The Memory Police by Yōko Ogawa, translated by Stephen Snyder (Harvill Secker) Books one and two are already out in the UK, and volume three will hit the shelves in 2020. A satire of modern France, its protagonist, an antihero of antiheroes and a homeless guru of sorts, is the former owner of a Parisian record store, “trapped in the last century”, and on a quest to uncover the secrets of a dead pop star, his friend Alex Bleach. The Vernon Subutex trilogy is “post-punk, post-morality, post-civilisation”. Vernon Subutex 3 by Virginie Despentes, translated by Frank Wynne (MacLehose) Iris is weighed down by work and motherhood, and, as she begins an affair, Shalev plunges the reader into a whirlwind story of impossible choices. A decade after she is injured in a suicide bombing, two different kinds of pain return to Iris’s life: the physical trauma of that attack, and the love of her youth. The Israeli writer is always incisive on the complexities of family and relationship dynamics, and her latest novel, published in the UK this month, focuses on the longing of old passions versus the dreads and comforts of domesticity. Pain by Zeruya Shalev, translated by Sondra Silverston (Other)
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