Picking up yesterday’s thread, the balance in Seçkin’s novel sways toward the personal, whereas the political scene in Alaa Al-Aswany’s The Republic of False Truths (2021) is more prominent, despite all the attention paid to characterization—a network that grows increasingly complex as readers turn the pages. (And there’s at least one link to an earlier novel, rewarding his loyal readers.) Prominent in the group is Ashraf Wissa, an Egyptian writer: “He often thought about the change that had come over him. He had been drowning in a sense of frustration and lack of self-worth, and then he’d found himself in a real battle, waged by young people the age of his children, young people who believed in their cause to the point that they were prepared to die for it.” If you’ve enjoyed Al-Aswany’s other fiction, you’ll feel at home here, in a translation by S. R. Fellowes.

Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s Velvet Was the Night (2021) also takes place amidst political instability—in the 1970s, in Mexico City. The viewpoint alternates and, about a quarter in, readers understand the connection between the narrators; until that point, both were equally engaging, but then the novel slips into page-turning territory. Moreno-Garcia is an experienced novelist, her structure orchestrated and controlled: “…her mind jumped to everything that had happened to them so far, like unspooling the reel of a film and looking at it frame by frame.” An awareness that this is the kind of fiction that seeps from history makes the stages ever higher. As her afterword explains: “My novel is noir, pulp fiction, but it’s based on a real horror story.”

Set slightly south of Mexico City—in Cuernavaca—is Fabio Morábito’s 2018 novel, Home Reading Service (translated by Curtis Bauer, via Other Press this year). The novel is just as bookish as one might guess, although relationships between family members are as important as those between books and readers (or, in this case, listeners). I thought this would be the ideal job, but Eduardo does the work as community service and although he has a sonorous voice, he doesn’t connect with the stories; clients complain about his detachment from writers as varied as Dostoevsky and Daphne du Maurier. He is equally distanced from his father, whose illness should make him an ideal candidate for daily reading. Eduardo never thinks of that—but, in time, he makes some other discoveries.

A father-son relationship is also at the heart of Jakob Guanzon’s Abundance (2021), from the inimitable Graywolf Press, longlisted for the National Book Award this year. From the opening scene, I was overwhelmed by the pressing need to understand what has brought Henry to a place where he’s holding the McDonalds’ bathroom door closed with the toe of his boot, to conceal the fact that he’s washing the “wet-leaf gutter musk” off him there in the first chapter, titled $89.34. His F-250 is parked in this lot, three towns away from where Junior attends school, because that McDonalds requires no keycode for the restroom; that’s where he finds a quarter on the floor, so the second chapter is titled $89.59. And because it’s Junior’s birthday, and Henry has an interview lined up, there’s a “slender excess” for a celebration, which leads to the third chapter $79.00 and, yes, that’s how it goes. Right until it stops. I read it in a single sitting. “If fatherhood has taught him anything at all, it is helplessness.”

Family ties drive the story in Max Lobe’s 2018 novel A Long Way from Douala too (translated from the French in 2021 by Ros Schwartz and including a Camfranglais glossary). It opens in February 2014, shortly before midnight in Bonamoussadi, a neighbourhood to the north of Douala in Cameroon, with the death of Jean and Roger’s father. Roger flees with dreams of playing soccer overseas, but when the family has no news, Jean pursues him. In short, scenic chapters, readers glimpse life in Cameroon. Even before he leaves, Jean says: “I’ve become a punch bag.” Leaving, he travels the N3, nicknamed the “Death Highway” and passes a plywood sign marking the death of 22 people in a bus accident, near Edea, a day or two earlier. Checkpoints, metal protectors, the fear of a Boko Haram attack en route: this short novel moves quickly, the pacing fuelled by his fear and anxiety, but Jean’s journey is not fruitless.

Violence is prevalent in Thirii Myo Kyaw Myint’s Names for Light (2021) from the opening scene of her great-grandfather’s death in Myanmar. Absence underscores the narrative, yet, the poetic prose—and the sense that the author has absorbed a potent understanding through this storytelling—invites readers into a lyrical and expansive exploration. This passages hints at the way that a loss becomes more about presence than absence. “As the third son, the one in the middle, my grandfather held his brothers’ diverging lives together. He was the one recurring character in all the stories that my father told us, my sisters and me, of our great-uncles and their misadventures. […] They lived as if they had thousands of lives to spare, and in my father’s stories, it seemed that they did.” This phenomenon makes Thirii Myo Kyaw Myint’s memoir a genuine joy to read.

An unsolved crime is at the core of Kwon Yeo-sun’s Lemon (a 2019 Korean novel translated in 2021 by Janet Hong). Her debut novel received the Sangsang Literary Award in 1996, launching an acclaimed career, though this is her first work in English translation. The 18-year-old girl’s murder affects many people’s lives; when her classmates laugh, they feel terrible for even temporarily forgetting about her. “We were all seize by the same guilt, and the classroom was as still as the inside of a vacuum.” But some individuals have been impacted more than others. “Not being able to put an end to an incident so horrific—I couldn’t begin to imagine that kind of weight on a life.” Moving through a series of perspectives, readers begin to assemble an understanding, begin the process of determining what matters and what can be set aside.

The title alone, of Meena Kandasamy’s When I Hit You: Or, A Portrait of the Writer as a Young Wife (2017) connects it to the previous novel’s themes of violence. It was nominated for the Women’s Fiction Prize in 2018, but it was Deepika’s recommendation that nudged it up my list. I knew it would be a gentle and happy story, set on the shores of a rainbow-coloured land populated by cats and dogs who live forever, because those are the kinds of stories that she regularly recommends to me. Just kidding. But, in all fairness, we both read a lot of dark and heavy stories, and we met through Mel, who introduced us via The Saddest Story Ever about a Dog. So, Kandasamy fits.

Bisi Adjapon’s The Teller of Secrets was originally published in Nigeria in 2018 under the title Of Women and Frogs (her short story, of the same title, was nominated for the Caine Prize). It’s a punch to the patriarchy, sustaining the spirit of Kandasamy’s novel. The mood here, however, is varied: sometimes dramatic and moving, other times hilarious and entertaining. Someone tells Esi that white people smell like raw chicken (wet potato chips, says a character in Asali Solomon’s novel below) but it’s not the only pronouncement she disagrees with after she conducts a sniff test. Despite the restrictions on her behaviour and challenges she faces, Esi finds her own way. The authorial voice is almost unsettlingly direct, and she tells you everything, so you can’t help but keep her company. (And here’s to original cover art, here by Jim Tierney.)

Tomorrow, another debut novel, featuring a young woman and a compelling narrative voice…