Goldsmiths Prize shortlist 2025

3rd October 2025 / / 0 Comments

Right, it’s Goldsmiths Prize season. 2025 has not been a prolific year for me in terms of either reading or blogging, and I don’t like that one bit. Maybe a read-along with one of my favourite awards will revitalise things.

The Goldsmiths Prize is for “fiction that breaks the mould or extends the possibilities of the novel form.” This year’s shortlist was announced last night, and our contenders are:

  • We Pretty Pieces of Flesh by Colwill Brown (Chatto & Windus)
  • The Catch by Yrsa Daley-Ward (Merky Books)
  • Helm by Sarah Hall (Faber)
  • The Expansion Project by Ben Pester (Granta)
  • Nova Scotia House by Charlie Porter (Particular Books)
  • We Live Here Now by C.D. Rose (Melville House)

I haven’t read any of the books to date, and don’t have any preconceptions, so there is not much else for me to say right now. The titles above will turn into links as and when I post reviews. The winner will be announced on 5 November, so let’s see how far I get. Here’s to the journey!

Women in Translation Month: Failed Summer Vacation by Heuijung Hur (tr. Paige Aniyah Morris)

2nd August 2025 / / 0 Comments

Hello, it’s been a while. I have been taking a break from the world of blogging; hopefully now I can get back into it. August brings us Women in Translation Month, so here goes…

***

If one word comes to mind when I’m thinking about the stories in Heuijung Hur’s Failed Summer Vacation (translated from Korean by Paige Aniyah Morris), it is ‘disconnection’. Disconnection in the characters, yes, but also in the fabric of the stories themselves. 

My favourite story is ‘Imperfect Pitch’, which introduces us to Baek, who drifts through life and spends most of his time checking a fancafe for the titular rock band. The band are defunct, but the cafe just about keeps going. The story begins with Baek reading about the death of O, a long-time fan of Imperfect Pitch, and a driving force behind the fancafe. 

From there, the story splits into three strands: there’s the fancafe in the present day, where it becomes apparent that no one really knew O, despite her centrality. There is the time Baek went to Imperfect Pitch’s farewell show, buying a ticket from O and picking it up from a station locker, without ever meeting her. Further back, there is Baek’s discovery of the band at university, and the time he performed one of their songs at a student society concert. 

In each strand, we then see people ultimately failing to come together despite being in institutions meant to facilitate that (the fancafe, the student music club). Likewise, the three strands remain separate on the page, apart from a striking moment that merges Baek’s student performance with the final Imperfect Pitch show – and which highlights Baek’s isolation even back then. 

(An extract from ‘Imperfect Pitch’ is available on the Wasafiri website.)

Failed Summer Vacation is full of striking images and imaginative turns, leading to stories that don’t necessarily lend themselves to easy interpretation, but instead nag at the mind. A good example is ‘Loaf Cake’, which begins with the narrator’s partner (housemate? companion?) Sand leaving the house, after which she, the narrator, loses the ability to speak. 

The narrator then needs to find a new means of connection, and she begins to find this with a baker named Snow and his delicious creations, especially the loaf cake that the narrator devours each time she visits his shop. Then Sand returns, but he appears to have walked so far that his very self is crumbling away. It’s the images and sensations that linger longest: as so often in these stories, there’s the nagging sense that true connection lies just out of reach of Hur’s characters.

Failed Summer Vacation is published by Scratch Books.


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.

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