Sarah Resnick

In Hanne Ørstavik’s​ novel Ti Amo (2020), the narrator, an unnamed Norwegian writer, finds her life structured by the rhythms of illness. Her husband, the Italian publisher of her books, was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in 2018. When the novel opens, in Milan in early January 2020, she is counting the days – eight – until her husband’s next MRI. And the...

The narrators​ of Permafrost (2018), Boulder (2020) and Mammoth, a triptych of novels by the Catalan writer Eva Baltasar, have much in common. They are young, and lesbian, and nameless. They live, or once lived, in Barcelona. And they are disillusioned with the expectations of modern life. Early in adulthood each woman realises that the middle-class mores of her childhood mask widespread...

Helen Oyeyemi’s​ latest novel, Parasol against the Axe, opens with a playful monologue from its narrator, the city of Prague. Prague has recently found its way – ‘who knows how’ – into a WhatsApp group ‘set up as a safe space for sharing complaints about the capital city of Czechia’. ‘Some of the incidents referred to had taken place many years...

Stories about the oil sands tend to fall into one of two categories. Either they emphasise economic prosperity, describing the well-paid jobs and the money flowing into impoverished areas, or they focus on environmental catastrophe: forests razed by vast strip mines, tailings ponds filled with toxic sludge, polluted waterways and, in the surrounding communities, elevated rates of cancer and disease. Kate Beaton’s Ducks can’t be slotted neatly into either.

‘Do I want to have children?’ For a woman in her mid-thirties, the question can be vexed. It’s not that she suppressed the question in her twenties, but she was occupied with other things – how to earn a living, for one. Then, in her thirties, a sense of urgency kicks in. The question, inasmuch as it refers to a pregnancy with her own genetic material, can no longer be...