Shortlisted for the International Booker Prize, Perfection by Vincenzo Latronico is a slim, quiet novel that manages to whisper something deeply unsettling about the way we live today. It’s not exactly a dystopia, but it gives you that strange, weightless feeling you get in the presence of too much design and not enough life - a kind of sterile existential dread surrounded by cheese plants, dressed in linen, and filtered through Instagram.

Reading The Ministry of Utmost Happiness is like standing in a crowded street, overwhelmed by beauty, tragedy, noise and grace all at once. Roy opens a space between old and new, between the living and the dead, between identities that won’t sit still. From the opening pages, the novel swells with contradiction: between the brutality of the state and the tenderness of unlikely kinships; between the weight of history and the disjointed, sometimes jarring present.

Édouard Louis’ Change is a tender and honest look at what it means to reimagine yourself when everything you come from tells you not to. Told in a very easy to read, colloquial voice, the narrative feels like a conversation half-whispered to a parent in the dead of night, equal parts confession and apology. From the start, Louis’ prose slips between modes.

In some ways, Ed Gillett’s Party Lines reads like a tragedy. A tragedy laced with his own and others’ passionate refusals to accept underground dance music’s soul being swallowed by the machine. Fr…

The Supreme Court is being asked to decide whether public schools can refuse to give parents the right to pull kids from lessons involving LGBTQ-themed books.

Graeme Armstrong’s The Young Team is a shot of pure adrenaline—funny, sharp, heartbreaking, and brutally real. Written in Scots dialect and narrated by Armstrong himself in the audiobook, the novel grips you straight away and doesn’t let up. His voice isn’t just a narrator, it becomes the story: lyrical, fast-paced, erratic, full of energy and anxiety, like the internal monologue of a young man who can’t stop moving because the silence is too heavy.

Elif Shafak’s There Are Rivers in the Sky is a multifaceted exploration of the intersection between mythology, history, and human nature. Much like Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, Shafak’s novel blurs the line between realism and myth, creating a tapestry where the fantastical and the real coexist, interwoven through a multitude of narratives. With each thread, Shafak evokes the sense that life, like a river, is never a singular stream but rather a confluence of currents - some personal, some historical, and some cosmic.

Aaron Labaree reviews Vincenzo Latronico’s novel “Perfection,” translated by Sophie Hughes.

Elif Shafak’s new novel, “There Are Rivers in the Sky,” follows the same drop of water from the Tigris to the Thames, from antiquity to the 19th century to today.

A new generation is finding brilliant and creative ways to object to the arrest of mayor Ekrem İmamoğlu

Monkey’s Uncle by Jenny Diski challenges the male-centric view of philosophy and science while being humorous and accessible. Check out my review below in my blog where you'll also find more reviews and essays on a range of topics https://t.co/lVj4vs6HXr

Flights by Olga Tokarczuk blew me away when I read it. It was the first book published my Fitzcarraldo that I read and now my read shelf is very Klein Blue. Here's my review of Flights. If you ha...