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Championing world literature since 1997. Book Club @hatchards piccadilly; reviews, interviews, podcasts by publishing insider Georgia DC & friends & special events. Instagram @bookblastofficial www.linktr.ee/bookblast Accept no imitations

Reading Around the World Top 5 Books of the Month Our monthly top 5 books roundup brings together five strong voices in translation, each tracking the art of survival across vastly different landscapes. Whether navigating the external terrors of a regime or the internal wilderness of obsession and…

Ooh ah Cantona! Ooh ah nostalgie! A clever little book this, not the usual predictable football offering….. bookblast.org/blog/eric-ca...

AND HOW HAVE YOU BEEN? Maria Judite de Carvalho Review If the title of this book by Maria Judite de Carvalho calls for an answer, it has to be, ‘As a woman, I’ve been frustrated, puzzled by the way life passes me by, with no-one, especially my husband, able to understand or love me’. Time and…

EXIT 8 Genki Kawamura Review Exit 8 by Genki Kawamura, translated by Sameeha Anwar, is a disturbing, short Japanese psychological mystery based on a hugely successful game that has sold three million copies, created by Kotake Create. The global craze for Japanese fiction designed explicitly as a…

Dark Heart Silvia Avallone Review A novel about second chances, which blends romance and melodrama, Dark Heart is strangely compulsive reading. Silvia Avallone’s heroine is both a deeply sensitive soul and fiercely independent. A paradoxical figure, she provokes both irritation and compassion. Her…

The White Desert Luis López Carrasco Review The White Desert is an unusual debut novel by Luis López Carrasco, expertly translated by Rosalind Harvey. Odd, unsettling and dystopian, the novel starts with nine people fleeing bombs in a hot air balloon which is “deflating a little more with every…

Your Presence is a Danger to Your Life Samar Yazbek Review In early 2024, Samar Yazbek found herself in Doha, where more than 2,500 Palestinian survivors of the genocide in Gaza were living alongside their families and receiving desperately needed medical care. Yazbek is a Syrian writer and…

“Rivera Garza’s eloquent book is much more than a family memoir. It also offers a social history of Mexico in the twentieth century, as well as philosophical debate about a sense of place and what we inherit from our ancestors," Nick Caistor, BookBlast Diary bookblast.org/blog/autobio...

Twenty Minutes of Silence Hélène Bessette Review Kate Briggs, translator of Twenty Minutes of Silence and of Hélène Bessette’s first novel Lili is Crying, wrote in an essay for The Yale Review in September 2025: How, why, and under what material circumstances a writer, translator, or publisher…

Our monthly top 5 books roundup brings together five strong voices in translation, each tracking the art of survival across vastly different landscapes. Whether navigating the external terrors of a regime or the internal wilderness of obsession and 'otherness', these books map the geography of our deepest, private battles. Mayfly Season by Matthias Jugler Tr. Jo Heinrich An exploration of a dark chapter of East German history: state-sanctioned forced adoptions.

Kate Briggs, translator of Twenty Minutes of Silence and of Hélène Bessette’s first novel Lili is Crying, wrote in an essay for The Yale Review in September 2025: How, why, and under what material circumstances a writer, translator, or publisher feels compelled to respond to the call of a past work — all of this is often wholly incidental. While there can be deep interest as well as contingency and opportunity at play, there is rarely a clear logic to it.

Review of Éric Cantona’s 82 Goals by Valentin Deudon. It is a precise record of every one of the 82 goals scored by Cantona during his time at Manchester United, written with artistic flair.

Exit 8 by Genki Kawamura, translated by Sameeha Anwar, is a disturbing, short Japanese psychological mystery based on a hugely successful game that has sold three million copies, created by Kotake Create. The global craze for Japanese fiction designed explicitly as a game between author and reader, based around interactive escape-room logic and surreal loops, is a hugely successful publishing trend. Yukito Ayatsuji’s Mansion Series, beginning with The Decagon House Murders, is the market leader and pioneer of this genre which has been a massive success for Pushkin Vertigo, who also publish Uketsu’s…

BookBlast Review of The Roof Beneath Their Feet by Geetanjali Shree out with And Other Stories. A lyrical meditation on memory, grief and unconventional female love. Beautifully translated into Englis...

If the title of this book by Maria Judite de Carvalho calls for an answer, it has to be, ‘As a woman, I’ve been frustrated, puzzled by the way life passes me by, with no-one, especially my husband, able to understand or love me’. Time and again in these short stories (some 450 pages of them!) selected from the author’s later works, the female protagonists find life a puzzle that disappoints them in ways that are not so much cataclysmic as simply impenetrable. Carvalho was one of the most prominent female authors in Portugal during the middle and late twentieth century.

The White Desert is an unusual debut novel by Luis López Carrasco, expertly translated by Rosalind Harvey. Odd, unsettling and dystopian, the novel starts with nine people fleeing bombs in a hot air balloon which is “deflating a little more with every second that passes”. A young man asks “What sort of bombs were they? Was it a nuclear attack? Biological?” while a young woman asserts that they must decide which one of them will jump into the sea so that the others can reach a desert island safely where a new civilisation can be established.

A novel about second chances, which blends romance and melodrama, Dark Heart is strangely compulsive reading. Silvia Avallone’s heroine is both a deeply sensitive soul and fiercely independent. A paradoxical figure, she provokes both irritation and compassion. Her actions and reactions possess a mysterious, unfathomable quality that create an ambiguous atmosphere. Lovers Are Never Losers The peace of a remote, largely uninhabited hamlet in the Italian Alps is disrupted by the arrival of thirty-one-year-old redhead, Emilia. “The cowsheds were dilapidated and the Black Madonna in the roadside shrine had been disfigured by bad weather [.

In early 2024, Samar Yazbek found herself in Doha, where more than 2,500 Palestinian survivors of the genocide in Gaza were living alongside their families and receiving desperately needed medical care. Yazbek is a Syrian writer and journalist. Forced into exile after joining the uprising against the Assad regime in 2011, she wrote several books collecting the testimonies of those who resisted the regime or who were forced to live through the civil war, including A Woman in the Crossfire and The Crossing. In 2024, seeing the survivors in Doha, Yazbek was immediately transported back to her experiences in Syria: ‘

Nick Caistor, author of Mexico Inside Out, explores how Cristina Rivera Garza weaves a personal and political tapestry of Northern Mexico in Autobiography of Cotton just published by And Other Stories...