“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.

The terrain Holding occupies is well travelled, but this new ITV four-part drama travels over it really well. The landmarks are familiar: a quiet rural community, a cop with an unhealthy lifestyle and a secret sorrow, a feud between rival lovers of the local lothario, a long-buried trauma that’s suddenly unearthed. We could be in any rural location in the primetime drama of the past half-century.

A garden is a space defined by its limits. Whatever its contents in terms of style and species, and however manicured or apparently wild its appearance, what distinguishes a garden from its equivalent quantity of uncultivated land is its enclosure within an uninterrupted border, which might be a wall, a hedge, a fence, or else natural dividers such as streams or woodland.

"My pen is the wing of a bird; it will tell you those thoughts we are not allowed to think, those dreams we are not allowed to dream." Batool Haidari’s words give this bold collection of stories its title and epigraph. She is one of 18 writers from the Write Afghanistan project, run by the organisation UNTOLD which works to promote the work of writers in communities marginalised by conflict.

Free Love opens in 1967 and remains within that heady era throughout; no flashbacks, no spanning of generations as in Hadley's wonderful novels The Past or Late in the Day. Phyllis, aged 40, is a suburban housewife, C of E, deeply apolitical and a contented mother of two.

She likes L’Air du Temps perfume (one of Hadley’s Sixties tropes: Jill, a character in The Past, also uses it), loves the panelled oak doors in her hallway, and has a special bond with her nine-year-old son, Hugh.

“Duck! Here comes another year.” We can, I think, all empathise with the motions and emotions of Ogden Nash’s new year poem, “Good Riddance, But Now What?” Before, however, we bid a troublesome year farewell, we look back at the year in fiction and share our favourites. 2021 was the year that Sally Rooney, to high anticipation, published her third novel, that Damon Galgut (third time lucky) won the Booker, and that Hillary Clinton, continuing the family legacy, wrote a thriller. Read on for more. 

For most of us, fluttering our eyelids to convince a loved one to cook dinner is harmless meddling. Complimenting our boss on their new coat before asking for a promotion is necessary cunning. For the characters in Lucie Elven’s debut novel The Weak Spot, however, small moments of manipulation amount to something rather more sinister.

How do you imagine the wind at dawn? Biting, brisk, peremptory – a kind of summons as another day begins?