International fiction has played a role of particular importance during the past two years as our worlds have shrunk, making it even more imperative to travel via fiction and film. This year featured an incredible array of international crime writing, including epic crime novels, bizarre and quirky thrillers, and pitch-black noir. There were strong showings from all over the globe, and we apologize for our francophile ways (there are two from France on here); the list also includes three novels from Japan, all completely different takes on the genre, as well as new novels from Latin American powerhouses Santiago Gamboa and Leonardo Padura. Finally, outliers include works from Croatia and Russia, both as bleak as they are beautiful, and a South Korean psychological thriller. May we all soon travel for real, but until that time, enjoy these brief forays into lands beyond.
Kaoru Takamura, Lady Joker
Translated by Allison Markin Powell and Marie Iida
(Soho)
Lady Joker reads like Don DeLillo’s Underworld rewritten by James Ellroy, or perhaps LA Confidential rewritten by Don DeLillo? What I’m trying to say here is, Lady Joker is EPIC. And this book isn’t even all of Lady Joker: it’s just part one! Takamura based her saga on an infamous unsolved case from the mid-90s in which a candy company exec was kidnapped, but gives the plot plenty of twists of her own. This book deserves to be on every best of list of the year just for the mammoth nature of the translation effort alone, but really, everything about Lady Joker is impressive. The book is also notable for drawing attention to Japan’s historically segregated buraku community, long denied effective protection from discrimination.
Natsuko Imamura, The Woman in the Purple Skirt
Translated by Lucy North
(Penguin Books)
Don’t be dissuaded by the loneliness of the main character—The Woman in the Purple Skirt is a defiant and hysterical ode to the power of the woman alone. The Woman in the Yellow Cardigan watches the Woman in the Purple Skirt as she drifts through their neighborhood, conspicuous in her apartness, an object of children’s fear and adults’ admonishments. The Woman in the Purple Skirt is, in effect, everything the Woman in the Yellow Cardigan would like to be—she is noticed. She is feared. And thus, she is powerful.
The Woman in the Yellow Cardigan gets the Woman in the Purple Skirt a job in hospitality, and witnesses her slow blossoming into a friendlier, more confident and approachable version of herself. And the Woman in the Yellow Cardigan continues to watch as the Woman in the Purple Skirt’s newfound confidence gets her into more and more trouble…
Santiago Gamboa, The Night Will Be Long
Translated by Andrea Rosenberg
(Europa)
For my money there may be no more ambitious, accomplished writer than Gamboa at work in international noir today. His newest novel, The Night Will Be Long, focuses on a mysterious flash of violence in Cauca, Colombia, witnessed by one boy only, with all others swearing to have seen nothing, know nothing. The investigation soon points in the direction of a powerful cabal of Christian churches exercising inordinate and disturbing power over their followers. Gamboa brings a searching, penetrating style to the prose and unwinds a genuinely compelling and provocative story that interrogates the very nature of violence and truth. –Dwyer Murphy, CrimeReads Editor-In-Chief
Kotaro Isaka, Bullet Train
Translated by Sam Malissa
(Overlook)
This book is so much fun!!! Bullet Train reads a bit like if Elmore Leonard was hired to adapt Murder on the Orient Express and it was directed by Bong Joon Ho. Several groups of criminals converge on on train headed from Tokyo to Morioka—an odd couple protecting a gangster’s son and a suitcase full of money, an odd job man with terrible luck who’s there to steal the suitcase, and a teenage psychopath facing off against the grieving father of a child he gravely wounded. Funny, action-packed, perfectly choreographed, and surprisingly moving!
Samira Sedira, People Like Them
Translated by Lara Vergnaud
(Penguin Books)
Samira Sedira’s newly translated novel is inspired by a real case in France in which racism was an obvious factor but ignored by the media. In People Like Them, a glamorous mixed-race family move to a small rural community, where they proceed to befriend, then defraud, many of their new neighbors. One of those neighbors then commits a disproportionate act of monstrous violence sparked far more by his own racism and jealousy than any money owed to him. This is a tale of the violence and prejudice that rears its head in the form of exponential punishment for small sins—an unbearably familiar narrative across the world today.
Kwon Yeo-sun, Lemon
Translated by Janet Hong
(Other Press)
Lemon stands among the best in the growing body of translated Korean thrillers. When a high-school girl is found murdered, the lives of her classmates and sister are torn apart in the aftermath by a botched investigation and their own suspicions. The novel carefully positions the central crime within a larger context of class and competition. The complexity of the story betrays its small size, but the driving narrative makes it difficult not to read in one sitting.
Ivana Bodrožić, We Trade Our Night for Someone Else’s Day
Translated by Ellen Elias-Bursac
(Seven Stories Press)
Ivana Bodrožić’s newly translated novel of trauma, vengeance, and despair is as noir as they come. A journalist’s arrival in an unnamed city where neighborhoods are long on memory and short on justice is the catalyst for new explosions of ethnic hatred. The journalist is there to interview a Croatian woman imprisoned for sleeping with her Serbian student and convincing him to murder her husband. She’s also there on a mission to find out the truth about her long-missing father, if her quiet connection with a nonpartisan taxi driver doesn’t derail her quest. Bleak, devastating, and lyrical in equal measures.
Leonardo Padura, The Transparency of Time
translated by Anna Kushner
(FSG)
From Padura, the crime fiction legend and giant of LatAm noir, this year brought a new Mario Conde novel, an epic occult history that leaps through time, place, and ideology to deliver one of the strangest, most alluring crime novels in years. Conde, now sixty and as ever full of disillusions and nostalgia, receives a new client, a former Marxist turned Santeria practitioner who wants Conde to track down a powerful statuette, la Virgen de Regla. It seems like Padura is getting more ambitious with each book, and here he’s bent the structures of the crime novel into an investigation on the astral plane, one that also happens to be a revealing commentary on the state of modern Cuba and the world pressing in on it. –DM
Hervé Le Tellier, The Anomaly
Translated by Adriana Hunter
(Other Press)
In this bizarre speculative thriller from literary powerhouse Hervé Le Tellier, already a massive bestseller in his native France, the passengers on a doomed flight from Paris to New York find themselves trapped in a world of simulacra come to flesh, experiencing the same events over and over again. Perfect for those who like their realities unstable, and those who, like most of us, still feel trapped in the endlessly repeating cycle of pandemic waves. Like I said in the introduction, this year’s international fiction got real weird.
Sergei Lebedev, Untraceable (New Vessel Press)
Translated by Antonina W. Bouis
Colorless, odorless, undetectable, and untraceable—the quality of Russia’s lethal poisons has only improved in the few decades following the collapse of the Soviet Union and the soon-restored oligarchy of KGB officers turned capitalist strongmen. In Untraceable, Lebedev takes us into the murky world of those scientists who have developed the country’s deadly weapons of targeted destruction. And in this brilliant tale of espionage, untraceable poisons are the stand-in for the lacunae of trauma, the gaps in understanding between felt experience and the ability to describe that experience. As riveting as it is profound, this powerful story will linger (like its poisonous contents) long after you finish reading it.
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NOTABLE SELECTIONS
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Franck Bouysse, Born of No Woman (Other Press) · Cecilia Ekbäck, The Historians (Harper Perennial) · Gilles Legardinier, The Paris Labyrinth (Flammarion-Pere Castor) · Victoria Mas, The Mad Women’s Ball (Overlook) · Helen Tursten, An Elderly Lady Must Not Be Crossed (Soho) · Virginia Feito, Mrs. March (Liveright) · Karin Smirnoff, My Brother (Pushkin) · Hervé Le Corre, In the Shadow of the Fire (Europa) · Geling Yan, The Secret Talker (HarperVia) · Phillipe Claudel, Dog Island (Little Brown) · Sergio Schmucler, The Guardian of Amsterdam Street (House of Anansi Press) · Jean-Patrick Manchette, The N’Gustro Affair (New York Review of Books) · Andrea Camilleri, Riccardino (Penguin Books)
