Sololand by Hassan Blasim, translated by Jonathan Wright (Comma Press, £10.99)
This exceptional trio of novellas about postwar Iraq is filled with comedy and horror. In the first story, a boy is abducted from his family to work for Isis. Tests on sharia law penalties are easy – the answer is usually “death” – but the work is hard: “[he] picked up the commander’s head, put it in an empty flour bag”. Meanwhile, a woman becomes an Islamic State bride after closing her pharmacy down (“she could no longer tolerate Islamic State people interfering in her work and asking for Viagra”). In another story, a refugee goes to a city in an unspecified “North”, where anger boils over after two refugees rape a girl. “I found a Facebook page called ‘Refugees Welcome in Sololand’, with just 34 followers.” In the third, a young dreamer is tasked with running an email account so the local religious leader/militia commander can communicate with his “female admirers”. Blasim’s previous collection was award-winning: this one should be, too.
On the Clock by Claire Baglin, translated by Jordan Stump (Daunt, £9.99)
French writer Claire Baglin’s autofictional debut takes its inspiration from her own experiences of the workplace. The narrator gets a job at a fast-food restaurant. It’s a world of paradox: an entry-level gig requires a competitive interview process (“He’s expecting me to talk about the honour of joining a team”); the work is both stressful and dull, with customer demands well above her pay grade. “No no that’s not a piece of fingernail in your salad, it’s the end of your wooden fork.” Scenes of her time there alternate with memories of a working-class childhood: her father’s exhaustion after his factory shift work; the family apartment where the walls are so thin they can hear their neighbour’s parrot saying “Sarkozy sucks”; her shame after visiting a friend’s posh house. The message, of social immobility, is stark but delivered with energy and charm; and there is some room for hope. At work, “I dream that someone’s whispering in my ear it’s time, you can go now.”
Nothing Grows By Moonlight by Torborg Nedreaas, translated by Bibbi Lee (Penguin Classics, £12.99)
Life “hooks you like a claw every time you think you’re safe”, declares the protagonist of this novel, first published in Norway in 1947. “Well, now the claw has come to stay.” She’s a woman in love with an older man. When he invites her home she’s “dizzy with craziness”; when he rejects her, “my lips and cheeks turned cold and then the rest of me, little by little”. She becomes enraged by the way women suffer: her sister’s loveless marriage; her mother’s compliance with her own discontent. An operatic intensity builds until even her one joy – hearing Bach played in a church – can’t stop disaster, and the story powers through to a conclusion that’s both hard to read and impossible to look away from. Poets, the woman says, only tell “part of the truth. They keep quiet about the rest or nobody would buy their work.” There’s no such holding back in this breathtakingly powerful book.
Death Takes Me by Cristina Rivera Garza, translated by Sarah Booker and Robin Myers (Bloomsbury, £16.99)
In an unnamed city, four men have been found murdered and mutilated. Police are baffled – “Who’d want a penis?” – but the presence of poetry extracts left beside the bodies leads them to call in Cristina Rivera Garza, a literary professor and the author of this book. So this is not a traditional whodunnit: it switches viewpoints, takes in the art of Marina Abramović and the work of Argentinian poet Alejandra Pizarnik. Rivera Garza, who won a Pulitzer prize last year for her memoir of femicide in Mexico, plays with form, blending fiction with an essay complete with footnotes, satirising media coverage, incorporating comments on the publication of the book we’re reading, and generally having fun. Her exuberance is contagious. “Reading shouldn’t be so complicated,” says one character. “A matter of turning the page.” Of course, it’s both.
