An elder care worker struggles with her daughter’s choices in Kim Hye-jin’s moving novel "Concerning My Daughter". A mother raises her child, instills good values, and models appropriate behavior: for the novel’s unnamed narrator,... Read More

"Phalaina" is an enchanting dark fairy tale focused on an ethereal, red-eyed girl who may not be human. Manon is a little girl when she appears, alone in the woods, in late nineteenth-century England. Although she is free and happy, she... Read More

Lars Mytting’s epic, enchanting historical novel "The Reindeer Hunters" ushers a remote Norwegian village into the modern age. In the twenty years since Butangen’s stave church was removed and Astrid Hekne died giving birth to twins,... Read More

In Brenda Lozano’s "Witches", an Indigenous healer tells her story to a reporter who has her own unhealed wounds. Paloma was killed for being Muxe, a third gender recognized by the Zapotec, one of Mexico’s many Indigenous groups. The... Read More

Two outcasts from a troubled Rwandan village try to save their country in Scholastique Mukasonga’s novel "Kibogo". In the 1940s and 1950s, Rwanda faced numerous tragedies, including drought, famine, war, and continuing repression by... Read More

In Hemley Boum’s novel Days Come & Go, a woman’s terminal diagnosis triggers memories of her family’s tragic history. Anna grew up without a mother. Her daughter, Abi, has never known a world without her mother in it. But Anna... Read More

A taxi driver succumbs to her bizarre, terrifying delusions in Juan José Millás’s novel "Let No One Sleep". From the moment that she heard her downstairs neighbor playing opera through the air vent, Lucía knew that they were... Read More

Dark and supernatural forces affect many lives in Alla Gorbunova’s novel It’s the End of the World, My Love. Russia is a vast, contradictory place. For all its natural beauty and cultural traditions, its troubled history often causes... Read More