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Sisters in Yellow in Mieko Kawakami, translated by Laurel Taylor and Hitomi Yoshio (Picador, £16.99)
Kawakami’s latest begins with a bang, as narrator Hana learns that her old friend Kimiko has been accused of kidnapping. This MacGuffin takes us to their friendship in the late 1990s in Tokyo, when a young Hana and an elderly woman open a bar called Lemon: “Yellow attracts money.” But it’s a difficult journey and before long Hana is in a world of terrorism. “The world is crazy. He’s not the only one, and you need the passion of Kawakami’s style, which tends to explore rather than explain – people come and go, houses burn down, cancer is found, almost at random – but the constant rush means there’s never a dull moment. So good – like how his unreliable mother Hana wants to borrow 2m yen to sell underwear that helps “your spine and organs get back to where they should be” – this is a silly and scary story.
All Animals by Ananda Devi, translated by Jeffrey Zuckerman (Pushkin, £12.99)
“Forgive me for starting this story with an unpleasant source.” Maybe – everything is like that. In an unnamed European country, a schoolgirl “born with no desire but to eat” is growing up. “My stomach, my ass, my thighs – everything was ready to reach the farthest corners of the earth.” He blames his laziness on the need to suppress the voice of his dead twin brother, who was “implanted into my body” in the womb. He hates school, where other kids make fun of him, as if his self-loathing wasn’t enough. After a darkly comic scene where she gets stuck in her bedroom door as if it had “no handle”, she falls in love with a carpenter who comes to widen the door – but there are more twists and turns to come. This powerful story is very physical, but driven by a compelling voice that describes the torment of a young woman who is “the magic mirror of our time … intemperance shines through”.
White Desert and Luis López Carrasco, translated by Rosalind Harvey (Granta, £14.99)
This unexpected book, which contains five connected stories about a Spanish family, begins with the end of the world and becomes mysterious from there. A balloon argument about a post-apocalyptic scenario turns ugly when one of them picks up a knife, or thinks they have. A plane crashes on an island. “Can (we) go and get our stuff… A lot of people, you know, they’ve soiled themselves.” What binds the events together is a sense of dissonance in our interconnected world, but this book subverts expectations: when a group of New Year’s Eve goers disappear, it becomes a game of hide and seek. The footnotes written throughout indicate that we are watching all this in the future (“Emirates was a famous airline…”), and find out what the white desert turns everything on its head. For readers who like to join in on their own, and who want to play, the original based on our busy lives, this is something to be inspired by.
Home of the Drowned by Elin Anna Labba, translated by Elizabeth Clark Wessel (Harvill, £16.99)
“You should have waited, kids.” In 1942 Lapland, a village inhabited by nomadic Sámi people was flooded by the dam of a new power plant. A family watches as their goahti (peat-covered hut) disappears under the water. “It wasn’t the best goahti,” says Ánne. “No, but I was mine,” says his sister Rávdná. When Rávdná wants to build a house to replace it, the authorities refuse permission: the life of the Sámi people is denied but alternatives are not allowed. The local newspaper willingly offers to publish their story, but “we get very angry letters if we use foreign words”. When the government tells the local people that a new dam will “lift us out of poverty and injustice”, the words ring true. This intimate story of outrageous racism, Labba says, is based on real life events in Sweden.
