Solitude & Exile

Set in Angola around the time of independence and the ensuing political turmoil, A General Theory of Oblivion follows Ludovica, a Portuguese woman who becomes terrified of the violence unfolding around her. After barricading herself inside her Luanda apartment, she isolates herself from the outside world, attempting to survive through the limited resources available to her. As the country undergoes dramatic transformations, Ludovica’s private existence becomes increasingly detached from the history unfolding beyond her walls. Her story gradually connects with those of other characters whose lives are shaped by political upheaval, chance, and the struggle to survive. Blending historical fiction, dark humour, and elements of the surreal, Agualusa explores solitude, memory, and the human capacity to construct a separate reality when the world outside becomes unbearable.

A Month in Siena is a reflective memoir in which Hisham Matar explores the relationship between art, memory, and personal grief during a month spent in the Italian city of Siena. Drawn to the city’s extraordinary collection of Sienese paintings, Matar immerses himself in the works of medieval and Renaissance artists, seeking solace and understanding through their depictions of human suffering, devotion, and beauty. His observations become intertwined with reflections on his Libyan heritage, his father’s disappearance, and the emotional consequences of years spent searching for answers. Moving between the art galleries of Siena and memories of his own life, Matar considers how art can offer a form of companionship and provide a language for experiences that are otherwise difficult to express. Rather than presenting art history as a purely intellectual pursuit, he approaches painting as an intimate encounter capable of changing how we see ourselves and others. The book is a meditation on loss, exile, faith, and the quiet possibilities of healing through beauty and contemplation.

Tara Selter, the heroine of On the Calculation of Volume, has involuntarily stepped off the train of in her world, November eighteenth repeats itself endlessly. We meet Tara on her 122nd November 18 she no longer experiences the changes of days, weeks, months, or seasons. She finds herself in a lonely new reality without being able to explain how is it that she wakes every morning into the same day, knowing to the exact second when the blackbird will burst into song and when the rain will begin? Will she ever be able to share her new life with her beloved and now chronically befuddled husband? And on top of her profound isolation and confusion, Tara takes in with pain how slight a difference she makes in the world. (As she puts “That’s how little the activities of one person matter on the eighteenth of November.”) Balle is hypnotic and masterful in her remixing of the endless recursive day, creating curious little folds of time and her flashbacks light up inside the text like old flash bulbs. The first volume’s gravitational pull—a force inverse to its constriction—has the effect of a strong tranquilizer, but a drug under which your powers of observation only grow sharper and more acute. Give in to the book's logic (its minute movements, its thrilling shifts, its slant wit, its slowing of time) and its spell is utterly intoxicating. Solvej Balle’s seven-volume novel wrings enthralling and magical new dimensions from time and its hapless, mortal subjects.

An unnamed Turkish writer embarks on a restless journey across Europe, following the lives and deaths of three writers who have profoundly shaped her imagination: Cesare Pavese, Franz Kafka, and Italo Svevo. Travelling through Berlin, Prague, Vienna, Zagreb, and other cities, she seeks out the places where they lived, wrote, and died, hoping to understand the connection between literature, suffering, and the desire to live. But this is no ordinary literary pilgrimage. Moving between memories, encounters with lovers, and reflections on her own troubled past, the narrator questions marriage, sexuality, political repression, and the expectations society imposes on women. Her travels become an attempt to escape the confines of her former life and discover a freedom that has always seemed just beyond reach. Blurring the boundaries between autobiography, travel writing, and fiction, Journey to the Edge of Life is an intense meditation on loneliness, mortality, and the search for meaning. Tezer Özlü transforms the European landscape into a map of her inner world, revealing how the lives of writers we admire can become inseparable from our own search for identity and freedom.

After leaving behind the pressures of city life in Seoul, Yoojin unexpectedly opens the Book Kitchen in Soyangri, a peaceful village in the South Korean countryside. Part bookshop, part café and part guesthouse, this welcoming retreat offers visitors a place to rest, enjoy homemade food and rediscover the comfort of books. Over the course of a year, as the seasons change, people arrive at the Book Kitchen during difficult turning points in their lives. Among them are a singer struggling with an identity crisis, a promising lawyer facing a troubling medical diagnosis, and a young musical director whose dreams have been diminished by repeated failures. Through quiet conversations, shared meals and the stories found on the shelves, each visitor begins to reconsider their circumstances and imagine new possibilities. With its gentle atmosphere and interconnected characters, the novel celebrates the restorative power of literature, the kindness of strangers and the importance of finding a place where one can pause, reflect and begin again.

A woman arrives in Geneva, beginning a train journey through Switzerland, the country where her father was born. Seeking solitude and a temporary escape from the demands of ordinary life, she hopes to exist outside the usual rhythms of time. Yet as she travels through snowy landscapes, museums, and historic towns, she becomes immersed in the stories embedded in the places she encounters. She discovers traces of writers and artists including Mary Shelley, James Baldwin, Charlie Chaplin, and Patricia Highsmith, alongside the histories of political revolutionaries, scientific pioneers, and workers who carved tunnels through the Alps. Gradually, these fragments of art, history, and human experience begin to resonate with her own memories and grief. Blending travel writing, historical reflection, and literary fiction, On Not Climbing Mountains is a contemplative novel about the connections between landscape and memory, the fragility of the natural world, and the ways art allows us to encounter lives beyond our own.