Literary Fiction

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Foster

During the summer of 1981, an unnamed young girl is sent from her crowded family home to live with relatives in rural County Wexford while her mother prepares to give birth. Quiet and observant, she arrives at the Kinsellas’ farm uncertain of what awaits her. But unlike the home she has left behind, this household offers her tenderness, attention, and a sense of belonging she has never experienced before. As the summer unfolds, the girl discovers the transformative power of being cared for. Yet beneath the peaceful routines of farm life lies a grief the Kinsellas rarely discuss. Through small gestures, unspoken truths, and the child’s growing awareness of the adult world, Claire Keegan creates a moving portrait of childhood and the complicated bonds between parents and children. Foster is a beautifully restrained novella about the families we are born into, the love we find unexpectedly, and the lasting impact of being seen and valued.

The Secret Lives of Baba Segi's Wives

The Secret Lives of Baba Segi's Wives

Set in contemporary Ibadan, Nigeria, The Secret Lives of Baba Segi’s Wives explores the complicated dynamics of a polygamous household where jealousy, ambition, and long-buried secrets threaten to destroy the family’s carefully maintained balance. Bolanle, a young university graduate, becomes the fourth wife of Baba Segi, a wealthy businessman whose large family is a source of pride and proof of his masculinity. Hoping to find security and acceptance, she enters a household already governed by three wives, each with her own personality, ambitions, and strategies for survival. However, Bolanle’s education and independence make her a source of suspicion and resentment, particularly when she offers to teach the other wives to read. When Bolanle struggles to conceive, Baba Segi takes her to the hospital to discover the reason for her childlessness. The investigation threatens to expose a secret that the other wives have carefully protected for years. As the truth begins to emerge, the family must confront the consequences of deception and the fragile foundations upon which their relationships have been built. Told through the perspectives of Baba Segi and his wives, Shoneyin’s novel combines dark humour with an incisive examination of marriage, motherhood, female rivalry, and patriarchal expectations. Beneath its entertaining portrayal of domestic life lies a deeper exploration of the ways women navigate restrictive social structures, compete for security, and find agency within a system that often measures their worth by their ability to bear children.

Celestial Bodies

Celestial Bodies

In the Omani village of al-Awafi, three sisters navigate love, marriage, family expectations, and the changing world around them. Mayya marries Abdallah, the son of a wealthy merchant, after experiencing heartbreak. Asma enters marriage out of a sense of duty, while Khawla refuses every suitor, remaining devoted to the man she loves, who has emigrated to Canada. Through the intertwined lives of these women and their extended family, Jokha Alharthi paints a richly layered portrait of Oman across generations. The novel moves between memories, personal histories, and shifting perspectives, gradually revealing how individual lives are shaped by social class, gender roles, and the legacy of slavery. As Oman transitions from a traditional society to a modern nation, its people struggle to reconcile inherited customs with new possibilities. Poetic and intricately structured, Celestial Bodies explores the tension between personal desire and social obligation, showing how love, loss, and family secrets echo across generations. The novel won the 2019 Man Booker International Prize, shared by Alharthi and her translator, Marilyn Booth.

Skippy Dies

Skippy Dies begins with a shocking event at Seabrook College, a prestigious Catholic boarding school in Dublin: fourteen-year-old Daniel “Skippy” Juster collapses and dies in a doughnut shop. His death sets off a chain of revelations that expose the hidden struggles of the students and adults around him. Before this tragedy, Skippy had been falling in love with Lori, a girl from a neighboring school, while trying to navigate adolescence, bullying, and the pressures of school life. His roommate, Ruprecht Van Doren, a brilliant but socially awkward teenager obsessed with theoretical physics, becomes increasingly determined to understand what happened to his friend. Meanwhile, the school’s teachers wrestle with their own disappointments, secrets, and moral failures. Combining dark comedy, heartbreak, and social satire, Murray’s novel explores teenage loneliness, first love, addiction, institutional hypocrisy, and the difficulties of growing up. Beneath its humorous surface lies a moving portrait of young people searching for connection in a world that often fails to protect them.

Cutting for Stone

Cutting for Stone

Abraham Verghese

In 1950s Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, twin brothers Marion and Shiva Stone are born from a secret relationship between an Indian nun and a British surgeon at a mission hospital. Their mother dies during childbirth, and their father disappears, leaving the twins to be raised by two devoted doctors who become their adoptive parents. Growing up surrounded by the world of medicine, the brothers develop an extraordinary bond and a shared fascination with surgery. But as Ethiopia approaches revolution, their lives become entangled in forbidden love, jealousy, and betrayal. A devastating rupture drives Marion into exile in the United States, where he must confront the past he has tried to escape. When circumstances eventually bring him back to the world of his childhood, he faces the people and choices that shaped his life—and discovers that healing some wounds requires more than surgical skill. Spanning continents and decades, Cutting for Stone is an epic story of brotherhood, sacrifice, and the complicated ties between parents and children. Abraham Verghese combines the intimate drama of a family saga with the intricate world of medicine, exploring how love, loss, and the accidents of birth can shape a person’s destiny.

Ethiopia United States 2009

Vilnius Poker

Ričardas Gavelis

Set in Soviet-occupied Vilnius during the 1970s, Vilnius Poker is a dark, surreal exploration of life under totalitarian rule. The novel follows Vytautas Vargalys, an intellectual working as a cataloguer in a public library, who becomes obsessed with uncovering a mysterious organisation known as “Them.” He believes this hidden force controls society, manipulating people’s thoughts, behaviour, and destinies. His growing paranoia intertwines with his relationship with Lolita, a mysterious woman whose fate becomes central to his increasingly fractured understanding of reality. The story unfolds through four different narrators, each offering a conflicting account of events. As their perspectives overlap and contradict one another, the distinction between truth, memory, fantasy, and delusion begins to collapse. Vilnius itself emerges as a living presence: a labyrinthine city haunted by historical trauma, political oppression, and the psychological damage inflicted by Soviet rule. Combining psychological horror, political satire, and postmodern experimentation, Gavelis challenges official historical narratives and exposes the ways authoritarian systems infiltrate people’s inner lives. The novel also questions whether individuals can ever fully escape the structures of power surrounding them. Published in 1989, as Lithuania approached independence, Vilnius Poker became a landmark of modern Lithuanian literature and a powerful literary reckoning with the Soviet experience.

Queen Pokou

Veronique Tadjo

In Queen Pokou, Véronique Tadjo reimagines the legend of Queen Abraha Pokou, the eighteenth-century Akan leader traditionally credited with founding the Baoulé people of Côte d’Ivoire. According to the legend, as Pokou leads her people away from danger and across the Comoé River, she faces an impossible choice: sacrifice her only son to secure their passage and save her community. Her decision becomes a defining story of collective survival, maternal grief, and the origins of a people. Rather than presenting the legend as one fixed historical truth, Tadjo retells it through multiple imagined possibilities. What if Pokou refused to sacrifice her child? What if grief destroyed her, or her journey led her towards a different fate? These alternative narratives challenge the authority of traditional stories and explore how myths are reshaped by the people who inherit them. Moving between eighteenth-century West Africa and more recent conflicts across the continent, Tadjo connects the queen’s legendary sacrifice to the enduring consequences of war, displacement, and political violence. At its heart, the book asks what communities demand of their leaders—and what individuals must surrender for collective survival. It is both a reimagining of an important African legend and a reflection on motherhood, historical memory, and the human cost of founding a nation.

Côte d’Ivoire (Ivory Coast) 2009

Say You're One of Them

Say You're One of Them

Say You’re One of Them is a collection of five interconnected-in-spirit stories set in different African countries, exploring the lives of children caught in circumstances far beyond their control. Through the eyes of young narrators, Uwem Akpan portrays the devastating effects of poverty, religious conflict, human trafficking, and political violence on families and communities. Written with emotional intensity and compassion, the collection challenges readers to look beyond headlines and statistics to recognise the individual lives behind Africa’s social and political crises. Rather than reducing its characters to victims, Akpan gives them distinctive voices, relationships, and hopes, creating a powerful portrait of childhood under extreme circumstances.

Benin Ethiopia Kenya Nigeria Rwanda 2009

The Museum of Innocence

The Museum of Innocence

Istanbul, 1975. Kemal, the privileged son of a wealthy family, is preparing to marry Sibel, a woman who belongs to his own sophisticated social circle. But a chance encounter with Füsun, a beautiful young shop assistant and distant relative, sets his carefully ordered life on an unexpected course. Their passionate affair soon becomes complicated by social conventions, class divisions, and the expectations placed on women in a rapidly modernising Turkey. When Füsun disappears from his life, Kemal begins collecting objects connected to her: earrings, hair clips, cigarette butts, and countless other seemingly insignificant things. Each item becomes a vessel for memory, allowing him to preserve moments that time would otherwise erase. Over the years, his collection grows into an extraordinary personal museum, reflecting both his devotion and his inability to let go. Spanning decades of Istanbul’s social and cultural transformation, The Museum of Innocence is a richly layered exploration of love, obsession, memory, and longing. Nobel Prize-winning author Orhan Pamuk transforms ordinary objects into fragments of a vanished world, asking whether preserving the past can bring happiness—or merely keep us imprisoned within it.

The Good Life Elsewhere

The Good Life Elsewhere

Vladimir Lorchenkov

Set in the Moldovan village of Larga in the years following the collapse of the Soviet Union, The Good Life Elsewhere follows a community of villagers desperate to escape poverty and build better lives in Italy. Convinced that prosperity awaits them in Western Europe, the villagers devise increasingly absurd and improbable schemes to cross the border, despite repeated obstacles and the near impossibility of obtaining visas. Among them are an Orthodox priest whose wife has emigrated to Italy, a resourceful mechanic who dreams of transforming his tractor into a vehicle capable of travelling by air and sea, and villagers who embark on an enormous, misguided crusade towards their imagined promised land. Even local politicians become entangled in the collective obsession with escape, revealing a society where hope and desperation often override common sense. Blending absurdist humour, political satire, and tragedy, Lorchenkov portrays a country caught between its Soviet past and an uncertain future. Italy becomes more than a destination: it represents the promise of dignity, opportunity, and freedom from a life that seems impossible to change. Yet the villagers’ increasingly desperate attempts expose the harsh realities of migration, economic inequality, corruption, and the idealisation of life abroad. Beneath its comic extravagance, the novel offers a poignant portrait of people searching for a better future when home no longer seems to offer one.

A Leopard-Skin Hat

A Leopard-Skin Hat

Some people remain impossible to understand, no matter how deeply we love them. In this intimate, unconventional novel, an unnamed narrator recounts his lifelong friendship with Fanny, a brilliant, rebellious, and deeply troubled woman whose inner world remains beyond his grasp. Bound to her by affection and concern, he witnesses her struggle with profound psychological difficulties, moving between moments of hope and periods of despair. Yet Fanny refuses to be reduced to her suffering: she is unpredictable, spirited, and fiercely individual. Told through brief, lyrical scenes, the novel explores the fragile boundaries between love and helplessness, understanding and mystery. Written in the wake of the death of Serre’s younger sister, this moving work becomes both a tribute to a life cut short and a meditation on grief, memory, and the limits of our ability to truly know another person.

More Days at the Morisaki Bookshop

More Days at the Morisaki Bookshop

Satoshi Yagisawa

More Days at the Morisaki Bookshop continues the story of Takako, a young woman who found comfort and a new direction in life while living above her uncle’s second-hand bookshop in Tokyo. Having gradually rebuilt her confidence after a painful romantic disappointment, Takako becomes more involved in the lives of her uncle Satoru and aunt Momoko. When Momoko returns after a long absence, old emotions and unanswered questions emerge, prompting the family to reconsider the choices that have kept them apart. Takako also begins exploring new relationships and possibilities beyond the bookshop, discovering that healing does not mean leaving the past behind completely. Set in Tokyo’s book-loving Jinbōchō district, the novel celebrates literature, ordinary routines, and the quiet comfort of human connection. Yagisawa explores family bonds, emotional recovery, and the ways people create a sense of belonging through shared spaces and everyday acts of kindness.

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