Cormac McCarthy’s first books in over a decade are coming out this year, a month apart from one another. The Passenger tells the story of deep-sea diver Bobby Western, desperately in love with his perfect, beautiful, wildly intelligent dead sister, Alicia. Then, Stella Maris is her story, named after the asylum to which she commits herself.

Tense with horror and the sticky darkness of the Argentinian night, Mariana Enriquez’s writing is rich and occult. Her epic novel, Our Share of Night, vividly translated from the Spanish by Megan McDowell, follows on from her short story collections Things We Lost in the Fire and The Dangers of Smoking in Bed. In this, her first novel to be translated into English, she delves further into a lushly violent and erotic world.

Writing in the Edinburgh Review in 1814, Francis Jeffrey began his review of Wordsworth’s The Excursion with a provocative denunciation of romanticism: “This will never do,” he complained. “It bears no doubt the stamp of the author’s heart and fancy; but unfortunately not half so visibly as that of his peculiar system.”

Bringing Olivier Guez’s novel The Disappearance of Josef Mengele on a beach holiday may seem like an odd choice (such is the lot of a reviewer). This incongruity transformed into something stranger, however, when I learned that the Nazi doctor Josef Mengele fled to South America and the book’s subject is the permanent holiday of the so-called “Angel of Death” – a poisoned chalice of a life in unending, hidden exile.

Sitting in the park on a hot summer’s day, life began to imitate art. I had been soaking up the sun’s now overpowering rays for over an hour and was beginning to feel its radiating effects.

Golden green filaments of grass moved back, the trees swayed in heady sympathetic succession; buzzing from the outside in, my body started to metabolise light at a speed my brain couldn’t fathom. My skin bubbled green, my tongue unfurled petals and my eyes sprouted luminous buds. I had become a plant – or so I felt – and the sun-soaked synthesis of my transformation was near complete.

The title of Katya Adaui’s debut collection in English is taken from one of the 12 short stories it contains: an allusion to the depths hidden below the surface, which is also one of the book’s central motifs.

Mieko Kawakami is the champion of the loner. Since achieving immense success in the UK with her translated works, she has become an indie fiction icon for her modern, visceral depictions of characters who exist on the fringes of Japanese society. Kawakami’s latest novel to be translated into English by Sam Bett and David Boyd not only cements her reputation for giving voice to the quieter souls of this world, but also sees the intimacy of her writing reach new heights.

“Is she at a pivotal point in her life but unable to pivot…?” Eve, the young heroine of Chloë Ashby’s dazzling debut novel, Wet Paint, asks this question standing in front of Édouard Manet’s painting "A Bar at the Folies-Bergère" (1882). Yet she could easily be asking herself the same question.

In this best-selling Korean novella, recently translated into English by Jamie Chang, Kim Hye-jin offers us the perspective of a Korean mother. It’s narrated entirely from the perspective of a woman of around 60 who has a daughter in her thirties and focuses on her inability to understand what her daughter, Green, wants from life and why she’s decided to live openly as a lesbian with her partner Lane: 

Daniel Hahn began his translation of Jamás el fuego nunca, a novel by experimental Chilean artist Diamela Eltit, in January 2021. Considering the careful, difficult but not impossible “craft” of translation as he worked, Hahn kept a diary, describing the “discrete choices” made during the process of writing Never Did the Fire: an English version of Eltit’s original with Hahn’s “fingerprints” all over it.