Review

Five of the best translated fiction of 2025

The return of Nobel laureate Han Kang; film-making under the Nazis; stuck in a time loop; Scandinavian thrills; and essential stories from postwar Iraq

John Self

1 December 2025

We Do Not Part
Han Kang, translated by e yaewon and Paige Aniyah Morris (Hamish Hamilton)
The Korean 2024 Nobel laureate combines the strangeness of The Vegetarian and the political history in Human Acts to extraordinary effect in her latest novel. Kyungha, a writer experiencing a health crisis (“I can sense a migraine coming on like ice cracking in the distance”), agrees to look after a hospitalised friend’s pet bird. The friend, Inseon, makes films that expose historical massacres in Korea. At the centre of the book is a mesmerising sequence “between dream and reality” where Kyungha stumbles toward Inseon’s rural home, blinded by snow, then finds herself in ghostly company. As the pace slows, and physical and psychic pain meet, the story only becomes more involving. This might be Han’s best novel yet.

 

Review

Five of the best translated fiction of 2024

This article is more than 11 months old

An indigenous epic, macabre short stories from Spain, Aztec adventures and more

John Self 

6 December 2024

Aednan
Linnea Axelsson, translated by Saskia Vogel, Pushkin
This award-winning novel set in northern Sweden (the title means both “the land” and “my mother”) is subtitled “An Epic”, but its form – spare, haiku-like verse – means the pages breathe freely. The impressionistic style is matched by the structure, which shifts back and forward, covering a century from 1913 to 2015 in the lives of two indigenous Sámi families. They face the arrival of Swedish settlers and the destruction of their culture, including the building of a dam on Sámi land. One woman regrets her own failure to resist – “The Swedish / language grew / along my thoughts // The Sámi since long / asleep in the body / of shame // obedience overlaid” – and wonders of her children, “How am I to / explain to them // that the ruin / is in my voice.” The result is indeed epic, but also intimate and powerful.

 

Review

Five of the best translated novels of 2023

This article is more than 1 year old

Javier Marías’s final book, a love affair in 1980s East Berlin, reincarnation in France, a story of obsession and a South Korean romp

John Self
Friday 8 December 2023

Tomás Levinson
Javier Marías, translated by Margaret Jull Costa (Hamish Hamilton)
“I was brought up in the old-fashioned way, and could never have dreamed that one day I would be ordered to kill a woman.” Ah, how we will miss the late Javier Marías and his unique genre of slow-motion page-turners, blending thrillery plots with long, equivocating sentences. His final work, a “companion novel” to its predecessor, Berta Isla, tells the story of a washed-up spy chasing down a terrorist, and is full of the complexities, comedy and most of all contradictions that define his work. Fittingly, its closing words are “Possibly. You never know.”

Anton Chekhov / My Life

MY LIFE

by ANTON CHEKHOV

BIOGRAPHY

“Perhaps I was not living as I ought.”

Renowned as the greatest short story writer ever, Anton Chekhov was also a master of the novella, and perhaps his most overlooked is this gem, My Life—the tale of a rebellious young man so disgusted with bourgeois society that he drops out to live amongst the working classes, only to find himself confronted by the morally and mentally deadening effects of provincialism.

Chekhov / The Requiem

The Requiem

By Anton Chekhov
BIOGRAPHY

IN the village church of Verhny Zaprudy mass was just over. The people had begun moving and were trooping out of church. The only one who did not move was Andrey Andreyitch, a shopkeeper and old inhabitant of Verhny Zaprudy. He stood waiting, with his elbows on the railing of the right choir. His fat and shaven face, covered with indentations left by pimples, expressed on this occasion two contradictory feelings: resignation in the face of inevitable destiny, and stupid, unbounded disdain for the smocks and striped kerchiefs passing by him. As it was Sunday, he was dressed like a dandy. He wore a long cloth overcoat with yellow bone buttons, blue trousers not thrust into his boots, and sturdy goloshes — the huge clumsy goloshes only seen on the feet of practical and prudent persons of firm religious convictions.

Review

The best children’s books of 2025

A new read-aloud favourite, doughnuts with world-conquering ambitions, high fantasy from Katherine Rundell, and more

This year’s standout works for children include joyous picture books, gloriously bizarre nonfiction and stories of courage, companionship and rapturous flight – testament to the human need for connection, justice and freedom.

‘We were swimming in the mind pool of Tom Stoppard!’ – actors salute the great playwright

 

‘We were swimming in the mind pool of Tom Stoppard!’ – actors salute the great playwright

Rufus Sewell, Christine Baranski, Susan Wokoma, Toby Jones and Harriet Walter share their unforgettable encounters with a theatrical giant

Obituaries / Tom Stoppard

Sir Tom Stoppard obituary

One of Britain’s most outstanding playwrights famed for the ‘hypnotised brilliance’ of his prose and dialogue

Michael Coveney

Sunday 30 November 2025

After the first night of his play Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead at the National Theatre in London in 1967, Tom Stoppard awoke, like Lord Byron, and found himself famous. This new star in the playwriting firmament was a restless, questing bundle of contradictions. Stoppard wrote great theatre because, primarily, he wrote argumentative and witty dialogue. Writing plays, he said, was the only respectable way of contradicting oneself. His favourite line in modern drama was Christopher Hampton’s in The Philanthropist: “I’m a man of no convictions – at least, I think I am.”

Tom Stoppard / The Art of Theater

Tom Stoppard

Tom Stoppard

The Art of Theater No. 7

Interviewed by Shusha Guppy

ISSUE 109, WINTER 1988

 

At the time of this interview, Stoppard was near the end of rehearsals for his new play, Hapgood, which opened in London in March, 1988. For the duration of the rehearsals Stoppard had rented a furnished apartment in central London in order to avoid commuting, and although he had said, “I would never volunteer to talk about my work and myself more than ninety seconds,” he was extremely generous with his time and attention. Stoppard is tall and exotically handsome, and he speaks with a very slight lisp.

Marilyn Monroe reading Ulysses by James Joyce

 

Marilyn Monroe reading Ulysses by James Joyce, Long Island,1955 by Eve Arnold.

Where There’s Love, There’s Hate by Adolfo Bioy Casares and Silvina Ocampo

Adolfo Bioy Casares and Silvina Ocampo

Where There’s Love, There’s Hate 

by Adolfo Bioy Casares and Silvina Ocampo

Back in July, I read a few books to tie in with Richard and Stu’s Spanish Lit Month. All well and good except I ended up with several other books on my shopping list on the back of other bloggers’ reviews. Where There’s Love, There’s Hate was near the top of that list thanks to Grant’s review, and when I spotted it in the new Foyles, I couldn’t resist.

Author author / Ian Fleming / James Bond - a tickt to distant joys XLISTO

AUTHOR AUTHOR

Ian Fleming

James Bond – a ticket to distant joys

'Ian Fleming's novels offer the opportunity to glimpse, even to revel in, how things used to be before progress and equality spoiled all the fun'

Jonathan Freedland
Fri 28 Sep 2012 22.55 BST

Twenty Questions with Sarah Moss

‘I fear that the discourse of identity politics will continue to separate readers and writers’

Writers and thinkers take on twenty questions from the TLS, revealing the books they most admire, nagging regrets and the occasional hidden talent

Jack Vettriano / Unreal Rooms

Jack Vettriano, Mad Dogs

Jack Vettriano

Unreal Rooms

1 JULY 2017, 

EMANUELA BORGATTA DUNNETT

Why are we able to feel nostalgia for a world we have never visited nor known, in front of Jack Vettriano’s paintings? Why do we feel as strangers - yet accomplices - in front of the men and women populating his works? These are key questions to understand the Scottish painter’s success, a painter who has managed to become one of the most followed artist of contemporary painting, all over the world. First, we need to focus our attention on the use of the light: unprecedented in the way he uses to play with the darkness which characterises all his works: faces in half light, thoughtful, facing a crossroad where they are asked to state their position. The bodies are captured at the beginning of an action, the consequences of which are unknown: deceitful gazes, arms meeting in secret relationships. 

Mario Puzo / The Godfather / Quotes

The Godfather 

by Mario Puzo

BIOGRAPHY

Quotes

BOOK I

“Friendship is everything. Friendship is more than talent. It is more than government. It is almost the equal of a family. Never forget that. If you had built up a wall of friendships you wouldn’t have to ask me for help.” – Don Vito Corleone