November global fiction: Welcome winter with new reads from Haruki Murakami, Jon Fosse and other

Morning and Evening, Jon Fosse, translated from the Norwegian by Damion Searls

A child who will be named Johannes is born. An old man named Johannes dies. Between these two points, Jon Fosse gives us the details of an entire life, starkly compressed. Beginning with Johannes’s father’s thoughts as his wife goes into labour, and ending with Johannes’s own thoughts as he embarks upon a day in his life when everything is exactly the same, yet totally different.

The City and Its Uncertain Walls, Haruki Murakami, translated from the Japanese by Philip Gabriel

When a young man’s girlfriend mysteriously vanishes, he sets his heart on finding the imaginary city where her true self lives. His search will lead him to take a job in a remote library with mysteries of its own.

When he finally makes it to the walled city, a shadowless place of horned beasts and willow trees, he finds his beloved working in a different library – a dream library. But she has no memory of their life together in the other world and, as the lines between reality and fantasy start to blur, he must decide what he’s willing to lose.

A Bird in Winter, Louise Doughty

Bird is a woman on the run. One minute, she’s in a...

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