Hungarian family saga, purple America, the war in Algeria and the shadow of the GDR

Nelio Biederman. Lazar, Inspiria

Lazar is a gothic family saga. It is a novel about the rise and fall of a Hungarian aristocratic family against the backdrop of the 20th century: from 1900 to the uprising in 1956. The plot revolves around a family living in a castle far from the capital and therefore always lagging behind historical events. While the world is changing, the characters cling to order, habits, and family myths. The outcome is predictable and merciless: wars, Nazism, communism, confiscations, flight. And also suicide, alcoholism, opportunism, domestic violence. There are no «pure» roles here: the same people are victims and accomplices in turn. The figure of the «madman» Imre works especially accurately; he sees the century more clearly than others and therefore survives. The author was in his early twenties when the novel became a bestseller in German-speaking Switzerland and reached the first place in sales in four months. Translation rights were sold to more than 20 countries.

László Krasznahorkai. «The Return of Baron Vankheym», Corpus

Krasznahorkai shows modern Hungary as a system of small expectations, big illusions, and controlled absurdity. After decades of fleeing, the elderly Baron Vankheym returns to his native provincial town with debts from the Buenos Aires casino and no money. He dreams of a simple thing: to see his school love, Marika. The town dreams of something else. He is mistaken for a wealthy saviour and immediately they begin to divide his non-existent inheritance. Intrigues, fake patriotism, local politics, and collective madness come into play. At the same time, the voice of the Professor, a reclusive scholar who studies moss and tries to learn not to think, is heard. László Krasznahorkai calls this novel the finale of all his prose — a «cadence» to «Satanic Tango» and other books. In 2025, the writer received the Nobel Prize, after which «The Return of Baron Vankheym» began to be read as the result of his work.

Kemal Daoud. «The Houris», NoAge

This is a novel about the Civil War in Algeria, from which the country never recovered, it just decided not to talk about it. The action formally takes place twenty years after the «black decade». The narrative is from several voices. First, there is Oub, a mute pregnant woman from Oran with a scar on her throat: as a child, she was deprived of her voice by Islamists. She speaks to her unborn child and immediately raises an uncomfortable question: does he have the right to appear in a country where violence is not named and not understood. Then Aissa Guerdid, a driver and the son of the owners of the bookstore «The Houris», a man with his own memory and his own form of madness, takes the floor. This is not a novel about war as an event, but about war as a residual effect. About bodies that remember. About trauma that is built into everyday life. About a law that demands to forget. Daoud constantly returns the reader to mass murders, disappearances, fear. Each character is a bearer of a fact that is better not to utter officially. For «The Houris», Daoud received the Goncourt Prize, and the book was immediately banned in Algeria. After the release of the novel, the publishing house Gallimard was banned from participating in the Algerian Book Fair.

Katja Oskamp. «Marzahn, mon amour», Livebook

The heroine of the novel, a writer in her forties, closes an unsuccessful literary chapter and goes to study to become a podologist. The setting of the book is Marzahn, a Berlin district of panel buildings, a symbol of the former GDR and post-socialist hangover. Elderly clients sit in her chair. And together with calluses, sore joints, and fungal nails, they bring their stories. Life in the «new houses» of socialism, then a sharp transition to capitalism, loneliness, poverty, stubborn dignity. Working with your hands becomes a way to hear people. There is a lot of talk about the body, aging, loss of status, invisibility, and almost nothing about ideology. Marzahn is shown not as a ghetto, but as a concentration of ordinary life, where big historical shifts are felt through small everyday details. Katja Oskamp actually gave up her career as a writer and worked as a podologist in Marzahn for several years. The book grew directly out of this practice and won the Dublin Literary Award.

Tracy Chevalier (Trity Umrigar). «The Museum of Failure», Belle Lettres

Remi Vadia has long left India, built a life in the USA, and carefully kept his distance from the past. Now he returns to Bombay to formalize the adoption and at the same time to see his mother, with whom he has a difficult, almost burnt-out relationship. The plan quickly falls apart. The adoption is in question. The mother is in the hospital, silent, refusing to eat. And then there is a find in the apartment and a chain of family secrets that force Remi to reassemble everything: childhood, the image of his parents, his own role in this story, and his readiness to become a father himself. This is a novel about a privileged family without an external catastrophe, but with internal destruction. About the cold that is masked by care. About parental decisions whose consequences catch up decades later. There is Bombay as a city of contrasts, the Parsi community, the emigrant rift between «there» and «here», guilt that cannot be delegated. The plot is held together by facts from the past that come to the surface and demand an answer. Trity Umrigar is a former journalist and literature professor in the USA, her books are published in more than 15 countries, and her previous novel «The Honor» was included in the selection of Reese Witherspoon's book club.

Günter Grass. «The Unploughed Field», Alpina. Prose

This is a novel about how a country unites and what breaks in the process. The action takes place in Berlin between the fall of the Wall and the legal reunification of Germany, but the scale is wider: Grass draws a thread from the 1848 revolution to the 1990s. At the centre of the plot is Theo Wuttke, an East Berliner, a self-taught historian, and a living archive of the era. His past and present constantly intersect with the figure of Hofthaller, a former Stasi officer who has been watching the hero for years and remains by his side in the new country. This strange alliance is the key to the book. Through their dialogues, Grass dissects the myth of unification: money instead of meaning, speed instead of discussion, more winners than those who agree. The novel is dense, overloaded with facts and allusions, deliberately uncomfortable. This is what was fiercely criticised, and this is what made the book an event. Even before its release, «The Unploughed Field» became the object of a large-scale media attack, and a year later Grass received the Hans Fallada Prize for it.

Kiran Desai. «The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny», Corpus

«The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny» is a big novel about love that arises at the wrong time and in the wrong place. Sonia and Sunny are children of Indian families who grew up between India and the USA. She wants to write and is looking for her voice. He works as a night news editor and tries to escape from family pressure. Their acquaintance is almost an accident, but it is followed by a long chain of parental expectations, failed marriages, class differences, and old agreements. Desai tells the story on several levels at once. This is a novel about a couple, but at the same time a family saga and an analysis of the life of the diaspora. The USA here is not a land of opportunity, but a place of chronic uncertainty. India is not a home, but a complex knot of obligations and memory. The heroes are always choosing: love or duty, freedom or belonging, their own path or a pre-written scenario. Desai wrote this book for almost 20 years, and in 2025 it made the shortlist for the Booker Prize and Barack Obama's list of favourite books.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. «The Report of Dreams», Phantom Press

This is Adichie's first novel in ten years. The action begins during the pandemic, but this is not a «covid novel». This is a book about choice and its price. The main characters are four women. Chiamaka, a Nigerian writer in the USA, counts not the number of sexual partners, but missed opportunities: unfulfilled versions of life and love. Her friend Zikora is a successful lawyer, used to winning, but not in the personal sphere. Ome logarithm, a cousin, a financier from Nigeria, cynical and efficient, suddenly doubts her own system of coordinates. And Kadiatu, a former housekeeper, whose story of violence becomes the moral core of the novel. Her line is inspired by the real case of Dominique Strauss-Kahn, only in the novel the writer consciously «rewrites» the story, giving a voice to the victim. In this book, Adichie talks about sex, money, power, motherhood, and immigration without smoothing the corners.

Rick Moody. «Purple America», Pollen Press, «Antonym»

One weekend in a wealthy suburb of Connecticut. The son returns home because his stepfather has run away. The mother is in a wheelchair, with a severe neurodegenerative disease, losing her speech and control over her body. She demands a promise from her son to help her die. At the same time, there is an accident with a leak at the local nuclear power plant. A small incident. For now. The novel is held together by two leaks at once — family and technological. Crumbling relationships, an aging body, corroded reactor valves. Everything is flowing. Literally. The main character, Dexter, nicknamed Hex, an alcoholic with a stutter and a meaningless job in PR, rushes between abandonment and duty. He takes care of his mother, looks for his stepfather, clings to a random romance, and slowly falls apart himself. Rick Moody tells the story in several voices, mixing domestic comedy with harsh existential prose.

This is a book about privileged America, which turned out to be unprepared for either old age or responsibility. «Purple America» shows the decay of the middle class through details: hospitals, diners, TV broadcasts, emergency reports, kitchen conversations. The system is still working, but it is already failing. This is the third novel by Rick Moody, one of the key authors of avant-pop and the author of «The Ice Storm», later filmed by Ang Lee.

Halgrím Helgason. «Sixty Kilograms of Knockouts», Gorodets Publishing House

«Sixty Kilograms of Knockouts» is a sequel to the novel «Sixty Kilograms of Sunshine». Gestur is already 18 years old, childhood is over. He suddenly becomes the breadwinner of a large family on a northern fjord, which from a poor hole is rapidly turning into a capitalist cauldron. Herring brings money, Norwegians bring work, alcohol, fights, and a new rhythm of life. Along with them, shops, bars, telephones, electricity, and new rules come to Iceland. This is a novel of growing up, tightly woven into economic history. Gestur's personal decisions go hand in hand with the country's industrial leap. Love, debts, deals, hired labour, social lifts. Helgason writes грубо and funny, not shy about physicality and everyday dirt. Humor here coexists with harsh calculation and the feeling that the one who learns faster survives. The novel won the Icelandic National Literary Prize, like the first book of the cycle, and Helgason himself is not only a writer, but also an artist and a knight of the French Order of Arts and Literature.

Ekaterina Petrova is a literary reviewer for the online newspaper «Real Time» and the host of the Telegram channel «Macaroon Buns».