Sarah Resnick

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...

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...

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...