Tagged: Picador Books

Translated from Japanese by Sam Bett and David Boyd (Picador Books, 2022) It’s always a happy event for me when there’s a new Mieko Kawakami novel to read. This is the third of her books that Picador have released in the past three years: Breasts and Eggs was published in Bett and Boyd’s translation in 2020, […]

Translated from Korean by Jamie Chang Concerning my Daughter is a Korean novel that explores and challenges the difficulties of being lesbian in an adamantly (and at times violently) heteronormative society. The two primary characters are a mother and daughter who are opposed in almost every way: when the daughter, Green, asks to move back […]

When I wrote my round-up of 2020, I had no idea that 2021 would be another year of restrictions and adaptations. I haven’t read as much as I’d have liked to this year, and I leave 2021 with several unread or awaiting review. But of those I have read, I wanted to bring you my […]

Translated from Japanese by Sam Bett and David Boyd (Picador Books, 2021) Mieko Kawakami’s Breasts and Eggs (also translated by Sam Bett and David Boyd and released in the UK by Picador Books) was one of my favourite releases of 2020; prior to that I had loved the offbeat humour of her novella Ms Ice […]

Translated from French by Frank Wynne (Picador Books, 2021) Alice Zeniter’s multi-generational narrative The Art of Losing deals with the troubled legacy of the Algerian War of Independence, focusing on one family’s difficulties in coming to terms with the unnamed experience and unresolved traumas that are handed down through generations. Multiple historians have noted that […]

I had intended to post this piece in December, but the end of the year brought some unexpected challenges and I had to delay it until the new year. So although you may have left 2020 behind with relief, I hope you’ll still be willing to travel back there with me in books: 2020 will […]

Translated from Japanese by Sam Bett and David Boyd (Picador Books, 2020) Breasts and Eggs is a spectacular and delicate exposition of what it is to be in a woman’s body when that body is eternally viewed as either a commodity, a conduit for male pleasure, or a reproductive vessel. The breasts and eggs of […]