Horsefly - Mireille Gagnon (Coach House Books, 2025) (translated from the French by Pablo Strauss) I've read enough Quebecois literature in translation by now to know that it's all a little bit weird. But always in a very fascinating way. Horsefly is a story told in two timelines with two different men. Thomas is a… Continue reading Book Review: Horsefly by Mireille Gagnon
Heart Lamp - Banu Mushtaq (And Other Stories, 2025) When I heard that Heart Lamp was the winner of this year's International Booker Prize, I'll admit that my first reaction was disappointment in that cover. I had my bookseller eyes on in this circumstance, where short story collections don't generally sell that well and covers… Continue reading Book Review: Heart Lamp: Selected Stories by Banu Mushtaq
Present Tense Machine - Gunnhild Oyehaug (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2022) (translated from Norwegian by Kari Dickson) This is a book more about a concept than a story. Which isn't to say it's not an interesting book, it's just a book where it's more about the idea than the plot or the characters. Anna and… Continue reading Book Review: Present Tense Machine by Gunnhild Oyehaug
Hard Copy - Fien Veldman (Head of Zeus, 2024) (translated by Hester Velmans) This is such a weird book. Which isn't to say I didn't like it. I just don't know quite what to say about it. The basic premise is that a young woman, the unnamed narrator, falls in love with a printer. She… Continue reading Book Review: Hard Copy by Fien Veldman
Abigail - Magda Szabo (New York Review Books, 2020) This book was translated from the Hungarian by Len Rix. I think we can all be guilty sometimes of assuming that people who lived a long time ago (and by extension, books written by and about people who lived a long time ago), aren't going to… Continue reading Book Review: Abigail by Magda Szabo
Tyll - Daniel Kehlmann (Pantheon Books, 2022) (translated from the German by Ross Benjamin) I had never heard of Tyll Ulenspiegel before picking up this novel but I gather that he's a well-known German folk figure. A classic trickster type, given to bawdy jokes. Here Kehlmann brings him into the context of the Thirty Years… Continue reading Book Review: Tyll by Daniel Kehlmann
The Stolen Bicycle - Wu Ming-Yi (translated from Mandarin by Darryl Sterk) (Text Publishing, 2017) This was such an unexpected, playful, thoughtful, and informative book. It reads more like a non-fiction story rather than a novel, perhaps because it’s hard to tell at times how much is based on the author’s actual life. And perhaps… Continue reading Book Review: The Stolen Bicycle by Wu Ming-Yi
The Empusium - Olga Tokarczuk (Riverhead Books, 2024) (translated to English by Antonia Lloyd-Jones) The Empusium - a strange sort of novel set in a sanitorium, health resort town in the early 20th century with a mysterious, plural-voiced ghost-like narration - is a tricky book to describe. I like Tokarczuk's work quite a lot -… Continue reading Book Review: The Empusium by Olga Tokarczuk
Claude Simon was a French writer who wrote several semi-autobiographical works, many of which are inspired by his own experiences in World War Two. He won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1985, which is the reason I picked up a copy of The Flanders Road. After learning that Gabriel Garcia Marquez (one of my… Continue reading Book Review: The Flanders Road by Claude Simon
I picked The Future up when it was shortlisted for this year's Canada Reads competition. This is where 5 books are "championed" by famous Canadians over the course of one week until there is one final winner. I always follow along with interest but it doesn't generally add a lot of titles to my TBR.… Continue reading Book Review: The Future by Catherine Leroux
Karissa Reads Books 