Author: David Hebblethwaite

Wild Boar by Hannah Lutz (tr. Andy Turner): European Literature Network review

4th July 2025 / / 0 Comments

I’m back writing for European Literature Network, in their #RivetingReviews section. The book I’ve got for you this time is Wild Boar, a striking novel by Finland Swedish author Hannah Lutz (translated from Swedish by Andy Turner). It follows three characters in the forests of southern Sweden, and looks at their relationship with nature, as symbolised by the local wild boar. It is also the first novel for adults published by The Emma Press — and, on the strength of this, I look forward to seeing what may follow.

Read my review of Wild Boar in full.

Dengue Boy by Michel Nieva (tr. Rahul Bery): Strange Horizons review

22nd June 2025 / / 0 Comments

I have a new review up at Strange Horizons this week. I’m looking at an Argentinian novel, Dengue Boy by Michel Nieva, translated from Spanish by Rahul Bery and published in the UK by Serpent’s Tail. It’s a hallucinatory ride about a human-mosquito hybrid trying to find meaning in a future where the divide between the haves and have-nots has been sharpened by climate change. That is not the half of it, though. As I say in the review, I have rarely read a novel that destroys itself with such gleeful abandon.

Read my review of Dengue Boy in full.

#InternationalBooker2025: and the winner is…

21st May 2025 / / 0 Comments

We announced our shadow winner on Monday, and last night the official winner of the International Booker was revealed:

Heart Lamp by Banu Mushtaq, tr. Deepa Bhasthi (And Other Stories)

It’s not at all the direction that the shadow panel went in, but of course that’s all part of the fun. Congratulations to the winners!

Click here to read my other posts on the 2025 International Booker Prize.

#InternationalBooker2025: the shadow panel’s winner

19th May 2025 / / 2 Comments

We have read the longlist, voted on our shortlist, crunched the numbers, and arrived at our shadow panel winner for this year’s International Booker. Our winner is:

On the Calculation of Volume I by Solvej Balle, tr. Barbara J. Haveland (Faber)

We have some more detail on the results in Frances’s post over on the group Substack. For me, this was my favourite book of the longlist (even though I haven’t reviewed it yet…), so I’m happy with that result.

Will the official judges make the same choice? We’ll find out tomorrow.

Click here to read my other posts on the 2025 International Booker Prize.

#InternationalBooker2025: Under the Eye of the Big Bird by Hiromi Kawakami (tr. Asa Yoneda)

24th April 2025 / / 2 Comments

Under the Eye of the Big Bird is a journey into humanity’s deep future, told quietly. It begins with a group of women taking some children to the park. The women’s white robes strike an odd note, but apart from that, all seems ordinary enough. Gradually, though, the differences between our present and this future emerge: the idea of countries as we know them has long gone, and children are made in factories, derived from animal DNA. As one character puts it:

“If we lose the children, that’s the end of the world. We have to make the children and raise them, because that’s how we maintain the biological diversity of the genetic information we need to preserve for stop that’s the only way the world keeps going.”

Translated from Japanese by Asa Yoneda

The narrator who’s being told this, however, doesn’t really understand what it means. Hiromi Kawakami puts the reader in a similar situation, in that her novel’s future is revealed piecemeal across its story-chapters, and often at ‘eye level’ as it were, so that we have to work out the bigger picture. For example, one chapter sees its narrator come face to face with “a much younger me”. Another has characters with an elaborate numbering system instead of names. Only towards novel’s end does Kawakami offer a fuller explanation of how this artificially managed version of a human world arose. 

This means that the main focus throughout is, for me, the moment itself – the relationships and emotions, and how they have been transformed (or otherwise). Kawakami asks what humanity might mean in a changed world, what aspects might remain.

Published by Granta Books.

Click here to read my other posts on the 2025 International Booker Prize.


#InternationalBooker2025: the shadow panel’s shortlist

18th April 2025 / / 0 Comments

After the official International Booker Prize shortlist, here is the shortlist that we’ve chosen on the Shadow Panel:

  • On the Calculation of Volume I by Solvej Balle, translated from Danish by Barbara J. Haveland (Faber)
  • There’s a Monster Behind the Door by Gaëlle Bélem, translated from French by Karen Fleetwood and Laëtitia Saint-Loubert (Bullaun Press)
  • Solenoid by Mircea Cărtărescu, translated from Romanian by Sean Cotter (Pushkin Press)
  • Small Boat by Vincent Delecroix, translated from French by Helen Stevenson (Small Axes)
  • Hunchback by Saou Ichikawa, translated from Japanese by Polly Barton (Viking)
  • A Leopard-Skin Hat by Anne Serre, translated from French by Mark Hutchinson (Lolli Editions)

Half in common with the official shortlist, half not. For more of our thoughts on the shortlist, head over to our Substack.

Click here to read my other posts on the 2025 International Booker Prize.

#InternationalBooker2025: the official shortlist

11th April 2025 / / 4 Comments

Here is the official shortlist of this year’s International Booker Prize, which was revealed earlier in the week:

  • On the Calculation of Volume I by Solvej Balle, translated from Danish by Barbara J. Haveland (Faber)
  • Small Boat by Vincent Delecroix, translated from French by Helen Stevenson (Small Axes)
  • Under the Eye of the Big Bird by Hiromi Kawakami, translated from Japanese by Asa Yoneda (Granta Books)
  • Perfection by Vincenzo Latronico, translated from Italian by Sophie Hughes (Fitzcarraldo Editions)
  • Heart Lamp by Banu Mushtaq, translated from Kannada by Deepa Bhasthi (And Other Stories)
  • A Leopard-Skin Hat by Anne Serre, translated from French by Mark Hutchinson (Lolli Editions)

I hhaven’t quite finished reading everything yet, but this looks like a pretty decent shortlist to me. We’ll announce the Shadow Panel’s shortlist in due course.

#InternationalBooker2025: Small Boat by Vincent Delecroix (tr. Helen Stevenson)

7th April 2025 / / 2 Comments

Small Boat is the first novel by French philosopher Vincent Delecroix to be translated into English. It’s inspired by real events from 2021, when a dinghy taking migrants from France to the UK capsized, and 27 people died. Despite receiving calls from the passengers, the French authorities didn’t send help, judging that the boat was nearer to – and had then crossed into – British waters.

Recordings of the calls between the migrants and the French monitoring station emerged during the subsequent investigation, with the radio operator seeming indifferent and making comments such as, “I didn’t ask you to leave.” Delecroix’s narrator is that radio operator, as she is being interviewed by police.

The operator is adamant that she has done nothing wrong, that she carried out the duties of her job, and that it wasn’t her place to get emotionally involved:

So I didn’t enlist with the Navy to save the migrants sloshing about on the rail tracks of Pas-ds-Calais, that’s for sure, but if I’m asked to do it, or to help do it, I do. So don’t then ask me what I think, deep down, about these people, or rather about their obsession with flinging themselves into the water in search of I know not what. Also, I have to do it with the means available…I cannot send out dozens of dinghies, speed boats, patrol boats or forty helicopters to save forty small boats at the same time. You have to prioritise.

[Translation from French by Helen Stevenson.]

As the novel goes on, the operator challenges the premises of the investigation. Who can really be held responsible for the migrants’ situation, she asks. Not her, who was only a voice down the phone. Didn’t their problems really start long before they stepped on that boat? Delecroix holds back from explicitly judging his narrator’s position, which pushes the reader to step in.

There is one third-person chapter depicting events on the dinghy, and here Delecroix moves out, writing as an external observer, in contrast to the close psychological examination of the radio operator. The experience is jarring, as it should be, and raises questions of complicity that go beyond one character or country, beyond the pages of a book.

Published by Small Axes (HopeRoad).

Click here to read my other posts on the 2025 International Booker Prize.

#InternationalBooker2025: Eurotrash by Christian Kracht (tr. Daniel Bowles)

27th March 2025 / / 1 Comment

The narrator of this novel is, like its author, a middle-aged Swiss writer named Christian Kracht. His mother calls him urgently to Zurich, which is a stifling place for him:

Zurich was claustrophobic; the little flower shop made me claustrophobic, the old city made me claustrophobic, the fifteenth-century buildings, never destroyed in World War II, made me claustrophobic, the ladies with their shopping bags from Kaufhaus Grieder made me claustrophobic and cut me off, the streetcars made me claustrophobic and cut me off, the bankers walking for their banks to accumulate more gold beneath Paradeplatz made me claustrophobic and cut me off.

[Translated from German by Daniel Bowles.]

Still, it could be worse: there are dark aspects to the history of Christian’s German family – including a Nazi grandfather and a fortune amassed from the arms industry – that are about to come to the fore. Christian’s mother has recently been discharged from a psychiatric institution, and now sets out on a road trip with him to give away that fortune, and revisit some old familiar places. 

The first half of Eurotrash intersperses the present day with Christian’s memories of his mother and anecdotes from his family history. In the second half, once the road trip begins, there’s a slight change of emphasis, with more short-and-snappy passages of dialogue, and stories that Christian tells his mother. There is a certain feeling of stepping outside reality, or perhaps of stepping closer to Christian and his mother. It’s fitting, because their relationship is what hangs the novel together, amid the uncertainty of where they’re going to go. 

Published by Serpent’s Tail.

Click here to read my other posts on the 2025 International Booker Prize.

#InternationalBooker2025: The Book of Disappearance by Ibtisam Azem (tr. Sinan Antoon)

21st March 2025 / / 2 Comments

The Book of Disappearance is the second novel by Palestinian writer Ibtisam Azem. It was originally published in Arabic in 2014, translated into English by Sinan Antoon in 2019, and gains a place on the International Booker longlist following a UK edition published by And Other Stories last year. 

The book begins with Alaa, a young Palestinian, discovering that his grandmother has died. She had chosen to stay behind in Jaffa following the displacement of 1948, and Alaa wishes he had taken more time to listen and talk to her. He is all too aware that his grandmother had access to an older world which is now lost to him:

Your memory, which is engraved in my mind, has all these holes in it. Am I forgetting parts of what you told me, or were the things you said incomprehensible? I was very young when I started listening to your stories. Later, when I turned to them for help, I discovered these holes. I started to ask you about them. But the more I asked, the more you got mixed up, or maybe I did. How could things not get mixed up? I was certain there was another city on top of the one we lived in, wearing it. I was certain that your city, the one you kept talking about, which has the same name, has nothing to do with my city. It resembles it a great deal.

[Translated from Arabic by Sinan Antoon.]

The loss of Alaa’s grandmother and her memories is one disappearance. In another narrative strand, all Palestinians disappear from their homeland inexplicably one morning. Azem depicts the immediate aftermath of this party through a series of vignettes that illustrate the changing mood of the Jewish community in response. At first, it’s an inconvenience that people haven’t turned up to work. This gives way to paranoia at the thought of what may have caused the disappearance, and eventually taking advantage of what is left behind. 

On a more personal level is the character of Ariel, the liberal Zionist neighbour and friend of Alaa. While trying to find out what happened to him, Ariel comes across Alaa’s notebook, in which he has written about and to his grandmother. Ariel finds an anger on Alaa’s part that he has perhaps known about but not appreciated to the degree it’s expressed in the notebook. Ariel reads on, but it doesn’t stop him taking up Alaa’s space in certain ways. There’s more than one form of disappearance in this book.

Click here to read my other posts on the 2025 International Booker Prize.

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