“I can’t use my hands, I can only move my left one and move it a little, and I need help with everything. With washing myself, with eating. I have to lie completely still in the iron lung with my arms at my side while my body is pumped with air…”

Agnes will spend months inside the iron lung, with only visits from her mother and her friend, Ella, to break the monotony. The language suggests her mother’s visits are not entirely welcome, as she “bends over the iron lung as if it were a coffin” and “her hands crawl over my body,” whereas Ella is described as a “sister” to her. As the novel progresses, we see Ella become more distant from Agnes as she is able to embrace her developing sexually in a way Agnes cannot, telling her:

“I was out last night. All night. With a man, he invited me out… he told me to take off my clothes, and I wanted to do it quickly, but he said slowly, slowly and I didn’t understand why. He sucked on my breasts, he examined every part of my body as if I was the sick one.”

Agnes’ reaction is to cry, not because she unable to experience life like her friend, but because she fears she is losing Ella. Perhaps, it is suggested, she is jealous not of Ella but of the man. Earlier, when her friend brought her a diaphragm, the first sign that she was maturing more quickly, it is Ella she imagines:

“The men stand over Ella. She spreads her legs and their eyes flash as they fumble with the diaphragm, looking up at her hole, and they’re all naked and blushing and bashful.”

Agnes’ story alone would not sustain a novel, but it is paired with the story of Boy (later Iggy), a baby abandoned by its mother near Budapest in the early twentieth century. Agnes first feels a connection to Iggy’s story when she faints as a result of the polio:

“When I fell to the asphalt, the old world disappeared…I was somewhere I’ve never been before. In a city I’ve only read about in books. The city was called Budapest… I reached out my hand. I saw my own birth. It really was me.”

There are hints that there is something unusual about the baby as the midwife “touched its genitals with a thumb and sighed”, describing it as a “strange child”

“The first of its kind

and the last.”

The child is taken in by nuns at an orphanage for boys, and is called ‘Boy’, but they when they are older they realise they are different:

“I have slender wrists and light down over my lip. My sex is smooth and arching like a big goose egg.”

Any idea that they are simply a girl, hiding their gender among all the male orphans, is contradicted by the fact that they are taken to a doctor in Budapest to be x-rayed:

“Dr Vajda says that he will print the pictures in a scientific journal, to share their findings about me, my body, the walking mystery that I am.”

What isn’t in doubt is the treatment they receive when the boys at the orphanage discover their secret which will see them leave to forge a new life. Boy’s story is obviously more dramatic, but also more intriguing, particularly the conjunction of the character’s uncertain gender with the early part of the twentieth century. However, both parts if the novel work on their own terms: Refferstrup is especially adept at creating a sense of period. Where Iron Lung does not quite work, for me at least, is in the combination of the two as one does not seem to reflect the other in a meaningful way. Each is so well-written, however, that this flaw only occasionally detracts from the experience of reading.

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The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne

January 24, 2026

Brian Moore’s first novel, The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne published in 1955, was not actually his first novel – he had already written a series of pulp thrillers and would go on to write three more after. It is, however, very far from the thrills implied in A Bullet for my Lady and This Gun for Gloria despite sharing the author’s love of a female-centred title. There is nothing in the way of violence in Judith Hearne unless one counts the violent passions that arise in Judith, a middle-aged spinster, on the appearance of her landlady’s brother, James Madden, from New York where he has spent most of his adult life. (Moore similarly left Ireland for Canada in 1949, and would later live in New York).

Hearne lives a lonely, unfulfilled life, moving from boarding house to boarding house (we think, initially, as a result of her high standards), counting every coin she spends as her pupils (she teaches piano) dwindle in number, and unlikely ever to marry now that she is in her forties. Watched over by a picture of the aunt she nursed through the prime years of her life, and Jesus with his Scared Heart, she seems content with her limited existence until she meets Madden:

“He was a big man. He alone had risen when she entered… Who else but an American would wear that big bluestone ring on his finger.”

His manners (important to Hearn who has earlier dismissed her landlady’s son, Bernard, as having “no manners, staring like that”) and the glamour of his stateside life are attractive to Hearne; her interest in that life pleases Madden. Yet, she immediately fears rejection:

“He would, see her shyness, her stiffness. And it would frighten him, he would remember he was alone with her… he would see the hysteria in her eyes, the hateful hot flush in her cheeks. And he would go as all men had gone before him.”

This fear is rooted in her desperate loneliness, which Moore exposes in the pages which follow. Her meagre budget is such she cannot afford to eat lunch, describing hunger as an “expensive little rascal”. She meets an ex-pupil only to discover he has a new music teacher:

“You’d think I had the plague or something. That’s four pupils gone in the last six months.”

The only bright spot in her week is Sunday, “the great day of the week,” her only social occasion when she visits the O’Neill’s. The visit is viewed as a chore by their children, Shaun describing it as “the advent of the Great Bore” before disappearing to study, as does his sister, Una. The routine nature her visit is emphasised by their mimicking of her greeting, “It’s only me,” and her regular refusal of a third glass of sherry. Hearne is both aware of this but unable to break free from the straitjacket of her repetitive existence:

“There! She’d done it again, saying something she always said. She saw the small cruel smile on Una’s face…”

It is this awareness that prevents Hearne being simply a figure of fun to the reader as she is to the children. Where they assume that she is contented with her unchanging routine, we sense that she still hopes, as she does with Madden. At the same time, Moore suggests from the beginning that her feelings are not reciprocated:

“Friendly, she is. And educated. Those rings and that gold wristwatch. They’re real. A pity she looks like that.”

The emphasis on her expensive jewellery and dismissal of her looks indicate that, though Madden may admire her sophistication, he does not view her romantically. Throughout the novel, Moore will allow the reader glimpses of Hearne from the point of view of other characters, enhancing the essential tragedy of her story. Her weakness for alcohol is also hinted at on her first visit to the O’Neill’s:

“The first sip was delicious, steadying, making you want a big swallow. But it has to last.”

Even the language (“a big swallow”) suggests the loss of decorum that will come with drinking. As Hearne loses the tight control she attempts to hold on her life by constantly denying herself there is something to admire as well as regret. Moore’s ability to write the life of a middle-aged woman is quite remarkable and though the novel may not be a ‘thriller’ the narrative tension is, at times, exquisite.

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Piercing

January 18, 2026

Ryu Murakimi’s Piercing was originally published in 1994 and became the second of his novels to be translated into English (by Ralph McCarthy) in 2007. A dark thriller of dysfunctional love and damaged individuals, it begins with new father Kawashima Masayuki watching over his baby as she sleeps. This tender scene takes an unexpected turn when he takes an ice pick from his pocket and lifts the baby’s blanket to expose her neck and chest:

“Gripping the ice pick lightly to minimise the trembling, he placed the point of it next to the baby’s cheek.”

Kawashima’s compulsion lies in his past, firstly in an abusive childhood which he has confessed to his wife, Yoko, where his mother regularly beat him:

“What bothered me most, though, was that I was the only one she hit. She never laid a finger on my baby brother.”

What Yoko does not know is that this led to a relationship with an older woman when Kawashima was seventeen. Kawashima lives with the woman, a stripper in her thirties, who often brings men back to the apartment and then complains when he tolerates this – and when he doesn’t:

“What a hateful bitch, Kawashima used to think – how does a person ever get to be this despicable? He was sure he was the only one in the world who could ever care about her.”

One particularly ferocious argument ends with Kawashima deliberately placing his hand in boiling water and then stabbing the woman with an ice pick when she is in the shower. His memory of the incident is vague after that point, though he knows the woman survived. The last thing he remembers is the ice pick falling under the bathtub and he imagines it is still there “and he somehow felt the day would come when he’d go back there to see.” Perhaps this sense that the incident remains ‘unfinished’ leads to his present compulsion which he dismisses as “just a remnant of those times, just an echo from the past.” Despite this he decides:

“There’s only one way to overcome the fear: you’ve got to stab someone else with an ice pick.”

If the novel was only about Kawashima’s plan to lure a prostitute to a hotel room and kill her it would make for a tense if conventional thriller, but Murakami moves the narrative perspective to that of the prostitute before she arrives. Sanada Chiaki is a young woman with her own problems. She is worried that her sex drive had disappeared (“she couldn’t detect so much as zero point one milligram of sexual desire anywhere in her body”) which scares her as “it had always been the first stage of that awful cycle…

“The cycle of terror that took hold with the sudden realisation that she alone was to blame for all the bad things happening around her.”

The single nipple that she has pierced herself (presumably a more transgressive action in 1990s Japan than now) thrills her as a symbol of being able to “choose your own pain” – now she is worried “it would be choosing her.”

Like Kawashima, Chiaki was abused as a child – in her case, sexually abused by her father. She is similarly haunted by the past:

“When these sleeping memories are awakened, they begin to squirm and then to swim, slowly at first, but gradually faster, up to the surface. And once they get there, your senses shut down.”

Both Chiaki and Kawashima disassociate to survive. Chiaki imagines she is watching herself have sex:

“At first I used to ask her not to look at me like that, but all she would do is snicker, so I stopped. Besides, I was afraid that if I talked to her too much, I might divide into two separate people.”

When Kawashima was being beaten by his mother as a child he also separated into two:

“As a boy, he’d escaped the pain and terror of his mother’s beatings by concentrating on the thought that the one who was being hit wasn’t really him.”

The two are more alike than they realise but also have a very confused relationship with reality. The novel could actually be seen as a twisted romance where the suitability of the couple is more apparent to the reader than to the characters, and they meanwhile seem intent on placing barriers (for example, murder) between them. As the novel progresses, the narrative itself begins to move freely between the characters, outlining a series of misunderstandings.

Piercing certainly has the sex and violence one is led to expect from Ryu Murakami, but beneath its pulpy exterior it reflects on the legacy of abuse. Not only is Kawashima fully developed as character, but so is his ‘victim’, Chiaki. In its crazed and chaotic denouement, there is also something quite touching.

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The Suicides

January 14, 2026

As translator Esther Allen points out in her afterword, it was fellow novelist Juan Jose Saer who first referred to Antonio di Benedetto’s novels Zama, The Silentiary and The Suicides as a “Trilogy of Expectation.” Now, almost ten years after the first, the third and final novel has appeared in her translation. Unlike the previous novels – Zama is set at the end of the 18th century and The Silentiary shortly after World War Two – The Suicides feels contemporary with its original publication in 1969. Its nameless narrator, a journalist, also feels closer to Benedetto himself, whose father died when he was eleven, possibly by his own hand. The novel begins:

“My father took his life on a Friday afternoon.

He was thirty-three.

I’ll be thirty-three the last Friday of next month.”

And so the story takes on an urgency that goes beyond the journalist’s deadline when the narrator is asked to investigate a photograph of two suicides:

“There’s terror in their eye. But their mouths are grimacing in sombre pleasure.”

Their expression echoes the contradictions of the narrator. As he explores death, his mind frequently strays to sex – “Here, along the sidewalk, comes a blouse with a lot going on inside,” he thinks as he leaves the office. A girlfriend, Julia, does not prevent him looking for other sexual encounters, or even relationships, symbolic of a more general sense of dissatisfaction with his life. (His relationship with Julia is perhaps best summed up when he says, “she accedes to my desires, as docile as ever”). He is paired with a photographer, Marcela, whom he freely admits to disliking, yet determinedly attempts to discover if she is single. There is also a dichotomy between his ability to look clearly at the darker side of life and his need for escape, which often takes the form of a science fiction film at the cinema.

The initial photograph leads to a wider investigation into suicide for a series of articles which are apparently never written. A key component of the novel is the interpolation of facts on the subject provided by Bibi, the agency translator. The narrator and Marcela visit the scene of a double suicide, two boys, and speak to the father, though the suggestion of a relationship (“Why’d they do it? Things weren’t working out between them?”) is ignored by the police officer. The idea of a suicide pact will provide the novel with its conclusion.

Though the article the narrator is writing has a nominal deadline, the novel moves inward rather than forward as his research widens, and the urgency seems to come from his fear that he, too, is a suicide. He remembers walking with his grandfather:

“Then he would proclaim in his Italian dialect that I understood perfectly, ‘Twelve – twelve suicides there have been among us.”

Julia, too, is sucked into his obsession with death when she asks her class to write on the topic – an assignment which the principal and parents regard with distaste. The incident both demonstrates the narrator’s egotism (he has little thought for the problems he has caused her – “I tell myself that in the end, it’s all so much theatre”) and society’s reluctance to face the inevitable. As the novel progresses the proposed series of articles on suicide increasingly resembles the narrator’s life, When the editor laments the lack of publication possibilities (“It won’t be any use, there are no buyers…”):

“I ask whether the series is cancelled. He says not yet.”

The novel is full of striking incident – a woman who claims to hear voices, a body exhumed with a missing hand – but it is the narrator’s own journey which holds the reader’s real attention, told in a tone that seeks the cynicism of the hardboiled detective but is secretly too earnest for that role. Whether it is a true trilogy or not, the publication of all three novels in English is to be celebrated.

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