მხატვრული ლიტერატურა

Circe by Madeline Miller (Bloomsbury) — the daughter of Helios, possessed of a gift for witchcraft she discovered by accident, given the interior life and psychological completeness that Greek mythology denies her. Miller transforms a witch into a woman and a woman into one of the most fully realised characters in contemporary fiction — ancient and completely contemporary, faithfully mythological and entirely original. Published by Bloomsbury.

Audition by Ryu Murakami (Bloomsbury) — a widower uses a fake film audition to screen potential wives, and the woman who answers — quiet, composed, with a mysterious past — seems perfect. Miike Takashi adapted this into one of the most notorious horror films of the 1990s; the novel is the source of that notoriety, operating in the narrow space between literary fiction and pure dread. Brief, elegant, and unforgettable. Published by Bloomsbury.

Everyone in My Family Has Killed Someone by Benjamin Stevenson (Michael Joseph) — a true crime author at a family holiday gathering when someone turns up dead, applying his own logical methodology to the problem and discovering that real-world murder investigation is rather less neat than its literary equivalent. A witty, inventive, genuinely clever mystery that plays knowingly with genre conventions while delivering a genuine puzzle. Published by Michael Joseph.

And Every Morning the Way Home Gets Longer and Longer by Fredrik Backman (Michael Joseph) — a grandfather in a hospital, his grandson beside him, a maze on a piece of paper between them that is getting smaller as the grandfather gets older. A meditation on loss, love, and the specific grief of watching a parent’s mind diminish — barely a hundred pages, some almost blank, close to perfect. Brief enough to read in a single sitting; moving enough to stay for years. Published by Michael Joseph.

Factotum by Charles Bukowski (Virgin Books) — Henry Chinaski drifts from city to city and job to job through 1940s America, losing each position with a combination of incompetence, insubordination, and constitutional inability to take orders from people he considers his inferiors. Bukowski’s picaresque of American working-class life — the novel of the itinerant years before Post Office, written with complete authenticity and dark, dry humour. Published by Virgin Books.

Tales of Ordinary Madness by Charles Bukowski (Virgin Books) — Henry Chinaski wanders through bars and rooming houses, working menial labour, drinking heavily, loving badly, and observing the world with merciless precision. Not comfortable, not meant to be: the essential Bukowski short story collection, establishing him as one of the defining voices of American underground literature. Published by Virgin Books.

Piercing by Ryu Murakami (Bloomsbury) — Kazuki, quiet and seemingly ordinary, is methodically planning a murder with great care. A slim, wickedly precise psychological thriller about the relationship between violence and intimacy, written in the sparse, disturbing style that made In the Miso Soup an international sensation. A masterclass in literary horror that illuminates rather than merely disturbs — not for the faint-hearted. Published by Bloomsbury.

89 Words Followed by a Dream by Milan Kundera (Faber) — Kundera’s final work, completed shortly before his death in 2023: short prose pieces gathered around the question of what it means to be at the end of a long life and a long literary career, to look back at the words you have written and find them both yours and not yours. As concentrated and as precisely formed as everything he wrote. The capstone of one of literature’s great bodies of work. Published by Faber & Faber.

Beautiful World, Where Are You by Sally Rooney (Faber) — Alice and Eileen, best friends in their early thirties in Dublin, navigating professional lives, romantic complications, and the persistent sense that the world they expected has not arrived. Rooney’s most spacious novel — uncertain in ways that its predecessors were not, attempting to find beauty and goodness in a world that feels neither. For readers who have followed her development with care. Published by Faber & Faber.

Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro (Faber) — Klara is an Artificial Friend who observes the world with absolute clarity and absolute limitation simultaneously, chosen by a teenager whose health is declining and who needs her in ways she must learn to understand. Ishiguro’s Nobel Prize lecture novel — narrated by a consciousness both less and more than human — a novel of quiet devastation from one of the greatest living writers. Published by Faber & Faber.

Come Rain or Come Shine by Kazuo Ishiguro (Faber) — in the space of a single evening, a journey, a meal, a game of cards, everything is decided or not decided between a man and a woman who have known each other for fifteen years. Ishiguro’s short story as compressed and precisely balanced as a Japanese object — few pages that repay repeated reading. Part of the Faber Stories series. Published by Faber & Faber.

Normal People by Sally Rooney (Faber) — Connell and Marianne in school, then in Trinity College Dublin, then in the world: a love story of complete precision and complete emotional honesty, in which two intelligent people repeatedly fail and find each other. The novel that established Rooney as the defining literary voice of her generation in English — intimate, funny, and quietly devastating. Published by Faber & Faber.

The Buried Giant by Kazuo Ishiguro (Faber) — in a post-Arthurian Britain veiled in mist and forgetting, an elderly couple journey to find their son, gradually discovering the nature and purpose of a collective amnesia that has settled over the entire country. What do we owe to a painful past we might prefer to forget? Ishiguro’s most mythological novel — profound, strange, and unforgettable from a Nobel laureate at the height of his powers. Published by Faber & Faber.

The Feast of the Goat by Mario Vargas Llosa (Faber) — 1961, the Dominican Republic: five men wait in a car to assassinate the dictator Trujillo, who has governed with a terror so complete it has become the atmosphere of daily life. Vargas Llosa’s most formally accomplished novel — about the nature of absolute power, what it does to those who exercise it and those who submit to it. One of the great political novels of the twenty-first century. Published by Faber & Faber.

The Unconsoled by Kazuo Ishiguro (Faber) — a celebrated pianist arrives in a Central European city to give a concert of enormous civic importance, and finds himself drawn into an endless succession of encounters and detours whose aggregate logic is the logic of a dream. Deliberately structured as an extended dream, demanding complete surrender — a novel about the impossibility of presence and the gap between our obligations and our capacity to fulfil them. Extraordinary. Published by Faber & Faber.