The novels I have recommended in this series so far have a wide range of settings, protagonists, and interactional arrangements. Perhaps, summaries of a few lines can provide a first orientation about what they are about and thereby help answer the question of whether one should go on reading the brief description, not to mention the entire novel.

• Anne Berest’s The Postcard is about the fate of a French Jewish family during the Holocaust and the mother and daughter’s attempts to shed light on what happened, beginning with the receipt of a postcard with the names of the four family members who were killed.

• Celeste Ng’s Our Missing Hearts is set in a fictious authoritarian United States of America (with the advent of the second Trump presidency, what used to be fiction is fast becoming reality), and deals with the resistance of a Chinese mother and the determination of her son to find her.

• Celeste Ng’s Little Fires Everywhere is set at Shakers High, a suburb of Cleveland for those who can afford luxurious single houses, and the interactions of two women and their children. It ends with the rebellious daughter burning her parent’s house.

• Paul Lynch’ Prophet Song fictionalizes Ireland into a fascist state in which a mother tries to survive with her children, but at a great loss, and finally a daring escape to the continent. Impressive final chapter.

• Laurent Mauvignier’s The Birthday Party plays in an isolated hamlet in the French countryside, in which the present and, especially, the past of the husband’s wife come to clash violently in a Western-style final gunfight. This book truly deserves more readers.

• In Seichō Matsumoto’s classic detective story Tokyo Express, two detectives succeed in unraveling the complex process preceding a murder that looked, at first sight, like a clear double suicide.

• Luke Jennings’ Killing Eve trilogy is the story of a focused psychopathic assassin and her more intuitive and emotional pursuer, an MI5/MI6 officer. There are plenty of killing methods and bodies on display. But at its heart, the novel is about two very different women who are attracted to each other and try to create a stable, loving relationship and a safe environment for it.

• Itamar Vieira Junior’s Crooked Plow takes us to a plantation of former slaves in Bahia, Brazil. It is about the changes brought about by a new generation that wants more than a subsistence existence based on the whims of an exploitative plantation owner. The novel is also about the importance of the supernatural in the lives of plantation workers and the role of violence.

• Charlotte Wood’s The Weekend relies on the contrasting of four very different elderly women and their group dynamics after death removed the one of them whose house they must now tidy up. Their different approaches in dealing with their past, present, and future includes the painful insight, “my life has not been what I believed it to be.” The dog of one of the participants plays an important role.

• Adelle Waldman’s Help Wanted has been called a “workplace novel,” because it is set in a big box store the size of several football fields, with 150 employees (mostly belonging to the “precariat”) and six departments, located in Potterstown, New Jersey. The novel focuses on the attempt of the employees in the logistics department (“Movement”) to influence the decision about who should be their superior.

• Selva Almada’s Not a River does have an underlying story, but it is not arranged in a simple chronological line. Rather, it consists of short sections interwoven with events that occurred earlier. Thus, as the story progresses, its narrative is interrupted by flashbacks, such as that of the drowning of Tilo’s father, Eusebio, twenty years ago or of the deaths of two girls who would later help the main protagonists escape their assailants (yes, after their death—this is Argentina).

• Ia Genberg’s The Details does not offer a plot. Rather, the author presents the reader with four characters that her bisexual protagonist, who lives in urban Sweden, has met in her life and who have left a lasting impression on her: Johanna, Niki, Alejandro, and Birgitte.

• Jente Posthuma’s What I’d Rather Not Think About is about the twin sister of a gay brother who suffered from severe depression and eventually committed suicide. This event shocks her deeply and leads to a seemingly never-ending stream of reflections about her brother, their relationship, and her own personality.

• Anne Serre’s A Leopard-Skin Hat is about the interactions between Fanny and the “Narrator,” the ways, or modus operandi, that two selves use that function within fundamentally different psychological parameters (Fanny seemingly having a self that “had begun slowly breaking into a multitude of fragments that nothing held together any longer”), and who cannot really understand how the other mentally operates and what her/his mental and emotional needs are.

• Charlotte Wood’s Stone Yard Devotional is about an unnamed female first-person narrator who describes her everyday life in a small isolated Catholic convent in Australia. The narrative adapts to that surrounding by flowing leisurely through the pages like a small shallow stream in the countryside. Mice play an important role in disrupting the routine everyday life.

• Jenny Erpenbeck’s Kairos narrates a two-year love story between Hans, who is a 53-year-old successful writer, and married with a son. He also has a penchant for extramarital affairs, with some tendency toward sadistic practices. Katharina is 19 years old. Before falling madly in love with Hans and believing that all her happiness depends on her relationship with him, she had only a few brief relationships with boys her age, though she is open to relationships with women. Both live in East Berlin, the capital of what was then the German Democratic Republic, before and after the Wall collapsed.

• Paul Murray’s The Bee Sting can be read as a story about the dynamics within a family. The Barnes family includes Dickie (husband), Imelda (wife), their teenage daughter Cassandra (“Cass”), and her younger brother “PJ.” They live in a small town in Ireland, not far from Dublin. Dickie has taken over his father Maurice’s successful car dealership and garage, and the family is well respected in the town. The novel mainly consists of separate portraits of the family members and what happens to them. Dickie is the main protagonist, portrayed as a perennial loser with a tendency to make reckless decisions or non-decisions.

• Rachel Kushner’s Creation Lake features an American female undercover agent (“Sadie”)  with an invented identity who is tasked to infiltrate an obscure French rural commune of people with an alternative worldview and an inclination to disrupt state projects by staging protests. The narrative flows very slowly. The climax of the book happens like a scene from a slapstick comedy, followed by an adapted Lucky Luke-style riding into the sunset, only that “Sadie” does not ride Jolly Jumper but drives an E-class Mercedes.

• Richard Ford’s Be Mine is the latest installment in Richard Ford’s series about Frank Bascomb. Frank has become old now. Fate has it that his son, Paul, who is 47, has become sick with Lou Gehrig’s disease, a terminal neurodegenerative disorder (ALS), for which he was treated at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester. Frank has persuaded Paul, who is wheelchair bound, to make a last joint trip to Mount Rushmore, for which they rent a Windbreaker camper. Ford’s language is a bit on the rough side.

• Samantha Harvey’s Orbital is the celebrated winner of the Booker Prize 2024. The novel’s setting is the international space station and its personnel. There are four astronauts on this station (Nell, Chie, Shaun, and Pietro) and two cosmonauts, as they are called in Russia (Anton and Roman). The real stars of this novel are not its personnel, but the space station and, above all, our planet Earth.

• Vincenzo Latronico’s Perfection tells the story of Anna and Tom, who escape the social narrowness of their Southern European home country to join a bustling sub-culture of “creative professionals” of the internet and social media world in a Berlin that, not long after the collapse of the Wall, seemed to hold the promise of “potential and abundance.” Anna and Tom live this life to the fullest, but cannot escape getting older, their circle of friends disintegrating, and the city environment undergoing a process of gentrification. They need to reinvent the direction and purpose of their lives.

• Yael Van Der Wouden’s The Safekeep is set in the Netherlands of 1961. It returns us to the theme of Berest’s novel, Nazi Germany and its mass murder of Europe’s Jewish population. The novel combines the history of collaboration between sectors of the Dutch population and the Nazi’s in basically stealing the Jewish population’s property with the relationship between two women who were children when that happened. One of the women (Isabel) belongs to a family that took advantage of the Jews’ ordeal and the other (Eva) belongs to the family that was dispossessed by the actions of Isabel’s family. Eva’s covert attempt to recover her family’s property piece-by-piece leads to an unlikely but touching relationship between these two women.