Hotels in fiction can serve as places of desolation or discovery; as escape hatches, or else punishment blocks. In her third novel, Eimear McBride channels this ambivalence but annexes it to another sub-genre - the narrative of life on the road, with all its detours and disorientations. Captured at intervals, from her thirties to her fifties, McBride‘s protagonist picks up the tangled threads of a woman’s life.

Neatly contained, truncated by decisive white space, Jenny Offill’s paragraphs – they have been called “fragments” and even “stanzas” – might be the first thing you notice about Weather, if you are new to her writing. Sometimes they are pithy, aphoristic; mostly they stretch to the extent of a vivid vignette, and the logic that links them is not necessarily linear, but spatial, as they slip from observation to joke to anecdote to rehearsals of Q&As and facts carefully collected like objet trouvés, although the gaps between them never feel abrupt. 

For travellers, “music is a passport, especially in Russia…” Borrowing an adage from the British diplomat Thomas Preston, Sophy Roberts could be speaking about the eccentric quest that lies behind The Lost Pianos of Siberia.

These days, Bloomsbury rests in a state of elegant somnolence. The ghosts of Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell linger on in the shabby gentility of Russell Square and its environs, the bookish institutions that are the bones of the place conferring tranquility, despite the many students and tourists.

To the Lake, Kassabova titles this book, but the journey it unfolds tells of not one ancient lake but two: “twins” Ohrid and Prespa, the Lake of Light and the Vale of Snow; these siblings feed each other’s waters through underground streams (the only "subterranean communication system" of its kind in Eurasia). Meanwhile, above, the waters sit “embedded diamond-like in the mountain folds of Western Macedonia and eastern Albania” in a region that was, once upon a time, “the nerve centre of the Balkans”. 

Conjuring up nostalgia for a past readers never had is, perhaps, the litmus test for any good coming-of-age story. Writers have the hard task of making the general particular – because growing up, in one way or another, is universal whereas how and when and where we do is not. They also have the equally, if not harder, task of making the particular general – blurring that focus enough for the rest of us to share in their vision. A bit like using a state-of-the-art camera to take an early photograph; a twenty-first century Stieglitz.

Those of us who have to toil and sweat with other languages often feel a twinge of envy when we meet truly bilingual folk. That ability to switch codes, seemingly without any fuss, must confer so many benefits. More than ever, bilingualism blossoms across an increasingly connected world, often under the radar of social and educational policy. I know people who will claim to be no good at languages – in the formal, academic sense – and then phone their mum to chat in Urdu or in Greek.

In Clemens Meyer’s new collection of short stories Dark Satellites (translated from German by Kate Derbyshire), the lonely frequently enter into each other’s orbit. Their loneliness is intensified by every rotation they make of one another. These are people at the very margins of society. It is here where the author plies his trade.

"The deaf don’t believe in silence. Silence is the invention of the hearing." This is one of two author’s "Notes" to Ilya Kaminsky’s latest collection, Deaf Republic, which was nominated for this year’s T. S. Eliot Prize. As an afterword, the note acts as a cautionary gloss on the silences within the preceding poems: do not take these at face-value, as absences of sound. Instead, they seem to ask us to think of silence as a shorthand for ideas of courage, fortitude – silence as "a soul’s noise".

Like many writers, Jeet Thayil is a bit of an outsider. And, if his track record is anything to go by, he has been happy to keep it that way.