5 books, 5 countries: Russia, Spain, Algeria, Norway and Iraq (via the UK) set the scene. What links these works is a shared desire for clarity. Stepanova dismantles memory; García Llovet stalks the edges of crime; Khatibi writes with hindsight of the sociological and political; Hjorth worries at family trauma like a dog with a bone; Haddad traces power where death, identity and money collide. Spare, sharp and illuminating each in its own way in its humanity.
Floodlines by Saleem Haddad
“It’s about what we remember, what we choose to forget, and what refuses to let us go” — Saleem Haddad
A sweeping, multigenerational literary novel that knits together family drama, historical trauma and the politics of memory across Iraq and the wider world. Set primarily in the summer of 2014, it begins when three estranged Iraqi-British sisters — Zainab, the elusive beauty; Mediha, the embittered pragmatist; and Ishtar, the rebellious queer artist — are reunited when their late father’s long-lost paintings are rediscovered. What seems like an inheritance dispute quickly becomes a reckoning with betrayal, exile and the fractured legacy of a homeland they barely recognise. The narrative spans decades and travels from 1950s Baghdad to contemporary London, from the banks of the Tigris to refugee camps. The impact of war, art, memory and identity on lives and relationships is clear to see. Inspired in part by the artistic legacy of Haddad’s great-uncle, modernist painter Jewad Selim, Floodlines is both an intimate family saga and a broader meditation on belonging, creativity, queer identity and the after-effects of (neo)colonial violence.
Repetition by Vigdis Hjorth Tr. Charlotte Barslunj
“Hjorth has a gift for depicting painful, confusing, and mortifying relationships” — Ursula Lindsey, New York Review of Books
The Norwegian novelist Vigdis Hjorth has had six of her twenty novels published in English by Verso. The latest just out this month is Repetition: A Novel, which really reads like a memoir. A woman retreats to a forest cabin with her dog, deliberately alone. From this solitude she slips back to the year she was sixteen, nearly half a century earlier. When her mother discovers her diary, the source of the daughter’s fear and anxiety, and the father’s aloofness, is revealed. It isn’t easy being human . . . In all her novels, Hjorth returns obsessively to family conflict and trauma, truth vs the stories we tell ourselves, identity, memory and autonomy and social norms in a so-called progressive society. Her prose is sharp and precise without being precious. Autofiction has a strong readership in the UK thanks to authors like Karl Ove Knausgaard.
Is Mother Dead? was longlisted for the International Booker Prize in 2023.
The End of the Sahara by Saïd Khatibi Tr. Alexander Elinson
“Elegant prose and a keen sense of place bring the narrative to life. It’s a solid whodunit that doubles as a captivating look at a country in transition” — Publishers’ Weekly
A polyphonic, atmospheric noir-inflected crime novel set in Algeria’s Bou Saada in the autumn of 1988, its catalyst is the brutal murder of Zakia “Zaza” Zaghouani, a young nightclub singer whose death ripples through a small desert town already on edge, experiencing food shortages, locusts, corruption, social unrest, economic decline and looming political upheaval. Multiple voices tell the story – locals, hotel staff, associates of Zaza, a bungling police inspector, a defense lawyer, shopkeepers, and others – offering a variety of viewpoints illuminating not only the murder but the broader fault lines impacting the community. Women in the novel aren’t just victims but are resourceful and central to the narrative.
Selected by The Markaz Review as one of their !10 Noir Novels to Kill For”
BookBlast Review, Sarajevo Firewood
Sánchez by Esther García Llovet Tr. Richard Village
“This novel is a road movie, very traditionally Spanish, where the main characters desperately search, under the Madrid sky, for a piece of heaven that they’re never going to reach” — Esquire
A lean, visceral urban night-ride through the underbelly of Madrid, Sánchez centres around two former lovers who are self-described “losers” with dubious pasts. Nikki has made money on contraband tobacco near Gibraltar, and ropes in Sánchez, (known for being unlucky), into helping her deliver a greyhound dog to an Italian woman involved in the greyhound-racing underworld. What follows over the course of one long, surreal night is a journey through an urban Madrid that tourists never see: of flyovers, bus stations and industrial estates. Of empty highways, rundown bars and bingo halls. Of poker games, scams and dodgy deals. Of gamblers, gangsters and the occasional saint, who might just perform a miracle since chance encounters and absurdity sit side by side. The prose is sparse and sharp, with clipped dialogue and a lean structure that borrows from noir and thriller traditions while also capturing an almost dreamlike atmospheric quality. The city itself is a character — brutal, tender, absurd, and very alive in the margins.
The Disappearing Act by Maria Stepanova Tr. Sasha Dugdale
“Far from a literary gimmick, the novel comes across as an urgent call to resist complacency and recover one’s vitality in the face of injustice. It’s a stunner” — Publishers Weekly
In The Disappearing Act, a novelist in exile, referred to as M, is crippled by shame as her country wages war on a separate sovereign state, and her language and vocation fall away from her. Stranded in an unfamiliar city which 
she visits for an event, severed from the roots of her identity, she briefly imagines reinvention when she meets a troupe of circus performers who invite her to join them. Hope is on the horizon. But memory, culture and history close in. A disturbing, lucid meditation on political exile by one of the most formidable writers of her generation.
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