Books of the Year 2025 Part 2

Badenheim 1939 by Aharon Appelfeld

Most of my favourite translated reads are new to English, but Aharon Appelfeld’s Badenheim 1939 first appeared in 1978 and was translated by David R Godine in 1980. Badenhiem is a fictional town in Austria with a largely Jewish population; over the course of the novel, its inhabitants are prepared for transportation to Eastern Europe by the ‘Sanitation Department’ in an allegory of Nazism. Appelfeld assembles an extensive cast who react in different ways to their impending doom, some remaining optimistic and unbelieving while others despair. Many have forgotten their Jewish heritage, or regard it of little significance. The novel works because we know how it will end – almost entirely as a result of the date in the title as Appelfeld deliberately eschews historical details. It goes without saying that the novel’s conclusion is almost unbearably sad.

On the Calculation of Volume by Solvej Balle

Solvej Balle’s On the Calculation of Volume, steadily being translated into English by Barbara J Haveland, seems likely to divide readers in the same way as Karl Knausgard’s My Struggle, though for different reasons. First of all, it requires us to accept the premise that its narrator, Tara, is stuck in a single day, and then to relive it with her over and over, the very reverse of what a narrative is supposed to do. It draws the reader in by starting on the 121^st reiteration of that day allowing her to look both backwards and ahead. As a thought experiment it tells us about our relationship with time and also with others, Tara’s husband Thomas’ inability to experience what she is acting as an emphasis of the individuality we all struggle to escape. Whether to will be worth all seven volumes remains to be seen, but it certainly worth the commitment of one book.

Perspectives by Laurence Binet

Laurent Binet’s fourth novel, Perspectives, is just as erudite and entertaining as the previous three. The novel is a murder mystery set at the intersection of art and politics in 16^th century Florence told via a series of letters from a variety of correspondents (or perspectives). The victim is a painter, there are possible clues in the mural he is painting, and the motivation may lie in the appearance of Maria de’ Medici’s face on a nude Venus. Michelangelo and Vasari, among others, not only swap theories but get involved in the investigation. Binet balances the demands of the narrative and the epistolary style with skill navigating numerous twists and turns while still delivering a satisfying conclusion. Unlike Umberto Eco, you suspect Binet prioritises entertainment over philosophy, but this does not prevent his work from being the current standard for intellectual page-turners.

The Other Girl by Annie Ernaux

The Other Girl was the book which followed The Years but has only now been translated into English by Alison L Strayer. Among Ernaux’s many short books, it is shorter, and also seems to lie outside her project of recording her own life being, as the title suggest, about someone else. The ‘other girl’ is her sister, Ginette, who died of diphtheria at the age of six before Annie was born and remains unmentioned by her parents. Only an overheard remark when Annie is ten reveals Ginette’s existence: “She died like a little saint…” her mother says, “she was nicer than the other one.” The ‘other one’ is, of course, Annie suggesting that the title has a double meaning, Ernaux’s difficult otherness a comparison with her sister’s frozen innocence. Much of the book is addressed to her sister, even as she questions her motivation for writing. Like much of Ernaux’s work, it is moving without ever being sentimental.

The Director by Daniel Kehlmann

Daniel Kehlmann’s latest novel, The Director (translated by Ross Benjamin) must surely be in the running for the International Booker Prize in 2026. Set during the Second World War, it tells the story of real-life film director Georg Pabst who finds himself accidentally stranded in Nazi Austria as war is declared. ‘Red’ Pabst has little sympathy for the Nazi regime and must decide whether to take up their offer to make ‘non-political’ films in a novel that wrestles with the relationship between art and politics. While probing these deeper issues, Kehlmann gives us an eye-opening insight into how films were made at the time, introducing a number of drawn from life characters into the story. If it sometimes feels like there can be little new to say about Nazi Germany, Kehlmann disproves this with a novel that will entertain and horrify.

Money to Burn by Asta Olivia Nordenhof

Asta Olivia Nordenhof’s Money to Burn (translated by Caroline Waight) is in some ways the antidote to On the Calculation of Volume despite being another projected seven volume series from Denmark. Whereas Balle focuses in – one narrator, one day – Nordenhof is widescreen. Yes, this is the story of dysfunctional couple Kurt and Maggie, but it also their lives beforehand, and, thanks to Kurt’s random investment, related to the fire of the Scandinavian Star which gives the series its title. It is also nakedly political (“Capitalism is a massacre”) and with a tendency to break the fourth wall (even more so in the second volume which begins with a long digression about how difficult it was to write). Money to Burn is more successful as a standalone novel and also seems to have quite different intentions as a series, but the excitement over the next volume is just as intense.

Books of the Year 2025 Part 1

TonyInterrupter by Nicola Barker

Nicolas Barker’s fourteenth novel (but her first since 2019) continues to give the impression that she writes exactly what she likes with little care for literary fashion – and, appropriately enough, it is a celebration of non-conformity which begins with the interruption of a jazz concert: “Is this honest? Are we all being honest here?” The interruption is filmed, as is the angry response of band member Sasha who labels the offender as a “small-town TonyInterrupter”, a sobriquet which soon becomes a viral hashtag. Art about authenticity has never been less serious since Wilde as the initial incident ricochets around various band and audience members in a prose style which is deliberately divergent to the point that even the author feels compelled to comment, “This is a dreadful waste of time. It’s silly.” Silly or not, Barker manages to make us care about her characters as we laugh at them.

The Lowlife by Alexander Baron

Alexander Baron’s The Lowlife, originally published in 1963, would have claim to be the rediscovery of the year if not for the fact that it has been rediscovered (more than once) before.  No matter – it well deserves its latest round of enthusiastic readers. Grounded by its incredible sense of place – London, towards the end of the fifties – its irregular protagonist, Harryboy, is the kind of character who might carry any novel, a chancer intent on not taking his chances, averse to settling down or standing still, whose natural instinct to avoid entanglement is unwillingly undermined by a child, the son of new neighbours in the building where he stays. The parents could not be more ordinary, a lonely father and unaffectionate mother.  Apparently proud to be a lowlife, Harry regards himself as such not for his carefree lifestyle but because of a wartime regret he cannot forget. A novel which refuses to die because it feels so alive.

The Fate of Mary Rose by Caroline Blackwood

Another rediscovered novel, though from the more recent 1981 (still over forty years ago!) is Caroline Blackwood’s The Fate of Mary Rose. Blackwood takes the trappings of a crime novel and twists it into something that is both difficult to look at yet impossible to take your eyes off. As is usually the case with this author, everyone is awful, from the narrator, Rowan, a historian with a predilection for using women, to his maniacally protective wife, Cressida, who, following a local murder, refuses to let her daughter (Mary Rose) out of her sight. Rather than her daughter’s safety, her obsession is with the murder itself as she insists Mary Rose memorises all the details and attends the funeral. Rowan meanwhile is aware of his wife’s deteriorating mental state but blind to any responsibility he might bear for it despite spending most of his time in London with his mistress. Most impressively, Blackwood manages a tour de force ending which will leave you gasping.

Dreaming of Dead People by Rosalind Belben

Anything Blackwood can do, Rosalind Belben can do darker. Where we might think we hear the former cackling wickedly in the background, Belben’s laughter is a more uncomfortable experience. Dreaming of Dead People was published two years earlier than The Fate of Mary Rose, the last of four novels she published in the 1970s. Written in six sections (“I visualized the arrangement of these chapters to echo the compartments of a biography”) the  novel reflects on a life at the midway point touching on Belben’s childlessness and her relationship with animals through a character called Lavinia. Belben is what one might refer to as an acquired taste, a moving section relating her relationship with a particular dog sitting alongside an extended essay on masturbation with an electric toothbrush. If that is not variety enough, one chapter is interspersed with middle-English songs. Behind all this, however, is a desire for unflinching truth from a writer who does genuinely seem fearless.

The Story of the Stone by James Kelman

James Kelman has the unusual distinction of being both a strong candidate for the UK’s greatest living writer and without a publisher in his own country. Luckily the small American publisher, PM Press, have stepped in, releasing a new novel, collections of essays and short stories, and a book of interviews in the last few years. This year saw the publication of The Story of the Stone which collects Kelman’s shortest stories, a genre he excels at. It contains 96 pieces ranging from four pages to less than a page (including perhaps his most famous short short story, ‘Acid’, which features as a footnote in Alasdair Gray’s Lanark). They demonstrate Kelman’s range of both style and subject matter for those who continue to think of him as a one-note writer. Anyone who appreciates the craft of writing should not be without this book, or, indeed, all of Kelman’s work.

From Scenes Like These by Gordon Williams

From Scenes Like These is another novel to have been rediscovered more than once and bears the distinction of having been shortlisted for the first Booker Prize in 1969. Unfortunately, its author Gordon Williams refused to stick to literary fiction, cowriting the Hazell books with Terry Venables when both football and crime fiction were much less fashionable. This, however, is a wonderful novel, exposing the harshness of both urban and rural life in 1950s Scotland. It also touches on contemporary concerns, however, as its central character, school-leaver fifteen-year-old Dunky Logan, wrestles with what it means to be a man. Its portrayal of misogynistic attitudes among the farm workers still has the power to shock, more so as we may fear they are not so outdated as we hope. Though not without the occasional moment of hope, it is a bleak work with little the way of redemption, A Catcher in the Rye for those who cannot afford therapy.

Napalm in the Heart

Napalm in the Heart is Catalan writer Pol Gausch’s debut, originally published in 2021 and now translated into English by Mara Faye Letham. The novel is set in a dystopian landscape where the narrator lives with his mother in a militarised zone, occupied by an army with a different language. It is a novel filled with death; within a few pages the narrator reports:

“I found him dead among the tomato plants and cold, as cold as the winter frost… Grandpa dead, his heart destroyed. From so much wating… For nine hundred nights he’d held out.”

Later the narrator will tell us how he discovered his father, dead by his own hand, and in the novel’s second half he will travel with the body of his mother. There are echoes of Chernobyl in the novel’s setting, a town centred on ‘the Factory’. The narrator, whose limited understanding of events may be excused by his age, the deliberate ignorance in which the population is kept, or his focus on the man he longs for, Boris, can only tell us:

“I began to understand the Factory. Understand that when night suddenly becomes day it is because of a mistake.”

The Factory, we learn, was “the first building they sealed off” and “it is now skeletal and in ruins…the Factory enters the ground and sinks beneath the world.” The nine hundred days of waiting referred to above began on the day of the accident, and Gausch includes pages of tally marks which count up from that nine hundred, though in the narrator’s case he is also wating for his lover. The short chapters of the novel, some headed with single word titles, are interrupted by the narrator’s letters to Boris:

“Sometimes I’m scared we’ll never see each other again, scared I risk never being happy with you again…”

Though the words are tender, the lovemaking he remembers is as violent as the land, Boris “almost choking me with his kisses…”

“He grabs me by the hair really hard and when he grips me, I think about how animals fuck…”

While the narrator writes frequently, in person they hardly speak. Do they meet rarely and in secret because the relationship is disapproved of? This is unclear, as there is a wider sense of the narrator’s existence being marginalised when even his language is degraded. His hatred of the occupation finds its focus in a soldier who visits his mother:

“The man with the shaved head is at our house again… I thought I saw mother beside him, small, as though his arrival had shrunk her.”

At first he is unfriendly, but later (encouraged by Boris – or so it seems, we never see Boris’ replies) decides to kill him, luring him into the woods where he wounds him, ties him up and leaves him. When he returns:

“His lips were pale, his clothes soaked, and he was barely moving. He didn’t say anything to me: he just looked at me.”

The cruelty of his death is in keeping with general sense of violence, but he will later discover that his impression of the man’s relationship with his mother is, once again, based on a limited understanding. In the novel’s second part, as the narrator travels with Boris, his letters are replaced by a letter his mother has written to him. As they travel, they encounter military checkpoints, servitude and companionship in a landscape which verges on the desolation of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road.

Some readers may find this novel frustrating, populated as it is not only with blank spaces on the page, but with absences in the story. It rests on the relationship between the narrator’s emotional journey and the apocalyptic landscape (and similarly between intensity and abstraction) – and I suspect that not every reader will agree on which is an echo of the other. It is, however, a novel that will leave an impression with its ferocity and its passion.

Last Date in El Zapotal

“I came to El Zapotal to die once and for all,” begins Mateo Garcia Elizondo’s Last Date in El Zapotal, now translated into English by Robin Myers, echoing the opening of Juan Rulfo’s Pedro Paramo (“I came to Comala…). Elizondo’s novel is also set in a remote Mexican village, the kind of place that there are few reasons to visit. He comes with only “three thousand pesos, twenty grams of opium and a quarter ounce of heroin, which had better be enough to kill me,” leaving the city behind because “when I die I don’t want anyone to wake me up again.” He chooses El Zapotal for no other reason than he wants to reach “the end of the line, the ends of the earth.” The town (as the novel’s title suggests) is as important as any character to the novel:

“The streets were deserted. There were more dogs than people, and some of them barked until they realised I was one of them, gaunt and homeless.”

Yet, the setting itself is confused by the narrator’s dreams and hallucinations. After a night of drinking, the narrator’s memories come back to him disordered and unconnected: “I’m finding it harder and harder to distinguish experience from dreams.” The town comes to represent his addiction, a place of uncertain reality:

“That’s where I live now. That’s what this whole town is: limbo. That’s what heroin is too. You’re halfway between the world of the living and the dead, and neither wants to deal with you.”

Somehow, Elizonda manages to both capture the existence (or otherwise) of the addict while at the same producing a sympathetic, almost companionable, narrator. Partly this is the narrator’s own acceptance of his flaws, but it is also in the voice itself which remains searching even as it claims to have given up.  Indeed, Elizonda has said that it is a novel about life rather than death, and, as it progresses, it seems the narrator thinks more about his own life than his (as he claims, imminent) death:

“At long last, I pulled it off: I’m completely alone. Now I really do have time to think about my life. That’s the true hell, especially if you spent it like I did.”

In particular, he remembers Valerie, a woman he falls in love with who tries to cure him of his addiction (“I think life tried to save me through Valerie”) but who herself becomes an addict and later dies of an overdose. As he reflects on these regrets, it becomes gradually clear that there is more to the novel than a junkie’s final days. There are hints early in the narrative, for example when he is warned not to “stir up trouble” shortly after arriving: on claiming he is passing through, he is told:

“No one just passes through this place. They always stay in the end.”

Later, when the narrator is searching for his ‘lady’ an ambiguity develops: this might refer to heroin, Valerie, or death herself. One character (“They say you’re the devil himself”) tells him:

“I can make you an appointment with the Lady… There’s really nothing better, let me tell you. Puts an end to all your troubles. You find peace in her arms.”

The description might equally apply to death or drugs.

The novel is also engaging in its use of imagery. Take, for example, this description of the narrator’s drug-induced dreaming coming to an end:

“I feel a string pulled tight in me, then snap, and a brilliant light floods my eyes as if someone had yanked out the final frame of a film roll. The celluloid starts to fog and bubble until it evaporates, leaving me floating in milky neon liquid that swamps everything around me…”

Such moments use language to raise the reader above the ordinary, in much the same way that the narrator uses drugs. This, in turn, echoes the novel’s transcendence, rising above the wreckage of the narrator’s life to find, in death, a reason for living.

Childish Literature

Alejandro Zambra touched on fatherhood (or at least step-fatherhood) in his last novel, Chilean Poet, but in his latest, Childish Literature (also translated by Megan McDowell), relationships between fathers and sons are at the very centre of the book. It begins with the birth of his own son:

“With you in my arms, I see the shadow we cast together on the wall for the first time.”

The opening section reflects on the early days of fatherhood, perhaps originating in the hundred poems Zambra says he writes on his phone. Addressed to his son, he reflects that literature lacks ‘letters to my son’:

“To imagine that our children will read our own work is, likewise, as exhilarating as it is overwhelming. To narrate the world that a child will forget – to become our children’s correspondents – is an enormous challenge.”

Zambra’s diary of the first year of his son’s life leads into a short piece in which he speculates on his life should he have been born female (Jennifer was the name his parents had chosen for a girl) and then a memory of a drug he took for migraines which has hallucinogenic effects but brings us back to his son in the end when he states, “I could carry him on my arms his whole life.” Zambra has always been an entertaining and thoughtful narrator of his own life, but it is the slightly patchwork nature of Childish Literature that prevents it becoming over-sentimental. Sections can be read separately, such as ‘French for Beginners’ about reading his son a particular book, or ‘Screen Time’ where the parents try to avoid their child watching TV:

“His whole life he has believed that the TV in our bedroom is broken.”

These chapters, however, only form the first part of the book. The second part opens with something quite different, almost a negative of what has gone before, ‘The Kid with No Dad’:

“More than a nickname it was a condition they acknowledged in a low voice, in the tone of someone talking about a shameful or deadly illness that was maybe also contagious…”

It tells the story of two boys, Dario and Sebastian, who become friends one of whom lives alone with his mother. The friendship ends in unfortunate circumstances but is renewed later. This piece of fiction (it is the only section not narrated by the author) allows Zambra to transition into memories of his relationship with his own father. It starts with a letter:

“I wrote, maybe, as if I were the adult and I had to explain that leaving home was the only way to keep from hating him and from hating myself.”

His father, however, tells him he hasn’t read it: “I’ll read it next time I feel like crying… Except I never feel like crying.” The story is echoed later when his father gives him a novel to read (Norman McLean’s A River Runs Through It) which he dismisses, then loses, and only reads years later having first tracked down a new copy. (His father knows this having taken the original book back from him unannounced and asking him to read out the handwritten dedication when he claims to still have it). Fishing is one sport which united father and son at times; football is another, and, being Scottish, I can certainly identify with the title of the chapter ‘An Introduction to Football Sadness’, particularly when he describes the Chilean national team as “the one that was destined to fail but still, every once and a while, allowed us to flirt with glory from a decorous distance.” The story continues towards his own son’s enrolment in a football class.

The book concludes with Zambra once again addressing his son, and returning to the subject of unread texts like the letter he sent his father and the book his father leant him:

“I don’t even know if I want you to read this book. It’s unnecessary of course. It exists thanks to you, and you are its main recipient, but I wrote it, above all, to accompany, with my friends, the mysteries of happiness. It’s okay of you don’t read it.”

In the end, it is the act of writing not reading which matters most, just as loving your child matters more than receiving their love. Childish Literature is a heart-warming book which would make a wonderful gift for any new father (should they have time to read it).