Author: David Hebblethwaite

#InternationalBooker2025: the shadow panel’s shortlist

18th April 2025 / / 0 Comments

After the official International Booker Prize shortlist, here is the shortlist that we’ve chosen on the Shadow Panel:

  • On the Calculation of Volume I by Solvej Balle, translated from Danish by Barbara J. Haveland (Faber)
  • There’s a Monster Behind the Door by Gaëlle Bélem, translated from French by Karen Fleetwood and Laëtitia Saint-Loubert (Bullaun Press)
  • Solenoid by Mircea Cărtărescu, translated from Romanian by Sean Cotter (Pushkin Press)
  • Small Boat by Vincent Delecroix, translated from French by Helen Stevenson (Small Axes)
  • Hunchback by Saou Ichikawa, translated from Japanese by Polly Barton (Viking)
  • A Leopard-Skin Hat by Anne Serre, translated from French by Mark Hutchinson (Lolli Editions)

Half in common with the official shortlist, half not. For more of our thoughts on the shortlist, head over to our Substack.

Click here to read my other posts on the 2025 International Booker Prize.

#InternationalBooker2025: the official shortlist

11th April 2025 / / 4 Comments

Here is the official shortlist of this year’s International Booker Prize, which was revealed earlier in the week:

  • On the Calculation of Volume I by Solvej Balle, translated from Danish by Barbara J. Haveland (Faber)
  • Small Boat by Vincent Delecroix, translated from French by Helen Stevenson (Small Axes)
  • Under the Eye of the Big Bird by Hiromi Kawakami, translated from Japanese by Asa Yoneda (Granta Books)
  • Perfection by Vincenzo Latronico, translated from Italian by Sophie Hughes (Fitzcarraldo Editions)
  • Heart Lamp by Banu Mushtaq, translated from Kannada by Deepa Bhasthi (And Other Stories)
  • A Leopard-Skin Hat by Anne Serre, translated from French by Mark Hutchinson (Lolli Editions)

I hhaven’t quite finished reading everything yet, but this looks like a pretty decent shortlist to me. We’ll announce the Shadow Panel’s shortlist in due course.

#InternationalBooker2025: Small Boat by Vincent Delecroix (tr. Helen Stevenson)

7th April 2025 / / 2 Comments

Small Boat is the first novel by French philosopher Vincent Delecroix to be translated into English. It’s inspired by real events from 2021, when a dinghy taking migrants from France to the UK capsized, and 27 people died. Despite receiving calls from the passengers, the French authorities didn’t send help, judging that the boat was nearer to – and had then crossed into – British waters.

Recordings of the calls between the migrants and the French monitoring station emerged during the subsequent investigation, with the radio operator seeming indifferent and making comments such as, “I didn’t ask you to leave.” Delecroix’s narrator is that radio operator, as she is being interviewed by police.

The operator is adamant that she has done nothing wrong, that she carried out the duties of her job, and that it wasn’t her place to get emotionally involved:

So I didn’t enlist with the Navy to save the migrants sloshing about on the rail tracks of Pas-ds-Calais, that’s for sure, but if I’m asked to do it, or to help do it, I do. So don’t then ask me what I think, deep down, about these people, or rather about their obsession with flinging themselves into the water in search of I know not what. Also, I have to do it with the means available…I cannot send out dozens of dinghies, speed boats, patrol boats or forty helicopters to save forty small boats at the same time. You have to prioritise.

[Translation from French by Helen Stevenson.]

As the novel goes on, the operator challenges the premises of the investigation. Who can really be held responsible for the migrants’ situation, she asks. Not her, who was only a voice down the phone. Didn’t their problems really start long before they stepped on that boat? Delecroix holds back from explicitly judging his narrator’s position, which pushes the reader to step in.

There is one third-person chapter depicting events on the dinghy, and here Delecroix moves out, writing as an external observer, in contrast to the close psychological examination of the radio operator. The experience is jarring, as it should be, and raises questions of complicity that go beyond one character or country, beyond the pages of a book.

Published by Small Axes (HopeRoad).

Click here to read my other posts on the 2025 International Booker Prize.

#InternationalBooker2025: Eurotrash by Christian Kracht (tr. Daniel Bowles)

27th March 2025 / / 1 Comment

The narrator of this novel is, like its author, a middle-aged Swiss writer named Christian Kracht. His mother calls him urgently to Zurich, which is a stifling place for him:

Zurich was claustrophobic; the little flower shop made me claustrophobic, the old city made me claustrophobic, the fifteenth-century buildings, never destroyed in World War II, made me claustrophobic, the ladies with their shopping bags from Kaufhaus Grieder made me claustrophobic and cut me off, the streetcars made me claustrophobic and cut me off, the bankers walking for their banks to accumulate more gold beneath Paradeplatz made me claustrophobic and cut me off.

[Translated from German by Daniel Bowles.]

Still, it could be worse: there are dark aspects to the history of Christian’s German family – including a Nazi grandfather and a fortune amassed from the arms industry – that are about to come to the fore. Christian’s mother has recently been discharged from a psychiatric institution, and now sets out on a road trip with him to give away that fortune, and revisit some old familiar places. 

The first half of Eurotrash intersperses the present day with Christian’s memories of his mother and anecdotes from his family history. In the second half, once the road trip begins, there’s a slight change of emphasis, with more short-and-snappy passages of dialogue, and stories that Christian tells his mother. There is a certain feeling of stepping outside reality, or perhaps of stepping closer to Christian and his mother. It’s fitting, because their relationship is what hangs the novel together, amid the uncertainty of where they’re going to go. 

Published by Serpent’s Tail.

Click here to read my other posts on the 2025 International Booker Prize.

#InternationalBooker2025: The Book of Disappearance by Ibtisam Azem (tr. Sinan Antoon)

21st March 2025 / / 2 Comments

The Book of Disappearance is the second novel by Palestinian writer Ibtisam Azem. It was originally published in Arabic in 2014, translated into English by Sinan Antoon in 2019, and gains a place on the International Booker longlist following a UK edition published by And Other Stories last year. 

The book begins with Alaa, a young Palestinian, discovering that his grandmother has died. She had chosen to stay behind in Jaffa following the displacement of 1948, and Alaa wishes he had taken more time to listen and talk to her. He is all too aware that his grandmother had access to an older world which is now lost to him:

Your memory, which is engraved in my mind, has all these holes in it. Am I forgetting parts of what you told me, or were the things you said incomprehensible? I was very young when I started listening to your stories. Later, when I turned to them for help, I discovered these holes. I started to ask you about them. But the more I asked, the more you got mixed up, or maybe I did. How could things not get mixed up? I was certain there was another city on top of the one we lived in, wearing it. I was certain that your city, the one you kept talking about, which has the same name, has nothing to do with my city. It resembles it a great deal.

[Translated from Arabic by Sinan Antoon.]

The loss of Alaa’s grandmother and her memories is one disappearance. In another narrative strand, all Palestinians disappear from their homeland inexplicably one morning. Azem depicts the immediate aftermath of this party through a series of vignettes that illustrate the changing mood of the Jewish community in response. At first, it’s an inconvenience that people haven’t turned up to work. This gives way to paranoia at the thought of what may have caused the disappearance, and eventually taking advantage of what is left behind. 

On a more personal level is the character of Ariel, the liberal Zionist neighbour and friend of Alaa. While trying to find out what happened to him, Ariel comes across Alaa’s notebook, in which he has written about and to his grandmother. Ariel finds an anger on Alaa’s part that he has perhaps known about but not appreciated to the degree it’s expressed in the notebook. Ariel reads on, but it doesn’t stop him taking up Alaa’s space in certain ways. There’s more than one form of disappearance in this book.

Click here to read my other posts on the 2025 International Booker Prize.

#InternationalBooker2025: Perfection by Vincenzo Latronico (tr. Sophie Hughes)

11th March 2025 / / 1 Comment

This novel is Italian, but its focus is international: a search across borders for the perfect life. Anna and Tom didn’t intend to become freelance graphic designer-web developers, but came to it naturally through their youthful obsession with the internet. They moved to Berlin for the promise of a freer life, and were captivated by its unfamiliar sensations:

They would go for walks on endless summer evenings and freezing winter mornings when the blinding sunlight would reflect off the fresh snow. They would gaze up in awe at the vast and changeable northern sky, so different from the one under which they had grown…They were fascinated by the contrast between the recently renovated buildings and those still bearing the shabbiness of the former East – the crumbling or graffitied stucco, the boarded-up windows.

[Translated from Italian by Sophie Hughes]

These are surface impressions, though: Anna and Tom don’t really know much about the history of the city. Their life in Berlin runs along similar lines: a carousel of friendships with ex-pats in similar professions, often structured around artistic events even though Anna and Tom aren’t necessarily that interested in art. It’s busy, but missing something. 

As the years pass, people come and go, technology changes, housing is precarious. Through it all, Anna and Tom try different ways to reach a life that feels full and authentic, a life that can live up to the glossy pictures in the apartment ads. 

What really makes Perfection work for me is the way it embodies what it depicts. It skates over the surface of its characters’ lives, not even allowing Anna and Tom individual viewpoints, and rarely pausing to flesh out their experiences. It ends in a way that both ties the work up in a neat little bundle, and reminds one that there’s no real ending after all. The perfect life is always just around the corner. 

Published by Fitzcarraldo Editions.

Click here to read my other posts on the 2025 International Booker Prize.

#InternationalBooker2025: A Leopard-Skin Hat by Anne Serre (tr. Mark Hutchinson)

4th March 2025 / / 1 Comment

The Narrator of this novel remembers his late friend Fanny. She struggled with her mental health, and could often appear distant, holding herself still within her own body. But there was a lighter side to her, too. The Narrator recalls that Fanny once stole a leopard-skin hat, and wearing this made her act differently:

She also had in her, popping up from time to time, and always when you least expected it, the jovial young woman in the leopard-skin hat she would have been had certain hatches not got battened down one day, by accident, abruptly, as if by a gust of wind. Whenever this woman turned up in a word or a look, the Narrator was astounded. So Fanny wasn’t just this old friend battling against great odds? She was also this perfect stranger, this person no one had ever heard of whose lineaments had yet to be set down.
[Translated from French by Mark Hutchinson]

A Leopard-Skin Hat is an account of the Narrator’s friendship with Fanny, but all told at a distance like this. The Narrator can see his friend is struggling profoundly, but also knows that ultimately he can’t see the world through her eyes. There’s a push-and-pull to the writing, as we see the Narrator by turns get closer to and further away from his friend. 

There is a further distancing, in that even the character called “the Narrator” isn’t speaking to us directly. It’s especially poignant to learn that this book was written following the death of Anne Serre’s sister, and the distancing at work is Serre’s way of approaching that. If the leopard-skin hat in the novel can be seen as a symbol of those times when the Narrator can reach Fanny, then perhaps the novel itself is something similar for its author. 

Published by Lolli Editions.

Click here to read my other posts on the 2025 International Booker Prize.

#InternationalBooker2025: the longlist

26th February 2025 / / 5 Comments

It’s that time of year again, as the longlist for this year’s International Booker Prize was announced this week:

  • The Book of Disappearance by Ibtisam Azem, translated from Arabic by Sinan Antoon (And Other Stories)
  • On the Calculation of Volume I by Solvej Balle, translated from Danish by Barbara J. Haveland (Faber)
  • There’s a Monster Behind the Door by Gaëlle Bélem, translated from French by Karen Fleetwood and Laëtitia Saint-Loubert (Bullaun Press)
  • Solenoid by Mircea Cărtărescu, translated from Romanian by Sean Cotter (Pushkin Press)
  • Reservoir Bitches by Dahlia de la Cerda, translated from Spanish by Julia Sanches and Heather Cleary (Scribe UK)
  • Small Boat by Vincent Delecroix, translated from French by Helen Stevenson (Small Axes)
  • Hunchback by Saou Ichikawa, translated from Japanese by Polly Barton (Viking)
  • Under the Eye of the Big Bird by Hiromi Kawakami, translated from Japanese by Asa Yoneda (Granta Books)
  • Eurotrash by Christian Kracht, translated from German by Daniel Bowles (Serpent’s Tail)
  • Perfection by Vincenzo Latronico, translated from Italian by Sophie Hughes (Fitzcarraldo Editions)
  • Heart Lamp by Banu Mushtaq, translated from Kannada by Deepa Bhasthi (And Other Stories)
  • On a Woman’s Madness by Astrid Roemer, translated from Dutch by Lucy Scott (Tilted Axis Press)
  • A Leopard-Skin Hat by Anne Serre, translated from French by Mark Hutchinson (Lolli Editions)

I haven’t read any of those as yet, so it’s time to make a start. As always, I will be taking part in the Shadow Panel, and this year we have our own joint Substack. So any reviews I do of the longlist will be posted on there as well as here, linked in the above list as I go along.

Republic of Consciousness Prize 2025: the longlist

4th February 2025 / / 0 Comments

I am a long-time fan of the Republic of Consciousness Prize for Small Presses, which is now in its ninth year. The 2025 longlist was announced recently:

The publisher names above link to the individual publisher pages on each book.

I’m not intending to read the whole longlist, but it is an intriguing selection, and I will be having a look at some. In the meantime, congratulations to all!

The Bridge Between Worlds: A Brief History of Connection by Gavin Francis

30th January 2025 / / 0 Comments

In his preface to this book, Gavin Francis writes that his interest in bridges began in childhood, from the Forth Rail Bridge just a few miles from his house, to a Ladybird book about bridges (which I’m pretty sure I must have read as a child too), to the tale of the Billy Goats Gruff. That is to say, it’s not just the spectacle or the technical aspects of bridges which captured Francis’ interest, but also how bridges can be used imaginatively – what they may represent. 

All these aspects come together in The Bridge Between Worlds, which is not a history of bridges as such, but a tour of bridges that Francis has visited or lived near, bringing in elements of memoir, history, geography, technology, culture and metaphor. The way I phrase that, it sounds a lot, and I honestly wasn’t sure at first whether it would all fit together – but it does. 

The first chapter, about the Union Chain Bridge across the River Tweed at the Scotland-England border, is typical of Francis’ approach. He sets the scene with a link to his own life (in this case, crossing the bridge on childhood holidays), then goes into the history of the bridge and its construction, a wider look at the border and the changing position (so to speak) of Berwick, and a mention of bridges as a metaphor in Paradise Lost, before touching on the politics of that point in his life (shortly before he was born in 1975, Britain had voted to stay in the European Community).

Francis ends the chapter reflecting that the announcement of a new bridge may bring hope:

Perhaps during periods of retrenchment behind borders, when literal and metaphorical drawbridges are everywhere being pulled up, people are comforted to think that the closure of bridges won’t prove permanent. We want to hear that new connections will one day be laid across the boundaries we draw around ourselves.

In mixing the different topics together as he does, Francis makes his book feel both wide-ranging and intensely personal, which is fascinating to read. Francis’ other destinations in the book include London as a 17-year-old, where he has a sense of life’s possibilities opening up at a student science forum; Türkiye, and the world’s oldest bridge still in use; and Scandinavia, whose bridges suggest to him a picture of international cooperation, post-Brexit. It’s a world tour of bridges, their roles and meanings – one that I found rewarding. 

The Bridge Between Worlds is published by Canongate.

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