Verso Fiction – serie

On a planet where men are contained in ghettoised isolation, women enjoy the fruits of a queer matriarchal utopia -- until a boy escapes and a young woman's perception of the world is violently interupted. Two old friends enjoy cocktails on a holiday resort planet where all is not as it seems. A bickering couple emigrate to a world that has worked out an innovative way to side-step the need for war, only to bring their quarrels (and something far more destructive) with them.And in the title story, Suzuki offers readers a tragic and warped mirroring of her own final days as the tyranny of enforced screen-time and the mechanistion of labour bring about a shattering psychic collapse. At turns nonchalantly hip and charmingly deranged, Suzuki's singular slant on speculative fiction would be echoed in countless later works, from Margaret Atwood and Harumi Murakami, to Black Mirror and Ex Machina. In these darkly playful and punky stories, the fantastical elements are always earthed by the universal pettiness of strife between the sexes, and the gritty reality of life on the lower rungs, whatever planet that ladder might be on.

When the successful British mystery writer Judith Moore meets Gavin, a handsome and charming baron, at a birthday party on the Cornish coast, his love transforms her from a bitter, lonely young woman into a romance heroine overnight. After a whirlwind honeymoon in Paris, he whisks her away to a secluded Gothic castle. But soon she finds herself trapped in a nightmare, as her husband's mysterious nature and his alternation between charm and violence become increasingly frightening. As Judith battles both internal and external demons, including sexual ambivalence, psychological self-torture, gaslighting, family neglect, alcoholism, and domestic abuse, she becomes increasingly addicted to her wild beast of a husband. Why do women stay in abusive relationships? The answer can be found in the tortured mind of the protagonist, whose richly layered fantasy life parallels that of the female Gothic romance reader. Filled with dark humor and evocative imagery, Bluebeard's Castle is a subversive take on modern romance and Gothic erotica.

"As intriguing and impressive a novelist as she is a musician, Hval is a master of quiet horror and wonder."Chris Kraus, author of I Love DickJo is in a strange new country for university and having a more peculiar time than most. A house with no walls, a roommate with no boundaries, and a home that seems ever more alive as the days pass. Jo's sensitivity and all her senses become increasingly heightened and fraught as the lines between bodies and plants, dreaming and wakefulness, blur and mesh.This debut novel from a critically adored artist and musician presents a heady and hypersensual portrayal of sexual awakening and queer desire.

A new collection of stories from the cult author of Terminal Boredom.Izumi Suzuki had ideas about doing things differently, ideas that paid little attention to the laws of physics, or the laws of the land. In this new collection, her skewed imagination distorts and enhances some of the classic concepts of science fiction and fantasy.A philandering husband receives a bestial punishment from a wife with her own secrets to keep; a music lover finds herself in a timeline both familiar and as wrong as can be; a misfit band of space pirates discover a mysterious baby among the stars; Emma, the Bovary-like character from one of Suzuki's stories in Terminal Boredom, lands herself in a bizarre romantic pickle.Wryly anarchic and deeply imaginative, Suzuki was a writer like no other. These eleven stories offer readers the opportunity to delve deeper in this singular writer's work.

As winter approaches in Norway and the daylight dwindles, a chance encounter prompts a novelist to reexamine her past. The seismic events following her sixteenth birthday return with haunting vividness, exposing a story both utterly familiar and desperately strange.It was the year she first got drunk, the year she first had sex with a boy. She was watched like a hawk by an anxious mother and a silent, distant father. It was a year of typical teenage fixation and typical teenage frivolity, and of all the usual parental fretting. Until something else took hold, and her family made an unspoken decision and a terrible sacrifice. Only now, decades later, can these events come close to being comprehended.In Repetition, award-winning novelist Vigdis Hjorth explores through fiction the parts of childhood that chime through the decades.

It was the Autumn of 1969, and Italy exploded. Across the north of the country, factory workers stormed out on strike, demanding better pay and working conditions. The slogan "We Want Everything" rang through the streets. Italy's "Hot Autumn" had begun.In Nanni Balestrini's fictionalized account of the uprising, a young worker from Italy's impoverished south arrives at Fiat's Mirafiori factory in Torino, where he barely scrapes by with fourteen hour days of backbreaking work. His frustration is palpable, and soon he is agitating again his bosses for fun and giving himself minor injuries to win sick leave. Soon enough, he is swept up by a snowballing worker movement that leads to months of continuous strikes at Mirafiori. Eventually, the conflict bubbles out of the factory. The growing pressure having produced an inevitable crack, the streets are lined with barricades, and tear gas wafts into private homes.Introduced by Rachel Kushner, author of the critically acclaimed The Flamethrowers, We Want Everything is an explosive account of a revolution that would clear the way for another decade of radical unrest.

Longlisted for The Millions Best Translated Book Awards for FictionLonglisted for the National Book Award for Translated LiteratureFour siblings. Two summer houses. One terrible secret. When a dispute over her parents' will grows bitter, Bergljot is drawn back into the orbit of the family she fled twenty years before. Her mother and father have decided to leave two island summer houses to her sisters, disinheriting the two eldest siblings from the most meaningful part of the estate. To outsiders, it is a quarrel about property and favouritism. But Bergljot, who has borne a horrible secret since childhood, understands the gesture as something very different-a final attempt to suppress the truth and a cruel insult to the grievously injured.Will and Testament is a lyrical meditation on trauma and memory, as well as a furious account of a woman's struggle to survive and be believed. Vigdis Hjorth's novel became a controversial literary sensation in Norway and has been translated into twenty languages.

Ellinor, a 35-year-old media consultant, has not been feeling herself; she's not been feeling much at all lately. Far beyond jaded, she picks through an old diary and fails to recognise the woman in its pages, seemingly as far away from the world around her as she's ever been. But when her coworker vanishes overnight, an unusual new task is dropped on her desk. Off she goes to meet the Norwegian Postal Workers Union, setting the ball rolling on a strange and transformative six months.This is an existential scream of a novel about loneliness (and the postal service!), written in Vigdis Hjorth's trademark spare, rhythmic and cutting style.

For three decades, until the day he collapsed in the Brazilian surf in 1979, Josef Mengele, the Angel of Death who performed horrific experiments on the prisoners of Auschwitz, floated through South America in linen suits, keeping two steps ahead of Mossad agents, international police and the world's journalists. In this rigorusly researched factual novel-drawn almost entirely from historical documents-Olivier Guez traces Mengele's footsteps through these years of flight. This chilling novel situates the reader in a literary manhunt on the trail of one of the most elusive and evil figures of the twentieth century.Selected as one of The 50 best books of 2022 by The Telegraph

A young revolutionary plants a bomb in a factory on the outskirts of Algiers during the Algerian War. The bomb is timed to explode after work hours, so no one will be hurt. But the authorities have been watching. He is caught, the bomb is defused, and he is tortured, tried in a day and sentenced to death by guillotine. A routine event, perhaps, in a brutal conflict that ended the lives of more than a million Muslim Algerians.But what if the militant is a "pied-noir"? What if his lover is a Jewish survivor of the Holocaust? What happens to a "European" who chooses the side of anti-colonialism? By turns lyrical, meditative, and heart-stoppingly suspenseful, this debut novel by Joseph Andras, based on a true story, was a literary and political sensation in France, winning the Prix Goncourt for First Novel and being acclaimed by Le Monde as "vibrantly lyrical and somber" and by the journal La Croix as a "masterpiece".

Welcome to 1990s Norway. White picket fences run in neat rows and Christian conservatism runs deep. But as the Artist considers her past, her practice and her hatred, things start stirring themselves up around her. In a corner of Oslo a coven of witches begin cooking up some curses. A time-travelling Edvard Munch arrives in town to join a death metal band, closely pursued by the teenaged subject of his painting Puberty, who has murder on her mind. Meanwhile, out deep in the forest, a group of school girls get very lost and things get very strange. And awful things happen in aspic.Jenny Hval's latest novel is a radical fusion of feminist theory and experimental horror, and a unique treatise on magic, writing and art.

Fleeing persecution in Indochina, the young Ho Chi Minh arrived in Paris as World War I was sputtering to a close. A painfully shy twentysomething, he joined the shadowy figures of the demimonde, the radicals, poor artists, prostitutes, the luckless, and rebellious.Six years later, he boarded a train bound for the young Soviet Union as the fiery, passionate leader of the Vietnamese independence movement and a founder of the French Communist Party. He had lived under various pseudonyms in a succession of seedy apartments. There had been arrests and beatings, jobs in restaurants and photo shops, revolutionary writing in the Bibliothèque nationale, and meetings with Chaplin and Colette, all while being dogged by French spies-much of what we know about the young man's Paris years is thanks to that surveillance.Searching for traces of the past in the streets of today, Joseph Andras hears echoes of other angry histories, from terror attacks to tent encampments to the protests of the Gilets jaunes. This intensely lyrical, genre-bending book is a meditation on what could be called the grandeur of the poor, the free, the outcast, and the rebellious-people who might not find a place in history books but without whom history could not be written.Praise for Tomorrow They Won't Dare to Murder Us- "Electrifying ... insists on plumbing the thorniest details of history's scandal, suggesting-convincingly-that certain truths are best revealed in fiction." Kaiama L. Glover, New York Times- "A very beautiful book to reflect on: when a 'traitor' preserves our 'dignity.'" Éric Vuillard, author of The War of the Poor and The Order of the Day- "An austerely compelling account ... Andras's bleak account is leavened by passages of vibrant lyricism." Laura Garmeson, Times Literary Supplement- "Andras delivers a brisk, angry slap of outraged idealism . Powerful." Boyd Tonkin, Spectator- "Tightly coiled ... Andras is fastidious about adhering to the known facts. His restraint is commendable." Literary Review

**Longlisted for The International Booker Prize 2023**'To mother is to murder, or close enough', thinks Johanna, as she looks at the spelling of the two words in Norwegian. She's recently widowed and back in Oslo after a long absence as she prepares for a retrospective of her art. The subject of her work is motherhood and some of her more controversial paintings have brought about a dramatic rift between parent and child. This new proximity, after decades of acrimonious absence, set both women on edge, and before too long Johanna finds her mother stalking her thoughts, and Johanna starts stalking her mother's house.

Nicola Long is a few years out of a fine arts degree, listless and unenthusiastically employed in London. She begins to spend her hours at a small underfunded archive dedicated to women's art. There she discovers one side of a correspondence beginning in 1976 and spanning a dozen years, written from one woman - a ceramics graduate, uncannily like Nicola - to a friend living a contrasting and conventionally moored life. As Nicola reads on, an acute sense of affinity turns into obsession.She abandons one job after another to make time for the archive. The litany of coincidences in the letters becomes uncanny, and Nicola's feeling of ownership begets a growing dread: should she be afraid of where these letters are leading?

Moisés lives with his father, Mundinho, and his sister, Luzia, in Tapera do Paraguaçu, a Brazilian village of farmers, fishermen, and potters of Afro-Indigenous origin, ruled from on high by a forbidding monastery. As Luzia hears whispers about her own strange powers and absorbs the threatening stares of neighbors, she seeks protection from the same Church that exploits her. When secrets buried for decades rise to the surface, Luzia finds herself alone, fighting for her piece of land, for her place in the world. Little does she know that Moisés, in his own way, has put himself on the front line of an ancient battle between the oppressors and the dispossessed. Epic and lyrical, with the power to both enchant and outrage the reader, Saving the Fire shows us that the ghosts of a family's past are often indistinguishable from the shadows of a nation's history. Masterfully, Itamar Vieira Junior blends the intimate journeys of his characters with faithfully rendered elements of Brazilian life. It's a story permeated by the spectre of colonialism, the scars of which still show, and still ache.

After dropping out of college, a young woman wanders through New York both invisible and vulnerable, studying the city's strong magic and longing for a man she knows will never love her back. Salvation appears to arrive when Charlotte Herzfeld, the young wife of a successful businessman, hires her as a live-in nanny to accompany the family on a trip to Berlin. As the Herzfelds begin to crack under the weight of their secrets, she finds herself in a more precarious position than ever before.Reflective yet propulsive, and told in a voice both ingenuous and insightful, Other Women is a timeless and all-too-relatable tale of unwise decisions and unfortunate fixations.This volume includes three new short stories and an introduction from Megan Nolan.

Jennifer Higgie presents a year in the life of Rich­ard Dadd, infamous inmate of one of England's most notorious sanitariums, London's Bethlem Hospital, better known as Bedlam.A young man of great promise, Dadd embarks on a grand tour of Europe and the Middle East with his patron, Sir Thomas Phillips. The two men travel through German forests, Alexan­drian brothels and across the desert to the Nile. By the time they find themselves beneath the unforgiving sun of Syria and Palestine, Dadd's fraught mind has been taxed to the limit with extraordinary images. He becomes stranger and more violent, changes his companion attributes to sunstroke. But in Dadd's imagination he has become a devotee of the god Osiris. Shortly after his return to England in 1843, the god directs him to take a life, and Dadd is set on the road to Bedlam.At once jarringly acute and alarmingly askew, Dadd's voice is rendered with both empathy and acuity by Higgie. This is a poetic and consid­ered portrait of an artist, as well as an intriguing mystery about how, and why, a mind can go so swiftly and dangerously awry.

Romy, an art history student, glibly accepts a writing gig that tips her headlong into hollow glamour and strange air of London's art world. As she begins to document the scene, in all its decadence and debauchery, her sense of self is lost to the buzz. Soon, Romy, and her merry band of gays, find themselves in (of all things) the maelstrom of an unfolding novel.Tapping into Lawrence Sterne as much as it does Eve Babitz and Truman Capote, this infectious, irreverent debut explores authorship and identity, and whether the pursuit of meaning can (or should) get in the way of a good time.

Bait is a product manufactured to create desire. Fantasy costs a lot of money. There is a girl. There is everything she wants. She gets it. She doesn't get it. She gets it, she wants more. In the city she can be who she wants to be, in the countryside she is who she has to be. Accumulation works, then it doesn't. Soon, she is indebted to everyone. Debt creates relation. To try to pay her debt she tries more and more drastic measures: pregnancy, death, love. But will she ever pay? And if she does will the currency be recognized?An unnamed protagonist fucks her way through the lesbians of New York City in borrowed apartments before returning to the only home she can afford, a two hour drive out into the countryside. In the city she can be whoever she wants. Her collection of sample sale clothes and fake designer bags grants the affect of wealth and she attracts suitors beyond those she is used to. These new suitors have jobs The protagonist attempts to be desired in a way that will protect and take care of her, but instead finds herself taking on more and more debts, both literal and metaphorical. She digs and digs until all she knows is hole. Bait explores the economics of desirability and the way capitalist patriarchy infiltrates queer community. Over time, our protagonist breaks through this rigid strategic approach to really fall in love with a non-binary transmasc person. Together, they create a Dom/sub dynamic. She does everything she is told to do and unlocks a new reality where she can relax and open herself up. They teach her how to accept care through domination and control. But, will her hole ever really be filled?

Fleeing her moribund marriage in Cape Town, Beth accepts a diplomatic posting to Shanghai. In this anonymous city she hopes to lose herself in books, wine, and solitude, and to dodge whatever pangs of conscience she feels for her fealty to a South African regime that, by the 21st century, has betrayed its early promises.At night, she hears the sound of typing, and then late one evening Zhao arrives at her door. They explore hidden Shanghai and discover a shared love of Langston Hughes--who had his own Chinese and African sojourns. But then Zhao vanishes, and a typewritten manuscript--chunk by chunk--appears at her doorstep instead. The truths unearthed in this manuscript cause her to reckon with her own past, and the long-buried story of what happened to Kay, her fearless, revolutionary friend...Connecting contemporary Shanghai, late Apartheid-era South Africa, and China during the Great Leap Forward and the Tiananmen uprising--and refracting this globe-trotting and time-traveling through Hughes' confessional letters to a South African protege about the poet's time in Shanghai--How to Be a Revolutionary is an amazingly ambitious novel. It's also a heartbreaking exploration of what we owe our countries, our consciences, and ourselves.

With the verve and bite of Ottessa Moshfegh and the barbed charm of Nancy Mitford, Marlowe Granados's stunning début brilliantly captures a summer of striving in New York CityRefreshing and wry in equal measure, Happy Hour is an intoxicating novel of youth well spent. Isa Epley is all of twenty-one years old, and already wise enough to understand that the purpose of life is the pursuit of pleasure. She arrives in New York City for a summer of adventure with her best friend, one newly blond Gala Novak. They have little money, but that's hardly going to stop them from having a good time.In her diary, Isa describes a sweltering summer in the glittering city. By day, the girls sell clothes in a market stall, pinching pennies for their Bed-Stuy sublet and bodega lunches. By night, they weave from Brooklyn to the Upper East Side to the Hamptons among a rotating cast of celebrities, artists, Internet entrepreneurs, stuffy intellectuals, and bad-mannered grifters. Resources run ever tighter and the strain tests their friendship as they try to convert their social capital into something more lasting than precarious gigs as au pairs, nightclub hostesses, paid audience members, and aspiring foot fetish models. Through it all, Isa's bold, beguiling voice captures the precise thrill of cultivating a life of glamour and intrigue as she juggles paying her dues with skipping out on the bill. Happy Hour is a novel about getting by and having fun in a world that wants you to do neither.

Margot is the child of renowned musicians and the product of a particularly punky upbringing. Burnt-out from the burden of expectation and the bad end of the worst relationship yet, she leaves New York and heads to Montana. She's seeking to escape both the eyes of the world and the echoing voice of that last bad man. But a chance encounter with a dubious doctor in a graveyard, and the discovery of a dozen old film reels, opens the door to a study of both the peculiarities of her body and the absurdities of her famous family.A literary take on cinema du corps, Stephanie LaCava's new novel is an audaciously sexy and moving exploration of culture and connections, bodies and breakdowns.

Shortlisted for The International Booker Prize 2024'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. Heralded as a new masterpiece and the most important Brazilian novel of this century, this fascinating and gripping story about the lives of subsistence farmers in the Brazil's poorest region, three generations after the abolition of slavery in that country is at once fantastic and realist, covering themes of family, spirituality, slavery and its aftermath and political struggle.