Keith Ridgway, Dooneen (Fitzcarraldo, 2026)

Keith Ridgway is a writer who carries you away, just lifts you up, like a cat making off with a mouse – or, let’s say, like a cat carrying off a kitten.

In Dooneen, the Irish writer Bartholomew Port (known as Mew) is invited back to Dublin for a literary festival and he steps into the bushes in a London park and steps out of the bushes in a Dublin one. And it is a future Dublin—there are no longer cars in the city; there are “clickers” (moving footpaths). Mew has ruined his only pair of trousers in the bushes and accepts a tight little baby-blue pair from two oddly eager and helpful bellhops at his hotel (doppelgängers of the assistants in Kafka’s The Castle)…

Everything (starting with those pants he’s squeezed himself into) feels embarrassing to Mew, and ominous (the strikes going on are part of some larger revolt), and yet this queer Dublin is alluring too: the air’s electric and alive with song – and with rumors. Mew visits his baffled family (with a split in the seat of his pants) and perhaps sees a ghost. And he’s soon swept up in a confused and confusing revolution. Off-kilter, Mew fiercely misses his boyfriend Mootie, back in London. Will he ever get home safe? Is he even still in This World? Dooneen is a magic book, and fay (in the goblin sense) to turn your mind inside-out. But even as Ridgway’s wickedly witty and profane, he’s also incredibly touching, and somehow sweet.

Solvej Balle, On the Calculation of Volume, Book IV, translated by Jennifer Russell (Faber, 2026)

In the newest installment of the now-legendary On the Calculation of Volume septology, fresh developments appear in Tara Seltzer’s endlessly recurring November 18th. Book IV opens on her 1,892nd day in this temporal trap, and no longer all alone. Tara now lives in a sort of commune-in-the-making in a big old house in Bremen with a slew of others who are also trapped in the endlessly repeating November 18th. The return of society – of others – is a muchness, and in the “community-building” there is much that is absurdly funny, and also quite a bit that is plain absurd. Her fellow beings are very present: “It is hard to know where something ends and where something begins. Or someone. Where a person starts or stops. Where the next begins.”

With the commune’s many meetings as everyone tries to both work together and test out theories on what has befallen them all, Tara contemplates her growing (or perhaps returning) sense of human enmeshedness, as here, working over in her mind the coincidence that a new housemate had also lived in a place she’d once occupied before she helped establish the time-trapped commune:

It’s strange to feel this sense of kinship simply because you have lived in the same house, I noted, and then we spoke about the garden furniture, the sounds of night, and the small market where we both bought fruits and vegetables. We spoke about the moon’s shadows. I don’t know why I remember it so clearly. I had wondered why the moonlight had been so bright.

But how did we end up in the same house! He didn’t know. It looked like a house that had been abandoned, he said. Abandoned, but not dilapidated. That’s often what our homes are like: habitable, but uninhabited. And then we discussed all the prerequisites for moving into somewhere new. The houses couldn’t be too big, nor too small. Not too close to the neighbours, but not too far from a town where you could find food. There had to be shops of a certain size so as not to be constantly reminded of how we’re emptying our world. The area couldn’t be too deserted but not too overrun either, as there needed to be enough life nearby to avoid feeling lonely, without feeling crowded. Maybe it was not so odd that we had ended up in the same house after all.

As the many-volumed novel expands (there in the fifth dimension), Balle explores what it is to co-exist, to share, to age, and to befriend in this new populated thickness. In Book IV, there is a gear shift, and the story seems to be moving in one direction for Tara, until an intensely personal surprise of a new kind suddenly obtrudes…

On the Calculation of Volume has exploded into a phenomenon in America: a bookseller friend told me that neighbors she has seen walking by her shop for years are coming in for the very first time to ask for the Balle. Watching all the interest unfold, and finding a New Directions book becoming a cultural touchstone (the way Borges’ Labyrinths had hit in 1962), I have had to stop and think why. And my guess is that, for one thing, we must like being teased. Balle – holding up a brilliant, brutal, and funny mirror to the way we live now – is cajoling us to see ourselves, much in the way Gulliver’s Travels teased its readers in 1726. Swift was satirising so much and so entertainingly, and his book too enjoyed a massive success with its own central fantastic premise and slant honesty. (And what’s three centuries, anyway?)

Marlen Haushofer, The Fifth Year, translated by Shaun Whiteside (New Directions, 2026)

The Fifth Year is one of those seemingly simple short novellas that look straightforward. And it’s true that Marlen Haushofer immerses you in the life of Marili, a five-year-old girl, on her grandparents’ farm in Austria. Over the course of a year, season by season, Marili takes in her small but intense world, discovering – with curiosity, wonder, and fear – what’s inside their quiet pastoral life (a boy who threatens to drown kittens, a strange crucified god, death). And while her calm and cheerful grandfather radiates warmth, her quiet grandmother (several of whose children have died, including Marili’s mother) is melancholic: the war (which also claimed Marili’s father) may technically be over but it’s ever-present. And despite the loving old folks, Marili is largely left alone with nature (a major character: human moods improve as the fog lifts and “a different color shimmered yellow and red through the milky veils”). Haushofer’s joy in nature’s beauty and her profound moral starkness radiate tension – and enjoy a weirdly true co-existence. That tension powers all her books and gives them their stunning taproot pull.

The air grew increasingly transparent and the sky ever darker. Then one afternoon it happened that Grandmother brought out Marilis’s nicest little blue velvet dress, and she herself put on a black woollen one.

“We’re paying a visit,” she said, and smoothed her black hair with her long yellow fingers until it lay gleaming around her head.

She took the girl by the hand and together they left the house. A cool breeze wafted over the blades of grass, and the sun hung clearly in the sky. Marili trotted curiously along beside the old woman. On the hilly meadow beside the path, a low gentian grew in purple bushes. Marili plucked such a big bunch that she couldn’t reach around it with her fingers.

“So are we going to church?” she asked when she caught sight of the pointed red steeple.

“You’ll see in a minute, child.”

Marili fell silent. Now, as if pulled by an invisible 67 force, the old woman almost started running, so that the child by her side could hardly keep up.

At last they stopped by the cemetery gate.

Mariella Mehr, Nightmare of the Embryos, translated by Caroline Froh (New Directions, 2026)

“I woke up on a mountain of rubble that should have been called ‘childhood’.”

When the great and much neglected Yenish-Swiss writer Mariella Mehr was a little girl, she was taken from her family and put into one of the “children’s homes” where the Swiss government forced their “Gypsy” population to send their offspring in the name of assimilation. Her stories mix swift memoir, chaotic poetry, and electric-eel-shocking prose: even her titles veer off at odd angles (“On the Aversion to Sensuality in Clay Pigeon Shooting”). The scissor-edged short pieces of Nightmare of the Embryos you read once and never forget:

It was always about that. The search for a lost land. Love. This fucked-up youth, always exploited, betrayed, bribed, lost. Lies, sadism, the stronger ones’ malicious laughter. Love, useless pastime, it was bad enough having to feed the children from the home. During the day you were tough, smashed that little human to pieces in that massive rage. Night then, rolled up together like embryos in strange sheets, was another world. Dormitories, embryos in beds, craving a womb. Blue nightlight (the eye of Justice, judging), each exhale a meager tenderness for the foreign embryo beside you. Night: groping hands in the darkness, moth-like thoughts, longing dreamed into an inhuman emptiness, screaming children’s prayers, ice cream, icebergs, unconsciousness. Night: children’s great no man’s land. We were also worthy of love. But we didn’t want to live. Night, the matron’s metallic voice, too. We waited, trembling, for her call, and each embryo crept back into their own strange bed.

Copi, City of Rats, translated by Kit Schluter (Vintage Classics, 2026)

Oh to be young and a rat on the qui vive in Paris, where anything really can – and does – happen. Beautifully translated by Kit Schluter, City of Rats stars a high-hearted hero, the young rat named Gouri, and our hero has a Master. And for his Master, Gouri must write down all his adventures in letters. He writes of victories over his enemies (terriers and snakes), notes his successful business dealings (selling worms to pigeons), and he brags of having gained entrée to the Royal Rat Court. His maniacal letters about his exploits are the novel but, despite his buoyancy, dangers also loom. And one day, poor Gouri must tell his Master of falling into the Seine and of what followed—his near-fatal encounter with a toddler:

I was swimming courageously toward the bank [but] a second later, I was already far from both water and terra firma, shivering with cold and fear in the closed fist of the child, who was staring straight at me… Everyone, including the hamsters, was shouting to me, “Stay strong! Stay strong!” from their perch in the willow branches. Then I saw the immense mouth of the child slowly open, revealing eight serrated incisors surrounded by four fangs. I steeled myself for the worst. The Queen and her daughters screamed in horror, and Rakä cried, “Bite his nose, Gouri!” Suddenly, a pink tongue appeared from inside the mouth, quite thick as it emerged, then becoming pointy and thin the moment it touched my muzzle, which it licked before moving on to my whiskers and ears. Contact with this massive chunk of flesh disgusted me beyond all possible description. The tongue continued to lick my entire body. Even worse! It sucked my paws and tail. Then the child stuck my head in his mouth, and here I thought I was going to die of a heart attack: he squeezed my ribs with his teeth, all while pushing and pulling me in and out of his mouth. And the more this game amused him, the harder he sucked and bit down, pressing me so far into his throat that I thought he was going to swallow me alive. Finally, when I was fully inserted, he squeezed hard, holding me by the base of the tail. I began to struggle inside his mouth; his clenched teeth restrained me. My position was made all the more uncomfortable by the fact that he was using the entire muscle of his tongue to pin me against his palate. Believing myself lost, I made one last effort to wheel around and bite his tongue, but it was so slippery that I couldn’t sink my teeth in. And yet, in the end, this little merry-go-round of mine saved my life: by brushing his glottis with my whiskers, I made him vomit! His throat contracted, then he hurled a cyclone of goopy juice that swept me away. I was launched onto a cobblestone where I dislocated my tail and scraped my right ear badly, to say nothing of the state of my fur, which was soaked through with acidulated milk.

The human mother stepped away from her radio and knitting to come over to her son and say, “Did you throw up again? You’re all worked up! What’s gotten into you today, darling?”… and went to change his shoes on the bench, which, miraculously, meant the coast was clear for now.

Copi, the novel’s ultra-gay author [pictured below], was an Argentine who wrote in French and lived in Paris before dying too young of AIDS. He was also a noted performance artist avant le lettre, cartoonist, critic, and playwright famous for manic, scandalous plays in what was known as the Theater of Panic. And, as his fellow Argentine César Aira notes in his introduction, Copi was “the greatest miniaturist of our time; everything happens on a small canvas the size of the eye; and very quickly. In general, critics agree that reading Copi draws us in, engulfs us, but not all of them point out that, before this irresistible impulse, there is a transposition to the microscopic, or rather subatomic, level. There we find once more the vicissitudes of our existence, but organized in a new way. Heisenberg’s principle provides an explanation: there is a state so small that qualities cease to apply to things, and it all begins to float freely, qualities and things, as well as time, place, relationships, perception, as in a democratic family reunion. This is called the ‘uncertainty principle’ but only because the observer continues to believe he is Gulliver in Lilliput. Copi generalizes, and so do we, when we become Copi (and we have no choice but to do so); we float on the same level as everything else, and our dreams, fingers, desires, hair, ideas, clothes, memories, certainties and uncertainties, near or far, do so too.”

César Aira, Five, translated by Chris Andrews (New Directions, 2026)

A César Aira variety pack: from the Argentine genius who has published some 120 books, these four astonishing novellas and one long story make a perfect fivesome (if billed as Five Novels). In this not un-diabolical pentagram of a book, César Aira dabbles in the fifth dimension as a duck paddles in the water. He carries us into that rich theoretical extra place (his special place, as they say) beyond 3-D space and 4-D time, full of “what-if” scenarios, alternative timelines, and parallel universes, where we find a newspaper vendor with his own newsstand-sized extra-dimensional issues as well as cyber nuns and a young princess forced to slave as a hack translator. This is the perfect book for an old-school ocean liner crossing, absolutely all you’d need, lounging on the deck, only the ocean all around you, all alone with César….

Hélène Bessette, Twenty Minutes of Silence, translated by Kate Briggs, (Fitzcarraldo, 2026)

A man is shot dead in his villa; his wife and their son are at home. Nothing is done. No alarm is sounded. Twenty minutes go by before the doctor who lives next door is summoned. Helene Bessette’s Twenty Minutes of Silence fingers the possible story lines, plucking at the chords of accusation, denial, guilt, and suspicion. The novel begins:

The revolver was in the car.

The revolver was not in the car.

It was hidden behind the books in the library.

No, excuse me, my apologies for misleading you, the revolver was in the cupboard, buried beneath a pile of sheets.

All the lights were off.

No, they weren’t, shouts the maid named Rose Hollyhock.

Then she retracts her statement.

The child had his shoes on,

At three o’clock in the morning, it’s unusual for a child to be wearing shoes.

The mother and Rose Hollyhock were both fully dressed.

At three o’clock in the morning people don’t tend to be fully dressed.

A hypnotic, stripey book, Twenty Minutes of Silence flashes along the way a silvery fish streaks by, turning in a dark aquarium: dark familial “truths” flash silvery bright, then go dark. The book’s restlessness and its multiplicity of perception opens up vistas full of questions and short on answers. Refusing to make simple or plain this raveled-up tragedy, Bessette controls every revelation, pulling with surgical skill all the dangling strings of mutually exclusive theories about the murder as she flays both this family and our assumptions about what a novel can do. The author casts her spell, and we brace ourselves for the next brutal turn, and the next, breathing the strangely enticing air inside Bessette’s locked-box mystery.

Rosemary Tonks, Businessmen as Lovers (Vintage Classics, 2024)

One of those wickedly funny yet curiously sweet writers you never get enough of – and with a stripe of Muriel Spark’s gleeful joy in shredding her characters to pieces – Rosemary Tonks is addictive. Her heroine Mimi sets off for a sunny Italian island holiday with her friend Caroline, where they find various shiny co-guests of their very comfortably well-off host and hostess, everyone glamorous (or trying to be) and flawed (and probably not trying terribly hard not to be). But then, joining the party a bit late, comes Beetle, a quiet and unassuming English journalist, who is Mimi’s true love:

“We touch one another and go on a short journey. In the middle we say ‘Hullo’ to one another helplessly, for fear of getting lost. What strong grey flannel arms. I shall never be cured of them. We kiss so well without meaning to, that Beetle again laughs out loud for joy. Oh, he’s so triumphant! It’s like a cock crowing. And I’m delighted with him; his strong neck so well rooted and bolted into his shoulders (always a point on which I’m vulnerable. Woe to those with weedy necks), his silky hair that smells of lemon, the layers of imagination and intelligence inside his kissing mouth, with all its moods and always its fastidiousness. The basis of my happiness lies in the rightness of his attitudes to life and to women: if these are faulty, a woman can never be herself in that man’s company, which means she can never be truly sensuous. For no woman shows herself as she is to an enemy…”

But Mimi does show herself to the other guests, and clearly enough: “I’ve got my nasty little smile on (Mona Lisa interviews for a job).”

A prickly and delightful saga of affairs and pranks (that poor local dentist) on a sunbaked vacation, Businessmen as Lovers is itself a little vacation: try it for a break from gray days and banality.

Giada Scodellaro, Ruins, Child (Fitzcarraldo, 2026)

“Looseness, that is the thing people fear in a person (in women) and in objects.”

I love Giada Scodellaro’s Ruins, Child, which won the Novel Prize: a sweeping choral work driven by the voices of six women, who share a space in a once-subsidized crumbling apartment tower in a screwed-up future. Their snatches of speech are casually tossed off, often just overheard: “The woman is old, I hear children saying nearby, not in the way we consider all adults to be old, but really old, ancient, she is endless.” There’s a powerful pushing back against authority and the incredible vivacity in their telling:

THE LENS IS COVERED IN GREASE?

There is art in the apartment windows. Oh hell, the windows are covered with it: taped up with construction paper or with instructions for assembling furniture. During the Holiday most windows are covered with family photographs. The sun filters in low.

A photo of someone eating cake with her man, her man fitted in a black suit. White lace, a wedding.

The lens is covered. The lens is covered in grease from the rose shea butter offered to the crew by the woman. I can’t stand the look of some dry hands. She rubs her hands together, moisturising them, sitting down in the wooden chair to get the elbows, knees, the heel of the foot.

Some time has passed. The clothes are different, and the hair. A kettle is humming on the stove. Mona is unpacking, she yawns and her teeth are small in her mouth, what a long neck. The sound of garbage trucks going past, the oak trees turning. Below: an allée.

The women (6) are gathered around the television. We (107) watch them watching something. They eat dates. We’ve seen this film so many times, they say. They watch a version of the same film we are watching, but a shorter cut, an older version. The six getting up on the bus. We’ve seen them see this part so many times.

They talk about the landscape, they take turns reciting a word, the landscape is thus, they say: weeds, blurry weeds. Buildings, birds, and behind them someone is yelling; goddamn, or what in the world, lord, lordy, or baby, where do you think you’re going, dressed like that? More sounds layered over these, over us – a car horn; a voiceover telling us that the garbage is turning around and around in the white garbage truck.

The garbage is turning around and around in a white garbage truck, so loud, and that car engine revving up, Vonetta!’s voice says, a good voice, raspy, we hear it and the children repeat, baby, baby, where the hell you think you’re going, dressed up like that?

It’s Vonetta!, with an exclamation point at the end, yes, the woman repeats, and they adjust themselves, they sit up straight. An aircraft moving past, a 747. Vonetta!, this is how the name is written on the birth certificate, though it is old and falls apart a little in our hands, yellowed/ruined. Vonetta!, the woman explains, the name was given to me by my father to prepare me for how I would be erected, called on to lead, heralded!

A piece of art is missing from its place on the living room wall. I don’t know what they’ve done with it, Faith Ringgold’s Church Picnic. “Freedom Baptist Church Annual Sunday School Picnic,” it reads. Vonetta!, Vonetta!, she is blurry from the shea butter.

Can we get a paper towel, or something to wipe the lens down? And the leg is seen because Vonetta! is bending over, getting ready to tie her shoe, a brushed leather.

She has a fine pair of legs.

A kick from the child, the skin near the bellybutton distended. The laces are always coming undone. Isn’t the leg a line? Tying the laces. A little skin of the upper leg, and soon, the narrator tells us, Vonetta! tells us, the temperature will reach 37 degrees Celsius.

The lens is wiped clean. Vonetta! is at the window and at first it’s this: the mountains behind her, the building where she has remained all of her life (except for a week’s time) and where her parents once lived, the great-grandparents, all of her people, her aunts, a five room apartment. She stands like this, and the women (6) are always a hand’s throw away, then she turns, blurry, and she is cut in half, off-center, we take in half of her back, half of her backside.

Eka Kurniawan, The Dog Meows, The Cat Barks, translated by Annie Tucker (Pushkin, 2026)

Eka Kurniawan, the remarkable Indonesian author of the famous sweeping epic Beauty Is a Wound (2015), here delivers a short swift intense novella of adolescent rebellion. His very young hero Sato Reang lives in a little town in Java and has been enjoying a pretty idyllic childhood of loafing around, playing soccer, and investing in fighting crickets—until the day his religious father announces he become “a pious child” and he must be circumcised. Sato launches into a secret revolt:

I stopped going to mosque. I no longer joined in worship. I never said my prayers before bed. Sato Reang eats with his left hand – so stupid – and barges in where he pleases, without calling out a greeting. If I was feeling lazy, I’d just piss on a banana tree, and I wouldn’t wash myself off after.

But for all his adolescent, hormone-fuelled crotchetiness, his yearning to be free and his pain are terribly real. In this short novel – which will ring true for any child of any age who grew up under an overbearing parent – the topsy-turvy wit of Kurniawan hits home, even as Sato’s rebellious pranks invite tragedy.

they, Helle Helle, translated by Martin Aitken (Akoya, 2026) 

I don’t think any writer makes me feel so totally in the soup as Helle Helle: the nowness, the steeping effect of her perpetual present tense – it’s as if she makes incarnate the meaning of in media res.

The story of they is pointedly modest in scope: in small-town 1980s Denmark, a perhaps too tightly knit together mother and teenage daughter face the fallout of the mom discovering a lump in her breast. This unbelievably intimate coming-of-age tale, without a filter or much of a skin, unfolds as time seemingly hangs in place – even as nothing stops the course of events. Telling of their struggles together in such a quiet, don’t-mention-it, tossed-off way, Helle Helle keeps the gut perspective adamantly low-to-the-ground, and the grief and fear held within her restraint feel all too true. It’s a quitely beautiful heart-breaker, Helle Helle’s they.

On the third of April her mother says:

“I must have swallowed a stone.”

They go for a walk by the playing fields, the anemones are out. Some small boys are playing football, shrieks and shouts, one of them’s crying up against the goalpost. Her mother’s in her winter coat. They’re having beef burgers, hence the walk. She’s wearing an Icelandic sweater herself, it’s still too early yet, the wind cuts through the wool.

“A stone stone?” she says, her mother nods.

“A heavy one. Here.”

She pauses a second and puts a hand to her coat, below the chest. They carry on then towards the pond. The shrubberies are dotted with crocuses, they don’t care for crocuses.

On the way home they bump into Palle, her mother kicks up a leg in delight. Palle’s from Clothes Man, sometimes he comes over and eats his sandwiches with her mother in the shop. When it’s sunny they sit with their feet outside the back door. He’s going to see his niece and is in a hurry, he has a layer cake with him on the luggage rack. He turns and waves to them, the bike wobbles.

They don’t talk about anything on the way home. Just before the square her mother says:

“I think I’ll ask Palle round for a roast beef dinner one day. Do you think we should?”

“If you want.”

“It’s not the sort of thing you cook for yourself, a roast beef dinner.”

She rearranges her room. The noticeboard goes over by the window. She has a number of cuttings and postcards and photographs. The cuttings are fixed with a single pin, they curl up from the bottom as the summer wears on. Her room faces the yard, she watches the dock plants grow at the foot of the rear building. The bin down there is full of hair. At one point a complete pair of plaits. She’s so taken aback that she drops the bin lid with a bang and steps in some coffee grounds, there are always so many coffee grounds.

In June her mother can’t get through her bread and jam. Normally she has a slice with honey too, and half a slice of white with cheese on top. The other half she wraps up and takes with her to the shop. Now she sits and drums her nails on the tabletop next to her plate, it’s strawberry jam, she blows a strand away from her face. She really isn’t hungry. But lots of people have no appetite first thing in the morning.

She herself shuttles between her yoghurt and the mirror in the hall, her German exam starts in an hour, she changes her shirt too.

“You’re flitting about,” her mother says.

“I need to get a move on.”

“Sit down, for crying out loud.”

“But I’ll be late.”

“You’ve got plenty of time.”

“No, I haven’t.”

“That suits you, just turn the collar up.”

“Only you still do that.”

“Maybe so,” her mother says and looks at her plate, flexes her fingers.

One of the cuttings is from the Politiken newspaper, she finds a copy on the pavement outside the baker’s. She’s never been aware that you can buy that paper at the baker’s, and actually you can’t, the baker woman says. Someone’s had it with them and dropped it on their way out. It’s yesterday’s, they study it over the counter. Tourists, most likely. She buys a wholemeal roll and often a single-serve butter packet.

When school breaks up the teachers put on a sketch. Her mother claps and claps, now and then she flaps the song sheet in front of her face, it starts a wave. They open the side door onto the fields. It’s the emergency exit, they’re not supposed to. Outside, everything’s glorious green and blue. During the leavers’ speech, in a short, breathless pause, first the cuckoo is heard, then the lapwing, and everyone laughs. .