A World of Love

by Elizabeth Bowen

Swastika Night

by Katharine Burdekin

The Copenhagen Trilogy (Childhood, Youth, and Dependency)

by Tove Ditlevsen

The Spare Room

by Helen Garner

I’ll admit the set-up is not promising even in the best of times: two upper-middle-aged/class friends, one with cancer, the other caring for her. BUT STICK WITH ME! In the highly capable hands of one of Australia’s most celebrated authors, there’s no bathos or cliche to be found in this sharply entertaining novel, which might end up my favorite of this unimaginable year. Garner is as famous for her journalism as her fiction, and the specificity of her details and dialogue is so ordinarily odd that they just feel true. The narrator (a writer named Helen) sounds like she’s talking to you—her friend, you hope—because she’s so smart, funny and recognizably human: she knows she’s imperfect but would prefer to be less so. And since actual events don’t unfold neatly, Garner cleverly structures her story to uphold that reality while delivering a satisfying narrative. This slim, unassuming book reminded me that an everyday miracle of creativity can reassure us of the everyday miracle of kindness.

Hurricane Season

by Fernanda Melchor

Melchor’s English-language debut is a portrait of a Mexican village as unnerving and entrancing as any painting by Bruegel or Bosch. The scene opens on the village's outskirts, its resident Witch found murdered and floating in a ditch. Chapter by chapter, Melchor shifts focus from one inhabitant to another, edging closer to the why, how, and who of the crime. She trains her lens on the most anguished and the pages overflow with their torrential voices: the abused and the abusers, as well as complicit bystanders. Yet all are to be pitied—all prisoners of their hellish social-scape. Melchor alludes to drug gangs, political corruption, racial tensions, heavy-handed religion, and economic exploitation, but the true devils are machismo and misogyny that have metastasized until they engender rampant femicide and devour their hosts. A maelstrom of language that demands to be heard, Hurricane Season is currently on the shortlist for the International Booker Prize, which awards both author and translator. And it’s already won a spot on my personal Top 10 of 2020.

Abigail

by Magda Szabo

Booksellers geek out devising pithy comparisons that telegraph the feel of one book with the modified title of another. So I gave myself a pat on the back when I realized I had just finished the Hungarian To Kill A Mockingbird! Szabo was a popular and acclaimed author, and Abigail was voted the sixth most beloved novel by her compatriots (as well as adapted as a TV show and a musical). The story is told from the point-of-view of a girl (at a point in time after the events) with a wise father fighting on the right side of history, and a mysterious benefactor whose identity is revealed at the end. Adolescent readers will commiserate with Gina as she navigates her cloistered boarding school, and when they share her discoveries about the outside world, their minds just might be blown. Adults will be amused and appalled by the specifics of a Calvinist girls school in 1940s Debrecen (Szabo was a teacher in one), and the plotting and pacing guarantee a twisty, breakneck ride even if they can guess the destination.

Summer in Baden-Baden

by Leonid Tsypkin

Fathers and Sons

by Ivan Turgenev

Lolly Willowes

by Sylvia Townsend Warner

In Youth Is Pleasure

by Denton Welch