International Booker 2024

Kyiv, 1919. The Soviets control the city, but White armies menace them from the West. No man trusts his neighbour and any spark of resistance may ignite into open rebellion.When Samson Kolechko's father is murdered, his last act is to save his son from a falling Cossack sabre. Deprived of his right ear instead of his head, Samson is left an orphan, with only his father's collection of abacuses for company.Until, that is, his flat is requisitioned by two Red Army soldiers, whose secret plans Samson is somehow able to overhear with uncanny clarity. Eager to thwart them, he stumbles into a world of murder and intrigue that will either be the making of him—or finish what the Cossack started.Inflected with Kurkov's signature humour and magical realism, The Silver Bone takes inspiration from the real-life archives of crime enforcement agencies in Kyiv, crafting a propulsive narrative that bursts to life with rich historical detail.Translated from the Russian by Boris Dralyuk

Rodrigo Blanco Calderón has established himself as one of the great voices of Latin American literature with his debut novel The Night, and his short story collection Sacrifices.Simpatía is set in Venezuela under Nicolás Maduro amid a mass exodus of the intellectual class who have been leaving their pets behind. Ulises Kan, the protagonist and a movie buff, receives a text message from his wife, Paulina, saying she is leaving the country (and him). Ulises is not heartbroken but liberated by Paulina's departure. Two other events disrupt his life: the return of Nadine, an unrequited love from the past, and the death of his father-in-law, General Martín Ayala. Thanks to Ayala’s will, Ulises discovers that he has been entrusted with a mission—to transform Los Argonautas, the great family home, into a shelter for abandoned dogs. If he manages to do it in time, he will inherit the luxurious apartment that he had shared with Paulina.This novel centers on themes of family and orphanhood in order to address the abuse of power by a patrilineage of political figures in Latin America, from Simón Bolívar to Hugo Chávez. The untranslatable title, Simpatía, which means both sympathy and charm, ironically references the qualities these political figures share. In a morally bankrupt society, where all human ties seem to have dissolved, Ulises is like a stray dog picking up scraps of sympathy. Can you really know who you love? What is, in essence, a family? Are abandoned dogs proof of the existence or non-existence of God? Ulises unknowingly embodies these questions, as a pilgrim of affection in a post-love era.Simpatía is a suspenseful novel with unexpected twists and turns about the agony of Venezuela and the collapse of Chavismo.

The novel tells the story of two friends, Enero and El Negro, who take Tilo, the teenage son of Eusebio — their recently deceased friend — fishing to the Paraná River. While they drink and cook and talk and dance, they try to overcome the ghosts of their past and those of the present: their mood altered by wine and torpor. This intimate, peculiar moment connecting the lives of these three men also links them to the lives of the local inhabitants of this watery universe that runs by its own laws. There are losses, premature deaths… But there is also the stubborn vitality of nature: a bush covered with ancient trees, animals, birds; the river bearing life in its entrails, the people born and raised in this landscape whom they protect tooth and nail against intruders. This story, which flows like water, talks about the love between friends, the love of a mother for her daughters, and the love of the islanders for their river and everything that lives in it. This masterful novel reveals once again Selva Almada's unique voice and extraordinary sensitivity, allowing its characters to shine and express in action what the depths of their souls harbour.EndorsementsOne of the Best Books of 2020 in Clarín and La Nación.Shortlisted for the Mario Vargas Llosa Novel Prize.

Alone in an ethnographic museum in Paris, Gabriela Wiener is confronted with her unusual inheritance. She is visiting an exhibition of pre-Columbian artefacts, the spoils of European colonial plunder, many of them from her home country of Peru. Peering through the glass, she sees sculptures of Indigenous faces that resemble her own — but the man responsible for pillaging them was her own great-great-grandfather, Austrian colonial explorer Charles Wiener.In the wake of her father's death, Gabriela begins delving into all she has inherited from her paternal line. From the brutal trail of racism and theft Charles was responsible for, to revelations of her father's infidelity, she traces a legacy of abandonment, jealousy and colonial violence, and questions its impact on her own struggles with desire, love and race in a polyamorous relationship.Blending personal, historical and fictional modes, Undiscovered tells of a search for identity beyond the old stories of patriarchs and plunder. Incisive and fiercely irreverent, it builds to a powerful call for decolonisation.A provocative autobiographical novel that reckons with the legacy of colonialism through one woman's family ties to both colonised and coloniser.Endorsements"Wiener has rescued an intimate story from the family archive, a story that is also the infamous history of our continent, with her trademark intelligence and irreverent humor. Her prose, sober and forward, is fresh air; her view allows us to be testimonies of Latin America's cycles of plundering and looting." — Valeria Luiselli, author of Lost Children Archive"Reading Undiscovered, I wondered what so captivated me about this novel. Was it Gabriela's innate ability to plunder all sorts of convention? Her persistent exploration of our deepest despairs — the weight and falsehoods of the stories and imperatives we inherit? All this, but Undiscovered is also spurred on by a yet more profound and radical spirit of fury. Powerful and searing, this novel snaps, bucks, heals, and snaps again." — Samanta Schweblin, author of Fever Dream"Undiscovered's beautiful blend of fiction and personal feeling on everything from sex, to death, to Peru's traumatic history to France's heritage-colonial industry could not be more contemporary, vital and important, or expressed in more dynamic and immersive prose." — Preti Taneja, author of the Desmond Elliott Prize–winning We That Are Young

White Nights, the debut short story collection from poet Urszula Honek, is a series of thirteen interconnected stories concerning the various tragedies and misfortunes that befall a group of people who grew up and lived in the same village in the Beskid Niski region in southern Poland.Each story centres itself around a different character and how they manage to cope, survive, or merely exist despite, and often in ignorance of, the poverty, disappointment, tragedy, despair, brutality, and general sense of futility that surrounds them.Urszula relates to us with the sincerest care and honesty a localised, yet so clearly universal, story of ruin and hope: a story where the protagonists do not ask to be understood but merely to be seen and to be heard.EndorsementsKate Webster’s brilliant translation of Honek’s poetic, yet often earthen, prose brings us to places that, though they are seldom seen in literature, we may never forget. — Kate Webster

What if one half of a pair of twins no longer wants to live? What if the other can’t live without them?This question lies at the heart of Jente Posthuma’s deceptively simple What I’d Rather Not Think About. The narrator is a twin whose brother has recently taken his own life. She looks back on their childhood, and tells of their adult lives: how her brother tried to find happiness, but lost himself in various men and the Bhagwan movement, though never completely.In brief, precise vignettes, full of gentle melancholy and surprising humour, Posthuma tells the story of a depressive brother, viewed from the perspective of the sister who both loves and resents her twin, struggles to understand him, and misses him terribly.

"I heard our grandmother asking what we were doing. 'Say something!' she demanded, threatening to tear out our tongues. Little did she know that one of us was holding her tongue in her hand."Deep in Brazil's neglected Bahia hinterland, two sisters find an ancient knife beneath their grandmother's bed and, momentarily mystified by its power, decide to taste its metal. The shuddering violence that follows marks their lives and binds them together forever. This fascinating and gripping story about the lives of subsistence farmers in Brazil's poorest region, three generations after the abolition of slavery, is at once fantastic and realist, covering themes of family, spirituality, slavery and its aftermath, and political struggle.

Centred on three generations of a family of rail workers and a laid-off factory worker staging a high-altitude sit-in, MATER 2-10 vividly depicts the lives of ordinary working Koreans, starting from the Japanese colonial era, continuing through Liberation, and right up to the twenty-first century. It is at once a powerful account that captures a nation’s longing for a rail line to reconnect North and South, a magical-realist novel that reflects the lives of modern industrial workers.An epic, multi-generational tale that threads together a century of Korean history.EndorsementsInternational Booker–nominated Hwang Sok-yong.

The modest apartment on Via Gemito smells of paint and white spirit. The furniture is pushed up against the wall to create a make-shift studio, and drying canvases must be moved off the beds each night.Federì, a railway clerk, is convinced that, if he didn't have a family to feed, he'd be a world-famous painter. Talented, ambitious, and frustrated, his life is marked by bitter disappointment. His long-suffering wife and their four sons bear the brunt.Years later, his first-born son will tell the story of a man he spent his whole life trying not to resemble.Narrated against the background of a Naples still marked by WWII and first published in Italy 20 years ago, The House on Via Gemito is a masterpiece of contemporary Italian literature.Endorsements"Starnone uses languages the way a great painter works with colour, conjuring the illusion of three dimensions from a blank flat surface." —Jhumpa Lahiri"One of Italy's most accomplished novelists." —The Guardian

Vero has grown up in Rome with her eccentric, omnipresent mother who is devoted to her own anxiety, a father ruled by hygienic and architectural obsessions, and a precocious genius brother at the centre of their attention.As she becomes an adult, Vero's need to strike out on her own leads her into bizarre and comical episodes: she tries (and fails) to run away to Paris at the age of fifteen; she moves into an unwitting older boyfriend's house after they have been together for less than a week; and she sets up a fraudulent (and wildly successful) street clothing stall to raise funds to go to Mexico. Most of all, she falls in love — repeatedly, dramatically, and often with the most unlikely and inappropriate of candidates.As she continues to plot escapades, her mother's relentless tracking methods and guilt-tripping mastery thwart her at every turn; it is no wonder that Vero becomes a writer — and a liar, inventing stories in a bid for her own sanity.Narrated in a voice as wryly ironic as it is warm and affectionate, Lost on Me seductively explores the slippery relationship between deceitfulness and creativity, beginning with Vero's first artistic act: a painting she steals from a school classmate and successfully claims as her own.Deceptively simple, its tenderness is offset by moments of cool brutality; Lost on Me is a masterwork of human observation.For fans of Rachel Cusk and Deborah Levy.Endorsements'Deliciously enjoyable' — Katherine Heiny'I adored it' — Naoise Dolan'Hilarious' — Roddy Doyle'Thrillingly original' — Monica Ali

Using a sophisticated and literary version of the ever-popular game of telephone to examine the relationship of writers with tyranny, Ismail Kadare reflects on three particular minutes in a long moment of time when the dark shadow of Joseph Stalin passed over the world.In June 1934, Stalin allegedly called Boris Pasternak and they spoke about the arrest of Osip Mandelstam. A telephone call from the dictator was not something necessarily relished, and in the complicated world of literary politics it would have provided opportunities for potential misunderstanding and profound trouble. But this was a call one could not ignore. Stalin wanted to know what Pasternak thought of the idea that Mandelstam had been arrested.Ismail Kadare explores the afterlife of this phone call using accounts of witnesses, reporters, writers such as Isaiah Berlin and Anna Akhmatova, wives, mistresses, biographers, and even archivists of the KGB. The results offer a meditation on power and political structure, and how literature and authoritarianism construct themselves in plain sight of one another. Kadare’s reconstruction becomes a gripping mystery, as if true crime were being presented in a mosaic.A little time ago the poet Mandelstam was arrested. What have you to say to that, Comrade Pasternak?

A famous broadcaster writes a forgotten love letter; a friend abruptly disappears; a lover leaves something unexpected behind; a traumatised woman is consumed by her own anxiety.In the throes of a fever, a woman's mind casts her back to the past. In precise, vivid language, the stories of four important people who have shaped her life are revealed — a thousand little memories from across a lifetime, laid bare in vivid detail as her body temperature races.The Details is a luminous portrayal of all the small moments that make up a life; the little details that make us human.

Berlin. 11 July 1986. They meet by chance on a bus. She is a young student; he is older and married. Theirs is an intense and sudden attraction, fuelled by a shared passion for music and art, and heightened by the secrecy they must maintain. But when she strays for a single night he cannot forgive her and a dangerous crack forms between them, opening up a space for cruelty, punishment and the exertion of power. And the world around them is changing too: as the GDR begins to crumble, so too do all the old certainties and the old loyalties, ushering in a new era whose great gains also involve profound loss.From a prize-winning German writer, this is the intimate and devastating story of the path of two lovers through the ruins of a relationship, set against the backdrop of a seismic period in European history.