This month’s Top 5 Books from around the world takes in five distinct voices embracing sun-baked Mediterranean islands, surreal, tech-fused futures and witchy woods among other places, as they go behind the masks we wear to explore the fine line between connection and isolation.
You Know The Sun Bothers Me by Ryan Falzon (translated by Joe Gatt) is a contemporary ‘millennial dread’ novel set over the course of one hot, intense Maltese summer. An unnamed, thirty-something physics teacher plans to spend his holidays fixing up his vintage Fiat 131 and pursuing an obsessive crush on Sarah, an artist he encounters online. Though they sleep together and text endlessly, their relationship is a frustrating non-event. As August arrives, Sarah begins to ghost him, leaving him dazed and confused. This is mirrored by chaotic, overcrowded, claustrophobic modern Malta. Technology means we are constantly connected, but it actually makes it easier to stay completely detached and emotionally unavailable. It’s the quintessential twenty-first-century ‘almost-relationship’ novel.
BUY You Know The Sun Bothers Me
Philippe Besson’s The Summer Boy (translated by Sam Taylor) is a nostalgic, sentimental follow-up to Lie with Me. Set in 1985, this easy read follows a group of teenagers on a French island through a languid, aimless summer of drinking, smoking, and casual sex. The idyllic reverie is abruptly shattered when one of them vanishes, leaving behind a sense of shock and an unresolved mystery.
A Girl Left the Room is the debut novel by acclaimed Danish poet Ulrikka S. Gernes translated by Caroline Waight. Tanja is a lonely fourteen-year-old growing up in a Swedish forest. Her parents are preoccupied with her father’s painting career and their volatile marriage, leaving Tanja restless and bored. At her father’s gallery opening, she is introduced to a well-known forty-something writer who is a close family friend. He begins to write to her, using his intellect and way with words to seduce and ultimately exploit her. What was presented to her as a glorious love story turns out to be a dark, controlling relationship built on shame and emotional manipulation. The initial excitement and desire rapidly give way to a confusing, painful reality. Her isolation is worsened as the adults and their bohemian entourage look the other way. Tanja’s escape happens as she grows into her own person. Unlike Lolita, which is recounted by the predator, A Girl Left the Room is framed around the adult Tanja looking back and reclaiming the childhood stolen from her.
A Mask the Colour of the Sky by Bassem Khandaqji, translated by Addie Leak, won the International Prize for Arabic Fiction in 2024.
Nur, a Palestinian refugee from a camp near Ramallah has overlapping physical characteristics with an Ashkenazi Jew. Fluent in Hebrew and with a degree in archaeology, he dreams of freedom and of writing a novel about Mary Magdalene based on the Gnostic Gospels. When he discovers an Israeli ID card in the pocket of a secondhand coat, he assumes a false identity and is hired for an archaeological dig near Megiddo. Passing as an Israeli, he moves through a world that was previously off-limits and gains insight into the lives of those he’s been taught to perceive as enemies. As Nur’s borrowed identity deepens, so does the rift within. Ultimately, the novel explores the split between a person’s true identity that is suppressed and their protective ‘mask’ of survival.
Animal Spiral by Luis Othoniel Rosa (translated by Katie Marya) is a bizarre mind-bending combination of sci-fi and magical realism anchored by elements of reality. When middle-aged twin streamers in Puerto Rico plug into each other across thirty four translucent cables, a shared collective consciousness known as “the Animal” is born. Spanning 400 years of human and post-human history, Animal Spiral follows this expanding intra-cerebral force from a street revolution in San Juan to a transhuman compound in future Cuba. Eventually, humanity gives way to multi-bodied siblings sharing singular minds shaped like eels, serpents, beetles and anthropomorphic birds. Highly surreal and speculative, this oddball, inventive novel explores loneliness, the desire for genuine connection and the fear of losing our humanity as technology evolves.
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