In a remote Italian town, an unassuming cobbler is drawn into helping partisans fight against fascists and Nazis in Sacha Naspini’s novel "The Bishop’s Villa". Despite missing several fingers, René is the cobbler of Le Case. He’s... Read More

In Afabwaje Kurian’s novel "Before the Mango Ripens", Nigerians fight against white American missionaries for control over their country’s future. “Transition [is] afoot in Nigeria” in 1971, just after the nation’s... Read More

Set in the Netherlands, Jaap Robben’s novel "Afterlight" is about an elderly woman’s work to discover what happened to her child. In the book’s present, Frieda is in her eighties. After her husband, Louis, dies, she is deemed too... Read More

Itamar Vieira Junior’s novel "Crooked Plow" is a work of magical realism in which sisters fight to survive and improve conditions on the land they love. As children in Brazil, Bibiana and Belonísia discover their grandmother’s... Read More

In Ludmilla Petrushevskaya’s novel "Kidnapped", two boys are switched at birth, leading to unexpected consequences. The story unfolds against the backdrop of the Soviet Union’s collapse. Alina, a poor university student who has been... Read More

Dutch journalist Pieter van Os’s "Hiding in Plain Sight" is the biography of Mala Rivka Kizel, the only person in her Orthodox Jewish family to survive the Holocaust, which she did by passing as a gentile in Poland and Germany. Born in... Read More